Published in Overland Issue 201 Summer 2010 · Main Posts / Writing On the long road Hans Katakarinja This is a poem on the long road A trip to no where Step by step he drags his foot Wondering if he’s gonna hitch a ride This poem makes you feel tired and thirsty The man curses the water mirage Of an old fellah chanting the rain In the distance, on the horizon line This poem stops and lets you cut into it Straight black, white dotted lines fading Into the brown horizon, mixing into the sky Steam rises, sweat falls At anytime you wonder if he’s going to make it But he staggers with a limp into the middle At 200 kms an hour a wind just hits him Not a dragging foot sounds, not even a breath The poem ends with a long breaking sound Squeaking, whistling sound and comes to a halt. Acknowledgement: The opening words of each stanza are from ‘This is a poem’ by Catherine Bateson Hans Katakarinja Hans Katakarinja currently lives in Tennant Creek with his two daughters. He was born in Ntaria (Hermannsburg), about 130km south-west of Alice Springs, and speaks Western Arrarnta. ‘The Pain Rains’, was recently published in This country anytime anywhere, an anthology of new Indigenous writing from the Northern Territory. More by Hans Katakarinja 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.
