Overland literary journal

A painting I used to like a lot once & thought about / I haven’t thought about / for some time. It showed / Walter Benjamin at a table in Paris. / The artist’s name I can’t recall. Not Patrick. Not Paul?

Since October 2023, I have gotten to know members of the Palestinian Deaf community across the Gaza Strip. In sharing their accounts, it is my hope that readers will begin to understand their uniquely horrific experiences of the genocide, and how their Deaf and Palestinian identities are inextricably embedded within them. 

It has always been clear that there is no future in the oppressive Israeli occupation — not for Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis or Palestinians. It is just as obvious that antisemitism, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism cannot be defeated by a standing army.

"Every ten minutes, a child dies in Gaza," Al Jazeera reports on my phone on the bus. It is hell on earth. And every 60 seconds an announcement sounds in formal Hebrew: Even in such times we ask that you validate your travel pass. Together we are strong.

It seems that in 2024, in Australia and elsewhere, the interplay between the current funding models, and the gatekeepers of cultural institutions and festivals versus democratic freedom of artistic expression has come to a head.

Kusama literalises the self-loss inherent in communication, in eroticism, and in death through her work, and we all know it’s such a relief not to have to be yourself for a minute. Kusama’s brand is that feeling for a lifetime.

You never really know, do you? You never know anyone, not really. Twenty-four was pretty young to get married, when you think about it. They seemed fine. It was all a shock.

A classroom where someone from the dominant culture feels safe may be a place where a marginalised student or staff member feels unsafe because of the power dynamics in the university and society more broadly. This has been described by some scholars as slow violence. And this is why the goal of ensuring safety, in which risk and discomfort can take place for learning, is a collective responsibility.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean and Alan Fyfe’s T are books with a deep relation. A poetry collection and a novel respectively, Clean and T were released within less than a year of each other and attracted multiple award listings; and both deal with methamphetamine use in Western Australia, a state which consumes the drug at almost twice the national average.

pacific gulls carry tightly closed shells to a height then drop them to the rocks below I say I don’t not mind isolation I am introverted

As a researcher focused on Australian social work’s complicity in settler-colonialism, these acts of solidarity had me thinking about what social work institutions are doing to mobilise against what Israeli historian and genocide studies scholar Raz Segal has called a “textbook case of genocide.” The answer is, at least publicly, very little.

We demand an end to university ties with weapons manufacturers.

Political journalism follows scandal like a loyal dog. The Murray-Darling Basin is a gift to such an enterprise, breeding scandal and tragedy, windfall and downfall, wealthy abundance and mass ecological death.