254 Autumn 2024 Buy this issue 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. Issue Contents Features Meredith and Mental Life Daniel Lopez “A State of Waste”: Myall Creek, the Sydney Herald and the Foundations of Australian Capitalism Jeff Sparrow Writing after … October 7 Anon The Ruse of Safety Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange Fiction Who Rattles the Night? Annie Zhang Crime and Punishment Tim Loveday Event Horizon Marc Barrett Lovebirds Sahib Nazari Poetry Celestial Tree Andrew Brooks Judging Notes for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2023 Toby Fitch, Elena Gomez, Andy Jackson and Autumn Royal Torpor Angela Gardner Febrile William Fox Animalia Utopia John Kinsella larapuna Chloe Mayne [18. Palpebral] (from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem) Nam Le Editorial Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Browse the issue: Features Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Culture Meredith and Mental Life Daniel Lopez On the way to Meredith 2022, I felt a little like I imagine Mikhail Bakhtin did in Leningrad 1929. The man obviously wanted to party. But lacking a conducive historic situation, he sublimated his desire into a classic work about carnivals and carnivalesque literature. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · CoPower “A State of Waste”: Myall Creek, the Sydney Herald and the Foundations of Australian Capitalism Jeff Sparrow The destruction of the global commons secured the universal commodification of labour power and thus the system of capital accumulation that has, in an astonishingly brief period, devastated a country sustained by Indigenous labour over tens of thousands of years. In that sense, the violence of Myall Creek never ended. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Palestine Writing after … October 7 Anon Since October 7 my friends and I, all of us writers and creatives, cannot stop talking about Palestine. I do not think we have talked about much else. As writers working in academia and the cultural arts, many of us recently agreed that the act of writing itself seemed to have changed. We agreed that all our writing after October 7 would be transformed, irreversibly altered from what we had produced prior to the carnage we are witnessing in Gaza. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Palestine The Ruse of Safety Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange On the opening night of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull in November 2023, three members of the cast wore keffiyehs during curtain call in a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people under siege in Gaza and the West Bank by the occupying forces of the Israeli state. The controversy that followed will likely be known to readers. What may be less known is that on the same evening, across the world in the US, three young Palestinian men were shot in Burlington, Vermont by a man who noticed them speaking to each other in Arabic, two of them in keffiyehs. Fiction Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Fiction Who Rattles the Night? Annie Zhang Ghosts come to roost in our new home. Aunts and uncles, yiyis and kaufus, a medley of half-remembered faces and ancestors I’ve never seen. They flock on the balcony and screech against the glass doors. They crawl through the floorboards like cockroaches and root through the trash, looking for things to eat. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Fiction Crime and Punishment Tim Loveday The OH&S officer’s name is Lucy, though she looks like a Karyn to me. This is the sort of epiphany I have after an hour of listening to her tell us, over and again, that knowing your fire exits will save your life. We’re all sitting in Sunshine bookstore’s staffroom, where Clare, the sometimes-manager, has set up a whiteboard and a bunch of chairs; she’s in her mid-twenties, just a few years older than me, and I have this funny feeling she wants to ask Lucy, where are the fire exits, exactly? Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Fiction Event Horizon Marc Barrett I wake this morning with Andy Gibb’s “Thicker than Water” playing a personal broadcast in my head. Fifty-odd years since I last heard the damn thing, and maybe I only ever heard it a couple of times back then anyway, and yet it rings clear and distinguished as a pulsar’s hammering — every note, every corny line. I never even liked the Gibb brothers. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Lovebirds Sahib Nazari One hot and dusty summer day, while strolling to a kite shop, Ali requested me to write a letter for him, addressed to Nelofer — the narrow-nosed shy girl with dusky eyes, whose family had recently moved a few doors down from Ali’s, in the fatigued neighbourhood of Mariabad by the foot of the mountain, in Quetta city. Poetry Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Celestial Tree Andrew Brooks I woke to drink Kopi O kosong, which is / Bahasa Melayu for black coffee with no sugar. The coffee / is thick and rich and sludgy and I like it / best when it is brewed with chicory /root — / earthy and bitter and slightly sour. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Judging Notes for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2023 Toby Fitch, Elena Gomez, Andy Jackson and Autumn Royal After reading over six hundred entries, and from a shortlist of eight outstanding poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2023 — Elena Gomez, Andy Jackson, Autumn Royal and Toby Fitch — have selected three winners. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Torpor Angela Gardner Corruption and inequality. The rise of persecuted cults / and their role interpreting wildfires and crop failures. / How this was possible by loss of conviction in science / and technology, while everywhere roads and engines / and hydraulics were taken for granted. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Febrile William Fox Later, it was hypothesised / my little sister had been lying in / the sun too long. There was / a local cricket game on, / and she was stomach-down, / fingerpainting paths of kikuyu / out near the boundary line. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry Animalia Utopia John Kinsella Every creature ever. Every single one was there./ Every animal that ever existed. Everyone / who ever existed. All life of the animal kingdom / but without hierarchies. A kingdomless kingdom. Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry larapuna Chloe Mayne in larapuna, the bay is fired orange / and my foremothers are in the wind Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Poetry [18. Palpebral] (from 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem) Nam Le They’d rather you be inscrutable than difficult. / They’d rather you be impassive than original. / They’d rather you be enlightened than ambiguous. / They’d rather you be opaque than unpredictable. Editorial Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk With this two-hundred and fifty-fourth issue we are proud to mark Overland’s seventieth year with a new archivally informed design, and to take the opportunity throughout the year to reflect on the artistry and advocacy that has defined Overland for these many decades. Previous Issue 253 Summer 2023/4 Next Issue 255 Winter 2024
