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.
At the Russian restaurant
Listen to Lee Kofman reading ‘At the Russian restaurant’. AT MY REQUEST, Slavik is taking me to a Russian restaurant in the heart...
Refugium
THIS IS HOW it began for those in flight: with the scent of the sea, the sun playing on...
Brisbane, late 1960s
YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T like the school holidays. She has to run the shop as well as keep an eye...
Death by the book
THE NASTY CHEMICAL smell had gone. His eyelids were shut and she wanted to have one more peep to...
The elsewheres of Charlie Bolt
NO ONE KNEW what happened to Charlie Bolt. He had a wife, somewhere. She left to find ‘happiness’, believing...
The town turns over
Listen to Laura Elvery read ‘The town turns over’. IF YOU WANT to know how we got here, we will tell you. Once, not...
The compound
A TROPICAL SUMMER. 2006: A Monday. Wendy, the story: the compound, the day, her telling me in Mackay her...
Surrounded
IN TERMS OF the event, the make or type of bikes surely doesn’t matter now, but it weirdly did...
Best laid plans
THE KIDS IN Eleanor Hardy’s class are all still talking about the fight. They shouldn’t be – she heard the...
The things we’ll leave behind
THERE’S A LIGHT blearing hazy through the glass behind her brother’s head, the red-blue red-blue of a police car...
The market seller
For as long as she could, Emily hung back among the shelves of her shop. Being near books was one of the few things that truly comforted her. Her love of fairytales in particular, for the hope in darkness within them, had been the reason she’d started her market bookshop after Robert left her with barely anything following their divorce. Emily picked up a Victorian anthology of fairytales and poems, ran her fingertips along its edges, thinking of all the ways second chances might arrive in a life. Of how much she had to offer someone, how much love she had to give, if only she could find the courage.
Instructions for a steep decline
Whatever happens, this is. Adrienne Rich ONE IT IS PEAK hour in the City of Light. A woman cycles backwards up...
