In solidarity, so long, proshchay, take care, wadaeaan, all the best, adiaŭo, shalom, see you next year!

Overland is seeking fiction from new and emerging writers for a special online edition to be guest edited by Linda Godfrey.

In the centre, I was confronted by Australia’s past and current crimes. Viewing Australia’s designed cruelty first-hand left me both sorrowful and angry. Manus is a festering wound. Australians can ignore the sickness, but slowly, surely, it is poisoning our country. This is a sickness that was contracted during our violent invasion of Aboriginal land and it surfaces every time we condone state cruelty against a person.

These are words, phrases and stanzas that work the teeth and tongue, and the dense packages of syllables and consonants are often delivered in bite-sized chunks. Longer poems, such as ‘Dunes’, ‘Nether’ and ‘Mostly water’, are broken into shorter sections, so that there is a perpetual sense of ongoing creation and destruction, of worlds and substances forming only to dissolve again at a touch.

Our heroine is Acker, who is tattooed, shaven-headed, a dissector of old books (literally – she chops them up). At first we take her for an advocate for victims of domestic violence, but nothing in this text is that straightforward. How, Wright asks, could we ever resolve the debt we all owe to the unfairly dead?

Busyness has become a competition, a Victorian Cross or Legion of Merit for running ourselves into the ground. It speaks to our self-worth and dedication to our crafts. An overloaded lifestyle, rather than a quieter one, has become an aspirational status symbol. We venerate industry, even when it culminates in something lesser than the sum of its effort.

Speaking at a Moscow press conference in 1998, Oleg Gazenko – a scientist attached to the mission – expressed his regret in sombre and sympathetic tones: ‘The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.’

Since the early 1990s, political culture in the west had been underpinned by a belief in politically moderate pragmatism. This belief not only framed the policies of the major political parties, but also framed the assumptions in our broader political culture about what was politically possible in the modern era. We all thought we knew that principled ideologues could never get elected without becoming more pragmatic.

This brings us back to the question posed whenever a production of The Merchant of Venice is mounted: is this an antisemitic play, or a play about antisemitism? Indeed, if we need Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew’ speech to remind us that Jews are, in fact, human too, then we are dealing with a much larger cultural problem that productions of The Merchant of Venice play into.

There has been recent noise around whiteness in the arts in Australia, Melbourne in particular, due in part to Andy Butler’s article ‘Safe White Spaces’. Some of us have been talking about this for some time, but now it feels different, on account of the voices being heard and the opinions being seriously considered. This might be the demographic reckoning that is starting to happen as a consequence of the end of the White Australia Policy.

Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless.

These literary essays circle tightly around postpartum depression, but also explore themes including violence against women, art, writing and death. The strongest pieces are those that cut closest to the bone, making the reader witness to the author’s frankness.

Boochani’s dedication to his work as a reporter and a creator is fundamental to this unique project. It can never be forgotten that this film was made at risk of further violence. We may never have known the confinement wing Chauka existed if it wasn’t for his tireless investigation, including waking friends to snatch an interview, asking painful questions and always always witnessing, listening, believing.

As Millicent Weber pointed out a little while back in Overland, ‘literary festivals are complex beasts’. Particularly in recent years, they appear to have become more politicised, more contested spaces – exemplary of the tension that results when a ‘cultural project’, with presumed egalitarian aims, has a light shone on it by the market model it operates on, which doesn’t favour all people equally.

As a member of Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, I have had countless conversations with other writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds about the responsibility we feel to our communities, and of the demands and restrictions that places on our work. When we critique narrow but socially dominant mimesis we are seen as bitter and demanding.

Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Greens seem a confident and coherent political alternative. This is certainly the message that the party leadership is sending. Speaking at the recent national conference, leader Senator Richard di Natale outlined an ambitious plan to capture twenty-five House of Representatives seats over the next twenty-five years, transforming the party into the third-force of Australian politics.