y separately published work icon Overland periodical   peer reviewed assertion
Date: 2015-2019
Date: 2007-2015
Date: 2004-2007
Date: 2003-2004
Date: 1997-2002
Date: 1993-1996
Date: 1988-1992
Date: 1954-1988
Issue Details: First known date: 1954... 1954 Overland
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Issues

y separately published work icon Overland no. 254 Autumn 2024 28625508 2024 periodical issue

'Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 253 Summer 2023-2024 27835872 2023 periodical issue

'Dženana Vucic on the subtle and not-so-subtle Marxist symbolism in Sailor Moon, John Docker, a "non-theatre person" by his own admission on The New Theatre, Sarah Schwartz on prison healthcare as punishment and the killing of Veronica Nelson, a poignant short story on memory and displacement from Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini, Jeanine Leane's prize-winning poem, "Water under the bridge", and more.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 252 Spring 2023 27346368 2023 periodical issue

'Overland 252 brings together the work of many, including writer Vivian Blaxell, Australian-Palestinian writer and educator Micaela Sahhar, and Greek-Australian anarchist poet π. o., to offer up fictional, poetic and scholarly reflections on place, resistance, memory, desire and activism—inherently political themes that have always concerned Overland writers and its readers. You'll also find new poetry from Eileen Chong, Emma Simington, Niko Chłopicki and Jini Maxwell, as well as new short fiction from Andrew Roff, Pierce Wilcox, Dorell Ben, plus loads more.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 251 Winter 2023 26845190 2023 periodical issue

'New fiction, poetry, and essay from literary luminaries such as Daniel Browning, Bill Gammage, Jen Craig, Rico Craig, Luoyang Chen, Jane Downing, and Jo Langdon. Featuring cover art from Liss Fenwick's haunting Humpty Doom series.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 250 Autumn 2023 26417008 2023 periodical issue

'Jeff Sparrow on elite capture, Fiannuala Morgan on colonial literature and bushfires, Jordana Silverstein on Lily Brett and Louis Armand on John Tranter, plus outstanding fiction and poetry selected by Claire Corbett and Toby Fitch.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 249 Summer 2023 26017321 2023 periodical issue ''Overlanding', as in droving cattle across country at distance, waxed as a literary trope precisely as it waned as a means of labour. Like its dialectical opposite the Squatter, the Overlander is etymologically multiple, meaning both the drover who is employed and respectable. and the sundowner, who is itinerant and suspect. In the Australian social imaginary, one is elevated to a culture hero and a symbol of belonging, the other indexes the repressed cognisance of the settler as a predatory interloper. One of the innovations of Leah Purcell's adaptations of Lawson's 'The Drover's Wife' demonstrates the coextension of these types. The writing in our latest issue is animated by the problems and revelations of interiority. Elias Greig's illuminating discussion of nativist paranoia in Heather Rose's novel Bruny demonstrates the persistence of perennial settler fantasies of replacement. Through a more intimate lens. EI Clarence's personal essay 'Dovetails' traces the ongoing psychological disconnections wrought by Australian forced adoption policies. The recurrence and recursion of the nominal past is also the subject of Natalia Figueroa Barroso's graceful hybrid essay on linguistic loss and transformation. 'A guide to the colonisation of my mother tongues.' (Publication summary) 
 
y separately published work icon Overland no. 248 Spring 2022 25616816 2022 periodical issue 'This issue goes to print shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the victory of the Whitlam government, a moment in Australian history that increasingly  resembles a fragment from another political reality. But then, there's an extent to which progress always does; there's a moment, a moment to which radical positive change first manifests itself, to paraphrase Jameson, like a utopian spark cast by a passing comet. Our 248th issue is dominated by fragments, fissures and speculations. Abigail Fisher's alchemical tribute to Bella Li makes poetry the gap between myth and allegory, and Michael Griffiths traces the resonance between TS Eliot's organisation of history in 'The Waste Land' and Carl Schmitt's model of political theology as a grim augur of the neoliberalism to come. In fiction. meanwhile, Bruna Gomes splinters the patterns of consent manufacture to expose the moral decay roiling beneath. If the whole, as Adorno put it. is always already the false, perhaps the formal recognition of the fragment can point the way to different versions of the possible.' (Editorial)
 
y separately published work icon Overland no. 247 Winter 2022 25350922 2022 periodical issue 'In the time since our last edition the Victorian Aboriginal community has lost two of its most prominent Elders, Uncle Archie Roach and Uncle Jack Charles. Both were survivors of a brutal r3egime of state-sanctioned removal and assimilation that continues to tear apart Aboriginal families today. Both will be sorely missed from the community in which Overland lives and works, and remembered forever for their compassion, resilience and leadership.' (Editorial introduction)
y separately published work icon Overland no. 246 Autumn 2022 25007331 2022 periodical issue

