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.
Lou Garcia-Dolnik is a mixed-race Filipinx writer and editor working on unceded Gadigal land. A poetry editor for Voiceworks and alumnus of the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive, they have been awarded third place in PRISM International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and second place in Overland’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize. They have work published in or forthcoming with Overland, PRISM International, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Scum Mag and Voiceworks, among others.