This issue goes to print on the cusp of a darkening world, as the Israeli war-crimes committed in response to Hamas’ attacks expand to Lebanon and Syria as they reach a year’s duration, and a confrontation of major powers looms on the horizon.

With this two-hundred and fifty-fourth issue we are proud to mark Overland’s seventieth year with a new archivally informed design, and to take the opportunity throughout the year to reflect on the artistry and advocacy that has defined Overland for these many decades.

We believe that it is wrong to turn away from the suffering of Palestinian people. We believe that Overland should not shy away from criticism of the extreme violence of the Israeli military forces and the collective punishment of civilians in Gaza. We fear that we are witnessing a genocide unfold in plain view, and believe that Overland and the broader community have a moral responsibility to call attention to this horror.

We confess that this is our second run of this editorial. In the first version, written as pieces were being finalised in late September, we wrote towards the uncertain result of the referendum; we knew our statements would likely arrive in your letterbox as a spectral gesture towards a future not yet calcified to the seam of meanness that often stains the grain of the settler heart.

Since the attacks committed by Hamas on the seventh of last month, we have received considerable criticism, offered in good faith and otherwise, for publishing a number of collective statements in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and for our staff-members' presence at marches in protest of Israel’s ongoing war-crimes. Given the sclerotic condition of Australian political discourse, this isn’t surprising. But I have been shocked by the doggedly misdirective persistence of these arguments as the bombs continued to fall.

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.

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.

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.

Murray leaves a legacy of strong writing which, like much Australian literature, is tainted by indefensible principles and politics.

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.

Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse.