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. She lectures in Literature and Creative Writing at Deakin University. More by Evelyn Araluen › Jonathan Dunk Jonathan Dunk is the co-editor of Overland and 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 1 December 20231 December 2023 · History ‘We’re doing everything but treaty’: Law reform and sovereign refusal in the colonial debtscape Maria Giannacopoulos I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together. First published in Overland Issue 228 30 November 202330 November 2023 · Urbanism The Plains exposes the psychic terrain of Victoria’s highways Fred Pryce The Plains charts the psychic terrain of the freeway in miniature, peeling back the lid of the private vehicle to expose just one of the millions of dramas taking place in simultaneity, severed from one another yet still part of the same city-wide traffic ballet.
