Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015 · Uncategorized Noosa Beach Philip Neilsen My first dead body is when I am ten. A buzz below the shimmer tells us someone has drowned. We kids stare at him lying there on the sand. His face is powder blue like the guesthouse cups and plates laid out by aproned women at breakfast. The hairs on his chest and belly seem too coarse for an escaping spirit. More like an animal on an accidental roadside. Out in the darker water surfboards prop against the swell opportunistic, waiting. People shoo seagulls and us away. We decide because his eyes are open, trying to drink the sky. Philip Neilsen Philip Neilsen’s sixth collection of poetry Wildlife of Berlin (UWAP) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2019. More by Philip Neilsen › 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 June 2026 · The university Financial power in the public university: the case of ANU Beck Pearse The deeper problem is institutional. Universities have elaborate mechanisms for scrutinising knowledge claims circulating between staff and students. But we have remarkably weak mechanisms for scrutinising the financial assumptions through which executive power is exercised. 1 15 June 202616 June 2026 · Reviews Transubstantiations: Toby Fitch’s Or Grace Roodenrys The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.
