Published in Overland Issue 239 Winter 2020 · Uncategorized Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines. Vanamali Hermans writes against the institutionalisation of marginalised bodies in historically carceral healthcare systems. Alice Whitmore lyrically traverses the poetic and cultural history of melancholia. Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Samuel Lieblich writes scathingly of the vacuous concepts and slipshod science informing prominent practices in psychological health, and underwriting its totemic importance. These essays traverse the fraught space between mind, body, and person, and the logics we use to contain them, while Chloe Adams’ account ‘The Appointed Season’ elegises the conflicts which arise from their failure to heal. Edith Lyre’s essay ‘President Oedipus’ meanwhile, parodies the contradictions of accelerationism with a medley of fragments and responses. Our cover artist Seth Searle also stages a tableau of motifs contemplating relations of performativity and care, a scene of frozen hospitality in isolation. The essay, fiction and poetry of this edition do not offer utopias of wellness. It’s hard to imagine what that looks like now. Rather, the selection curated in this edition speak directly to the volatile so many of us have found ourselves in this year. It seems like this kind of thing is said a lot these days, but we hope these pieces illustrate the urgency of connection and care. Solidarity, and stay safe. Read the rest of Overland 239 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Evelyn Araluen Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her Stella-prize winning poetry collection DROPBEAR was published by UQP in 2021. More by Evelyn Araluen › Jonathan Dunk Jonathan Dunk is the co-editor of Overland, a widely published poet and scholar. He lives on Wurundjeri country. More by Jonathan Dunk › 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 1 6 November 2026 · Friday Fiction Headland Harry Goddard He must have still been sore. I could tell from the winces he made as he scooted down the trail. Some unspoken agreement of not hitting other people’s children — and the circumstances of me not being that type of kid — spared me from the same punishment. I was taken to my parents who agreed I would have to work off the damages, and I must have mowed the lawn once, or cleaned the family car. 4 November 2026 · Film MIFF, Minotaur and the politics of maternal reception Alicia Byrnes Maternal labour is, in the terms I’ve set out here, not labour at all. Noisy, unfocused, mobile, perhaps even sleepy — it is an affront to arthouse film viewing and therefore unserious.
