The first thing Ranald Allan and his friends heard, after they passed through customs at Sydney airport, was John Forbes’ booming deadpan, reciting the poem: ‘Up, Up, Home & Away’. Allan, together with Linn Cameron, Landon Watts and Jenny Redford, had just returned from a holiday in Bali.

At a certain point in the new political era of this century (and millennium), the peculiarly political branding of hope became inextricably bound up with the concept of work. Not only in the US, but also in Australia. After all, hope seemed to lead away from both a racially segregated America and the jingoism that characterised the Howard era, towards a more inclusive idea focused upon relentless productivity and individualised pursuit.

My mother calls her arrival in Australia ‘the years of hell’. In one story, she worked at the dry cleaners for a thousand unbroken days. By happy accident, she never left. Thanks to Bob Hawke’s tearful tribute, she stumbled into citizenship after 1989, the winner of a grisly scratchcard along with some forty thousand other Chinese. To this day, she votes Labor.

As my plane soars over the Northern Territory, I imagine the ocean has turned into desert, its skin inscribed with song cycles. Ribbed earth stretches into ochre dunes like the bottom of the sea, the hills puckering with naked-looking, coppery scars. Darker blooms jut fractally into the dry, tessellating scales and the sandy plains are dotted with poppyseed vegetation.

There’s only one road out of the mountains and that plays on their minds. There’s an air strip and a dam. Poor options if the Wild Red Herbivore, driven mad by wind, comes raging and ripping and wrecking its way through the forest. It’s savaged this forest before, leaving scars and stags—dead standing trees.

Around that time I’d spend most Saturdays on the couch watching television. And around that time my younger brother had a habit of nagging me. He’d pull my sleeves or kick my feet and make demands. I tried not to be harsh with him, for my mother’s sake, but also because I didn’t want to damage his view of me.

The ground against her back, Leila has her eyes on the sky. Not long ago it was watercolour blue, milky and pale and full of cotton-ball clouds; now blue is draining from it and the air is cooler. Her fingertips feel icy. She reaches an arm towards her backpack, still there on the dry leaves.

1. the task isn’t to tell the truth / but to induce in the reader / the belief that they’ve discovered it 2. only the poet finds Abyssinia inside the toe of their shoe

1 Beginning our descent with a banking turn of phrase and amusement park views. Arm doors, arm holes. Jingoistic chit-chat in the fouled cabin air. Exiting Economy through the refuse of Business: eye-masks and fine print. Leaf-blowers on Lime St, ear-splitting beautification and warship doorstop. Great lengths to salvage the Lord Sandwich, with much pushing […]

after the fact / they will position / our limbs heads and feet so they are pointing north-south / east-west / west-east as if to greet the dawn / or watch the setting sun / or shun forever the light

a black swarm of craters a bundle of woody beaks chirping a baritone, a bee hive made from a shark’s egg

I woke to find my hands humming in the dark hands I said what have you done? where did you creep? what did you plunder?

this is the poem from my dream I say / office hours are a myth / publishing poems is money for nothing / the supermarket is both under and over policed / today the first thing I said was ‘shut up’ (cat) / possible upsides to a pandemic include the death of musicals / possible downsides include the personal essay / publishing poems is printing money but the money is bad /

i pick an apple from the orchard at Seacliff. it is small & too green. imagine it growing                 under my own bent            thumb as i wander the lawns. afoot grass less dewy than in pictures. high summer & it’s yellow-grey like kōwhai    […]

The smell of Jasmine Through white fibro walls Hiding Dad’s double brick Dreaming Pedestal fans wearing dust cardigans Click click click behind Mum’s door Moaning aircons in lounge room windows With frames painted shut

Some of the questions two young soldiers asked me at the King Hussein border crossing checkpoint... Were you born on a Thursday in Cleopatra Hospital? Did you come out silently, as day-break smudged the night sky?

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Overland was founded with dual commitments to literary quality, and to publishing and fostering diverse writers. At the widest extremes of certain kinds of argument these priorities can be placed into a false dichotomy, and made to seem mutually antagonistic, but during our first year’s tenure as editors we’ve had the pleasure of working with […]

Readers of this journal will be aware that there have been numerous historical instances of children discovered in the care of creatures as varied as chimpanzees, wolves and elephants; and, of course, many more unverified accounts exist, from the case documented by Professor Oskar König in ‘The Bat Boy of Bersenbrück’ to the unlikely tale of the Lithuanian girl who was rumoured to have grown up within a hive of bees.

Of the many stories we read, ‘The Case of G: A Child Raised by Trains’ was easily one of the most original takes on the travel theme. Framed as an article for an academic journal, Dearborn’s story follows the case of an impoverished child found living among trains. One of those trains in fact—the 6.55 am from Greenhill Station—the young girl has taken to calling ‘ma’.

this is the poem from my dream I say / office hours are a myth / publishing poems is money for nothing / the supermarket is both under and over policed / today the first thing I said was ‘shut up’ (cat) / possible upsides to a pandemic include the death of musicals / possible downsides include the personal essay / publishing poems is printing money but the money is bad /

i pick an apple from the orchard at Seacliff. it is small & too green. imagine it growing                 under my own bent            thumb as i wander the lawns. afoot grass less dewy than in pictures. high summer & it’s yellow-grey like kōwhai    […]

The smell of Jasmine Through white fibro walls Hiding Dad’s double brick Dreaming Pedestal fans wearing dust cardigans Click click click behind Mum’s door Moaning aircons in lounge room windows With frames painted shut

Some of the questions two young soldiers asked me at the King Hussein border crossing checkpoint... Were you born on a Thursday in Cleopatra Hospital? Did you come out silently, as day-break smudged the night sky?

From a record number of entries, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2020—Bonny Cassidy, Bella Li, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, and Toby Fitch—selected these four poems as the winner.