Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Uncategorized Pillage John Kinsella The museum’s frog info site is sponsored by Alcoa, a company more responsible for the destruction of Hills frog habitat than any other. I went to confirm a childhood memory, and realised those tadpoles and froglets and juvenile frogs we stole from their homes under the spillway of Churchman’s Brook Dam, or from creeks or banks of those creeks downstream that still ran unhindered by engineering, to lift and bottle and translocate to our garden pond (a kind of liberty, we imagined: an old concrete double-sided washtub with its dividing wall smashed through and plughole cemented and buried, so soil and grass lapped its banks), were already or would become Moaning Frogs and Motorbike Frogs. Both defined by their noise, and not their psychologies or composition. We’d observe tadpole conversions. Alcoa mines bauxite. Aluminium comes from bauxite. Each act of extraction is lexical and contrite as donation. No E. M. Forster requirements for narrative are required to tell this story. Its outcomes. Though the sensation of frogskin on your skin was more than citation. And it is with more than détournement that we touch aluminium. John Kinsella John Kinsella’s most recent poetry books include the verse novel Cellnight (Transit Lounge, 2023), The Argonautica Inlandica (Vagabond, 2023), and the three volumes of his collected poems: The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024). A recent critical book is Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics (Palgrave, 2022). More by John Kinsella › 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
