Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Uncategorized Recrossing the Styx Berndt Sellheim Il faut être toujours ivre. The hardest working man in the Pantheon Charon ferries only kebabs now, demands his obol from the walking dead staggering the Oxford strip, tabouli and tahini on pita easy on the hummus. Having so discarded the curving scythe for bent aluminium tongs he claims no further loyalties future or past and carves ununionised through skewerings of meat, his new electric blade. So you can’t stop progress. That’s what it all means. A quick slide to the end of days, old men and apples. The morning harvests such tentative light to be a promissory note toward all endings — here being the world washed grey; here a dying earth. Of course it’s nothing so dire. Café Falconer’s a stroll down the road. It’s open too and you know the coffee’s good, and those widening gyres can yet be vaulted with a few unsteady steps. This is only the ancient mythologies departed. No facts but meanings, no detail but the map. You know, doesn’t it all look the same to you? Isn’t that sun finally pushing Homeric fingers through Rosie’s winter foliage (pinked yellow russets like the jaundice of chemo) revolving yet amongst heavenly spheres? The same orbit. The same star. Only heaven changed. And here we are. Olympic Gyros 6 a.m. Posters on the wall of the crumbling acropolis, tourists milling throughout the grease spots, absent as ghosts. Such being the risk of late night revelry get off the bus and you might just end up here, searching out a few coins lost amongst the lint, locked in some deepthroat with death. And it’s fourscore’n ten if you’re lucky, and if you’re not, well Berndt Sellheim Berndt Sellheim is a Sydney based writer and academic whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. His first novel, Beyond the Frame’s Edge, will come out with Fourth Estate in May 2013. More by Berndt Sellheim › 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 13 February 202513 February 2025 · Reviews Echoing of the white gaze in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes Karen Wyld Wyld’s creation of voiceless-nameless-lifeless Blak people in The Echoes serves no narrative purpose. This novel is not truth-telling of invasion and occupation, and it does not envision justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Instead of rejecting or confronting lazy literary tropes and colonial-style narratives, the author has erased Blak voices, bodies, histories and futures, adding her own voice to a never-ending echo of white-gazed literature when silence would have been better. 11 February 202511 February 2025 · Aboriginal Australia Acknowledgements without land Heba A What are land acknowledgements without land back? When you pay your respects to the dead whose descendants remain dispossessed, or recognise the “traditional owners” of the land that you now possess and reap as a gift of your modernity … whose voice is it that you hear?