Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017 · Uncategorized Equal first place: MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN Alison Whittaker no mist no mystery no hanging rock only many girls white linen men with guns and harsher things white women amongst gums white linen starch’er things later plaques will mark this war nails peeling back floor scrubbing back blak chores white luxe hangnails hanging more than nails while no palm glowing paler later plaques will mark this sick linen’s rotten cotton genes later plaques will track the try to bleed lineage dry its banks now flood a new ancestor, Ordeal, plaits this our blood if evil is banal how more boring is suffering evil two bloodlines from it how more raw rousing horrifying is the plaque that marks something else rolling on from this place a roll of white linen dropped on slight incline amongst gums collecting grit where blak girls hang nails hang out picking them hangnails Read the rest of Overland 226 If you enjoyed this prizewinning poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Alison Whittaker Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker from the floodplains of Gunnedah in NSW. Between 2017–2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School. Both her debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, and her recent collection, Blakwork, were published by Magabala Books. More by Alison Whittaker › 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 21 April 202621 April 2026 · Reviews Pilled to the gills: Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson’s Conspiracy Nation Cher Tan The question that Conspiracy Nation implicitly raises isn’t why people believe in conspiracy theories but rather why people have stopped trusting official narratives. But what do we do with this knowledge? When we call something a conspiracy theory, what work are we doing? Who benefits from that designation? 17 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction.
