Overland No. 260

“Air is a public good that remains an intimate secret.”
– Roger Chao, “How to Live with No Air”

“We are very small as individuals, but have relations bigger than us.”
– Hana Pera Aoake, “Class Consciousness, Labour, and Contemporary Indigenous Art from Aotearoa”

Overland’s 260th issue is our most substantial yet. At 212 pages, it contains writing from the winners and runners-up of the 2025 Judith Wright poetry and Neilma Sidney short story prizes, as well as last year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers.

Across eight short stories, nine poems and five essays, this issue showcases the breadth of talent across generations: Hana Pera Aoake mounts a critique of the economies of First Nations artmaking, asking who exactly benefits when Maōri artists excel within an unregulated market predicated on individualism, while John Kinsella makes an extensive case for unoriginality as both poetic method and political resistance.

Elsewhere, Tom Gurn, winner of the 2025 Neilma Sidney prize, imagines a surreal, fractured dialogue between two speakers orbiting loss and urban adaptation. Susie Anderson’s Nakata Brophy winning story follows a Blak elder navigating council rooms as she carries the stories of those who cared for her Country’s waterways. The issue also features new poetry by Ouyang Yu, Dorothy Lune and Dave Drayton, as well as an excerpt from Surveying the Wild Abyss, a new book by Hawkesbury elder and educator Barry Corr.

We will leave you with a line from “go raging”, a poem by 2025 Judith Wright winner Mia Thom: “lomandra tickles belly buttons / grazes throat wadjung / welcomes you home”

Contributors: Susie Anderson, Hana Pera Aoake, Madeleine Blackwell, Tom Britton, Simon Castles, Roger Chao, Barry Corr, Dave Drayton, Will Druce, Geetha Pathanjali, Tom Gurn, Chris Holdaway, Keith Goh Johnson, Linda Judge, John Kinsella, Dorothy Lune, Isabella G. Mead, Zoë Meager, Mia Thom, Myfanwy Williams and Ouyang Yu