We begin this edition with a warm thanks to all members of the Overland community who joined us in June for the launch of our previous edition and of our (long-awaited) digitised archive. The evening’s rich literary readings and discussions reflected the innumerable better worlds conceived and argued during Overland’s decades of publication.

Writing his SWAG column-cum-editorial for Overland’s twenty-first issue in 1975, our founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith cheerfully reflected that despite the magazine being thousands of dollars in debt and struggling to make its four yearly issues at the time—we can sympathise on that last score, Steve—he had known the deep satisfaction of building a collective work […]

‘Overlanding’, as in droving cattle across country at distance, waxed as a literary trope precisely as it waned as a means of labour. Like its dialectical opposite the Squatter, the Overlander is etymologically multiple, meaning both the drover who is employed and respectable, and the sundowner, who is itinerant and suspect.

This issue goes to print shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the victory of the Whitlam government, a moment in Australian history that increasingly resembles a fragment from another political reality. But then, there’s an extent to which progress always does; there’s a moment to which radical positive change first manifests itself, to paraphrase Jameson, like a utopian spark cast by a passing comet.

On reading Bonney, on reading Faulkner, on reading Fanon, on reading Mieville read Marx at my desk while listening to Fisher on Audible tell me ‘those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever’ and then rewatching again again that scene where the dead friend says she will take the displaced surplus of love that grief leaves for us to swallow for herself, the room a tender glow from steampunk LEDs I splurged on at the reconstructed crude oil store with money I was paid for poems howling to the dead ...

In the time since our last edition, the Victorian Aboriginal community has lost two of its most prominent Elders, Uncle Archie Roach and Uncle Jack Charles. Both were survivors of a brutal regime of state-sanctioned removal and assimilation that continues to tear apart Aboriginal families today. Both will be sorely missed from the community in which Overland lives and works, and remembered forever for their compassion, resilience and leadership.

In July critics and teachers of Australian literature met in Nipaluna/Hobart to commemorate the thirty-year anniversary of the Mabo decision, and to trace its various afterlives in the novels, films, and poems of the settler-colony. Keynotes and papers contemplating the changing aesthetics and politics of Australian writing were punctuated by austere reminders of the decimation of an already exclusionary humanities sector.

Last December in an article for Crikey, correspondent-at-large Guy Rundle trenchantly diagnosed the Coalition’s catastrophic miss-management of the universities as a betrayal of the very ‘western values’ they claim to revere. However, he also assigned a mysterious share of the situation’s blame to nefarious left-wing thinkers with their impenetrable queer theory and scandalous intolerance of intolerance.

It’s a cliché of contemporary publishing that every editorial in a literary journal like Overland invariably makes arguments for the importance of literary journals before platitudinising about the importance of literature generally. In Overland’s first editorial in 1954 Stephen Murray-Smith invited our readers to share our ‘love of living, our optimism, our belief in the traditional dream of a better Australia’ which is hard to beat for brevity.

Invasion Day is not a day to celebrate. It is not a day to profit from dispossession and genocide. It is not a day to debate the humanity of vulnerable and marginalised people.

In Overland’s 243rd issue, we’re proud to print the results of the inaugural Kuracca prize established honour of Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert.

Overland was founded with dual commitments to literary quality, and to publishing and fostering diverse writers. At the widest extremes of certain kinds of argument these priorities can be placed into a false dichotomy, and made to seem mutually antagonistic, but during our first year’s tenure as editors we’ve had the pleasure of working with […]

The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid, and perhaps contradictory; a matter of constantly shifting definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January at the US Capitol building was, among other things, a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens.

It feels like a decade has passed since we moved to Melbourne to take up work in the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. In our first days here, we attended several sessions of the Activism @ the Margins Conference, held in RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. It was perhaps the most diverse and interdisciplinary conference we’ve attended in our careers, with dozens of presentations challenging already contested boundaries of critical and creative performance.

Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.

Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.

We know that COVID-19’s effect on Australia’s literary and cultural industries is devastating, and its damages will likely mark the sector for years to come. In response to this predicament Overland has partnered with Creative Victoria to do our part to increase paid publication opportunities in the sector as best we can.

Friends, it’s getting dark. gumbih bundahng juhm. Australia is burning, the streets of its cities choke with miasmic smoke. junugur nyabay? A smirking unprincipled marketing executive rules the land, and an amoral fop has just been handed the biggest conservative majority in Westminster since Thatcher.

I remember mistakes over the years – the errors that made it into print, despite the concerted effort (sorry Fredric Jameson et al) – disagreements about whether a work is finished (who even really knows when a work is finished!) … Mostly, I remember the thrill of collaborating with writers and editors and our volunteer readers on thousands of ideas and essays and arguments and editions and special issues.

Reading 311 submissions gathered from across the world in the tight window of one week is complexly affective. Encouraging through the breadth and energy of the futures and pasts being simultaneously imagined; confronting in the depths of suffering and despair under capital those narratives so often described. Finally, of course, it was an impossible challenge to say which of so many stories, in so many voices and styles, should be published at this particular moment.

Tiddalik say I’m such great thirst I will drain the land and drag my big fat belly

When you go as the spaces between wine&zoloft say you must

As a member of Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, I have had countless conversations with other writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds about the responsibility we feel to our communities, and of the demands and restrictions that places on our work. When we critique narrow but socially dominant mimesis we are seen as bitter and demanding.

When I crossed there was only little light darkly. This place where I have been told to find you is light and floor-stained tea tree, as my sister who dreams has described, she who sees still water when she hears my name. It is she who should be here to lay down in you and listen, but I was the one who was unravelled by silence.

Earlier this year, a campaign started at the University of Sydney, where I work and study, calling for the renaming of the Wentworth building and for the removal of a statue of William Charles Wentworth from the Great Hall. Wentworth is one of the founders of the university, honoured in colonial memory for his 1813 expedition with Gregory Blaxland and William Lawson across the Blue Mountains, a journey that precipitated the pastoral exploitation of Wiradjuri country. Less known is Wentworth’s interference in the 1838 trial of seven white stockmen who massacred up to thirty unarmed Gamilaraay people at Myall Creek, in which he prevented Aboriginal witnesses from giving testimony that would have likely resulted in conviction.

Above his desk it is written: ‘I wish I knew the names of all the birds.’ I know this room through tessellation of leaf and branch,