Published in Overland Issue 258 2025 · Uncategorized Ex-landfill pastoral Mitchell Welch The Aussie raven plucks its musical ribcage and Blue Ribbon labels fly like white flags at the highest peak visible from the street. Milk bottle molars bite down on the sky from within this gingivitic heap. Roaches pop out gleaming, polished to a sheen from detergent bottles and Coca-Cola cans. The corax picking out its last flight feathers eyeballs the screw-top moon and buries its head in a wire nest festooned with lids. The real victims will be our kids. Ca-caw! Mitchell Welch Mitchell Welch is a writer and communications advisor from Queensland who has worked and lived in Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart and the Gold Coast. His first book, Vehicular Man, was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and is available from Rabbit. More by Mitchell Welch › 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 17 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 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.
