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 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.
