Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015 · Uncategorized Paradise losing Georgina Woods Le paradis n’est pas artificiel, but melting and fermenting, it seems. The panting, perishing white lemuroid possum can’t get enough water, can’t cool her febrile body, drops from the canopy of a thousand-year-old tree, in a white whoosh of rushing light. Le paradis n’est pas artificiel, but unpredictable, these days. Short-tailed shearwaters cruise southward, but their fruitless fishing for squid during this too-hot November, leaves them knackered, and the shore-break delivers them to us, as they give up the ghost. Le paradis n’est pas artificiel, but becoming simpler, no doubt. The great blue homeland acidifies and corrodes its little calcite prawns, absorbs them, with a sigh, into the same soup that sloshes over the coral beds, turning them a general algal brown. Georgina Woods is an activist and poet working and living on Awabakal and Worimi land in Newcastle, Australia. An earlier version of this essay was shortlisted for the 2016 Nature Writing Prize. More by Georgina Woods › 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 17 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction. 15 April 202615 April 2026 · Climate politics The $67 billion climate betrayal: how Australia’s record fossil fuel subsidies fund global destruction Noa Wynn The contradictions aren't failures of implementation. They're the predictable result of a political system that has decided fossil fuel profits matter more than climate stability, more than the Great Barrier Reef, more than Pacific Islander lives, and more than the future habitability of the planet.
