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.
Victoria Grieve-Williams is Warraimaay - an Aboriginal Australian historian who has published on Aboriginal family history, slavery, activism and the history wars in Australia. She works in interdisciplinary ways to progress the development of Indigenous knowledges, positioning Aboriginal spirituality /philosophy as the baseline for this development - with a focus on establishing the values and ethics inherent in what it means to be human in a changing world. Victoria is in the process of establishing a Healing Histories Foundation that will apply Aboriginal principles to heal the wounds of history through "truth telling" from a research base.
