Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 · Uncategorized To Nina Pam Brown once upon a time 19 hundred 68 is over is thin politics dashed, disconnected, diachronicity indicating technology’s noisy cataclysm & flashing strobe boxed in a dusty garage 19 hundred 98 is over is how to scratch the future when it’s gone, thinking pastness is up ahead 20 oh 8 is over is atmospheric brooding, interpretation rules the day, the weeks, years, the centuries sliding in to hide beneath the warmth of flock and shoddy, ruffling dust in the circuitry 20 ten is nothing else – laser beam a pilot’s eyes, upstage an apocalypse, my ten cent technophile you’re in my echo chamber, my feedback loop 20 twelve is corporately social, filtered, nothing deviant here, hop away now, recharge, unencumbered & unapologetic Nina – an entry in a ledger, all’s big data Pam Brown Pam Brown has published many chapbooks, pamphlets and full collections of poetry, most recently Stasis Shuffle (Hunter Publishers, 2021). She lives in a south Sydney suburb on reclaimed swampland on Gadigal Country. More by Pam Brown › 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 17 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction. 15 April 202615 April 2026 · Climate politics The $67 billion climate betrayal: how Australia’s record fossil fuel subsidies fund global destruction Noa Wynn The contradictions aren't failures of implementation. They're the predictable result of a political system that has decided fossil fuel profits matter more than climate stability, more than the Great Barrier Reef, more than Pacific Islander lives, and more than the future habitability of the planet.
