Senate Submission
Committee Secretary Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee Jacinda Woodhead Editor, Overland magazine VU – Footscray Park Campus PO Box 14428 Melbourne VIC 8001 17 July 2015 Dear Committee Secretary and Members, I edit one of Australia’s oldest literary magazines, Overland, founded in 1954 by Stephen Murray-Smith. Overland has a long and distinguished history, and it’s list of published authors reads like a catalogue of influential Australian writers, from Patrick White, Frank Hardy and Dorothy Hewett to Peter Carey, Alexis Wright and Christos Tsiolkas. Overland’s mission is to foster new, original and progressive work exploring the relationship between politics and culture, especially literature, and to bring that work to as many people as possible. In its sixty-first year of publication, Overland continues to be artistically vibrant, making significant contributions to Australian cultural life on a daily basis. Much of Overland’s current success has been enabled by the infrastructure the organisation has been able to build over the years through subscriber, philanthropic and government support, including the critical funding the Australia Council has offered the magazine at the various stages of its existence. Overland publishes four print issues of 96 pages a year, each edition consisting of original fiction, poetry, nonfiction and artwork of the highest standard. Recent editions have included work by Germaine Greer, Cate Kennedy, Rodney Hall, Alexis Wright, Christos Tsiolkas and Alison Croggon. Overland is also committed to finding new talent: writers whose early work featured in the journal include Nam Le, Jennifer Mills, Stephen Amsterdam, Ali Alizadeh, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Anwen Crawford (who has started recently writing for the New Yorker) and artist Megan Cope.
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