Published in Overland Issue 258 2025 · Uncategorized Trans pastoral Joel Keith How to tell cut rock from the natural wall of the gorge? Or the ducks from the moorhens plopped atop the screen-sheen of gorge water? Their wakes enclose the lake in wide parentheses. The swimmers swim and chatter with a naturalness whose opposite is what you are and which therefore is all that you desire. Their towels flutter like flags held to change, flutter and fly. What, what is it to be born in that bright nation? And not to be—only to guess at it and, guessing, have to reach toward—what tragic blessing? Joel Keith Joel Keith is a writer and musician living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her work has appeared in Island, Cordite, The Suburban Review, Overland, and elsewhere. They are the editor of Voiceworks. More by Joel Keith › 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.