'In July critics and teachers of Australian literature met in Nipaluna/Hobart to commemorate the thirty-year anniversary of the Mabo decision, and to trace its various afterlives in the novels, films, and poems of the settler-colony. Keynotes and papers contemplating the changing aesthetics and politics of Australian writing were punctuated by austere reminders of the decimation of an already exclusionary humanities sector. The scattering of early career researchers subsidising precarious sessional work by drawing on their superannuation, stories of suddenly terminated contracts in place of missing colleagues, and remaining ones drowning under compounding administrative duties as professional services are stripped to their absolute and untenable minimums. The dissonance between symbolic progress and material regress was a stark reminder of the disingenuities settlement, and the inadequacy of merely representational politics. The essays in this edition of Overland are un-themed, but all investigate the relationship between place and labour, and the necessity of collectively re-imagining that relationship.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Editorial)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 245 Summer 2022 24563122 2022 periodical issue
y separately published work icon Overland no. 244 Spring 2021 23746739 2021 periodical issue

'It’s a cliché of contemporary publishing that every editorial in a literary journal like Overland invariably makes arguments for the importance of literary journals before platitudinising about the importance of literature generally. In Overland’s first editorial in 1954 Stephen Murray-Smith invited our readers to share our ‘love of living, our optimism, our belief in the traditional dream of a better Australia’ which is hard to beat for brevity.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk : Editorial introduction)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 243 Winter 2021 23335042 2021 periodical issue In Overland's 243rd issue, we're proud to print the results of the inaugural Kuracca prize established honour of Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert. We received an enormous number of - submissions from writers of all levels of experience, and each of our veteran judges. Jeanine Leane, Elena Gomez and Justin Clemens remarked on the breadth and quality of submissions. Our winning entry came from Adam Brannigan. a registered nurse and previously unpublished writer; his poetic narrative 'Great grandmother Arrabrilya is a powerful reminder of the healing possibilities of language and culture, which so many of us — currently languishing in lockdown — might need. It's conventional at the moment to opine on the hidden costs and generational sacrifices of the pandemic, which are of course, terrible. Robbo Bennett's essay 'The Bridge and the Fire' articulates a new history of solidarity marginal to headline news, and perhaps points towards other narratives of care and decency currently being written.' (Editorial
 
y separately published work icon Overland no. 242 Autumn 2021 22090927 2021 periodical issue 'Overland was founded with dual commitments to literary quality, and to publishing and fostering diverse writers. At the Widest extremes of certain kind of argument these priorities can be placed into a false dichotomy, and made to seem mutually antagonistic, but during our first year's tenure as editors we've had the pleasure of working with brilliant writers informed by a wealth of diverging experiences. This issue proudly continues that commitment with a panoply of incisive essays of widely varying styles and subjects, the results of 2020's Judith Wright and Neilma Sidney prizes, and a selection of fiction and poetry bringing emerging voices.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk: Editorial introduction)
y separately published work icon Overland A Special Digital Fiction Edition no. 240 2021 21488352 2021 periodical issue short story

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland Overland : Autumn Fiction no. 237.5 Autumn 2020 19052761 2020 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 241 Summer 2020 21720250 2020 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland Activism no. 240 Spring 2020 20909344 2020 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland Health no. 239 Winter Jonathan Dunk (editor), Evelyn Araluen (editor), 2020 20735290 2020 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland no. 238 Autumn 2020 19661556 2020 periodical issue

'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)

y separately published work icon Overland An Autumn Fiction Edition with 16 Editors! no. 234.5 Autumn 2019 16560053 2019 periodical issue

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

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