Published in Overland Issue 240 Spring 2020 · Uncategorized Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk It feels like a decade has passed since we moved to Melbourne to take up work in the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. In our first days here, we attended several sessions of the Activism @ the Margins Conference, held in RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. It was perhaps the most diverse and interdisciplinary conference we’ve attended in our careers, with dozens of presentations challenging already contested boundaries of critical and creative performance. In the year we’ve all had, holding academic discourse accountable to material reality is a hell of a task, but one all scholars should consider central to their practice. In addition to our regular poetry and fiction, in Overland’s 240th issue we present a series of essays on the question of activism, drawn entirely from Globally Indigenous writers who contributed to that conference, organised by Olivia Guntarik and Victoria Grieve-Williams. Activism might be definitionally marginal in an institutional sense; and these essays are anything but conventional academic texts in the pejorative and quiescent sense of the term, as Guntarik and Grieve-Williams’ framing statement makes clear. N’Arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs’ essay on identity and connection situates activism within the history and traditions of Indigenous resistance. In ‘When I Speak, I Speak for the Land’ Adrian Burragubba articulates the importance of linking environmental activism to Indigenous sovereignty. Puralia Meenamatta-Jim Everett takes this point and expands it, linking the history of Indigenous survival to the activism of future generations. Our other essays examine similar thematic questions, interrogating moments of confl ict, histories of struggle and of solidarity between Indigenous epistemology, modern institutions, and other activist causes. The perspectives and forms presented here are as diverse as the voices of contemporary Indigenous writing. They articulate lives and struggles deeply marked by dispossession and colonial violence; they show the cost of resistance. But they also speak to hopes and pursuits which unify the oldest living cultures in the world in the conviction that we will continue to survive into the restoration of our sovereignties. Solidarity, bugalwan. Read the rest of Overland 240 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, 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
