Published in Overland Issue 255 Winter 2024 · Uncategorized Editorial Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk This issue goes to print on the cusp of a darkening world, as the Israeli war-crimes committed in response to Hamas’ attacks expand to Lebanon and Syria as they reach a year’s duration, and a confrontation of major powers looms on the horizon. A year ago, under a different moral dispensation, we were criticised for daring to allow that Israeli forces might have targeted the Al-Shifa hospital, an accusation since rendered almost naive. The subsequent escalation of horrors has been enabled by a concerted effort to distort moral language obvious in every tortuous passivised headline in the Global North. Our press daily occludes and minimises structural violence while inflating the semantic offence of slogans and symbols in the same breath. We don’t know where this is going or how dark it can get, but we do suspect that our journalists and politicians could only lie and equivocate so shamelessly if they thought we would all forget what we’ve seen. Overland won’t. 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.
