Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.
A Wiradjuri woman from Central New South Wales, Kerry Reed-Gilbert has performed and conducted writing workshops nationally and internationally. She was the inaugural Chairperson of the First Nations Australians Writers Network (FNAWN). In 2013 she co-edited a collection of works with the US Mob Writing (UMW) group ‘By Close of Business’, and was co-editor for the Ora Nui journal, a collaborative collection between First Nations Australia writers and Maori writers.
Kerry is a former member of the Aboriginal Studies Press Advisory Committee. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals and anthologies nationally and internationally, including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and Southerly. She is a member of the ACT Us Mob Writing group and First Nations Australia Writers’ Network.
