241 Summer 2020 Buy this issue Essays on climate change, Footscray history, radical activism, whiteness and more. New Australian fiction and poetry from writers such as Samual Wagan Watson, Jane Turner Goldsmith, Ann Vickery and Rico Craig. Issue Contents Features On the fantasy work that makes life bearable Angelita Biscotti Underfoot: history from below Jinghua Qian and Liz Crash The Australian government is not listening: education justice and remote Indigenous futures Lisa Stefanoff Prepare for collapse Sam Altman Resistance Stephen Muecke No longer malleable stuff Jeanine Leane 300 words for truth Mammad Aidani Fiction Smoke road Jane Turner Goldsmith The white sea Alistair Kitchen Smoke and mirrors Samuel Wagan Watson Frog song Magdalena McGuire Poetry River: contra/indications Jill Jones Mnemonic 2020 Yeena Kirkbright Lake Eucumbene Rico Craig the rose Monique Lyle ice skater Monique Lyle seek orchards, shelter. Grace Yee Bonza Ann Vickery Seam Cameron Lowe opacities, royal park Emily Barber Great dividing range William Fox Editorial Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Browse the issue: Features Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Feminism On the fantasy work that makes life bearable Angelita Biscotti Ray Filar writes that sex work is service work, that capitalism dangles money and celebrity as gains one can make in the field of ‘erotic professionalism’. This illusory and elusive promise of autonomy, wealth and desirability elides the precarity and complexity of how race, gender, ability, class, and technological advances facilitate disparities in sex workers’ experiences and expectations. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · History Underfoot: history from below Jinghua Qian and Liz Crash Underfoot is a series of virtual multimedia tours uncovering the secret histories of Footscray. Two old friends, both long-time Footscray residents, bring an intimate lens to local history as they travel through the archives looking for people like them: queers, migrants, radicals, and artists. Here, creators Liz Crash and Jinghua Qian discuss the ethos and […] Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Activism @ the Margins The Australian government is not listening: education justice and remote Indigenous futures Lisa Stefanoff It’s nighttime in the desert, moments before the opening credits of the acclaimed feature documentary In My Blood It Runs. We’re in a dusty yard enclosed in cyclone-wire fencing with 10-year-old multi-lingual Arrernte/Garrwa healer Dujuan Hoosan. He’s running joyfully, a firework in one hand. The danger and beauty of marking presence in the darkness with […] Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Activism @ the Margins Prepare for collapse Sam Altman Wholesale collapse of Earth’s planetary systems that sustain life as we know it is happening unevenly across the world. The poorest populations are already experiencing this. As the basic prerequisites of life – water, food and energy are becoming more contested. Political violence is on the rise. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Resistance Resistance Stephen Muecke Resistance, in Latin, means to ‘stand firm against’. The same word, in another cosmos, is resistor, an electronic component that absorbs energy across a potential difference. With such a voltage difference, the electrical energy passing through the resistor is transformed into heat. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · literary culture No longer malleable stuff Jeanine Leane The 'white imagination' imagines itself as limitless – boundless, colourless, neutral and universal. Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: it is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free! Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Exile 300 words for truth Mammad Aidani I dedicate my life's work to all past and present Iranian writers and thinkers who have been imprisoned, tortured, executed and exiled. We live in the age of new catastrophes. An exile’s life is about fighting against oppression in the country of birth, gaining knowledge, demanding justice and freedom for all the world’s people. Fiction Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Fiction Smoke road Jane Turner Goldsmith There’s a huddle of garden gnomes on the gravel strip outside the roadhouse. A huge hand-painted red sign advertises: Sale: Nomes. 2 for 1. Sandy hauls the heavy steering to the right and shudders the Holden off the red dirt highway. Maybe they’ll have urns. It’s midday but she doesn’t need fuel or food, not yet, so she pulls up just outside the window of the pre-fab hotbox that houses the sole cashier, presumably the procurer of the nomes, and yanks the handbrake up. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Fiction The white sea Alistair Kitchen From the veranda of her house on the hill, Maria watched the sun rise from behind the ocean. The air was cool and wet and the bare rolling hills beneath her cradled the remainder of the mist. Going up the hill behind the house, the property was wrapped in bush – mostly gums. They seemed to her, swaying and impatient, like a brutish, sieging army. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Fiction Smoke and mirrors Samuel Wagan Watson Joe Crow never imagined he would live to see a day like today. The love of his life turned into an echo. The emptiness in his future overwhelming. Shan gave away her capacities to endure. He started back-tracking in time. Complexities of events. How did it come to this? Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Fiction Frog song Magdalena McGuire It shocks them to discover the sun is not a thing of beauty. The mother and the boy venture outside and though it is morning, the heat thrashes their skin. Hats are pitiful protection – little wonder the locals don’t wear them. They hurry back inside. This house was built in the 80s and retains its orange lino kitchen and ineffectual fans. Poetry Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry River: contra/indications Jill Jones Even if I see and don’t see the river’s writhing the fish daphnia algae the water the water the swelling of ritalin warfarin methotrexate Even if I bend or don’t bend to the flow ingest bitter tasting wonders as do aquatic insects riparian spiders soaked in memantine codeine fluconazole mianserin Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry Mnemonic 2020 Yeena Kirkbright 1. Black Uncle takes us walking on Yuin Country. He shows us overgrown bush grape vine wrestling with sarsaparilla and gums. He tells us blackfullas would have burnt this back long ago, if they were allowed. He makes us tea in a billy, gets told by a ranger to put […] Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry Lake Eucumbene Rico Craig Eucumbene has fallen below the stump our old lives lift their lips through the water surface to sip air. In the umbrage of our kitchen my mother is frying trout, there are crumbs on the bench, flesh sticking to the pan, butter smokes Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry the rose Monique Lyle He held up her portrait, close, noticing things about flesh, then looked away at the mountains and through the green window. Then he looked, a third time, into his mind. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry ice skater Monique Lyle She loved to look like lovers and to be dressed all in white. The hems of her trousers tolling out like great balloons and with the waist pulled tiny tight, she sprang up high into the sky like that Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry seek orchards, shelter. Grace Yee they sailed into some savage country in 1926 on the ss victoria, incarcerated by a map of ideal drawings, dim in the hold. tea in the great depression was surreptitiously sipped. the spoons moved slowly. work involved a great deal of manual labour, oftentimes harsh. Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry Bonza Ann Vickery Citation (use of) as a form of resettlement that can be used at the level of the line 3D printing of ventilators and native vegetation repeating wilderness exactly Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry Seam Cameron Lowe Down by the carousel fishermen are back in droves. Nights there’s talk of what comes next. A rainbow lingers over the city—the baby waves Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Poetry opacities, royal park Emily Barber out on the circle where swallows cut sky we settle, invade thigh-high grass picnic on each other stein for deleuze, a rug’s thickness shy of the australian gothic Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Great dividing range William Fox I would like to try to find it again, this time without laminated map, without compass worn like a whistle. I hated school camp up to when group 3 snowballed off a ridge track into an accidental valley Editorial Published in Overland Issue 241 Summer 2020 · Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid, and perhaps contradictory; a matter of constantly shifting definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January at the US Capitol building was, among other things, a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens. 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