‘Graphology Mills’ by John Kinsella

A note from the editor

The page constraints of print publishing are one of the constant hindrances of editing a magazine like Westerly: we always, always want to publish more work than we have space for. This is especially so in the case of John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Motes’ and ‘Graphology Mills’. To preface these works, John has provided a brief essay introducing this specific iteration of his project, which can be found here alongside the first part of this sequence, ‘Graphology Motes’. In Westerly 69.2, you can see one part of the sequence collected in these posts in print: the beautiful and gyring ‘Mote’, which shows, as John says, that ‘nothing is fixed, and nothing less so than a photograph’.

—Daniel Juckes, April 2025

Graphology Mills

Mill on the River

Loomed over and loomed at
I had to take imaginative action.

All my doubts of being where
and when, couldn’t counter

the urge to creatively
respond to allusions

prompted by sun-work
on corrugated metal, the flour-

making machinery I’d encountered
as a child not understanding

its complexity, the symbolism
and danger of flour

as ‘replacement’, as colonial
mechanism. Looming

as overshadowing, looming
as sigmoid emergence

over what has been long set,
the sacred and disturbed

river flowing, sitting or resting
close by, pigeons tying shadows.

As obvious as exclusion,
this is no romantic allusion.

The grinding images don’t
fit with wattle seed traditionally

ground in the zone anyway
by very different stone

pulsing beneath the lichen.
There is knowledge about this

readily shared if you listen
appropriately, respectfully.

The fleur de lys is no allegory
which takes ‘us’ back

to the beginning of the project.
Australian Prime Hard.

Australian Premium White
Australian Standard White

Australian White Wheat. (Or even)
Australian Innovative Wheat.

Exposed to the dust that makes
blood and tissue. From the pinnacle,

you can imagine the harvest to come,
the crops gathered to go far away,

a grain rarely trickling back.
To store and disperse. To bake.

Cell to cell, pipe to filter,
gantry to vertigo a watershed,

bright shaping as precise
as earliest tech underscored

by heat and water. Feeding
conscience, germ of method.

The rearrangement of surfaces
is a story’s offcuts magic box

random generator shadings
subtextualiser, a pâtissier.

Sun’s dark beam is an
anti-fascist evocation

drawn under its tutelage,
not an interpolation

of what leaps out, what’s
rounded upon by public

opinion. Labour, wages,
raw materials, growth

factors. Spoonbills
sampling corrugations,

swallows bisecting
messages and reports.

Heat exchange over the breaks.
Shelf life of visibility out of reach.

I cope with every restraint
by dividing into grids.

Then I count proportions.
It’s reassuring, and doesn’t

keep me out. Papier mâché
binds then dissolves

when the rain comes through
and that’s not papering

over aspects of childhood.
I like to make things. Objects.

And the expressionist urge
was the hidden part of the mirror.

How wrong can it be listening
to Piper at the Gates of Dawn

in my head seeing dawn
in late afternoon and carrying

no device? All internal
and a soundtrack to nothing

specific, but certainly
affecting my optic reception

and throwing light
into sound-relief,

the clatter of ibis
and pelican beaks,

so different yet working
the sacred water affected

by traffic. And the mill
grinding light when its

machinery is quiet,
kill-switch safety

to ensure the hardness
of grain is a kernel

to the world that won’t
crack, won’t break

with the pressure.
Fantastic planets, awry.

Mill on the River 2

We have taken distinction
from these birds, or they

 are refusing facial ID’s
 software interpretation.

There are no uplifting days
under surveillance,

 departing from highlights.
 This doesn’t have to interest

the absurdists, who write for ‘us’
while energetically predicting

 their picture puzzle blocks
 aren’t an incomplete picture.

Posturing to look down upon
while posing to look up—

 magnets move the blood around
 while thoughts contract into a presence.

 Distracted by visual tricks
 of development and decoration,

the amusement park of naturalism
offsets pseudo wetland reconstruction.

 Still, an interval in the traffic
 and staking of claims

is a relief for those cormorant-
wing-driers… and also for swallows

 russet-chested and nipping
 into incomplete sentences. Ergo,

the cold hearts of guidance systems.
We float or are suspended

 in design claims, the industry
 of art and public satisfaction,

a folderol of self-conception
as if things aren’t what they seemed.

