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.
Dr Meg Foster is an award-winning historian of bushranging, settler colonial and public history, and the Mary Bateson Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her first book, Boundary Crossers: the hidden history of Australia's other bushrangers charts the lives of Aboriginal, African-American, Chinese and female bushrangers, and will be published with NewSouth in 2022. As well as writing for academic audiences, Meg is a public historian and has a passion for making connections between history and the contemporary world.
