Overland’s 260th issue is our most substantial yet. At 212 pages, it contains writing from the winners and runners-up of the 2025 Judith Wright poetry and Neilma Sidney short story prizes, as well as last year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. Across eight short stories, nine poems and five essays, this issue showcases the breadth of talent across generations: Hana Pera Aoake mounts a critique of the economies of First Nations artmaking, asking who exactly benefits when Maōri artists excel within an unregulated market predicated on individualism, while John Kinsella makes an extensive case for unoriginality as both poetic method and political resistance. Elsewhere, Tom Gurn, winner of the 2025 Neilma Sidney prize, imagines a surreal, fractured dialogue between two speakers orbiting loss and urban adaptation. Susie Anderson’s Nakata Brophy winning story follows a Blak elder navigating council rooms as she carries the stories of those who cared for her Country’s waterways. The issue also features new poetry by Ouyang Yu, Dorothy Lune and Dave Drayton, as well as an excerpt from Surveying the Wild Abyss, a new book by Hawkesbury elder and educator Barry Corr.
Overland has a longstanding commitment to progressive discourse on issues of environment, climate, and community organising. This is why the Overland team is pleased to announce our new partnership with CoPower, Australia’s first non-profit energy co-operative. CoPower is member-owned and member-run, with a mission statement to tackle poverty, build community, and take action against the climate crisis. CoPower’s 100% democratically determined budget reinvests surplus funds from their retail energy service into supporting community impact projects and initiatives.
In 2023, with the support of CoPower, we’ll be ensuring that each print edition of Overland holds space for the discussion of sustainable energy, community organising, climate and the environment, in addition to regular online features and special editions throughout the year.
To find out more about CoPower’s mission, services, and impact funding, jump online at https://www.cooperativepower.org.au/ or call 03 9068 6036 today.
