“We’re heading to Ålesund, which is just a name on a map to me, a small city hovering on the coast of my dreams. The Opening Heart – three days of stillness, singing and sharing. Not my choice. He insisted.”
From AT A CROSSROADS WITH REVEREND HANSEN BANG, a wonderful new story by Cameron Semmens.
“We allegedly had a bomb thrown at us — a bomb said to be designed to kill us — but there was mostly silence from the nation.”
Roxy Moore on Invasion Day in Boorloo and how safety can only come through truth-telling.
“If feminist organisations are genuinely concerned about safety, their efforts must target the everyday violences of imprisonment, not the scapegoating of trans women.”
Stacey Stokes, Witt Gorrie and Sheena Colquhoun on carceral feminism and the politics of exclusion.
“The committed writer is a movement writer … The committed writer knows that they know very little, and that the way to remedy that ignorance is through solidarity with people in struggle.”
For PEN Melbourne, André Dao on how a writer can make the world more free.
Issue 259 is now here. Available for purchase now: overland.org.au/product/curr...
This comic elegantly puts it all together, making abstract things concrete and seemingly remote things urgently relevant. Fantastic work
Bloody hell - how good's this?! I missed it some months ago: Chris Fleming on "Huts" (Heidegger's, Wittgenstein's, Adorno's* (* "the last philosopher who would be caught dead in a hut"), Kaczynski... In @overlandjournal.bsky.social overland.org.au/2025/08/huts/
We are very excited to announce the arrival of Overland No. 259. Now available for purchase in our online store. If you are already a subscriber, keep an eye out for your copy in the mail! overland.org.au/product/curr...
In our latest piece for @copower.bsky.social, the wonderful Sofia Sabbagh tries really hard, and ultimately fails, not to make a comic about critical minerals.
We are excited to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Head here to read more about the authors! overland.org.au/2026/03/anno...
We are excited to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. Head here to read more about the authors! overland.org.au/2026/03/anno...
We are thrilled to announce the shortlist for the 2025 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Head here to learn more about the poets! overland.org.au/2026/03/anno...
“Reading Australia from Lanka and Lanka from Australia, MacIntyre is an artist who made new cultural and social landscapes visible.”
Suvendrini Perera remembers the playwright Ernest Thalayasingham MacIntyre, who died in December at the age of 91.
“I write in the hope that the psych ward I do visit next, if that unfortunate day comes, is a reformed one, a changed one and one that treats its patients with a level of dignity and respect not always seen in the past.”
Jarni Blakkarly on the broken promises of mental health reform.
This will only take you five minutes (or less) and it helps us tremendously! Have a squiz: tally.so/r/vGyqVg
“I saw your face obscured / thirty-eight degrees / dead grass on the hill beneath the spires / when I returned the day after you left / when I returned did you decide”
From our latest #fridaypoem, SPRING’S EMBER by Elysha English.
Introducing our inaugural readers' survey. Help us do the best by you, and go into the running to win a prize! Head here: tally.so/r/vGyqVg
“Who were these spaces built for? I ask often myself. Because this famously liveable city seems to favour those able to remain regulated within it.”
Phoebe Thorburn on the hostility of public spaces.
Colonial authoritarianism did not start with Chris Minns: in her new comic, Eav Brennan weaves the testimonies of friends who participated in the Herzog rally at Town Hall with the recent history of the attacks on the right to protest in NSW.
“The story of my ancestors was written in the marks on our bodies and told around meals cooked in an underground oven then shared with the rest of our people over laughs.”
So begins MAGERE, a new story written and illustrated by the wonderful Dorell Ben.
“The selective punishment of one group of migrants or refugees is not an incidental feature of our migration regime: it is its central organising principle.”
Sanmati Verma, Josephine Langbien and James Clarke on the new wave of deportations to Nauru.
“I argue that the use of this term must not be dislocated from Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism.”
Ruth De Souza on the misuse of Cultural Safety.
If you sit still and quietly in a natural environment for twelve minutes, then the animals there will go back to how they were acting before you arrived: a new poster by the inimitable @samwallman.bsky.social.
“When it comes to fiction, then, I am arguing that the anxiety that provoked the writing of Juice is incited by, not detached from, capitalism and power, and no less dangerous than what Winton describes as apathy.”
Daniel Ray on Tim Winton’s JUICE
“This is the story of what this win means — not just for the Starkeys and the Kokatha people, but for the global arms trade and the corporate actors operating on Indigenous lands.”
Miriam Deprez on how Kokatha custodians took on multinationals in the Woomera Prohibited Area.
Our Summer Program concludes today with MASSIVE GLACIER COLLAPSE COMPILATION VOL 9, a brilliant new poem by Lach Valentine. Generously supported by our friends at @copower.bsky.social.
“But Gabriel was not alone, no matter how far his woolly thoughts stretched, and how eternal time felt.”
Our Summer program continues with the first Friday Fiction for 2026: BALM OF HURT MINDS by Claire Cao.
“And so ends an obscene, morally violent and deceptive novel.”
In what may be Overland’s most Summer read ever, John Kinsella engages in a masterful, labyrinthine (and parenthetical, elliptical …) reading of Hawthorne’s THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES.
We've lost Meanjin, a situation that was completely unthinkable until it actually happened. Don't think we won't lose more. It's quite clear there are people who don't care what they destroy for political gain. Literary culture in this country is already frayed. Don't let it come apart entirely.
In addition to supporting Palestinian writers like Randa Abdel-Fattah, and authors and artists who withdrew from AWW in solidarity, spare a thought for the "little" magazines like @overlandjournal.bsky.social, who have relentlessly stood up for Palestine and have been comprehensively defunded for it
