Overland literary journal

This is an essay about the chickadees, a bird family of North America, and about climate politics. By the end, it’s going to ask you to join me in November in Newcastle, New South Wales, for the People's Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port.

As Australian and/or Australian-based lawyers and legal scholars, we call on the Australian government to act without delay to ensure Australia’s compliance with its international obligations, as articulated by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

We unequivocally condemn the racism that Australian political leaders and authorities have shown towards Palestinians, particularly to Palestinian visa applicants from Gaza since October 2023. Australian political leaders and authorities have failed dismally to provide Palestinians with meaningful access to asylum and safety.

If we are going to worship the book as an object, then let us worship it as it really is. Let us turn the pages gently, enjoy the bend of a vertical grain as it deserves to and see the book as one object among many where the labour of the writer meets the labour of the printer and publisher.

but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn

I ask my mother if the Iron Dome is carbon-neutral. She replies that “the resulting explosion is tiny and probably negligible,” and asks me in return if I’m aware the Dead Sea is dying, the water receding.

"Found living in the safety of rockpools, sponges are animals sensitive to disturbance. They can regenerate, reshaping with the water flow." A new comic by Sofia Sabbagh.

We, the undersigned Deakin University staff and students, oppose Deakin’s disciplinary measures against students for participation in the Deakin Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We affirm our support for freedom of speech and the right to protest on campus.

I run past a sandstone wall and come back to the entry. Staring at the large house number 88 with its warm glow, I steady my short breaths in relief before ringing the bell. A vague voice comes out of the speaker but is cut off suddenly and the silence resumes. The man is not following me. I check, looking over both shoulders. The gate swings open. Ken is standing behind it, one outstretched arm gesturing to my grand entry. As I follow him into the house, my hands tremble – I’ve been gripping the bottle of wine for too long.

Increasingly, I refer to myself as disabled rather than autistic and disabled. Not because I am ashamed of being autistic, but rather, because I am troubled by what autism has come to represent. Autism is increasingly being located as separate from disability, a trendy quirk, and I worry that disability is yet again rendered “other” in order to serve autism’s “inclusion”.

A poetry of events also has to be generative — offer other possibilities, other ways of seeing. It is not enough to be settler-legacy anti-colonial and work in wish-fulfilling decolonising modes. There is a need to nuance levels of protest to be able to address injustices within injustice, and not hide behind binaries of right and wrong, good and bad.

A new poem by πO

In the 1980s, a horrible time was had by all. Yet the assorted Australian talent for making the best of a bad thing, gave us the most important and characteristic popular music genre, locals have (n)ever known.