Published in Overland Issue 233 Summer 2018 · Uncategorized Introducing Overland 233 Jacinda Woodhead Last month, I attended a symposium in Newport about memorialisation and the thirty-five bridge workers who died when the West Gate Bridge collapsed in 1970. The ‘past is never over’, observed visiting Canadian academic Tara Goldstein, because we are always reinterpreting history and, therefore, must always interrogate ‘veracity’. The royal commission into the accident held unions and workers partly accountable; as one of the speakers argued, in the lead-up to the fifty-year anniversary of the disaster, this is a narrative that must be corrected. There is a partisan nature to remembering. Hegemonic history, presented as contained and indisputable, is a fiction, and rarely takes into account the class forces that shape these events. There are also the questions of the pasts we choose to remember. This edition examines the memorialisation of Australian medievalism (and the fall of Constantinople) and reconsiders the history of the notion of ‘Australia Day’ and its insignificance. Elsewhere, there is a comparison of century-old Noongar letters and the #IndigenousDads twitter campaign; a survey of the contemporary Australian essay; and an account of women’s wrestling, popular culture and spectacle. Our writers remember the past in order to change the future, something Jennifer Mills reflects on in her memorial for utopias and dystopias, as do the four writers she commissioned as departing Overland fiction editor. We are indebted to for her magnificent work and the role she played in shaping the fiction within and outside these pages. Included in this issue are the winners of the 2018 Fair Australia Prize, powerful renderings of labour, each and every one. And a selection of poetry by Toby Fitch that makes the personal urgent. With the discovery of the illustration of a cockatoo in a medieval manuscript, we are reminded that the past is indeed ‘not over’, that it is not fixed or known, but shaped by external forces and thinking. Prior to invasion, there are countless histories; some have been shared or uncovered, but there is more to learn. Read the rest of Overland 233 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 17 January 202517 January 2025 · rape culture Neil Gaiman and the political economy of rape Emmy Rakete The interactions between Gaiman, Palmer, Pavlovich, and the couple’s young child are all outlined in Shapiro’s article. There is, though, another figure in the narrative whom the article does not name. Auckland city itself is a silent participant in the abuse that Pavlovich suffered. Auckland is not just the place where these things happen to have occurred: this is a story about Auckland. 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.
