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.
Stranger than the dreams of Ptolemy
Although Europeans had believed in the symmetry of the two hemispheres for nearly two centuries, they silently forgot the...
Negotiating botanical collections
IT IS NOT widely known that many Australian colonial natural history collections are represented in German museums and herbaria,...
Atrocity, remembrance, spectacle
The process of experiencing the European city is one of corrosion, in which the screens of the city are...
Asking the relevant questions
THE FIRST QUESTION. Why European thinking – again? My exchange with Europe goes back to the beginning: my father fled the...
Climate of stagnation
AT COP25 IN Madrid – the twenty-fifth United Nations climate summit, held in December 2019 – I watched as the vice...
Brexit, Australian-style
IT WAS ALWAYS going to be ‘Australian-style’. When Boris Johnson unveiled his government’s new points-based immigration system in early...
The kindness of strangers
FOR ALL HER long life, Baba Schwartz baked two yeast cakes every Friday: one laced with chocolate and nuts,...
Siege mentality
I FIRST CAME to Hungary thirty years ago as a young Australian diplomat, witnessing its democratic transition and conversion...
Squats, squares and city plans
WALKING ALONG BERLIN’S River Spree one hot summer’s day in 2019, I happened upon a little garden. It was fenced,...
Come together
AS LIBRARY-BASED complexes have evolved in recent decades to foster important community making, interculturalism and egalitarian learning, Australia and...
Wheat, wages and weapons
TWELVE KILOMETRES WEST of Melbourne’s central business district lies Sunshine, a growing urban centre that once housed Australia’s largest...
Memory and migration
AS PART OF its politics of memory, the European Union has expended considerable effort creating a transnational and unifying...
