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.
Lisa Bellear (1961–2006) was a Goenpul woman of the Noonuccal people of Minjerribah, Queensland. She was a respected poet, photographer, activist, spokeswoman, dramatist, comedian and broadcaster. Her work campaigning for equality and Indigenous rights, and her contribution to Indigenous writing, academia and the arts had a huge impact on many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Notably, Lisa was a presenter on Melbourne’s 3CR radio network’s Not Another Koori Show. Dreaming in the Urban Areas was her first, and only, published poetry collection.
