This issue goes to print on the cusp of a darkening world… Overland 255 is the second issue in a suite of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. In this issue, Samuel J Cox interviews Kim Scott on his works True Country (1993) and Benang (1995) in ‘Writing from the South’. Elsewhere, Juliet Scott interrogates ‘The Australian Media’s problem with Palestine’ and Sam Ryan looks back at Overland and the state of arts funding in Australia from 1973 to 1975. This issue also features poetry from Yeena Kirkbright, DJ Huppatz, Debbie Lim, among others, and short fiction from Lauren Collee, Madeline Byrne and Jordan Smith.
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.
