The new cartographers—Indigenous, grassroots, academic, etc.—are building new cartographic worldviews, methods and projects to talk back to the colonial cartographies that helped to structure the worldviews, laws and governance systems of settler-colonial societies like Australia.

The logic of delegated politics encourages this upward gaze from even its most principled adherents. They understand themselves as working on behalf of others and it’s easy to consider their own elevation a victory for an oppressed constituency, with the actual exclusion of that constituency obscured by the ambiguities of ‘representation’. Delegated politics often evolves into what I call ‘smug politics’: a model of social change in which the masses are neither a source of agency nor a constituency to be serviced but a problem to be policed.

My first real encounter with John Tranter’s work, outside the miscellaneous poetry journals that somehow found their way into the local public library, came about unexpectedly enough through the efforts of John Millett, editor of the soon-to-be-defunct Poetry Australia.

At least part of the rhetorical power of this work is owed to its drawing directly on the settler archive that presents early historical accounts of land as ‘verdant, open, pleasant and gentle’, as ‘gentleman’s parks’, thereby, demonstrating what pre-invasion land looked like under Indigenous custodianship, management, and care.

She was forty-seven when it began. Her head is locked towards the timber casement windows. Beyond the glass, a lake spreads out. A breeze rattles the shutters. It could be morning. Or late afternoon.

AM Gaming Trade Reports. WE HAVE A MASSIVE WEEKLY TARGET – 1.36M TURNOVER TO BEAT LAST YEAR. ITS TAX TIME SO PEOPLE WILL HAVE MORE MONEY TO SPEND. BE OUT THERE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO KEEP PEOPLE IN THE ROOM AND PLAYING! —Manager

blah moon smoulders as I careen        like a pulsar towards hot blah summer           I am failing       flailing       feeling    in a thalassic blah       in a time where I can’t hear the constant hum of the earth above the hum of mass air conditioning      originally invented to help ink dry & stop pages warping       it now entombs us in productivity      delusion lives in the phrase climate control         I think of sweat as a type of release    a friend texts me      did u know we work almost twice as much as medieval peasants? fml                     why am I

she existed in masks: lorikeets loudest in the mornings, leaves deliberating on a breezy day, blinds fluttering against the sill, the hum of conversation on the footpath by her window, Fleetwood Mac, her fingers on the keyboard (tippity-tap), her anxious dog’s paws pattering on the floorboards, her husband’s snoring at 3am, the off-and-on whir of […]

raw bone scrapes / wires through bared soles of feet & tin-can telephone voice to braindead hours like windowdraught. there are killing words of pure hypnotism, too, as though a contrary fact cld alter the physics of it. they whisper constantly.

Writing his SWAG column-cum-editorial for Overland’s twenty-first issue in 1975, our founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith cheerfully reflected that despite the magazine being thousands of dollars in debt and struggling to make its four yearly issues at the time—we can sympathise on that last score, Steve—he had known the deep satisfaction of building a collective work […]

In wombhole I meet feathered oracle, cross-legged and knowin’ / tells me I know nothin’ of time. “Listen ’ere Sis, don’t waste it / it’s slippin’ by while yous humans fuck everythin’ up” / Languorin’ now by springtime wound / swimmin’ where the light enters, warns me / when sun lays horizontal on graves dusk heavy / her coeval nebula will then be callin’ home.

After reading many hundreds of poems, and from a shortlist of eight standout poems, the judges of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2022—Pam Brown, Lachlan Brown and Toby Fitch—have selected these three poems as the winners:   In the winning poem ‘VIRIDITAS / little big scrub poem’ (published in […]