Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · Uncategorized First place, Nakata Brophy Prize: haunted house Raelee Lancaster i. when my cousin told me her house was haunted i replied: of course it is how can it not be when they built buildings on the bones of the broken used our skeletons to frame the walls of her lego house she told me to get over it chose to ignore the screams the taste of blood the smell of rot ii. my cousin told me her house was haunted by a little old english lady with purple hair and no children it couldn’t be anyone else her psychic friend told her so i reminded her that our great-grandfather was shot dead just down the road; and how the elders said there was a massacre site not far from the creek where, as children, we swung on a rope-swing that hung loose around the branch of an old gum like a noose she told me to shut up—those things didn’t happen anymore and that the old lady’s name was ethel iii. my cousin didn’t like my reply when she told me her house was haunted —so she asked for a second opinion she had her priest come over with holy water and exorcise her house, had her psychic friend do another round that night, resting peacefully in her no-longer ‘haunted’ house my cousin dreamed of the australia that the history books taught her she forgot the stories we were told under glistening stars with dark shadows bouncing off the light of the campfire: stories of death, of stolen babies, of blood-soaked land she forgot: that all land on this land, since the landing of the white man has been haunted Read the rest of Overland 231 If you appreciate Overland’s support of new writers, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Raelee Lancaster Raelee Lancaster is a Brisbane-based poet and research assistant. Her work has featured in Rabbit, Scum Mag, Voiceworks and other print and online publications. Raised on Awabakal land, Raelee has connections to the Wiradjuri nation. Find Raelee on Twitter @raeleelancaster. More by Raelee Lancaster › 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 11 June 202612 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another. 10 June 2026 · Rural Australia Left in place: how distance in Australia is political Emma Goldrick If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.
