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.
Dear mother
I am the scattered cherry blossomthat falls in the spring.I am the snow that feathersthe top of your headyour...
Terrorism and the Cold War
BEFORE THE WAR on terror, there was the Cold War. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was formed...
Allies in name alone
THE VIETNAM WAR lingers in the collective memory like some unspeakable crime, locked away in the nation’s attic. Contrary...
Barrier thinking
IN VIETNAM, MINES accounted for half of the Second Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2RAR) soldiers killed in action. Two...
A hundred in a million
MARTIN O’MEARA, A Tipperary man who had enlisted in Perth, was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for carrying both...
Anzac instincts
IT IS A curious thing, perhaps unique to Australia, that someone appraising the phenomenon of Anzac – that shared...
On ‘Bran Nue Dae’, by Jimmy Chi
Amid the fun and laughter of the film, memories of the original musical streamed back to me. I know it well; I spent time with Jimmy Chi and his partner, Glennys Allen, in Broome in the mid-1980s when he was working on the songs and the concept. I’d made my own road trip to Broome in a canary-yellow V8 station wagon that was covered with red dust.
From the edge of the edge
GOING HOME FROM work on late afternoons in summer, I drive west between lines of flat grey bush straight...
Open ground
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2015 EVERY FEW MONTHS my mother flies north from Perth to Karratha with a...
The limits of dominion
…We are, we often feel, living on the edge of something good. Nothing disturbs us. Winds from...
Finger money
Finalist in the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Awards 2015 in the Promotion of Indigenous Recognition Award...
Shifting focus
THE TYRANNY OF myopia continues to skew the chronicle of Australian art history. According to Edmund Capon in his...
