Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts / Writing Terminus Fiona Wright Little remains at track. Creepers, winding where the graded bed has grown so dank and soft it sponges at my toes. I sift the ballast, lift a stone, a sour-milk stem clings to its crevices, clasped in a veinery of roots. Sections of supporting walls remain at street level. The paint flakes scab under my fingers. The sun scrambles for the girders and gridlocked cars reverberate. Their drivers are silent. The blackened bricks leave crumbs on my clothes. Shortly before electrification. When I was young. I curled my fingers off my ticket-stub and caught the slipstream of the shunting carriages. I smelt soot in my hair for days, sour as fear. You never looked behind. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright 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 3 First published in Overland Issue 228 26 May 20238 June 2023 · Writing garramilla/Darwin Lulu Houdini We sit in East Point Reserve and look at how the gidjaas, green ants, make globe-like homes out of the leaves — connected edges with fibrous tissue that I later learn is faithful silk. Safe inside. Why isn’t it safe outside? I pick up the plastic around this circular lake cause this is the way […] 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.