AustLit

'Who are we? We’re some of the volunteer readers at Overland – you might recognise our names from the editorial pages of the journal. Ordinarily, we have the pleasure of reading a selection of the works submitted to the journal each month before they move onto Claire’s desk for further consideration. We read and carefully consider each piece, but don’t make the final choice of what’s published, and we don’t ordinarily interact with the authors.' (Editorial introduction)

'There are many things that come to mind when I sit down to write about these stories. The first is how great they are: that much is clear. But hovering over that is the cloud of everything that’s happened since submissions for this edition closed.' ( Allan Drew, Editorial introduction)

'The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid and perhaps contradictory: a matter of constantly sham; definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January - at the US Capitol building was, among other things. a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens. Scenes of white police officers calmly allowing Trump supporters to infiltrate the senate floor and some of the reported remarks: 'This is not America ... they're supposed to shoot BLM' nakedly displayed the inequity of some of these definitions. A number of the essays in this edition engage with our previous edition's focus on global Indigenous activism. others explore the complexity of inter-subjective space in other contexts. Writing and publishing are their own kinds of public space, structured by the conflicting definitions of race, class, and gender. In 'White Mythology* Derrida argued that western metaphysics. in attempting to erase its own historical specificity, misrepresents itself as abstract, universal, and infinitely plastic. In Australian writing the myth is more precise. William Stanner described Australian history as a window carefully placed to allow only one view of the landscape, and Australian literature is still marked by this myopia. Michael R Griffiths writes that the expression of settler nationalism is built upon a pathology of melancholia: a colonial logic of elimination which fetishises that which it destroys. This logic is palpable in much canonical Australian writing, from Lawson and Patterson, to Patrick White and Eleanor Dark, to the Jindyworobaks and Les Murray. To articulate an effective ethics of reading, writing, and publishing in this continent we must properly frame Aboriginality as an agentic subject, rather than a nationalist prop. Jeanine Leane's essay in this edition is a singular step towards better definitions. 

Solidarity. ' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Editorial)

'It feels like a decade has passed since we moved to Melbourne to take up work in the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. In our first days here, we attended several sessions of the Activism @ the Margins Conference, held in RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. It was perhaps the most diverse and interdisciplinary conference we’ve attended in our careers, with dozens of presentations challenging already contested boundaries of critical and creative performance.' (Editorial introduction)

'Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.' (Publication summary)

'In ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ JH Prynne writes that “no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.” Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Introduction)

'We need new voices and unconventional narratives to guard against rigidity. Plots that are distinct and lucid and sometimes boiling hot.'

'I didn’t expect to be making the magazine you are holding, which is why earlier editorials this year read like farewells, but this is definitely it: my twentieth, and final, edition.

'People have asked why I would leave a magazine that is so politically and culturally necessary and, therefore, satisfying.

'To ensure a magazine stays vibrant, it’s essential to make room for new editors and writers. As for the satisfying nature of the work here, it is undeniably true. But workplaces, and political and literary projects, are made of people who motivate and challenge you.

'Last night I attended a talk by former editor Jeff Sparrow, about his new book on fascism and the Christchurch massacre. ‘What can we do about the intense alienation and isolation that many people seem to feel today?’ someone in the audience asked.

'It seems obvious, but workplaces are part of the answer (and why the era of freelancing and the gig economy has been disastrous for unionism and collectivism more generally). These spaces are inherently social: on many levels, work is about the relationships you form and the people you work with; who help to ease the intense loneliness that we can feel, the kind described by Rachael McGuirk and Hannah McCann in this edition.

'It is also true that there are not many workplaces like Overland, where one can start as an intern and progress to editor. The democratic traditions and collaborative nature – where everyone in the office has control over how each edition looks and reads – is unique.

'Workplaces are always about the people. I would like to thank: Alex Skutenko, the backbone of Overland for more than two decades; copyediting genius John Marnell; the aforementioned Jeff Sparrow; inspired fiction and poetry editors Peter Minter, Jennifer Mills, Toby Fitch and Claire Corbett; designers Brent Stegeman and Lynley Eavis, the nimble-fingered Sam Wallman, and so many other talented artists!; the brilliant and committed interns and volunteers; Giovanni Tiso, one of my favourite writers who I now call a colleague; and Rachael McGuirk, who always meets every challenge.

