‘Overlanding’, as in droving cattle across country at distance, waxed as a literary trope precisely as it waned as a means of labour. Like its dialectical opposite the Squatter, the Overlander is etymologically multiple, meaning both the drover who is employed and respectable, and the sundowner, who is itinerant and suspect.

This issue goes to print shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the victory of the Whitlam government, a moment in Australian history that increasingly resembles a fragment from another political reality. But then, there’s an extent to which progress always does; there’s a moment to which radical positive change first manifests itself, to paraphrase Jameson, like a utopian spark cast by a passing comet.

I value blogs and small magazines that can’t afford to pay for contributors, and all of the informal mechanisms that allow people to produce culture outside of the traditional channels, take risks, learn their craft. I’m quite convinced I wouldn’t be writing at all if I hadn’t been blogging first, and it’s a form that continues to give me pleasure and in which I believe. But equally I recognise the value of the other layers, of literary magazines and serious general interest publications that promote and organise new writing according to a logic that is not that of the author alone.