Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts Siding Greg McLaren A disused rail siding, the grass-covered platform a sharp-edged mound of earth. Loose clunks of coal, patches of brown dirt, the gums’ sparse shadow. At the edge of the bush, crow calls shush the wheeling song of magpies. The odd car fizzes past, thirty- somethings behind the wheel born long after the mines closed down. In the middle-distance, short of those hills, it’s eucalyptus haze, not bushfire smoke, that distorts the changing patterns of light between clouds that flicker on the low slopes. Even though that light travels so quickly, scanning for the outline of the road into the hills is like looking into a hazy future. I kick a spot of gravel, trying to frame roughly where a photo was taken, somewhere very near here, once. Greg McLaren is a Sydney-based poet, critic and editor. His last book was The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead and he’s currently working on a sequence of poems ‘about’ museums. © Greg McLaren Overland 203-winter 2011, p. 81 Like this piece? Subscribe! Greg McLaren More by Greg McLaren 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 · Television 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 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.