To spellbind in copywrite
and appease the national

 derivations, compositing
 hot-letter ecologies to super-

impose a ‘radical’ template
on the outliers of source

 materials, the scratching
 of the wuthering glass,

old trade route reassurances.
How to frame a presentation.

 Employment opportunism
 is a difference in ‘making

ends meet’, a social order
to deliver sustenance

 in hydrological webcasting.
 The disk is what I remember

of staring at the sun
through childhood,

 not highlighted for critical            
 deporting, just as a garden

campus was an injection
of seclusions and not an

 opening to resources
 industry or pastoralism.

Or I just didn’t untangle
the cyclotron’s implications

 that blame would arrive
 in a pelican’s heart

(as painted by departments
accelerating subatomic particles).

Contours. So much spontaneity
lost through aligning different

 modes of recording: the semi-
 forgetting of the barely detectable

cross-currents so local so in the instant—
to tease out visuals and sound

 bytes to transport to multiply
 for later occasions. This degradation

of an instant this ‘making art’
of unfolding mutability.

 I regret but keep making.
 Acts of compulsion. Security

in reflections. Disturbance
losing the energy of decay,

 the close-calls of multiple usage,
 old plantings of conveyance retained.

 Where my grandfather sat to sketch
 and then watercolour the wetlands

without Narrows to divide banks
further—interstice in grind

 of settlement. Whitewash
 is too easy to say when the walls

glare, and it’s become part of the easing
of language into taking a burden

 while impetus of planning does the rest            
 and I wonder about familiar disclaiming

apropos of hours of gleaming creative endeavour
both idiomatically satisfying and/or frustrating.

A fragment of Theia
I can’t remove

 from my patina
 no matter

how many layers
of skin peel away.

 I am not sure where
 I picked it up

but know I wasn’t born
with such an array.

 I see something similar
 in river beach sand

where they’ve remaindered
petite arcs like acts

 of generosity
 framed by stone

ripped from the Scarp,
rough-ending lines

 and making lacunae
 that can’t heal.

All acts of drainage
in the spiral of a mill,

 the sound of river frieze
 and freeway traffic

through the airframe’s
empty sails. How lush

 is the exiguous when used
 to illustrate a past

with disclaimers
to ease the industrial

 into lustre of status.
 Dust of grind is not colour

but affect and patterns
of movement across barriers.

Water quality and sublimity
of hazardous waste glistening

 as bells overly chime as if consecrating
 a distorted sublime, or is that the timbre

of their politics, the sounding of country
to proffer as a settlement citing?

 River, enforced space between letters,
 outlined by retaining walls for joggers

to follow, to airpod the sonics of ripples
out of the riparian ‘experience’.

 Scansion. Sins of realpolitik
 make silhouettes in local parlance,

and cloud-weight is reflection
of river’s distress—squeezed

 and double inversion layering
 of ‘tragedy of the commons’

where money locates rights
in some security systems

 and penthouses allocate
 vantage points. Exclusive

deals of sharing become
a divvying up of the spoils.

Every attribute of surroundings
inflected, unspun node scratch art

 and mapping recusancy: this is,
 after all, how I found my way back

over the river to us. Sorry for the absence
at a time of stress I should have

 done better. But ingraining the currents
 with glare, and pooling against

the resources shout-out from tall
buildings, I recovered a fraction

 of flowering, hoping the replants
 will have time to see their offspring life.

 Whose marks, including my steps’
 humid slips and corrosive

commentaries where roots
reached into other waters.

 Star-studded effluvia,
 piecing together a composite

portrait of expansion and access,
board-walking to rank higher

 in ‘best places to live’ surveys,            
 lift the median house price,

powerlift greenery, concrete
and water levels alike,

 contra the sadness of terns,
 lowering of dolphin arcs.

Swallowed by logos and bad energy
of skyline photogenic to mark lifestyle!

 and new lens revealing off-gas            
 sweeping aside of consequence

to budget a surplus pollutant
as easy as riverfront fanfare

 in conditions beyond, ‘It’s
 hot weather’, and subsuming

of ‘outpost’ into the wholeness
of a nuclear undoing of life bonds,

 an oscillating ‘O’ of orgasm,
 organisation, occupancy, orifice,

obstinacy, ontology, order, occupation, originality
(not!), obfuscation, and faux omphalos.

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