posts by Jennifer Mills

jennifer mills (www.jenjen.com.au) is the author of the novel The Diamond Anchor (UQP 2009), and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth (Press press 2009). Her award-winning short stories, poetry and essays have been widely published. She lives in Alice Springs.

pullback

what makes the green grass grow

'Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?'
'Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!'
- popular US Army training chant before deployment to Iraq

cut grass, cut the

sentiment. but bug-eyed faces poke
glaring from between upended earth

dolls left buried by the kids that used to
live here but have since left buried

as some television ad for trouble elsewhere
poor kids hummed in a bloodless bubble

the boy who bucketed the dust before the café
is a facebust off an IED and

they will not haunt me, those nameless
traces in the marked earth, ploughed in

by the season. we're tearing the terror
at the roots, burying spined seeds that blow ... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 1-07-2009, 2 user comments

US border control

Democracy Now is running a story on No More Deaths' Dan Millis, who was convicted of littering last year for leaving water out for Mexicans crossing illegally into the USA.

I spent a week with No More Deaths last year and wrote a piece about it for New Matilda. Good to see the issue's alive and well in the US, and disappointing to see nothing has changed on it since the election.

Isabel Garcia of Derechos Humanos says "I think the Obama administration is smart, competent and totally unaware of what’s going on along this border." Let's hope she's right, and they are made aware, though i suspect this swine flu business will be used as an excuse for further tightening.

... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 28-04-2009, No comments

small press alive in the centre

This is the second offering from Ptilotus, following the success of 2007's The milk in the sky, and also edited by the wonderful Janet Hutchinson. The launch will be part of the NT writers festival, Eye of the Storm.

fishtails

... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 8-04-2009, No comments

Whaledreamers

cross-posted at walking and falling

I had the misfortune of seeing Whaledreamers on Friday, part of the Sydney Travelling Film Festival that made its way through Alice Springs. We are a hardened audience for the sort of vacuous worship that filmmaker Kim Kindersley profuses for the Mirning people. In the whitefellas-talking-about-blackfellas stakes, we are territorial and deeply wary, but always up for a challenge. So it was with horror that I realised I was watching a film about a British ex-actor's spiritual quest to become an Aboriginal dolphin.

This man is sadly obsessed by his own journey. Every moment is infected with a terrible seriousness, as though the Southern Right Whale has a patent on profundity (perfectly good ancestral myths about stink bugs have proven less popular). His pat explanations of "the dreamtime" and the Stolen Generations will only please the ignorant who wish to remain so. The structure is hopeless, the delivery wretched. Even the nice underwater shots of whales swimming soon exasperate. In a studenty montage towards the end Kindersley suggests that gazing into the mystical eyeballs of charismatic megafauna will save us from George Bush. If only someone could save us from the plague of earnest hippies that crawl over Indigenous cultures like lice. ... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 23-02-2009, 2 user comments