I wrote about shark nets and a very niche part of Sydney history from the other side of the fence (pun intended) for @overlandjournal.bsky.social

The truth emerges. The campaign to silence writers - which imploded the Bendigo Writers Fest - was waged by an anonymous group of pro-Israel academics, 5A. (A group that has no compunction naming and defaming individual writers, btw). Important scoop:

"When prominent voices withdraw en masse, they are not just declining to participate but making a statement about the conditions under which meaningful cultural dialogue can occur."

✊🏽

MEDIA RELEASE: Workers from across Australia’s media, creative and entertainment sectors are calling on the government to introduce regulation of Artificial Intelligence, amid widespread concerns about stolen work and future job losses. meaa.io/46A34Mo

"In this reality — the reality we actually live in, today — the ethics of spending $2 million per year on your personal science experiment, for increasingly marginal health benefits, are clearly bad. When Johnson claims that “death defenders” are “helpless”, he unwittingly gets to the point."

In response to the prompt of a publisher's campaign, Luke Horton offers an extended reflection on the value of literature and the work of writing (and reading) in the current moment.

"almost every night since Oct 2023, even during his hospitalization, Pope Francis made a daily phone call to the only Catholic parish in the Gaza Strip to check on their safety and offer words of prayer and support. His last public act, the day before he died, was to call for a ceasefire in Gaza."

Some good thoughts on short story vs novel writing by Natalia Theodoridou this in Lithub!

The Israeli military has completed trials of an advanced weapon designed and built by Australian company Electro Optic Systems (EOS). It can strike targets up to 2km away. Albo is still claiming Australia doesn't export weapons to Israel www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04...

We're beginning to unlock materials from issue #256 of Overland this week, and the place of honour firmly belongs to the beautiful speech (plus new poem!) that outgoing poetry editor Toby Fitch delivered at our 70th anniversary last December. overland.org.au/previous-iss...

Really pleased to have this statement from MEAA today for #TDOV2025 "Trans & gender diverse people disproportionately experience unemployment and insecure work, making trans justice part of the work of our union" #transdayofvisibility

As Jumana Bayeh argues in her scholarly close reading, Universities Australia's definition of antisemitism has one purpose only — to silence voices in support of Palestinians.

“The question of who can claim authority over a culture and engage with it is deeply meaningful. Can there be a genuine cultural exchange unmarred by the spectre of exchange value?” A formidable #longread by Reina Miura on the current state of Ramen.

I have a Substack!

This is horrific

Really enjoying Cher Tan's Peripathetic. Cher is so incisive and clever and wildly funny on stuff I've spent a lot of time thinking about: shit jobs, punk + subculture and being online. "We were fuck-ups but we also had something to sell".

The Age this morning. Imagine if our news media had shown the cost of this genocide from the start? The more than 20,000 kids killed? The babies starved to death. The destroyed NICU units. Maybe we’d have actually been able to change this miserable’s government’s position.

In the second of our unlocked features from issue #255 of Overland, Sam Ryan retraces the "tangled, literary web of a debate [on state funding of the arts] that so epitomised the journal under Murray-Smith." We might add: a debate that is always relevant.

Nina Culley on the publishing's latest bestselling trend: cosy East Asian literature. Read more: buff.ly/21quBhb