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 many tragedies of Animorphs
If you read a couple of the books themselves or watched the Nickelodeon TV show, then you might have some vague memories of cool but simple stories about teenagers transforming into animals to fight evil aliens. If you read most or all of them, then I’d be willing to bet Animorphs seared itself permanently into the fabric of your being, that the name Tobias makes your heart seize up, and that the words ‘you mattered’ threaten to reduce you to tears.
Subject, object
The vivid hues and spiky leaves of Jason Moad’s Temple of Venus – the arresting artwork featured on the cover of Griffith Review 89: Here Be Monsters – raises a tantalisingly sinister proposition. The subject of the painting is clear – a Venus flytrap, realistically rendered – but there’s a somewhat otherworldly quality to this plant, a sense that it might be biding its time, waiting to strike while we, the viewers, are distracted by its beauty. For Melbourne-based realist painter Jason Moad, this slippage between subject and object, reality and imagination, is part of the point.
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.
