Elias Greig on ecofascism and the settler invasion fantasy, Natalia Figueroa Barroso on Charrua language and colonisation, the winners of the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and Judith Wright Poetry Prize, new poetry and fiction from Angela Costi, Liam Ferney, Michael Farrell, Ouyang Yu, Tim Loveday and more.
OVERLAND 188 spring 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-5-2published 20 September 2007
A clearing with a town
Between the schoolyard and the church pages of newsprint flap in the night, ghosts of information. Some rustle and float a few streets to where the forest at night flashes past car windows, eight miles filled with the smell of gums and dirt and underfed cows: then a clearing with a town laid out flat with streets of square yellow lights, no talking going on behind them; and beneath the asphalt and gravel, only quiet, and the sound of toilets and showers, the shape water makes pouring into water beneath a town with no river, only flooded quarries and mines, and a wide flap of bush giddy with being mapped and surveyed for coal and lost children. Here and there, out of the long grass, a tree, bearing its ten thousand leaves. And what it has seen: the ordering of the land into plots, the grey rising and collapse of gun-smoke among the ti-trees, a flight of black cockatoos wheeling like vultures above ash-tinted eucalypts, no longer tied to anything the ground might yield or conceal, only there were no graves.
© Greg McLaren Overland 188 – spring 2007, p. 81
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