Published in Overland Issue The 2018 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize · Uncategorized Winner: Quandongs Brenda Saunders I remember days at La Pa going out with the Aunties to look for quandongs growing on the hill Selecting bright bush cherries ready to drop ─ a bite too bitter still for my sweet tooth The women would laugh as they sorted patting hot-pink fruit laced with wild honey teaching us bush tucker way Each ball rolled on the tongue ─ sent a sudden shock to the back of my throat A sweet sour hit ─ the after-taste perfumed with blossom Image: Giuseppe Milo / flickr Brenda Saunders Brenda Saunders is a poet and visual artist of Aboriginal and British descent. She has published three collections of poetry and her work has appeared in major anthologies and journals, including Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Southerly, and Best Australian Poems in 2013 and 2015 (Black Inc). She has received numerous prizes including the Mick Dark Varuna Environmental Writers’ Fellowship, the Banjo Patterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist in the prestigious Aesthetica Prize (UK) and the International Vice-Chancellors Poetry Prize (University of Canberra). She is a member of DiVerse Poets who write and perform their ekphrastic poetry in Sydney art galleries. More by Brenda Saunders › 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 1 May 20261 May 2026 · Long read Dungeons & Dragons is a waste of time: an unproductive case for radical action Scott Hudson Another such casualty is the push of AI into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Used in this way, AI purports to hack your recreational time, allowing you to maximise it by smoothing over the nitty gritty. But the thing is, the joy of D&D is the nitty gritty. AI promises to improve the productivity of work and leisure, but much of D&D thrives on being unproductive. 30 April 2026 · Housing Organised abandonment and Victoria’s Big Housing Build Oli Caruana-Brown and Ella McNicol The crisis is not due to a physical shortage of properties. Rather, it is a series of intentional decisions by Governments to prioritise a system of private property over peoples’ basic human need for shelter, allowing landlords and corporations to continue to hoard housing and extract wealth from tenants via rent.
