Jennifer Mills

Jennifer Mills is an author, editor and critic based on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). Her latest novel is The Airways, published by Picador in 2021. Dyschronia (2018) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Aurealis, and Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. In 2022, Mills is Artist in Residence at Vitalstatistix.
All essays by Jennifer Mills
Unnatural Being
It’s in my nature to be uncomfortable with the very idea of nature, the distinctions the term creates between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and desires, the value systems it imposes and disguises. For me, nature and gender are both trouble.
An Embassy for Nowhere
Shaun Prescott’s eminently strange novel, The Town, begins by rejecting outright any ‘sense of place’. The town in this novel is nameless. It is a site that refutes specificity, character, and indeed meaning itself. As a librarian tells its narrator early on: ‘There are no books about this town… Nothing of note has ever happened in this town, and by the time it does, there will no longer be any point in remembering it.’
Future Real: Cairo by Louis Armand
Cairo is both a futuristic dystopia and an attempt to respond to the dystopian nature of present reality. Although it appears on the surface to be a science fiction novel, it depicts a state of being that Umberto Eco described as hyperreality, in which life is experienced as a bewildering array of simulacra.
A victimless crime: Cairo by Chris Womersley
‘We live in a philistine nation but a civilised city,’ said the Director of the NGV, Patrick McCaughey, on purchasing Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million in 1986… In Cairo, Chris Womersley has taken the theft of Weeping Woman and re-imagined it from the perspective of a young innocent from the kind of country town McCaughey was referring to when he called Australia a philistine nation.
Tales of the city: Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man mystery
Somerton Man is one of Adelaide’s great cold cases. The place is built of such true crime stories. On the surface, these narratives tell us, Adelaide is a charmingly ordered, picture-book city. But step carelessly and you could fall through a hole into a parallel world of violence, murder and intrigue.