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.
The privatisation of anxiety
AT THE LAST moment, I had stuffed K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher into my carry-on case....
Breaking new ground
IT WAS NEVER part of my plan to move to a farm. The landscape is Wiradjuri country, bought from...
Masters of the future or heirs of the past?
IN MAY 2020, the international mining giant Rio Tinto made a calculated and informed decision to drill 382 blast...
Generation Covid
APRIL IS MY favourite time of year in Melbourne. The weather is comparatively stable and the days warm, richly...
It’s more than just the fruit
MANGOES ARE DEEPLY embedded in my childhood. Even now the smell or taste of the fruit connects me instantly...
Food insecurity in uncertain times
Wistfully she muses on / Something bartered, something gone / Songs of old remembered days / The walkabout, the...
Sitting with difficult things
AS A CHILD in the early 1970s I would sometimes overhear my parents discussing how much commercial television I should be...
Accords and antagonisms
Listen to Tony Wood, Grattan Institute, discuss ‘Accord and antagonisms’. THE PHYSICAL AND scientific evidence of human-induced climate change continues its depressing...
A long half-life
ON MY DESK there sits a well-thumbed copy of the 1976 Fox Report, the first report of the Ranger...
Trash fish, sand, sea snails
WHY ARE SOME resources sexy and others not? The monumental equipment that accompanies certain forms of major resource extraction...
Touching the future
As defined by Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician, cybernetics was ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’, and also in society and in the individual. In particular, for Wiener and others, it was about the study of feedback mechanisms and circular causal systems, including in the newly proliferating space of computers.
State actions and libertarian lawsuits
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, for the first time in its seventy-five-year history, the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly...
