Published 27 August 200927 August 2009 · Main Posts what’s that i see on the horizon, folks? Maxine Beneba Clarke Have you looked around you in Melbourne lately? The stationary shelves are empty. Strange dreamy-eyed out-of-towners walk around newsagents with odd hopeful smiles on their faces, slipping exercise books and HB pencils under their jackets and running for all hell in their threadbare docs as the anti-theft sensors scream at them. The coffee houses are full (but only the cheap and non-franchise ones) with silent scribblers, crouched low over their tables. The shelves of secondhand bookstores are dust free for the first time in months (cause we all know Borders and that Angus place don’t stock any of the hard stuff these godsent desperates are pining for). Must be folks, that Overload 09 is almost here. Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
