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 First published in Overland Issue 228 29 March 2023 Aboriginal Australia Standing in the dawn’s new light: truth-telling for settlers Anthony Kelly There’s a paradox about being a settler in a stolen country. No matter when we arrived, we inherited the bounty of genocidal violence. Many of us are the beneficiaries of the intergenerational wealth-building that saw English, Irish and Scottish settler families grow rich on the sheep, timber, wheat and resources provided by stolen land. We have a profound responsibility to dismantle the ‘lie-telling’ because it shores up this legacy and the systems of colonial violence that continue in our lifetimes. First published in Overland Issue 228 27 March 202328 March 2023 Culture Before ChatGPT, there was Rekognition: How Amazon’s algorithms control which books you see Claire Parnell almost fifteen years after approximately 57,000 books by and about LGBTQIA+ folks disappeared from Amazon’s search results, bestseller lists and sales ranks, the company’s algorithms are still unfairly targeting books by historically marginalised authors, including queer folks and people of colour, and controlling how readers can discover them.
