Loneliness: the state of being without company, of being destitute of sympathetic companionship, remote from people or places of human activity. 

Solitude: the state of being or living alone.

The articles, stories, and poems in this collection – spanning more than fifty years of Overland’s output – explore various shades and facets of loneliness.

In Everything is Not Enough, Nancy Keesing highlights the connection between loneliness and creativity when she says, ‘A child must have a bit of loneliness, a bit of self-reliance, make his own world. Creativity feeds on that.’ In The Legend and the Loneliness, a Discussion of the Australian Myth, leading Australian writers of the time suggest that loneliness is somehow inherent in the Australian landscape and its settlers—and in their art as well. We see this in The Lonely Hero, a review discussing the sense of aloneness portrayed in Sidney Nolan’s series of Ned Kelly paintings.

Some of the pieces gathered here explore specific experiences of loneliness, such as the isolation experienced by a young gay man in a prejudiced Seventies’ Australia, while others are more general meditations on the existential loneliness that is an indelible part of the human condition.