Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Uncategorized Wind shadow Jill Jones Terra incognita transfers across a plain, a wing blends the graces, tarmacs, macadam, concrete being so concrete, the tar-sick travel. And hills make effort, rock, shrug, years of it, as now we turn between cities. Traction in floodwater, levels, blue slate, trees, red hollow, millennia forms feral, forms survival, trail of goats, their black edges, hesitation on the road, emu too, scrabble, kangaroo switch to flight, twenty-one birds of prey, without prey, dwelling along bright white civilised lines, carrion mess, moon, and milky way, brutal shoulder, bloody, in wind, in shadow, uncertainty, a kind of thinking, all there, no matter what you dream, how uncomfortable, this is where it happens, this is where it passes, a thunderclap, a creek bed, falling branch. ‘Return to find a river,’ to be faceless, this once, off the grid, no identity, no thought but in itself, going out of no paradise, ‘where does memory live?’ To hear crows, thoughts pass, ‘you blew it’, the pace, hurry days, in skirl, in concentration, ‘return to the living body’, let the nothingness enter, keep swinging in a body, your own laboratory, work, push, and don’t push, off centre, centre. Smell grass, cow pats, new asphalt, let’s be doing. Jill Jones Jill Jones lives and works on unceded Kaurna land. Her latest book is Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia, Canada, Ireland, NZ, Singapore, Sweden, UK, and USA and has been translated into a number of languages. She has worked as an academic, arts administrator, journalist, and book editor. More by Jill Jones › 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 31 January 202531 January 2025 · Racism The QUT Symposium: holding the line against rising racism Elizabeth Strakosch, Jordy Silverstein, Crystal McKinnon, Eugenia Flynn, Natalie Ironfield, Holly Charles, Priya Kunjan, Roj Amedi and Lina Koleilat Last weeks's QUT Symposium met in the staunch tradition of the Brisbane Blacks, who have fought for sovereignty, land rights, liberation and an end to racial violence for decades. It was a gathering of Elders, academics, organisers and frontline community workers who speak, theorise and embody the truth about race and racism in this place. It refused to clothe itself in multicultural platitudes about tolerance, or to speak about racism only in terms of individual prejudice. 29 January 202529 January 2025 · Palestine The demonisation of the Palestine movement fuels anti-Muslim racism Mariam Tohamy and Miroslav Sandev The spate of anti-Muslim racist attacks around the country are being fuelled by the anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian policies of mainstream politicians. Political attempts to undermine the Palestine movement and bipartisan support for Israel’s genocide are causing this.