The stumps under our floor are teetering and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight of thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books, missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me. Though not uncommon, for me particularly this hinges on an inheritance of familial experience, and I am predisposed to regard that which is missing as a great and gaping hole in which one might never discern a silver lining, but rather a direct and literal loss, since our lives have been lived as much in the absence of things as in the presence of what has come to replace them.

It is this archival philosophy that allows me to locate two issues of Overland from the Summer of 2002 and 2004 respectively, the face price on the latter fifty cents higher. In each of these copies, even at the time I had bought them, I knew someone named in the index, which must have made me feel vicariously important to know people who were published outside of the gauche but humble student periodicals which comprised a backbone of my undergraduate reading. These two issues, along with their literary neighbours — two issues of Heat, a Southerly found on a remainder table (which quite by chance is the issue in which the first piece I had published was printed and which I was never sent), and one Granta — are never integrated with subscriptions. And it is their positioning as much as their presence that illustrates both the lack of rationale in ad hoc collections as well as the faith I have always had (and when I say it I can see I share this logic with hoarders) that these books in a general sense will have another use, now demonstrated in a specific sense by the commissioning of this essay, since in one fell swoop two archival Overlands have vindicated the value of hundreds of other unlikely volumes I may or may not one day return to.

Not long before the 2002 issue in my collection, I had taken a course in Creative Non-Fiction with Tony Birch, and sure enough I find his name in the table of contents with a piece from a symposium entitled Books that Changed My Life on page 129. It will be a few more years before he reaches his current heights of popularity, but this short essay about Tony’s older brother, and school, and detention, and finding people in literature that are relatable to your own life, is ineluctably the voice I will always associate with him. As a teacher he had impressed on me the infinite interest one should take in the local and the particular upon our doorsteps, and also imparted one of the greater lessons of my young adult life when he explained that sometimes the purpose of going away is so that you can return with a new way of seeing what is remarkable about where you are from. The essay concerns three texts, indicated in its title, “Atticus Finch, Camus and Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright”, but in the process of capturing something crucial about these books there is also a picture of a fraternal relationship and a dry and deprecating comedy that exists at the interstices of devastation. Though at nineteen I found Tony’s lesson on perspective almost unbelievable, in conjunction with this essay in which most of the central techniques to powerful non-fiction writing are present, it is I think a lesson that has over decades proved one of the most enduring.

There are other names in that volume that I now recognise, and names that never became famous outside I suppose of their own immediate circle of friends and enthusiasts, yet I treated that issue like a book, ticking off each read piece in pencil: all the poetry, most of the fiction, half of the features and of course the symposium essays. On page five, Bob Ellis’s essay The Age of Spin begins with an epigraph concerning 9/11, which at the time of this publication was very new and still we were learning how white fragility would rewrite the new century for the worst. There’s two phrases I’ve circled on that essay’s first page: “rogue nations” and “brave bones”. The denotation of the “rogue”, as Derrida’s two essays on reason explored, became an obsession for me, grappling with the monolith of Western discourse and its transformation of the bodies of young Arab boys into foe deserving violent repression (which called to mind in my fragmentary annotation accounts of my Palestinian father’s gentle childhood and all his cousins and my cousins too, and in this comparison I am trying to grasp the paradox of a civilised world). Brave bones is used twice and the time I have circled it, used to refer to the young men who perpetrated 9/11. This must have come as a shock to me, this unusual breaking of rank from the then widely adopted Bush doctrine that criminalised such alternative readings of the meaning of an event we were instructed could only be read in one particular way. Yet because of this, I, and people like me, all became inheritors of the inexplicable sunglasses from the 1980s cult classic, They Live, which reveal the horror of cultural hegemony to a select if marginal few, who can never again unsee the subliminal messaging of social fabric once the lie has been given. Ian Syson’s editorial calls the essay “a coruscating examination of the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ and its obscene justifications of mass murder, xenophobia and cruelty”. At the time that I read this I knew nothing of Ellis, but I knew well that there were few places where the war on terror was denoted in scare quotes (as became my practice as a young scholar); fewer still where a word like massacre could describe the acts of Western perpetrators.

