Published in Overland Issue 240 Spring 2020 · Uncategorized I can't make a living Adam Ford out of watching butterflies drinking turtles’ tears on the internet. My family won’t benefit financially from the quickening pulse and close-held breath that make sunlight slow and smooth on orange wings glowing and flickering around wise and patient reptilian eyes. No skills are gained or improved upon by spending moments so idly. No tangible ROI comes from resisting the urge to reach through the screen and touch the tiny strobing vortex of light and pigment landing a million quick kisses on such a stoic recipient. There is no profit in this, no place for it on any resume, no KSC or KPI addressed. Watching butterflies drinking turtles’ tears on the internet is wholly unsustainable, a complete misappropriation, a truly and gloriously shameless waste of my time. Read the rest of Overland 240 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Adam Ford Adam Ford is the author of Man Bites Dog, The Third Fruit is a Bird, Not Quite the Man for the Job and Heroes and Civilians. He has written for Australian Author, Desktop, Going Down Swinging and Cordite. He blogs at theotheradamford. More by Adam Ford › 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 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. 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.
