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.
Kristin O’Connell is an antipoverty activist living on the Disability Support Pension. She is an unemployed worker at The Antipoverty Centre and the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union, which provides peer support, rights information and representation for people in the social security system, and campaigns publicly for the rights of everyone who relies on income support to live.
