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 First published in Overland Issue 228 28 March 202428 March 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. First published in Overland Issue 228 27 March 202427 March 2024 · Cartoons Visas for Palestinians: let them in Sam Wallman Sam Wallman makes the case for a visa scheme for Palestinians fleeing the war on Gaza.