Published in Overland Issue 254 Autumn 2024 · Uncategorized Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk With this two-hundred and fifty-fourth issue we are proud to mark Overland’s seventieth year with a new archivally informed design, and to take the opportunity throughout the year to reflect on the artistry and advocacy that has defined Overland for these many decades. It’s a venerable lifespan for any literary journal in volatile and precarious funding conditions, but more significantly a trove of vital work produced by generations of Australian writers. Stephen Murray-Smith launched the first issues of this journal in 1954, in what was in many ways, another world. Overland came into the world thanks to a £15 grant from the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism, care of its secretary, the novelist Judah Waten. Its second issue, themed around the Eureka stockade, ran an essay by the then Leader of the Opposition, HV Evatt, and poems marking the contemporary Collinsville mine disaster, in which seven workers were killed. Collective memory is capricious, particularly in a settler-colony. As two vicious attacks in Sydney are described in markedly different terms, and the speculative unsafety of certain students is privileged over material threats to others; as Rafah burns, we wonder what will be remembered in another seventy years. In the decades that will follow, when museums and public institutions hold reverent exhibitions mourning the thousands slaughtered in Gaza or this nation opens righteous memorials to the student protesters fighting for divestment as this edition goes to print, we hope Overland will still be there to record the truth about those who were brave enough to resist. For now we offer our gratitude to our readers, contributors and broader community for your contribution to this legacy. Now, more than ever — in solidarity, Jonathan and Evelyn 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.
