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.
Kartiya are like Toyotas
'Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.' – remark by a Western Desert woman about...
Pissed off
AUSTRALIA, ANY CITY, Saturday night: red unsteady men in pastel shirts and designer sneakers have groping sweaty fists and...
Poetics of place
No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.–...
Paradox of identity
'Make it Australian.' 'How?' 'If I knew it I'd be doing it.'– Alex Miller, Autumn Laing (Allen & Unwin,...
Home in the imagination
WE LIVE OUT our lives, most of us, in other people's houses. We had no say in their shapes,...
Cultural creep
TODAY IT WOULD be called a reality show, but in the early 1950s the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Incognito was...
Girt by a sea of anomalies
FEDERATION BECAME CLEAR to me for the first time recently – at least fifteen years after I served on...
The land at the end of the world
THE INVASION OF Australia just didn't make any sense. A huge, dry, bulbous tile, sitting at the end of...
Mentioning the war
I BLAME Yasunari Kawabata for my obsession with Japan. When I was sixteen I read his short stories 'The...
Red truths and white lies
IN 2004 I drove to the Wave Hill area of the Northern Territory. I had been contracted to assist...
Andrew Bolt’s disappointment
MY FRIENDS TAKE a breath, lean across the table and assume the tone of Richard Dawkins explaining dinosaurs to...
Headstone
AT THE TIME of his death, in 1883, Wambeetch Puyuun was the only Liwira Gunditj still living on his...
