Featured Stories

Man’s Labyrinth

Non-fictionMax Weber foresaw the iron cage of rationalisation coming for us all: that industry and its social institutions would become so technically efficient that a worker would become a ‘specialist without spirit’ and a consumer a ‘sensualist without heart’. People could have everything they’d ever wanted, in theory, but the cost would be their humanity.

Weber conceived of this as a prison of capital when workers were in factories and those factories increasingly required employees to take on smaller and more specialised roles. This stretched into the bureaucratic sinew of large businesses and corporations, naturally, and into the administration of states, municipalities and even sufficiently large Zonta clubs.

By Rick Morton

The many tragedies of Animorphs

GR OnlineIf you read a couple of the books themselves or watched the Nickelodeon TV show, then you might have some vague memories of cool but simple stories about teenagers transforming into animals to fight evil aliens. If you read most or all of them, then I’d be willing to bet Animorphs seared itself permanently into the fabric of your being, that the name Tobias makes your heart seize up, and that the words ‘you mattered’ threaten to reduce you to tears.

By Gabriel Bergmoser

An image of Phar-Lap, taxidermic and exhibited in Melbourne.

Subject, object

GR OnlineThe vivid hues and spiky leaves of Jason Moad’s Temple of Venus – the arresting artwork featured on the cover of Griffith Review 89: Here Be Monsters – raises a tantalisingly sinister proposition. The subject of the painting is clear – a Venus flytrap, realistically rendered – but there’s a somewhat otherworldly quality to this plant, a sense that it might be biding its time, waiting to strike while we, the viewers, are distracted by its beauty. For Melbourne-based realist painter Jason Moad, this slippage between subject and object, reality and imagination, is part of the point.

By Jason Moad, Carody Culver

Latest Edition

Here Be Monsters

Edition 89

Portent, symbol, metaphor: From the werewolf to the Pale Man, from Count Dracula to the (far more sinister) emotional vampire, monsters of all forms have offered us ways to express and exorcise our fears for thousands of years. This edition...

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Featured Collection

First Nations Perspectives

We've put together a collection of essays by leading First Nations writers, thinkers and activists that explore the long road to Indigenous representation.

These works are all unlocked and free to read.

Where truths collide

I AM SITTING forward, in nautical terms, looking astern at my awa, who is guiding us through reefs and straits on a moonless night. Above him are stars like phosphorescence in the squid-ink sky. Around his silhouette I see phosphorescence like stars in our small dinghy’s wake. I’m a young man excited to be going night-spearing for kaiyar, the painted crayfish.

By Thomas Mayo

Speaking up

The modern Australian incarnation of truth-telling that emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 came not from dictatorship and civil war, as had truth-telling in the Latin American ‘radical democracies’ of the 1990s, which pioneered transitional justice. Instead, it derived from local people devising local solutions.

By Megan Davis

The power of the First Nations Matriarchy

I WAS BORN from the world’s most ancient womb: the sacred womb of a First Nations woman. The blood pumping through my veins is the life force of a long line of First Nations Warrior Women whose spirits run deep into this ancient soil. It is a privilege to be raised in a culture that understands the power of the First Nations Matriarchy.

By Teela Reid

When the heart speaks

I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

By Thomas Mayo

The heart of seeding First Nations sovereignty

The demand for treaty – or, more accurately, the demand for many treaties – must be driven by the cultural authority of each sovereign First Nation. This process must be underpinned by cultural protocol and custom that recognises the many tribal clans within the First Nations.

By Teela Reid

The long road to Uluru

Uluru is a game changer. The response of ordinary Australians to the Statement has been overwhelming…a rallying call to the Australian people to “walk with us in a movement…for a better future”.

By Megan Davis