Whatever else Ellis might now be remembered for, a man with one of those mid-century careers that was tremendously celebrated as much for the ephemera of a self-described “raconteur” as anything else, in hindsight there is a strange chance to issue 169, the cover of which depicts Dorothy Hewett to whom Ellis at one time was connected and whose daughters later named him in criminal allegations. Indeed, in June 2018 when Hewett’s daughters come forward, there is an explosion of reportage and then at least in the media not very much. One of the daughters explains this relentless silence when she notes that they (the sisters) are criticised for harming their mother’s reputation which she also says “is really just in disguise a critique of men from that generation, the kind of men who abused us and their supporters, who don’t want their behaviour to be examined”. It is troubling to imagine that the silencing of criminality has less to do with a woman’s reputation than a way of life for men, or that anyone’s reputation should outweigh the community good of publicising criminality, and I am troubled by how we continue to read and appreciate the literary outputs of people who have left these mixed legacies behind them other than that I think that we should. Ellis is part of a generation that was in 2018 being reappraised, me too against the so-called sexual revolution; and a generation of writers older than me who had worshipped Ellis’s career and intellect were wrestling with what could be gleaned from his legacy without doing more violence to those he had victimised. It would be dishonest to try and reconcile these things in a neat line, to wrap Ellis up as personally problematic but intellectually palatable. But I’m a great believer, as perhaps my book collection suggests, that no evidence should be destroyed. And that this essay of Ellis’s at least was remarkably prescient of the dystopian vistas this century has so far wrung in through the auspices of a Western response to 9/11.

When I revisit this issue I can see the prism through which a twenty-year-old viewed the riches of contributors and subjects, encoded in the way I denoted my reading with pencil annotations, and yet not quite knowing then how a journal might entail a physical community. Perhaps ironically now as I read Syson’s editorial (and as I would learn a few years later), there must have been a thriving group of people associated locally with the journal, and yet this very 169 issue was cunningly designed to engage both a Sydney and a regional readership. This is perhaps because, north of the Murray, a launch turnout was still only one third of the size that it was down south. And I can see too the way I marvelled at the discovery of the smallest of fragments that pointed towards what would become a professional obsession, though I recall my strident assertion of identity combined with a timidity born of a shocking dearth of actual knowledge about 20th century Palestinian history: that where-to-begin-ness of many young Palestinians who wish to speak all at once, and yet have nothing much credible to assert beyond the oppositional nature of the mainstream and our childhoods. Another essay that plucks at me now as I can see it did then, is by Rowan Cahill on a mutiny known sometimes as the “Battle of Central” or “Liverpool Mutiny”, in addition to the essay’s title “the Battle of Sydney”. In establishing the lineage for mutinies generally in Australian lore, which he notes are controversial and messy events where “a failure of command may be indicated, and certainly the breakdown of grievance-handling procedures”, Cahill refers to an instance, apparently record breaking for the army, in Palestine, during World War II.

Clearly I never found anything about this 1942 incident in 2002 as there are no further details either among my annotations or in my memory, nor as it turns out is there anything discoverable online even now, no skerrick of elucidation. On reflection this makes sense, since a mutiny might sound like a fantastic resistance, and thus be suppressed due to the obvious occasion of institutional embarrassment or incitement to further activism, but this mutiny at least does not represent a principled stand, which is no doubt what my young mind had invested into this fleeting reference. And now I am returning to these archives I follow up Cahill’s bibliographic list where he notes the essay is indebted to Mutiny! Naval Insurrection in Australia and New Zealand and specifically chapter fifteen. I am not quite sure what it is I expect to find in the book when a friendly courier dispatches this title to my door a few days later from the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence, and it is carefully packaged in a handmade envelope of recycled cardboard, and I am sitting in the dentist’s waiting room when I discover that this facet of military history, something I have cultivated a reasonable degree of knowledge in on the subject of the so-called Palestine Campaigns (which remain a kind of thorn in the side of Australian-Israeli relations since PALESTINE is emblazoned on all the military memorials and obelisks around the country) and narrative appropriation, is not at all the kind of story I had imagined but an entry on a disciplinary camp at Nuseirat, in Southern Palestine, which today comprises a district in the world’s largest open-air-prison, known as the Gaza Strip.

