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.
Born in Sydney, Indigenous writer Andrew Booth has had a diverse senior executive career in the public sector. Subsequently he freelanced as a government adviser in Australia and then in the South Pacific where, in a case of mistaken identity, he was once shot at. He took up writing full time in 2012 and won the Queensland Literary Awards 2015 David Unaipon Award for an Unpublished Indigenous Writer with his first book, an experimental novel, The First Octoroon or Report of an Experimental Child which will be published by University of Queensland Press in 2017. Andrew spends his time reading, writing and fishing.
