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.
Barry Leonard Dickins is a writer and artist born deliberately in Reservoir in order to be disbelieved. He teaches Creative Writing in many schools including Victoria University and state schools through out Australia; mostly to Grade Fours. He loves everything in life even death. He writes regularly for The Age and is always working on a new stage play. At present he is completing a commissioned stage play for Currency Press in Sydney to do with the mystery surrounding the disappearance of heiress Juanita Nielson on 4 July 1975. Barry first contributed to Overland magazine in 1970 and is thrilled to be back in print here where he started to write.
