Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018 · Uncategorized Editorial Jacinda Woodhead This edition is off to print at the same time as Indigenous activists are establishing Camp Freedom on the Gold Coast, a protest against the stolen wealth that props up yet another Australian Commonwealth Games spectacle. Camp Freedom has echoes of Melbourne’s 2006 Camp Sovereignty, a powerful demonstration against colonial authority, which Tony Birch documents within these pages. Such occupations, Birch writes, present ‘a spectre of repressed Indigenous histories’ that ‘stake a claim’ on past and present. And what of claims on the future? ‘Western colonisation is a haunting that started with genocide and continues with the Anthropocene,’ Jess Cockerill argues in a recent article in Overland’s online magazine, which takes readers to the shrinking giant kelp forests off the edge of Tasmania and introduces them to the work of researcher Emma Lee, who specialises in Indigenous land management. ‘I think traditional knowledges are about managing change,’ Lee says. ‘There’s not an Indigenous mob on the face of this earth that hasn’t gone through massive climate change.’ Including the destruction that came with invasion. But it is difficult to live in this period with its ongoing and pervasive environmental ruination and not feel the haunting that shadows this era – that of ‘a nostalgia for lost futures’. It is these lost futures that the writing in this edition interrogates, from Evelyn Araluen’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize-winning ‘Guarded by birds’ to Jennifer Mills’ encounter with the cuttlefish population off the coast of Port Augusta. ‘Climate change is not as straightforward as extinction and apocalypse,’ Cockerill reminds us, and it is what lies between and around catastrophe that many of the writers here explore. There is also the state of the Australian short story, domestic violence, Tehran in 1983, Henry Lawson’s lingering appeal, the Wayback Machine and the utopian city, in an essay that calls to mind Owen Hatherly’s question from Militant Modernism: ‘Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?’ Read the rest of Overland 230 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