Here, soldiers were sent for absence without leave, habitual drunkenness and insolence, and must have found this punishment particularly unaccountable since it seems the facility itself was officiated by a more senior infrastructure of drunk and disorderly men who made it their practice to humiliate those they outranked in insipidly personal ways and were reported in one testimony to be “sleeping off the effects of their drunken carousals”. I am sorry to find this dead end of deranged men here, a kind of satellite outpost of what Tony invokes in his essay on Wake in Fright, depicting men with a predilection for the capacity of institutions to sanction more major atrocities in the pursuit of the minor. The mutiny itself was inconsequential, the unresponsiveness of men in their tents in a meal break to an irrational order to get (to no end) on their feet. The legal point that became central to this event was whether the twenty-one indicted had conspired to mutiny in advance of the failure to follow direction. In the end, it was determined there need not be agreement or prior coordination for collective disobedience to be inscribed as Mutiny (! so often exclaimed over). And so, twenty-one men detained for behavioural irregularities, the bulk of which one might imagine were alibies to disguise the very reasonable fear a man might have had about combat, were outmanoeuvred by an infrastructure of seniors who out-drank and out-harangued them and were often absent, though for reasons that were readily explicable and have been. One man who tried to mount a legal defence to mitigate the court martial was, as an example, delivered the harshest sentence of those charged, a staggering five years and two months’ imprisonment. Later this circumstantial band appealed to higher authority, and for the most part served not more than six months, which, outside of the particularities of service and regimens of order, still strikes me as grossly excessive. Though my mind had on two occasions made a dash for the barricades at the apprehension of the word, Palestine, I had not accounted for the ways of authority and service but rather imagined a bridge between a gone past and my present formed by the backs of plucky soldiers to whom I had attributed, perhaps because of the political nous of Cahill’s own essay, some greater structural goal than what I have met in the archive of this little known footnote to military history in Palestine, which at least is a good deal less shocking than other minor and poorly recorded episodes like the Surafend Massacre.

**

The other Overland (177) is a single issue of what I now understand to be a collection of eight, as I have learnt from Overland’s digital archiving project (176 to 183), in which a man who I knew in that vague drifting sort of way for some years as an undergraduate participated. He flashes up now in a small index of memorable moments such as (why this one) standing over an ironing board untwisting his girlfriend’s laundry in a sparsely furnished corporate South Bank apartment that had the distinction of being charmless but cheap due to oversupply; his name appears under the acknowledgement of “editorial assistance” in each of these eight issues: David Wolstonecroft.

When I came to know David better in 2005, he was embarking on a history honours thesis about Overland, labour history, the local: things I recall he particularly cherished without needing Tony to teach him how to look at what was to hand. Once our honours degrees were conferred, students in history had the distinction of delivering a copy of their first major scholarly work to the Jessie Webb library, where it was duly archived alongside more substantial volumes, to impress upon young historians their relationship to a community of scholars and their value within that. Though ultimately closed down (I can only imagine due to the constraints of real estate and the beleaguered state of university funding), it is perhaps because the collection had been preserved as it was for as long as it had been that David’s honours thesis is still available in the Baillieu Library’s Special Collection. It’s called Overland: The First Eight Years; and when we began our honours year David was already deeply embedded at the journal.

