Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Goodbye to all that Keri Glastonbury ‘You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city, you’re why I’ll need to leave’ — Sharon Van Etten Driving over Styx Creek, appropriately laden with heavy metal, the TAFE maintaining a cold shoulder, where transgender trainee librarians from Kurri, meet Penny Wong’s ex-speech writer, meet all the dropkicks. Like watching Orange is the New Black thinking there but for the grace of god (& now whenever I think it’s in Pennsatuckey’s accent). The city’s lazily retooled past lives of a near future as I simply reach my nose around the back of my head, the slurry of toxic carcinogens leach from the gasworks, hidden in full public view. Outside parents are waddling their kids to school, and, for a minute there, we could be in the East Village. Seeking neither the uniform distancelessness of the network nor the uniform nearness of suburbia – all the disavowed derelict land, the perfect setting for an eat dirtzian doctorate. Mojo may have long left town but there’s still a few Los Chucos Suaves hiding in the native grasses, the world inside Clyde Street. Keri Glastonbury Keri Glastonbury is a poet, essayist and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. She is also former poetry editor of Overland. More by Keri Glastonbury › 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 May 20261 May 2026 · Long read Dungeons & Dragons is a waste of time: an unproductive case for radical action Scott Hudson Another such casualty is the push of AI into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Used in this way, AI purports to hack your recreational time, allowing you to maximise it by smoothing over the nitty gritty. But the thing is, the joy of D&D is the nitty gritty. AI promises to improve the productivity of work and leisure, but much of D&D thrives on being unproductive. 30 April 2026 · Housing Organised abandonment and Victoria’s Big Housing Build Oli Caruana-Brown and Ella McNicol The crisis is not due to a physical shortage of properties. Rather, it is a series of intentional decisions by Governments to prioritise a system of private property over peoples’ basic human need for shelter, allowing landlords and corporations to continue to hoard housing and extract wealth from tenants via rent.
