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