Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Uncategorized Marrickville Fiona Wright Later that night, I cut the plastic boning from the bodice of my dress: no need for structure, over summer. There were bruises on my knees I didn’t recognise. I saw us all that day, all day projected on a big screen: the bathtub underneath the orange tree, crushed grass imprinted on my shins, your cat-like eyeliner, the warm sangria out of mugs. My feet grew numb beneath my hips. Saturation. I still felt overseen when I walked home, alone and shouldered. A black light flicked behind a balcony, a woman, neon-lit, crushed out a cigarette and turned to kiss, to give a kiss. This wasn’t meant to sound like romance. But it’s not ironic, either. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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.
