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.
Confessions from a bookstore
What those who work outside of publishing don’t factor in is that, ultimately, bookselling is a niche form of retail work. You are working in a bookshop. The curatorial process is certainly unique, but the basic business premise of a bookshop is that it’s a place of commerce.
Inside it, trying
Savage describes her ideal world as one ‘where the value of creativity was not assessed against the metrics of excellence, institutional legibility, or professional viability’ – where artists ‘did not feel compelled, out of the threat of poverty or social disgrace, to professionalise’.
Who listens to CDs?
When my partner, Jerry, and I moved in together nine years ago, he was dismayed to discover my CD collection. Its existence was no mean feat. Since leaving my family home in Adelaide, I had moved fourteen times, including three overseas stints. And yet, the CDs endured.
Cruising the stranger
Welcome to the emotionally complex world of Stranger by the Lake, the 2013 French film written and directed by Alain Guiraudie that makes strangers of everyone, including the most bewildering stranger of all: the stranger each of us harbours within ourselves.
Safe haven
Research shows that when children are taught their genealogy, they come to understand that they are part of a larger tapestry. This is a fact that gives them strength. But as queer people, we’re raised – for the most part – in heterosexual families. Without our parents, schools or televisions enlightening us, this absence can worsen the isolation many of us experience during our younger years.
Tough love
As a Canadian, I was accustomed to wandering into any bookstore to find the latest Julia Quinn, Charlaine Harris or Robert Jordan novels. Moving to Australia in 2005 was an enormous shock to the system. Not only was I unable to find the latest Julia Quinn novel, I couldn’t find any Julia Quinn novels. Australian bookstores offered a couple of Ursula K Le Guin novels and maybe a George RR Martin if I was lucky. To me, Australia was the land that genre fiction forgot.
Our souls aglow
Like many writers, I find the idea of re-reading my past work torturous. Once I’m done with a piece, I desperately try to usher it out of my memory. Unfortunately, a piece I wrote two years ago for this platform was thrust back into my consciousness when it was reshared on Instagram. Having my old essay resurrected on social media was hard enough; the irony that it interrogates whether social media is flattening culture and taste-making was almost too much to bear.
My tiny green teacher
In June 2025, I was one of the many people emotionally wounded by a viral video clip of a little puppet named Tiny Chef (affectionately known as Cheffy) receiving some bad news. I hadn’t heard of this character and his playful children’s show, but the clip had a profound effect on me. It depicts a more potent vulnerability than many human skits achieve.
Cinema speaks back
Hind Rajab’s story unfolded four months into the spectacular unleashing of Israeli military violence on the people of Gaza. Hind and her family had been following evacuation orders. She remained trapped in the car with the corpses of her six family members for hours as Red Crescent staff tried to arrange a rescue operation. When emergency workers finally reached her, the IDF used an American-made weapon to shell Rajab and her rescue crew. Three hundred and fifty-five bullets hit the car.
All my friends are getting EVs
I was working out with my friend Matt when he asked if I wanted some coolant. Confused, I quipped darkly that I was depressed, not suicidal. Then I twigged – he’d recently bought an electric vehicle (EV) and no longer needed the half-bottle of Castrol Radicool he was offering. I said ‘yes’, and later – in a group chat we’re both members of – ‘Happy to take it like the internal combustion engine-running schlub that I am’.
The motherload
I recently sent my best friend a document titled ‘The Motherload’: a manual explaining how to be me in the event that I die, am incapacitated or sent to jail for killing my husband. It includes gems such as the food preferences of each of my children, the sunscreen that doesn’t cause rashes and how often they need to see the dentist. The ostensibly trivial items on it are the ones that matter most – catering to kids’ idiosyncrasies makes for a happy family life.
A race to the bottom?
It seems increasingly inevitable to me that two markets will soon emerge from the literary sector: one market for cheap, AI-generated content and another for the current, traditional model of publishing. I believe that publishers must value both to be sustainable. In spite of the evolving marketplace, publishers still have an obligation to guide emerging authors, editors and publishers through the peaks and pitfalls of a career in a notoriously complex and veiled industry.
