Published in Overland Issue 234 Autumn 2019 · Uncategorized Judith Wright Poetry Prize, third place: Surfing at Blackfellas Ross Belton Blackfellas is over the edge a sheer drop beside a path perched against the limestone cliff down to a narrow ledge and plunge a fast paddle over dark water out to the swell rising up from the deep breaking swollen tongues against the silent jaws of the continent. Blackfellas is barely a carpark of loose rock and windblown gulls facing Antarctica another outpost on the massacre atlas bleached of all other witness only a squinting glare to honour the last cries of the frightened and defiant mustered from the camps and the stunted heath forced at gunpoint to fly from this world into the maw of the deafening south wind Image: Ian / Flickr Read the rest of Overland 234 If you enjoyed the results of this prize, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Ross Belton Ross Belton grew up in Esperance on the Western Australian south coast, graduated in environmental science and has worked in disability facilitation, zookeeping, and in the public service. He lives with his son Jacky Blue, and Jo the Cripster, in Fremantle, where he writes recipes for climate change lamingtons. More by Ross Belton › 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 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry. 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.
