Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Crossing the line
IMAGINE AN AIRPLANE flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia’s eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers’ personal carbon footprints.
Lost and found in translation
The vast continent is really void of speech...this speechless, aimless solitariness was in the air. It was natural to...
Boodjar ngan djoorla
MY BONES ARE in the soul of Country, and Country is in my bones. My veins are the creeks...
A fragile civilisation
AT THE SAME time as a headline in The Guardian announced: ‘Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA...
The planet is alive
I WANT TO take you on a journey from the planet to the parish, from the global to the...
We all took a stand
NOBODY LOOKS VERY comfortable. There are four faces, angled inelegantly, only one inclined to engage with the camera, the...
Life and death on Dyarubbin
ON THE RIVERBANK at the old Sackville Aboriginal Reserve on Dyarubbin there’s a stone obelisk. It seems permanent and...
Rebuilding reefs, restoring memory
AS A HISTORIAN I’m not used to this sort of archive. It’s a freezing spring morning in Clifton Springs, near...
Valuing country
IT WAS READING Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (Giramondo, 2006) in 2007 that introduced me to the idea of ‘country’:...
The costs of consumption
LAST OCTOBER, THE World Wildlife Fund for Nature released the 2018 Living Planet Report. Published biennially since 1998, the...
Climate change, science and country
IT WOULD BE hard to hear a louder warning bell than the 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel...
Transforming landscapes
I stood rooted to the ground, for I realised this almost certainly would have been the first time in 150 years of degrading European management that a reed-warbler had returned to this valley. The powerful song of that small bird became a metaphor of hope for me. It was a symbol of the power of regeneration and the capacity of self-organisation in a landscape. It was a living example of what could be achieved.
