Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Editorial Jeff Sparrow children roast in the fires of this terrible century and no love is enough no elegy sufficient That’s regular Overland contributor Alison Croggon in her 1997 poem, ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’. Her words circulated on social media recently, at a time when the powerful seemed to have declared war on children. Half the population of Gaza is under eighteen and, as the world’s fourth largest military unleashed advanced weaponry on a tiny strip of land populated by 1.8 million people, the morgues soon filled with tiny bodies. Closer to home, we learned more details about how the Australian refugee detention centres are slowly sending kids mad. If no elegy is sufficient in this terrible century, why, then, write? Why publish, of all things, a literary journal? This special, expanded edition celebrates sixty years of Overland by asking those questions. It begins with the journalist and activist Laurie Penny revisiting Orwell’s famous essay on writing. It features a selection of editors from around the world explaining what they aim to accomplish with their publications. And it presents an array of essays, stories and poems that seek out to show, in practice, what the written word can achieve. Much has changed in six decades, and, unfortunately, much has not. Today, more than ever, we can see why the fight for the values Overland represents matters so greatly. In her poem, Croggon puts it like this. and truly what is my faith except a stubborn voice casting out its shining length to where I walk alone sick and afraid and unable to accept defeat singing as I was born to Jeff Sparrow Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland. More by Jeff Sparrow › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 1 December 20231 December 2023 · History ‘We’re doing everything but treaty’: Law reform and sovereign refusal in the colonial debtscape Maria Giannacopoulos I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together. First published in Overland Issue 228 30 November 202330 November 2023 · Urbanism The Plains exposes the psychic terrain of Victoria’s highways Fred Pryce The Plains charts the psychic terrain of the freeway in miniature, peeling back the lid of the private vehicle to expose just one of the millions of dramas taking place in simultaneity, severed from one another yet still part of the same city-wide traffic ballet.
