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.
Cherry chapstick
Before we railed on Katy Perry for her love of astrology, we piled on her lipstick lesbianism. Pseudo-sapphics copped a lot of shit – maybe we should shovel some of it onto the pseudo-socialists. Evidently, there were plenty of liberal cosplayers who are now back in their weekday clothes and killing it at the (government) office.
Nature through a different lens
Over the course of his remarkable career, Attenborough has taken us not merely to places most people are unlikely to visit but to places that are impossible to visit – into birds’ nests, burrows, termite mounds and the deepest recesses of the oceans. We’re shown things we will never encounter ‘in the flesh’ and that are simply not available to our senses as we navigate our daily lives.
A tough sell
While mine is a unique pathway to publication, the length of time it’s taken, the number of rewrites I’ve completed, and the thinly (and sometimes not-so-thinly) veiled racism that I’ve experienced are not unique when it comes to the journeys of authors who are First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC).
The drifting Miles Franklin Literary Award
Collectively, these works reveal to us, if we care to listen, an Australianness that is weird, wonderful, awful, impossible, contested and messy – less chicken parmi, more all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, including the odd cut of meat that’s turned.
Who’s next?
Tackling societal issues and politics in horror is, of course, nothing earth-shattering. Horror has long been grounded in political allegory – always passionate, often cheap and gory – to push against cultural boundaries and confront the ugliest sides of humanity: misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, classism.
Trans as monster
A near future in the West in which access to gender-affirming surgery and cross-sex hormones is outlawed is no longer unimaginable. Those of us who have updated our sex markers on our passports have begun to wonder if they will be soon declared invalid with the stroke of a pen. It’s already happening in the US and the UK, once the global torch bearers of queer liberation. Why couldn’t it happen here too?
Double vision
My memories of growing up in New Zealand and Australia are a technicolour whirl of cartoons, comic books, science fiction and arcade video games – I guess I’m instinctively drawn to imagery of that era. I love using readymade imagery as a starting point for my artwork. Sixties Pop Art taught me the joys of subverting the mundane and incorporating everyday imagery not necessarily intended to be viewed as art.
Is poetry disabled?
In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively.
The years happen again and again
A work of autofiction, A Girl’s Story has two protagonists: Annie Duchesne, an innocent seventeen-year-old camp counsellor, and Annie Ernaux, an experienced woman in her seventies.
Social media’s swan song?
Social media is now so bad that when parents sue TikTok for the role they believe it played in their children’s deaths, it feels terrifyingly quotidian. These platforms are ruining our health, the planet and our diplomatic processes.
The fair-go fallacy
Running as an independent parliamentary candidate is like building a plane while flying it – there’s no party machine, no head office, no ready-made team. Everything rests on your shoulders, and more often than not, it comes down to one thing: money.
Working body
We are taught to fear visible improvement. We are taught, passively and explicitly, to be ashamed. It is bad to look strong and muscular: our figures should not have a noticeable presence; they should not occupy too much space.
