Neill Overton has published essays, journal articles, reviews and poetry variously for Craft Arts International, Art Monthly, Fusion Journal, fourW anthology, RealTime, etc., over past decades. His novel, The Neon Eclipse (1986), published by Penguin was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award that year, and he received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

Since then he diverted into a career as an Art Historian. He was a lecturer at RMIT, Victoria College, Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts, in Art History, Drawing, and Design, for over 20 years. He also worked extensively as a newspaper journalist, interviewer, illustrator, graphic artist, exhibiting artist, art reviewer and novelist, prior to transplanting to regional NSW and to Wagga Wagga to become a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Charles Sturt University (CSU) for 20 years, and Associate Head of the School of Communication and Creative Industries. He left CSU in 2018, and disappeared without trace. He is currently engaged in independent curatorial and writing projects.

This current book of poems, Hidden in the Crawl Space, consists of scribbled word-sketches, written in the manner of a “book of dreams”; fragments of colliding memories - both real and envisioned; a surreal juxtaposition of childhood revisited, or as a young adult in Melbourne, to the decades later pervasive reflections from the hills overlooking Wagga… the writing dwells on nostalgia, loss and disappearance… different mirrors of place, of then and now, and of a determinedly rural, eclectic experience of inland NSW.

HIDDEN IN THE CRAWL SPACE

A book of poems

On sale at the Book Launch for $20, or online at FEBN Press at www.febn.au

Book to be launched by David Gilbey. Book launch followed by Open Night with Booranga Writers' Centre.