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.
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.
