The Journal

256 Spring 2024

Buy/subscribe now

Overland 256 is the third issue in a suite of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. Inside its pages you'll find: Daniel Browning on the politics of memory, Antonia Pont on impatience, Sarah Wehbe on Palestinian fury and joy, and a special editorial by our departing poetry editor Toby Fitch. There's also new short fiction from Rowan MacDonald, Bethany Lalor and Amalia Stone, and new poetry from Josie Suzanne, Tim Loveday, Lulu Houdini and more.

Browse by format:

Overland literary journal > Articles by: Michael Farrell

Author archives

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell is from Bombala, NSW, and has lived in Melbourne since 1990, predominantly in St Kilda and Fitzroy. Recent book publications are Googlecholia and Family Trees (both Giramondo), as well as inclusions in the Best of Australian Poems 2023 (AP), Admissions (Upswell), and Fishing for Lightning (UQP) anthologies.

Articles by Michael Farrell:

Published in Overland Issue 256 Spring 2024 · Teaser

Queueing to be pilloried

Michael Farrell

Online soon. In the meantime, subscribe to Overland.

16 December 202225 January 2023 · Poetry

Poetry | Wombats shit candy

Michael Farrell

To avoid treading on a snake, I stepped on a land mine. Did this really happen, in my dream? No. Is it a fiction, then? Yes and no. The time I spend looking for socks is insignificant: lie, irony, or philosophy? Wombats shit candy. Joke – hallucination? This is in fact a truth claim. My poems: litanies of truth claims.

Published in Overland Issue Poetry in Lockdown · Poetry

Leaves to the imagination

Michael Farrell

Standing in the shade of a lion statue or ode to the temporary Schoolchildren desultorily leaf through emails and posts Lunchtime on their collective mind presumably as it is mine When a person is a faun they’re expected to be highly sexed

Published in Overland Issue 238 Autumn 2020 · Judith Wright Poetry Prize

Judith Wright Poetry Prize Judges Notes

Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch and Ellen van Neerven

‘No Alarms’ could be said to have a strong tentativeness: in tending towards a prose poem, but not becoming one, in tending toward cutup, but resisting the difficulty of that for its own difficulty (of writing this good poem). ‘No Alarms’, despite its multi-directionality, finds clearings in the mind. Its strong sense of style helps, […]

Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017 ·

Fiat in Turin

Michael Farrell

We’ve gone inside with the bluebells, literary bluebells naturally. I am in your shirt pocket, where I always wanted to be. New Order plays somewhere outside but

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016 ·

Holiday pattern

Michael Farrell

I drive the boat to the shack and do nothing like knitting a Hole in the buffet table and other Tasks that need mismanaging I wake up five hours later for a tootle to find Icecream in the fishtank and the phone ringing

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016 ·

Solve a problem and it grows two heads

Michael Farrell

when I get what i want i worry go off bleeding into the Dusk lean my hungry Head against a taco Truck, nibble till i’m fit to bust on service Friendliness. independence

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015 ·

The bush and the internet are interchangeable

Michael Farrell

A wife looks at her husband; a treefrog at a modem. They view the bush from a comfortable position: enjoy wifi

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 ·

Making Love (to a man)

Michael Farrell

Didn’t think I’d hear from that man again, but then there was a message in my inbox. Within five hours we were in his bedroom. His hair is not computer hair, it’s straight and black: turntable hair, old school, calligraphy brush hair.

Published in Overland Issue 202 Autumn 2011 · Writing

The Influence of Lorca in the Outback

Michael Farrell

Where they once ate camel grease (and before

Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Writing

dinner with aspro

Michael Farrell

when straight friends change teams / when something that appears to be a nest isnt. because the drive, because the expansion.

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Writing

wide open road

Michael Farrell

There could be anything … elongation of a spear Needling To a sphere they think, mind suffused with honey, i reach out, hes a dead man,