In the physical issue I own, from before I really knew him, there is a book review by David on Mark McKenna’s This Country: A Reconciled Republic? I don’t think I am reifying the archive I have against the absence of what I haven’t in saying this (although there is really no way of verifying that belief in the circumstances), that it captures something essential about what I recall of David’s voice. While the academics who taught us, still youthful enough, as youthful as I am now, had cultivated a sort of ennui intended to patronise and shock — a fashion at the time though post-modernism was past its crest — David had a bright, almost staggering optimism about the possibilities of politics and activism and the right kind of subjectivity, expressed in his small body of published work, including his contributions to Overland. The review illustrates David’s engagement with big questions, in this instance the links between First Nations reconciliation and the failed referendum on the Republic, as against the trivia of political concerns in 2004 like (David jokes) how many chips Mark Latham can fit on his sandwich. David didn’t live to see them, but I’m certain he would have been appalled by the Morrison years, since he praises McKenna’s books for being one about ideas and not clever marketing strategies, prophetically even (as those young departed often seem), for what was nostalgia to David in 2004 seems a far-off utopia these nineteen years later.

In David’s sixth issue I discover now online the cover is of a familiar face of a man who has written two books that I regard as gifts, to both the local community and me personally, that captured something I don’t want to call zeitgeist because in truth I think they pre-dated it, much more than they capitalised on it. Christos Tsiolkas burst into my 90s with Loaded, its protagonist a Mediterranean queer migrant walking the seamy and working-class streets of Melbourne plugged into his Walkman. This was the first character I had ever met on a page who, if they weren’t me, was incontestably someone I knew. In 2005 at the time of the 181 issues, Christos launched his other masterpiece, Dead Europe, and I went to the launch at Readings where he spoke unforgettably about political conversations and difficult conversations and the fact that Australians don’t have them. Like Loaded this was also such a vital and true observation from this young writer, who being older than me seemed old to me then, though I can see in the gorgeous headshot on the 181 cover just how young and beautiful and beautifully earnest he was.

In issue 181, around the time of Dead Europe’s launch, Christos is featured in the Overland Lecture, in conversation with Patricia Corenlius, and there’s also a symposium comprising three reviews of his book. The interview is brilliant, and I can imagine how much more brilliant I might have found it in 2005, but still I can see the themes that have always impressed me in Christos’s thinking here in the transcript. Cornelius asks in her opening question if he would call himself a political writer, because then (as now) being a literary writer who is also “political” is considered to herald some sort of unpalatable didacticism, and Christos says in a way I find quite unflinching:

I am a political writer, but I think that tag is only applied to a writer who works from oppositional positions, or from positions on the left. I think all writing is political, because all writing deals with culture … but [when you come from oppositional or left politics] you can be labelled with the term ‘political writer’ in a way conservative writers don’t have to think about. It’s assumed that their work is not political, when I think in fact it is.

I find that last half line in particular devastatingly powerful, as I think all of Christos’s best writing is. It all looks so simple, and then you realise that you’re beneath a complex interlocking system of vaulted ceilings; if I was a better Christian it would be almost religious. The conversation turns to the question of representation in Dead Europe and also in a theatre piece Tsiolkas had worked on, Whose Afraid of the Working Class? There’s a sense in this conversation, born out also in the reviews, that a controversy must have surrounded this book — a controversy I must have been impervious to — namely that it was racist, and specifically anti-Semitic. Some of the following reviews gesture to that, although all agree that the book is doing important and difficult work, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, in challenging the moral conservatism of the time and challenging also the intergenerational legacy of racism’s destruction in both Europe and Australia. I’ll paraphrase him here, but Christos says precisely because racism is so horrific we need to understand that creating characters from specific minorities and making them good to make them worthy (he refers to Greek people, Aboriginal people and Jewish people) does absolutely no service to anti-racist work. Corenelius notes the anger in his writing, and he agrees there is anger, and that some of it is his. What I think he is driving at is that no one should have to justify themselves to anyone else. It was this kind of role model that helped me realise that if you can only empathise with Palestinian experience through elaborate projects to humanise us, such as showing the world that Palestinian children also fly kites, then frankly you can stick it. I wish we were far enough along the road of anti-racism that it went without saying that an audience’s need to have a whole class of people humanised only speaks to their own dereliction. But I’m not convinced we’re there yet.

