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.
Return of the moonbirds
THE WIND OFF the sea blows hard and it is savagely cold, despite it being midsummer. It is 8...
Writing, standing on your head
THE WRITER NEEDS a body to perform writing. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture,...
Finding order in art and life
PHYSICISTS, WE ARE often told, dream of formulating a single equation to explain the world. Yet the fundamental law...
Our bodies
THINK OF ABORIGINAL bodies. Think of Cathy Freeman, standing and waiting on the track in Sydney, lean, still, and...
Imperfect bodies of the poor
POOR PEOPLE'S BODIES have always told stories about poverty's origins and remedies. In their own accounts, poor people say...
Chewing the fat
I HAVE BEEN fascinated by fat ever since I was a pre-teen anorexic. My fascination may have preceded the...
Making perfect babies
THE BYSTANDER APPEARED shocked. Open-mouthed, she was standing there shaking her head. "Not one", she said, "not one but...
Sculpting your own brain
THE GREAT SPANISH neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal believed that with personal commitment and willpower we can do almost...
Promise of miracles in the age of uncertainty
Planets full of bronzed healthy clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business...
The play of days
I AM SITTING in the autumn shade at the edge of our long driveway. We always stop here on...
White me
IN THE COURSE of an average Australian lifetime, a white lifetime, face-to-face communication with Indigenous Australians might be fairly...
Exploring the historical imagination
IT HAS BEEN said of George Macaulay Trevelyan that he was gifted with a 'vivid pictorial sense'. True enough,...
