Published in Overland Issue 228 Spring 2017 · Uncategorized Everything that happens in the film clip for Men At Work’s ‘Down Under’ Liam Ferney A mid-twenties yarn, classic as A Country Practice kicks off with a caveman’s sodapop bottle steel kettle drum. Kombi cracks in the Cronulla dunes. TANERLORN RULES. The Age of Aquarius ends but we’re in the Eternal City now. Four fellas in the back. FAAAAARK! The medium serves muesli by an oasis & the Sipowicz spiv in sunnies says its SOLD SOLD to the guy with the toy koala playing flute in the tree. Deepcover as a tall Belgische in sailor stripes gives the shibboleth then handballs a Vegemite baguette sloshes seven Foster’s tinnies in four pots heaping with head. Bombay shanti shanti bombed on hashish not bliss. We’re not buying your old shoe but we will buy a bright prophecy through a freshly torn backdoor to our Cronulla. A spaghetti Western funeral & the bit I don’t understand is the stuffed koala chained to an ankle trawling across the sand like a fisherman’s slack line. Read the rest of Overland 228 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Liam Ferney Liam Ferney’s most recent collection, is Hot Take His previous collection, Content, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. His other books include Boom (Grande Parade Poets), Career (Vagabond Press) and Popular Mechanics (Interactive Press). He is a media manager, holder of the all-time games record for the New Farm Traktor Collective and convener of the Saturdays readings in Brisbane. More by Liam Ferney › 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 20 December 202420 December 2024 · Reviews Slippery totalities: appendices on oil and politics in Australia and beyond Scott Robinson Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this. 19 December 202419 December 2024 · Reviews Reading JH Prynne aloud: Poems 2016-2024 John Kinsella Poems 2016-2024 is a massive, vibrant and immersive collation of JH Prynne’s small press publication across this period. Some would call it a late life creative flourish, a glorious coda, but I don’t see it this way. Rather, this is an accumulation of concerns across a lifetime that have both relied on earlier form work and newly "discovered" expressions of genre that require recasting, resaying, and varying.