When I open Dead Europe, a copy with yellowing pages some of which are loose at the top where the glue has given way, I find to my surprise there is no inscription there. I remember that launch so vividly; yet although my memory of this copy is that I had queued at the signing, it seems I was far too shy to meet my hero then. More recently I am at a signing with Christos and I tell him a truncated version of these things, and he writes the inscription of my dreams, though he could only write it all this time later because I could only tell him about the longitudinal impact of these books once the time that has elapsed had elapsed; and unlike other literary heroes of mine whom on meeting have so disappointed me that I have had to work hard to keep cherishing their texts, Christos is exactly the hero I wished for but do not expect him to be.

David remained with Overland for around two years, staying on after submitting his honours thesis. I believe he was in touch with some of his Overland friends until the end of his days, though we had lost contact by then; but such was the impact of him on me, or the timing of our friendship, or perhaps because I remove so little documentation from the furniture of my life, that I still have a carefully saved folder of emails David sent me during his short one, where he would generously engage with the most fraught and urgent of questions, like what makes life good, what is the remedy for loneliness, and where does love come from? Overland will always remind me of David’s brief, but not insignificant, life, like a particular corner in Fitzroy or walking along Grattan Street in late summer, though it is two decades since these things took place, a decade since he left.

**

I am standing in an airport bookshop recently and quite by chance my eyes fasten upon a line of thickish cream-coloured books marked Vetro, Ironia e Dio. Quite possibly this is the only book I could so readily translate, the serendipity of a long-loved text, familiar and unfamiliar in a foreign place, the opening poem, “The Glass Essay”, which has followed me from a similar time as my old copies of Overland. In another bookshop, in another country but not an airport, I meet Anne Carson, and our exchange is so disappointing I put her words down for a decade until I am reading a review after the death of her mother and a line enters into me like a surgeon who pierces delicately the epidermis and hesitates over the anatomy of the human hide before plunging deeper. Like “The Glass Essay” before it, Carson’s words become an invisible brand, when she says quite simply, “I miss her like an odd sock”. When I talk about Carson now, I always recount this line as my way back into her jarring affect; and though my well-thumbed copy is exactly where I know it to be at home, I am compelled to buy this translated volume because it is like something essential about me has been placed here in Milan to remind me of what it is that makes me who I am; or perhaps it is simply that I cannot pass a serendipity by without elevating it to something significant; because meaning lies here and ought not be dismissed by disparaging descriptions, like coincidence.

Without recalling all writing that shapes you, though those formative pieces will always have an urgent quality — a gallery of clues to who you, I can see that my early encounters with Overland, and these two copies made precious as much in their impact as in any object they comprise, is an idiosyncratic archive as important for its unlikeliness as its survival. And yet, such a collection is not coincidental, but rather the physical manifestation of the craft of a person who is interested in archive and artifact and in the surprising connections that are always there to be found among archives, if you know how to look for them. As a journal at odds with the mainstream, Overland offered a younger version of me an intellectual place where radical thinking could reside, and a dawning awareness of a community I could take a place in. In this sense, Overland was the tangible expression of a counter to the indifference and invisibility of a young Palestinian woman, the significance of whose identity was rewritten just as she came of age at the time of a catastrophic intellectual nadir represented in 9/11; and a place of refusal against socio-political disengagement and apathy which have been the horsemen of these neo-liberal times. The digitising of all these archives speaks most to an important vein that mitigates against such a hopeless mainstream culture, and reminds us like Edward Said does, that in certain lights, even lost causes cannot be said to truly be lost at all.

Books Cited

Nichols, C 2018, “Dorothy Hewett’s daughters Rozanna and Kate Lilley talk about re-casting their mum’s image in the age of #MeToo”, ABC NEWS.
Baker, K & Frame, T 2000, Mutiny! Naval Insurrections in Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.