Published in Overland Issue 240 Spring 2020 · Uncategorized Poem | The oysters roar Ben Walter Rounds of unshucked applause bursting from the silt; for the festival heat, as though the sun has scraped back this tide; for the cast-away tyres and steps in a dark, treeless wood; for the fluttering white hedges shifting borders by the hour; for the tier of salty green fingers licked by the breeze; for the baskets of grass gathering shy feathers; for my footsteps like crunching jaws; for slim bones splintering the air; for the wide banks of twilight as evening flows between my feet and deepens; for the birds that have left us to brick up their bodies with rushes and leaves. so much still, silent applause. or so many unruly teeth snarling Read the rest of Overland 240 If you enjoyed this piece, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four brilliant issues for a year Ben Walter Ben Walter’s stories, essays and poems have appeared in Lithub, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and many other publications. He is the fiction editor of Island. More by Ben Walter › 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 21 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
