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 poet, educator, and co-editor of Overland. Her Stella Prize winning book DROPBEAR was published by UQP in 2021. Born, raised, and writing in Dharug country, she is a Bundjalung descendant. She tweets at @evelynaraluen More by Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Jonathan Dunk Jonathan Dunk is the co-editor of Overland, and a widely published poet and scholar. He lives on Woi Wurrung country. More by Evelyn Araluen and 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 June 20231 June 2023 · Politics Turning peaceful protesters into criminals—again Evan Smith So the Summary Offences (Obstruction of Public Places) Bill 2023 has been passed by South Australia’s Legislative Assembly and will become law. Fifteen hours of debate in the upper house, led by the Greens and SA Best, could not overturn the bill that was reportedly rushed through the lower house in just twenty-two minutes a fortnight ago. First published in Overland Issue 228 31 May 202331 May 2023 · Film In Memoriam: Kenneth Anger’s cinematic incantations Eloise Ross ‘Making a movie is casting a spell,’ said Kenneth Anger about his lifelong profession, his unique and spectacular talent, his very own dark magic. That certainly describes how I was lured into his realm. There was a time in my life where I would watch Anger’s seven-minute film Rabbit’s Moon basically on repeat, infatuated by its blue-tinted images of a sprightly harlequin dancing around a clearing and calling silently to the moon. It was poetry.