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.
Alfio Leotta is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He writes on a wide range of topics including the relationship between film and tourism, auteur cinema, national cinema and fantasy. He is the author of Touring the Screen: Tourism and New Zealand Film Geographies (Intellect, 2011), Peter Jackson (Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Cinema of John Milius (Lexington, 2018).