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.
On institutions
I LOVE INSTITUTIONS. It is not a very fashionable thing to admit, I know. In our age of individual freedoms,...
Capital O organising
THE UNION ORGANISING brand seems set to get a major makeover with news that Hollywood star James Franco is...
Economics of power
The only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust...
Birth of a nation?
IN FEBRUARY 1902 – just thirteen months after the Australian colonies federated to become the world’s newest nation –...
Strangers to the world
COMMENTING ON AUSTRALIA’S response to asylum seekers in the online version of Le Monde in July 2013, one reader...
The collapse of values
THE ARRIVAL OF the MV Tampa in Australian waters in 2001 was misrepresented to the public as a threat...
Barriers to understanding
It’s hard to be literate and numerate without attending school; it’s hard to find work without a basic education;...
On ‘The Complete Stories’, by David Malouf
THERE ARE ALWAYS two landscapes in a Malouf story. The one you can touch with your hands, and the one that is dreamed – discoverable by language, always on the verge of disappearing.
On ‘Five Bells’, by Gail Jones
GAIL JONES’ FIFTH novel, Five Bells, is many things: a love letter to Sydney and its physical beauty; a deeply moving exploration of the effects of grief and loss; and, perhaps most importantly, a luminous and shimmering reflection on time, memory and mortality.
On ‘Grace’, by Robert Drewe
THE ‘SOCIAL REALIST novel’ that Robert Drewe quite deliberately set out to write with Grace could have sunk under the weight of its own ideas, were it not for the thriller foil the story is wrapped in.
On ‘Don’t Take Your Love to Town’, by Ruby Langford Ginibi
N 1988, DON’T Take Your Love to Town became the first of five autobiographies that Ruby Langford Ginibi would have published during her almost thirty-year career as a writer, Aboriginal historian, activist and lecturer. Indeed it was this first book, her life story covering five generations of familial bonds, written in what would become her trademark conversational style, which would have a historic impression on Indigenous literature in Australia.
On ‘Nine Parts of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks
Welcome to the artful world of literary and narrative non-fiction, where the author’s experience is shuffled and edited in ways that dramatise and personalise the story for readers.
