Published in Overland Issue 223 Winter 2016 · Uncategorized Editorial Jacinda Woodhead What is hope and why do humans need it? In this issue, in her inimitable style, Alison Croggon ruminates on this idea. Is hope ‘a desperate mirage to combat despair, an expression of our inability to comprehend the reality of our own mortality’, or ‘perhaps, this light, falling now, on that tree?’ What does South Africa look like after the end of apartheid – a struggle that twenty-two years ago conducted the world into a crescendo of united hope? Sisonke Msimang offers us a glimpse: her essay examines the Fallists – the student movement that shut down every university across the country last year in an unprecedented act of resistance, one which shows how education, and barriers to it, remains one of the most fundamental markers of inequality. While South Africa’s disparity is obviously great, closer to home, we too witness a growing divide, seen in the erosion of our research and arts sectors, as documented by Sarah Burnside and Stuart Glover, just as Olivier Jutel’s brilliant portrait of New Zealand’s John Key shows how the neoliberal state is successfully sold. There are two moving outsider accounts: Dean Biron on his years as a detective in Brisbane, and Jay Carmichael on his experiences of contemporary homophobia. This issue also contains poetic beauty, such as Susie Orpen’s ‘Still Dreaming’, daring, as in Leif Mahoney’s ‘Night pieces’ (constructed from lines of Ern Malley), and poems that disrupt the mirage – Anna Ryan-Punch’s ‘Pseudonyms for women (after Danez Smith)’, and the winner of this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, Ellen van Neerven’s astounding ‘Expert’. All are reminders that ‘art is a wager,’ as Croggon writes, ‘however contingent, on a present that we create with our own hands, our minds, our bodies’. Read the rest of Overland 223 – If you liked this article, please subscribe or donate. Jacinda Woodhead Jacinda Woodhead is a former editor of Overland and current law student. More by Jacinda Woodhead 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 June 20231 June 2023 · Politics Turning peaceful protesters into criminals—again Evan Smith So the Summary Offences (Obstruction of Public Places) Bill 2023 has been passed by South Australia’s Legislative Assembly and will become law. Fifteen hours of debate in the upper house, led by the Greens and SA Best, could not overturn the bill that was reportedly rushed through the lower house in just twenty-two minutes a fortnight ago. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 May 202331 May 2023 · Film In Memoriam: Kenneth Anger’s cinematic incantations Eloise Ross ‘Making a movie is casting a spell,’ said Kenneth Anger about his lifelong profession, his unique and spectacular talent, his very own dark magic. That certainly describes how I was lured into his realm. There was a time in my life where I would watch Anger’s seven-minute film Rabbit’s Moon basically on repeat, infatuated by its blue-tinted images of a sprightly harlequin dancing around a clearing and calling silently to the moon. It was poetry.