Jelly with My Cake Blues   Knock me out a kiss give me jelly with my cake knock me out a kiss give me jelly with my cake it must be jelly because jam sure don’t shake   you don’t know what’s shaking until you come shake my tree you don’t know what’s shaking until […]

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If Hitler Also Spelled Hiedler    Hüttler or Huettler at seventeen had remained in watercolour been accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna even become a priest as once intended the swastika would still signify auspiciousness in Sanskrit Israel wouldn’t exist no Berlin or West Bank walls holocaust would refer to a burnt offering of Moses WWI would still […]

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I’ll bet the hardest thing about prize fightin’ is pickin’ up yer teeth with a boxin’ glove on. —Kin Hubbard (American humorist and writer, 1868–1930) Recently I was invited to perform at the National Multicultural Festival in Canberra. I decided to arrive the day before the concert so I could finally go to the National […]

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Judge not lest you be judged -- it's a piece of advice Overland's Peter Minter would have done well to heed. After banning poets who also publish in Quadrant, the impeccably leftist arbiter of art must now pick from a shortlist the winner of a poetry prize. Two of those contenders have published in Quadrant

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Publish in Quadrant and you can forget about seeing your verse in Overland. It may seem hard to believe that a taxpayer-funded magazine would actually state that policy for the record, but Peter Minter, poetry editor and arbiter of ideological soundness, has done just that

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Little Grandpa Train Ride   Not quite Casey Jones my little grandpa (to distinguish from grandma’s father big grandpa) early engineered the Baltimore & Ohio steam engines passing behind our Painesville house he often took me on rides sat me in the high steel seat near him the Iron Horse throwing a ribbony white steam […]

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Till eleven o’clock you are perfumed in the sweat you were born with.   At five, you stink of the sweat you deserve.   No relief from the heat.   Just the melting of external barriers.   A slow leak has the sun’s white hot salinity   spilling into the horizon’s water table.   Coloured […]

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"I wasn’t prepared for the offensiveness of some of Norman Lindsay’s malformed opinions. I discovered that Lindsay’s ideas were the obscenity. His celebrated and beautiful work starkly contrasted with the often despicable nature of his views"

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Males have a dulla in neck inflatable sac extruding from mouth resembling a swollen tongue when in rut to attract females red blood cells are oval not round feces dry enough to fuel fires gait wide even-toed feet stop sinking in sand descended from the same rabbit- sized ancestor as pigs Native Americans wiped out […]

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The big C word sounds loud on trams the big C word scares lemmings and lambs the big C word gets attention in banks the big C word in China stops tanks it’s hard to argue with the big C word the big C word will always be heard they’ve tried to kill it with […]

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