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.
Magdalena McGuire was born in Poland, grew up in Darwin, and now lives in Melbourne with her husband and young children. Her short fiction has been published in The Big Issue, Island Magazine, Mslexia, Margaret River Press anthologies and elsewhere. In 2016 she won the Impress Prize for New Writers. In 2017 she won Mslexia's Short Fiction Competition, judged by Deborah Levy. Her debut novel, Home Is Nearby, was published in the UK and Turkey. She is now working on her second book.
