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 15 May 2026 · Friday Fiction The structure Dominic Carew We made it to the park by eight. The winter sun was filtering through the far trees in a wan, lemon trickle, the thin clouds sheets of white. The cool sky a rubbed-at blue. The grass squelched beneath our feet and elsewhere, thinned from wear, the earth stretched grassless and muddy and, in some parts, released a thick mist. 8 May 202611 May 2026 · Nakata Brophy Prize The 2026 Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers (Poetry) Editorial Team Please follow this link to enter the prize. Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, established in 2014 […]
