Carbon sequestration proposes to reverse the ongoing particulate re-distribution of the air; that is, to turn the world upside down. The increasingly suffocating proportion of carbon in the atmosphere must be withdrawn and re-buried, whether through mineralisation as stones, which do not leak, or in unstably lachrymose carbonaceous deposits like trees and soil. Such a material inversion — the interment of air in the ground — rewinds historical time, which was knotted tightly in the deep past’s geological substrates. What burning unravelled, carbon sequestration proposes to restore in a ceremony of apology and appeasement that returns historical time to its safely deposited sediments.

Occasionally one encounters a story or situation that seems to reach out of the mass of historical fact and lend an individual shape to its anonymous suffering. In October 1917 one such remarkable incident took place on the battlefield of Passchendaele in western Belgium; it began a search for the relatives of the dead which has continued for more than a century.

On the face of things, Hope’s “Australia” (1943) is a mocking self-effacement of the colonial experience; but the poem is also “devastatingly ignorant of anything other than a whitefella, civilising view of settler culture” (Harrison 2004:287). One wonders on the affects that become available when Hope’s accusatory evisceration of Australian dumbness is misread, purposefully, so that his gaze no longer judges colonisers but instead is read as surveying colonised others.

When a novel invites me, as does the title section opening of Scott McCulloch’s debut novel Basin — “Figure in Terminal Landscape” — to approach it as I might a piece of visual art or dance or theatre, or even as a piece of music, my whole heart gladdens. Yes, and yes! Because this is what happens for me anyway when I read a novel, as I have always thought, since it will always be the thingness of the work and how that thingness affects (or not) my being in the world that tells me whether I am likely to keep that novel by me always or not.

Geoffrey Blainey’s recent article in The Weekend Australian (1–2 July) urged Australians to get the “facts in order” before voting on The Voice portrays the “Yes” campaign as historically unfounded and a misrepresention of Australian history before and after 1788.

To be Indigenous is to share cascading crises with the earth. Swarms of plastic suffocate our beaches; our wetlands drained for dairy farming are prone to catastrophic floods; the soils we live on are poisoned by industrial toxins, causing soaring rates of asthma and cancer in our communities.

I’m the first to admit I’ve tried to unmake journalism, or at least smooth its edges. Rather than break stories, I’ve been broken by them. I’ve never won a Walkley, or even been nominated for one. But then, I decided to spend nearly three decades of my life in a highly competitive industry driven by ego and the cult of personality, fortified by whiteness and normativity.

It is not the first time the thought occurs to her: that it might be days before anyone finds her, lying still on the linoleum. What prompts the thought this time is her bleeding thumb. Clumsily opening a can of baked beans she finds at the back of her kitchen cupboard yields such blood. Sofia drenches the handle of her mother’s old wooden spoon. The sauce, also a sickly red, is starting to bubble on the stove.

The next time we saw each other I would only remember the name Bastard, which was not his name but what his friends had called him, how they’d introduced him that first night, because it resembled the sound of his true surname. But I felt strange addressing him as that; even an unflattering nickname seemed to produce intimacy I didn’t care to feel. Instead, I didn’t call him anything.

We were not skydivers in the 1990s, I did not wear a cream crocheted bikini top, I was not in / love for the first time, we didn’t talk quietly amongst ourselves in large crowds about sex and / its dramas, we did not drink piss-weak beer, we did not pay $16 a jump and there was never a / DC-3 or a perfect sunset through its window, we never fell through snow.

I know you can hear, I’m talking directly / to the power socket, the transparent plug / each copper wire visible, like a bisection / of brain, pineal gland folded, a queen / around a void, the nest hovering around / them.

the jumpers I lent never find their way back / barely rehearsed, cold / overwhelmed I wasn’t ready for / the day has become tight / trying to force open a poem / the airtime in my mind

We begin this edition with a warm thanks to all members of the Overland community who joined us in June for the launch of our previous edition and of our (long-awaited) digitised archive. The evening’s rich literary readings and discussions reflected the innumerable better worlds conceived and argued during Overland’s decades of publication.