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.
Imagination as emancipation
THERE IS A condition described by Maya Angelou in the first instalment of her memoir I Know Why the...
Art works
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures. Georges Braque, French Painter IT STARTED WITH a life-and-death conversation. The doctor, faced with...
On ‘The Natural Way of Things’, by Charlotte Wood
The women in Charlotte Wood’s powerful and distinctive novel are prisoners in an imaginative landscape that we know only as a remote location somewhere in inland Australia. It is not a place, or a literature, that we have encountered before. There is nothing like it in our literary past.
The restorationist impulse
THE CHILDREN COME home from school to be greeted by their mother, who is wearing an apron. They then...
So you want to rule like an autocrat?
NOTE FOR CANDIDATES The word ‘populist’ has lately come to mean white nationalist, alt-right blogger, neo-fascist and so on. These...
What isn’t there
I DON’T KNOW how to write about something that isn’t there, such as longing. My entire life, it seems,...
When everybody does better
POPULISM – THE WORD – is surging. It has become the label of convenience for journalists, commentators and politicians to pin...
Poking mullock
Q: Did you hear the one about that politician you hate from the party you despise? A: The establishment and...
The men in green
TO KILL TIME following a minor a delay to their meeting schedule, three middle-aged men with thinning hair, charcoal-grey...
Sound, drums and light
IN MY LATE-TEENAGE years, I found myself for a time hovering on the border of bogandom. In those long-gone...
Held on trust
ONE OF THE key reasons that freedom of expression is so hotly contested in Australia, as elsewhere, is that...
Discontents
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the economist Joseph Stiglitz published a book called Globalization and its Discontents (WW Norton, 2002). For...
