“I saw your face obscured / thirty-eight degrees / dead grass on the hill beneath the spires / when I returned the day after you left / when I returned did you decide” From our latest #fridaypoem, SPRING’S EMBER by Elysha English.

Oh my god what did he do

Great to see a substantial essay on @pipadam.bsky.social's work, "Audition" (her latest) in particular. "Her work is now beginning to reach the US audience it deserves..."

Looks like the original has been swept away by the sands of time.

Guys I hope you're all sitting down

“Who were these spaces built for? I ask often myself. Because this famously liveable city seems to favour those able to remain regulated within it.” Phoebe Thorburn on the hostility of public spaces.

Colonial authoritarianism did not start with Chris Minns: in her new comic, Eav Brennan weaves the testimonies of friends who participated in the Herzog rally at Town Hall with the recent history of the attacks on the right to protest in NSW.

I see the new Saturday Morning is about as shit for our trans whānau as the one with Kim Hill was. www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

In case you missed it, hark at this yarn ft Aotearoa's own Topham Guerin

Perfectly okay for tech firms to enable abusers to create and display 'revenge porn' for 48 hours, says Starmer.

“The story of my ancestors was written in the marks on our bodies and told around meals cooked in an underground oven then shared with the rest of our people over laughs.” So begins MAGERE, a new story written and illustrated by the wonderful Dorell Ben.

OFF WITH HIS HEAD

In my head the heckler was @haydendonnell.bsky.social and I refuse to click through in case the article says otherwise.

One of the great tragedies of my childhood was the day my mother discovered that the Nestlé variety in a tube I used to consume like a junkie in our yearly mountain holidays contained added sugar, so she stopped buying it. I haven't fully recovered.

It's absolutely crazy to me that people read Twitter using its algorithm. I would immediately poke my eyes out.

Wait, wasn't that guy in Marty Supreme?

“The selective punishment of one group of migrants or refugees is not an incidental feature of our migration regime: it is its central organising principle.” Sanmati Verma, Josephine Langbien and James Clarke on the new wave of deportations to Nauru.

"The world is running out of memory" is a development that will enable me to publish the doctoral thesis I completed in 2006 without changing a comma.

“I argue that the use of this term must not be dislocated from Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism.” Ruth De Souza on the misuse of Cultural Safety.

New "I don't recall saying good luck" just dropped.

"We were just trying to make the paedophile poorer" is a bold defence.

Suburban wine moms will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a concentration camp" and then very effectively firebomb a concentration camp

If you sit still and quietly in a natural environment for twelve minutes, then the animals there will go back to how they were acting before you arrived: a new poster by the inimitable @samwallman.bsky.social.

Trying to sell the contents of old newspapers is dumb on so, so many levels. They're shooting themselves in the — let's say foot.

“When it comes to fiction, then, I am arguing that the anxiety that provoked the writing of Juice is incited by, not detached from, capitalism and power, and no less dangerous than what Winton describes as apathy.” Daniel Ray on Tim Winton’s JUICE

Kind of weird to illustrate this using a hacker-like figure as opposed to, say, a photo of Shane Jones

This is disgusting antisemitic language from the Australian PM - Herzog is the head of state of a genocidal regime, not the head of state of all Jews. We are not Israel, and the only people who win when Jews and Israel are conflated are antisemites and Zionists.

Captain Ragout reporting for duty

“This is the story of what this win means — not just for the Starkeys and the Kokatha people, but for the global arms trade and the corporate actors operating on Indigenous lands.” Miriam Deprez on how Kokatha custodians took on multinationals in the Woomera Prohibited Area.

a Noam-apology apology

The old Fred Allen joke finally realised: “I can’t understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.”

Our Summer Program concludes today with MASSIVE GLACIER COLLAPSE COMPILATION VOL 9, a brilliant new poem by Lach Valentine. Generously supported by our friends at @copower.bsky.social.

“But Gabriel was not alone, no matter how far his woolly thoughts stretched, and how eternal time felt.” Our Summer program continues with the first Friday Fiction for 2026: BALM OF HURT MINDS by Claire Cao.

“And so ends an obscene, morally violent and deceptive novel.” In what may be Overland’s most Summer read ever, John Kinsella engages in a masterful, labyrinthine (and parenthetical, elliptical …) reading of Hawthorne’s THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES.

We've lost Meanjin, a situation that was completely unthinkable until it actually happened. Don't think we won't lose more. It's quite clear there are people who don't care what they destroy for political gain. Literary culture in this country is already frayed. Don't let it come apart entirely.

If we don't have places like @overlandjournal.bsky.social who will publish dissenting voices, writers who make the hard and uncomfortable arguments, unapologetic left-wing positions, and who do the work of helping writers find their voices, we don't have literature in this country

In addition to supporting Palestinian writers like Randa Abdel-Fattah, and authors and artists who withdrew from AWW in solidarity, spare a thought for the "little" magazines like @overlandjournal.bsky.social, who have relentlessly stood up for Palestine and have been comprehensively defunded for it

As on old Twitter, my best posts are always the ones nobody notices.

That was the statement by Tracey Whiting AM. Now we wait for Tracey Whiting PM for the real goss.

When I leave my job, I also plan to thank my terrific as fuck team.

The wind did a bit of landscaping overnight, knocking down the main surviving offshoot of an olive tree my mum had given us in 2000. (Though another tiny offshoot remains. You can't kill olive trees.)

[sombrely, with tears in eyes] "truly the people of Iran embody the great spirit of Flumpo The Fart Wizard" - author of Flumpo The Fart Wizard

Heh. Perfect explanation of the AI market bubble.

This screenshot was how I discovered that Graham Linehan has given up pretending that he's anything other than a violent misogynist, and is now retweeting posts that lesbians actually want to get shot in the face by masked government agents.

Ardern hasn't pulled out. bsky.app/profile/grog...

“The Adelaide Festival’s decision to dump Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah gives us a grim foretaste of the Australian cultural landscape in 2026.” David Brophy on “ambient antisemitism” and the institutional mechanisms for curtailing protest and political expression.

Fair play Colbert, that is up there with the Daily Show calling Blagojevich "Scumbag Million-Hairs"