Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts / Writing Homecoming David Musgrave Sun-damaged, sporty, wearing tracky-daks, passengers can’t be told from cabin crew apart from their uniforms, their Australian chilliness; hedonists mostly, serious adepts of physis, puritanical, wary of alien cuisines, monolingual – all of them start relaxing as cabin crew cross-check, landing gear lowers, ailerons bristle, engines sough and earth climbs. Longitude-trekkers, these new internationalists humbled by nothing, not even their ignorance, chattering blithely, wonder aloud how home has changed in their absence. It hasn’t, but they have. The world has reduced them to miniature giants approaching a sparsely rich country, mulletocratic, athlete-revering, distrustful of politics, obedient. It’s all about making money now, caring for investments as if they were souls, or as if there was no such thing as a soul, or like, whatever. Closer inspection, though, reveals great variety: Shanghai-Chinese returning to investment properties; Heibei tycoons, cashed up and itching to visit the casino; taffy-haired surfers who get on at Cairns and stink of wine-garlic night-before-breath; Euro-tanned backpackers, double-chinned – even the fittest are Maillol-limbed beauties; experts in security returning from Guangzhou to Punchbowl; aromatherapists fresh from new franchises; teachers of English and commerce students back for one more semester. Where are the famous, the rich and powerful? Prize-winning architects returning from Chengdu with the Astrodome contract? Investment bankers from Stanmore? Fact-finding pollies? Business or first class, economy, it doesn’t matter: pig-tailed professionals or t-shirted, unkempt and scolding their children, they all speak the same vulgar-demotic. Even the hosties are customers somewhere or other. Difference is not really monetary – it’s an asset. As wheels kiss the tarmac, dawn strips them bare: so ugly they’re beautiful. David Musgrave David Musgrave is a poet, critic, novelist and publisher at Puncher & Wattmann. His latest books are Phantom Limb (John Leonard Press) and Glissando: A Melodrama (Sleepers Publishing). More by David Musgrave 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 23 February 202324 February 2023 · Writing From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author Rob Horning Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s Death of the Author articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.