Overland literary journal

If in future an image of mine— of course, I have made the if-ness of your looking a multiple Ferris wheel turned to trolley car trundling down the street. Damn, I will show you something all right here, inside the daily or what you call private.

We like to gentrify sci-fi a little, suiting the genre up and setting it to work on blueprints for the future, to imagine an alternative into which we can escape. In doing so, we forget the genre’s capacity for derangement.

Palestinians in the West Bank plant roughly 10,000 olive trees a year, to make up for the roughly 10,00 trees Israel cuts or burns every year, since 1967. People I get but why — why bring trees into this?

As members and friends of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS), we write to express the urgent need to transform IPCS, into an Institute that takes up antiracist and anticolonial work in the Australian colony and transnationally.

If you’ve ever been called a Luddite, it was probably meant as an insult. The Luddite name has been so powerfully besmirched that it is now commonly used as a pejorative to denote technophobia or an irrational aversion to progress. At the heart of Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine is a denouncement of this mischaracterisation. And in dismantling the myth, Merchant revitalises the legend.

We, the undersigned Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance members, condemn the Australian government's support for Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and its refusal to vote in the United Nations for a humanitarian truce.

This essay explores the political ecology of suburban gardens, focussing on Sydney but also drawing on insights from cities around the world. It draws on my academic studies in geography and political economy, but also on an adult life spent largely as a labourer building and maintaining gardens, parks and urban bushland.

We, the undersigned, reject violence against all civilians, regardless of identity. We stand for freedom and for humanity and we call for an end to the root cause of violence: oppression and occupation. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We ask literary organisations to show solidarity and call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered.

BORIS A quick guide to another year of Overland, from your trusty feline, Boris. I liked the ginger cat story, though it made my human cry. I liked the talking cat, too, but I’m definitely in the “not wasting my time learning to talk” camp. But reading is good. And writing is fun, though it’s been challenging […]

Since the attacks committed by Hamas on the seventh of last month, we have received considerable criticism, offered in good faith and otherwise, for publishing a number of collective statements in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and for our staff-members' presence at marches in protest of Israel’s ongoing war-crimes. Given the sclerotic condition of Australian political discourse, this isn’t surprising. But I have been shocked by the doggedly misdirective persistence of these arguments as the bombs continued to fall.

To my friends and comrades, I’m not sure if there’s language to communicate how this last month has utterly changed me. This time a few weeks ago the busyness and chaos of bricolage arts and academic labour had so efficiently distracted me from my anxiety about the upcoming referendum that I forgot to prepare myself for its inevitable conclusion.

In the late 1970s, a handful of unionists and communists studied the rules of an elite gentlemens' club on the waterfront of Semaphore, Adelaide. They carried out a coup, taking over formal outright owneship of the beautiful grand old social club. They turned the establishment into the Semaphore Workers Club ...

This year is not like every other year. Our schedule over the past month has been taken over by essays and public statements on Palestine and Gaza. Tomorrow, our chief editors Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk will give an account of the politics that ground our solidarity for the Palestinian cause. In the meantime, I want to express our deep gratitude to those have trusted us with their words, and assure them that we don’t take this privilege lightly.