Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013 · Uncategorized Natural editors Stella Rosa Mcdonald Twelve tuna, caught by a storm, split from the harbour and arrive in the Watson’s bay swimming pool. A set of twins enter with knives. They bleed and butcher as mute instructions pass between them. (One looks at the fish in the night and thinks, ‘God’s country’, the other takes a photo to prove it.) Life’s next, as they crop then render the particular order of events, make lists of attendances, debts unpaid. On scales they put street fights, car accidents, pissed hook ups, the question of who spewed in the bath and how it was exactly that a cuckoo came to land in the Moreton bay fig outside their house. They rarely think of shadows, but even dark matter might unravel if they shone a light. Two in orbit, they endlessly recall and fracture stories until legends disappear through the holes of missing parts. The world is solved as they empty out the universe of unnecessary stuff. Until all that is left and sure is an end tied neat like a surgeons knot. Stella Rosa Mcdonald Stella Rosa Mcdonald is an artist and writer based in Sydney. More by Stella Rosa Mcdonald › 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 26 April 202426 April 2024 · Aotearoa / New Zealand “Ration the Queen’s veges”: Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the poetics of erasure Toyah Webb In Te Waka Hourua’s intervention, I read a refusal of this binary. By using black spray paint to erase all but a few words and phrases, the activists transform the figuratively white “backdrop” into the legible difference that stands out against the illegible redaction. Yet it is this redaction’s very illegibility that demands to be read — not as difference, but as a radical contestation of colonial world-making. 24 April 2024 · History Anzac Day and the half-remembered history of the Anzacs in Palestine Bill Abrahams and Lucy Honan Schools are deliberate targets for government-funded mystification about Australia’s role in wars. Such instances of official remembrance crowd out the realities of war, and the consequences of Australia’s role in imperialism. As teachers, we should strive to resist this, and we should introduce our students to a fuller understanding of the history of the Anzacs.