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.
Tessa Rex, Yul Scarf, Crunch Kefford, Jessie Boyland, Alex Moulis, Andrea Steves and Gem Romuld are a group of artists and activists living in Australia, Aotearoa and USA. Their individual work confronting the nuclear industry spans audio, photography, video, installation, community radio, Nobel fucking Peace Prize-winning nuclear disarmament advocacy and working with nuclear-affected communities from New Mexico to Yalata. In August 2019 they travelled together to Maralinga, one of three nuclear test sites in Australia.