'I look forward to reading future editions edited by Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, and seeing the new directions they take Overland.' (Jacinda Woodhead  Introducing Overland 237)

'Since learning that we are to lose $80,000 a year in funding from 2021¹, we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on contemporary literary culture and its public perception.

'To put this figure in perspective, $80,000 is about three editions of the print magazine each year or three roles at the magazine (we only have four positions, or the equivalent of 2.2 full-time staff).

'Anyone involved in the arts or literature is used to precarity: funding and support comes and goes and is often finite; no-one likes to give money to keep the lights on.' (Jacinda Woodhead : Introducing Overland 236, introduction)

'It has been a privilege to edit a magazine that emerged from different left traditions and continues to find new ways to foster radical spaces and thought. For me, it has always been the making of the magazines that I loved (18 print editions since 2015, and countless online editions and pieces) and the ephemerality of each edition, a collaboration shaped by all the ideas and forces around it.' (Jacinda Woodhead, Editorial introduction)

'As I write this, we are still in mourning from a rightwing terror attack on Christchurch that took many lives, and damaged us all. Two weeks ago today, the true and brutal nature of fascism yet again showed its hideous visage.' (Jacinda Woodhead : Editorial introduction)

'When conceiving of this issue, I found myself wanting to bite back at critics of futurism. Those who call it sentimental, puerile, unrealistic. A fairy tale. Wish fulfilment. Such an anti-utopian mindset is what, I would argue, inspired Jonathan Franzen to write in The New Yorker recently that we may as well accept defeat against the climate emergency. I see this anti-utopianism everywhere. In fact, I see it in myself.' (Eda Gunaydin  : Editorial introduction)

'We think of sex as primordial and innate, but it is both the target of market strategies and highly mediated. The inventions of virtual reality, sexbots and RealDolls have broad implications. Dick pics, sexting, Tinder and Grindr have revolutionised the hook-up and, by extension, our sexual moralities. Alternative communities find connection online, where before there may have been nothing.' (Michalia Arathimos : Editorial introduction)

'As the editor for this autumn 2018 issue of Overland online, I read almost 450 stories. I had to think quite intently on which, in my opinion, four stories could represent the magazine Overland.

'Why did I relate to the stories I chose? The stories stand out because they have characters with complex lives. They are struggling with adversity, but are alive to life. The stories are written in scenes, not long descriptive passages or discursive dialogue. These are narratives that go to the heart of the matter and arrive there from the first sentence. The writing has a voice, tone and a story arc. The language is simple. And definitely not too many adjectives and adverbs.' (Linda Godfrey, Editorial introduction)

'Last month, I attended a symposium in Newport about memorialisation and the thirty-five bridge workers who died when the West Gate Bridge collapsed in 1970. The ‘past is never over’, observed visiting Canadian academic Tara Goldstein, because we are always reinterpreting history and, therefore, must always interrogate ‘veracity’. The royal commission into the accident held unions and workers partly accountable; as one of the speakers argued, in the lead-up to the fifty-year anniversary of the disaster, this is a narrative that must be corrected.' ( Jacinda Woodhead Introduction)

'Once upon a time, there was a first sentence. I wasn’t sure what to write after that.’ There isn’t a contributor here (or perhaps anywhere) who wouldn’t concur with Mel Campbell’s sentiment on beginnings.

'All the columnists in this edition muse on startings and endings. How do we begin anything, asks Campbell. What if endings are no longer quite so … final, asks Giovanni Tiso.' (Jacinda Woodhead, Editorial)

'What could education be?

'The neoliberal university – largely privatised, steered by market logic, forcing academic inquiry into vocational strictures – looms large in the Australian imagination and in reality; as documented in our online magazine over the past few months, class sizes swell alongside student fees, academic workloads and vice-chancellor salaries.' (Jacinda Woodhead : Editorial introduction)

'This edition is off to print at the same time as Indigenous activists are establishing Camp Freedom on the Gold Coast, a protest against the stolen wealth that props up yet another Australian Commonwealth Games spectacle. Camp Freedom has echoes of Melbourne’s 2006 Camp Sovereignty, a powerful demonstration against colonial authority, which Tony Birch documents within these pages. Such occupations, Birch writes, present ‘a spectre of repressed Indigenous histories’ that ‘stake a claim’ on past and present.' (Jacinda Woodhead : Editorial introduction)