Published in Overland Issue 251 Winter 2023 · Uncategorized Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk We begin this edition with a warm thanks to all members of the Overland community who joined us in June for the launch of our previous edition and of our (long-awaited) digitised archive. The evening’s rich literary readings and discussions reflected the innumerable better worlds conceived and argued during Overland’s decades of publication. In the background of those celebrations, the work of commissioning, editing and proofing continued, and so from our end at any rate, this edition resounds with reflections of the fateful lessons and uncanny serendipities of time, pocketed with story and feeling. Bill Gammage, normally a historian of epic proportions, muses here in his essay “An Incident at Passchendaele” on the poignance of private coincidence in the shadow of sweeping epochal events. As this year’s referendum on the Voice to Parliament approaches, certain reactionary mythological tendencies of the Australian historical consciousness are rearing their ugly heads, and we’re proud to publish a response to Geoffrey Blainey’s dubious July editorial against the Voice by the Aboriginal writer Barry Corr. Jen Craig’s exploration of metafiction and gender in Scott McCulloch’s recently published novel Basin weighs the formal nuances and semantic after-effects of abjection. While Scott Robinson’s work of speculative philology, “The Earth is Still an Urne unto Us”, examines the techno-fix of carbon sequestration through a futural lens, as a mythological sacrifice to capitalism’s chthonic gods. Dan Disney’s aphoristic essay “grave sites” persists in a theme, reading modern Australia’s various attempts to write its own organic mythology through its obsessive funereal rituals. Whatever else it is, cultural memory is made by the way we write it, as Heather Taylor-Johnson’s poem of intricate negations, “Nothing out of the Ordinary”, ironically reminds us: in fact I’ve completely forgotten about it so I almost didn’t write this poem, but then I thought none of us deserved it, nothing extraordinary happened, I mean no-one even died. In Solidarity Evelyn Araluen & Jonathan Dunk 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 25 September 202325 September 2023 · The university Solidarity but only among managers, or the future of the university sector Hannah Forsyth The process continued during Covid. Jobs were being cut due to the threats posed by the pandemic, yet more scholars were being recruited. Nice people, good at their job. But why are we doing this, we kept asking. Management kept telling us we have a funding crisis (which often turned to a surplus in the end), so why are we also on a hiring spree? All along it looked like it could end badly, for all of us. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 September 2023 · Friday Features Activating the poetic spirit as friendship John Kinsella I’ve always had the aching feeling that—as a text to be shared among friends and maybe eventually ‘enemies’—the soul-body dialogue poem is a way of arguing towards spiritual certainty in the face of earthly corruption and doubt.