Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013 · Uncategorized This Robert Verdon garden has a history like the great white-capped wall built across the horizon seen from the Snowy Mountains Highway before Nimmitabel in early spring which comes up with the onions planted in memory one millennium they will be dug in, back into the magma … the hot garden under the frame watching the worms escape a lazy child, just watching stretching, fetching things begrudgingly and bored but disinclined to work, or play just watching, dreaming being a pod of dolphins diving across the waves like waves while the garden grows and I am old snow falling deeper every day life rushes like a tabla words curl like worms in the sun my frame of plastic broken by the cats and my one cactus left run wild and this … Robert Verdon Robert Verdon is a Canberra-based writer of poetry and prose. He came second in the 2012 WB Yeats Poetry Prize. More by Robert Verdon › 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 1 6 November 2026 · Friday Fiction Headland Harry Goddard He must have still been sore. I could tell from the winces he made as he scooted down the trail. Some unspoken agreement of not hitting other people’s children — and the circumstances of me not being that type of kid — spared me from the same punishment. I was taken to my parents who agreed I would have to work off the damages, and I must have mowed the lawn once, or cleaned the family car. 4 November 2026 · Film MIFF, Minotaur and the politics of maternal reception Alicia Byrnes Maternal labour is, in the terms I’ve set out here, not labour at all. Noisy, unfocused, mobile, perhaps even sleepy — it is an affront to arthouse film viewing and therefore unserious.
