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.
Erik Eklund is Professor of Australian history at Federation University. Since 2008 he has lived and worked in the Latrobe Valley apart apart from a period between 2015 and 2016 when he completed a term as the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History at University College Dublin. He has also held appointments at the University of Newcastle, Monash University, Georgetown University in Washington DC, and at the ANU as a Visiting Fellow. He was the joint winner of the Labour History Prize for the best article in that journal in the period 2012 to 2013, and was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Regional and Community History in 2003, for his 2002 book Steel Town. In 2021 he was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's History Awards.
