Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.
Ainslie Templeton is an artist and writer who has worked across mediums and often in collaboration. Her work has been shown at Autoitalia, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Verge, Incinerator and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2019 she published a poetry book The Tower with Incendium Radical Library Press; her writing has also been published in Minority Report, un Magazine, The Dutch Journal of Gender Studies and Volupté. Ainslie was a founding member of the performance art vehicle Embittered Swish and has worked extensively with visionary Rafaela Pandolfini. Ongoing interests include the interplay between bodies and their representation, cracks in existing social forms, subliminal divisions of labour, transgender allegory, divination and smuggling.