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 7 February 20257 February 2025 · Friday Fiction The gap between the trees Jenny Sinclair At first it was because I was angry. It might have looked like I was running away but I wasn’t. I was punching the earth with my feet. The faster I went — the harder my soles hit the ground — the better it felt. Because punching people is, you know, illegal. And wrong. But mostly illegal. 6 February 2025 · open letter Open Letter from Attendees of the National Anti-Racism Symposium at the Queensland University of Technology Delegates to the National Anti-Racism Symposium We urge QUT, politicians and others receiving pressure to not only resist these attacks on the intellectual freedom and academic integrity of the presenters, Carumba Institute and QUT, but, further, to condemn the racist, reactionary and divisive campaign that produced them. Anything less will be a capitulation to the most corrosively anti-intellectual forces in Australian society, which will ultimately harm not only Carumba and QUT, but all of us.