Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011 · Main Posts At Heatherlie Quarry Ann Vickery by the track, everlastings in bloom; paper-fine heads that vandals cut for vased reverie. no heather here, only wildflowers white, yellow, pinks. everywhere. today there is no stonemason only stonemusing, all in a day’s labour. I find myself gariwording a kind of “I woz ’ere 2011” graffiti as old-fashioned texting marking one’s own parking the national poetics in sleight colonial fashion. what other histories striate here everlongingly? land removal & razed ken notwithstanding. how to read dys-scriptively, query the quarry as industrial site or tourist point, the perfunctory consume & abuse of sublimity ungirded. this poem as Babel enfant reconstructs a monument, stories the stone once transported to Melbourne to support State Library sophistries. surplus slabs left scarred & abandoned. forms of the past handed on treasured extract (speaks volumes). around stark mining huts, three children hide & seek, a different game (foxes now baited here) (try to) pull the chain of the old trolley rusted on broken lines. futuring hands find only toy forms & will not remember this day. except for three take-home everlastings: forever keepsakes? Ann Vickery is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry. She is contributing editor of the online journal, Jacket2, and a past editor-in-chief of the online journal, HOW2. © Ann Vickery Overland 204-spring 2011, p. 114 Like this piece? Subscribe! Ann Vickery Anny Vickery teaches at Deakin University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry. She is also co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers and co-editor of Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines. She has published poetry in a range of national and international journals. More by Ann Vickery › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.