Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014 · Uncategorized Xanadu Nathan Curnow after the film directed by Robert Greenwald, 1980 for the attractive people there is a wall to skate through it was a joke until somebody told it most of the town murals are dripping red – there is no talking sense to the ugly some try the Biblical Diet to get into shape or wear the breastplate of Saint Patrick some couples get married before they roll it is probably best if you are intoxicated makes no difference if you like the movie there are new spurts of red every day you won’t get through if you wear a helmet it is a watermelon explosion if you fail a place where so many of us dare to go might be the mural on the toilet block the love and the love and the echoes of where neon tubes blink ultra violet egged on by a fever that can’t be denied it is too late to unlock the secrets of fat the runway is lit and the bystanders waiting what commentators say about your face Nathan Curnow Nathan Curnow lives in Ballarat and is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His latest poetry collection is RADAR. More by Nathan Curnow › 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 11 June 202612 June 2026 · Solidarity The zero-sum state: what the Royal Commission reveals on the future of Muslim life in Australia Sara Cheikh Husain The zero-sum logic that the Royal Commission’s witnesses have voiced through the IHRA definition is a colonial act of oppression. If the state succumbs to that logic, as every indication suggests it will, Muslim political solidarity with Palestine risks becoming not merely unrecognised but structurally criminalised. The full institutional protection of one community will come to be constitutively built on the misrecognition of another. 10 June 2026 · Rural Australia Left in place: how distance in Australia is political Emma Goldrick If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.
