187: GATEKEEPERS
ISBN 0 9775171 4 4
WINTER 2007
launched 27 June 2007

The new issue from a new editorial team.

With Overland 187, writer and commentator Jeff Sparrow takes over the editorship of Australia’s most radical literary magazine.

Culture critic Mark Davis sets the tone with his important essay ‘Myths of the Generations: Baby Boomers, X and Y’, a return to the argument of his acclaimed book Gangland ten years on. He writes:

Many of the figures who stood out in 1997 as playing a disproportionate role in Australian cultural life by and large continue to do so. Kerry O’Brien, Robert Manne, Peter Craven, Phillip Adams, Christopher Pearson, Anne Summers, Helen Garner, Richard Neville, Keith Windschuttle, Ray Martin, Clive James, P.P. McGuinness, Germaine Greer, Piers Akerman, John Laws, Michelle Grattan, Laurie Oakes, Alan Jones, Gerard Henderson, George Negus are still out there, setting agendas, demarcating standards, creating much of the intellectual and cultural climate. Whatever they breathe out becomes the oxygen of Australian cultural life.
Or, to shift metaphors, the gang is still in town.

Elsewhere, Guy Rundle points out that the Iraq invasion, now universally acknowledged as the greatest foreign policy debacle of a generation, took place with the blessing of most of Australia’s professional pundits:

The pro-war Right provided the bodyguard of lies for allied governments; the pro-war ‘liberal Left’ did that it could to divide the anti-war opposition. Together, they helped create the situation in which the atomised violence of today’s Iraq could take place.

What happened to the author of The Hand That Signed the Paper,the book at the centre of a particularly bitter Culture War skirmish? Zora Simic traces the long, strange journey of Helen Demidenko since then and suggests “her refusal to attribute her own notoriety to anything other than her own eccentricity and immaturity are sleights of hands that close discussion about why she caused such a fuss in the first place”.

Immediate past Overland editor Nathan Hollier compares Frank Hardy’s attitude to the Australian bush with that of Les Murray, the poet whose work has “played an important role in creating and sustaining [a] conservative nationalist mythology”.

Both Left and Right argue for versions of a two-state solution as the panacea for the violence in Israel/Palestine. Ned Curthoys casts a critical eye over the recent intervention by Independent Jewish Voices group to argue that “any assessment of the dreadful situation … must begin with an historical critique of Zionism and the founding of Israel in 1948”.

Laurie Hergenhan reads Mark Twain against the grain, to uncover a different account of Aborigines in Australian history.

Peter Corris remembers studying history at the University of Melbourne back when he had “the ambition to be an academic – to smoke the cigarettes, wear the gown, the coloured shirt and woollen tie and the leather patches on the elbows of the sports jacket”.

Overland regular Christos Tsiolkas weighs up Americanism and anti-Americanism:

“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” How can you not love a culture that is capable of producing such a line? And I mean that seriously. I mean that without irony.

Finally, in a different kind of gangland, Mischa Merz writes about her unlikely friendship with Mick Gatto, a man with the “bright, friendly eyes of a bon vivant, not the cold eyes of a criminal”.