I've a short speculation up at the Overland blog today which wonders about art, use and politics. All extremely difficult questions which, as regular readers here would know, are close to my heart.

It's part of the Subscriberthon that this excellent literary magazine is running this week. May I encourage you to take part and subscribe? You can even do it online here. You mightn't get free beer like Herald Sun readers, but the good people at Overland are offering a brace of great prizes, not to mention the regular occurence of one of Australia's finest lit journals in your post box. Plus I'm writing a column for them next year. Go on. You know you want to.

A while back, I teased out some of my thoughts on nationalism in Australian theatre into an essay, How Australian is it?, for the 200th edition of the literary journal Overland. And being good chaps, they've now put it online.

To rephrase Borges: being Australian is either an inescapable act of fate – and in that case we shall be so in all events – or it is a mere affectation, a mask. The best of our contemporary theatre has dropped the mask. In the volatile performing arts, it’s difficult to forecast what will happen next; it’s possible that this renaissance, which has animated Australian stages for the past five years, will simply lose energy and peter out. It certainly has its detractors. But perhaps the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and our theatre has grown past the need to merely perform its national identity.

You can read the whole essay here.