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.
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.
Talking about generations
Gen X is fed benign time-capsule material: curated accounts and BuzzFeed lists featuring feral perms, lethal playground equipment, rollerskates, cassette recorders, butt-faced Cabbage Patch Kids, View-Masters, Game & Watches and so on, while millennials enjoy montages of neon acrylic phones, Beanie Babies, butterfly clips, Tamagotchis, portable CD players and Polly Pocket.
Gutenberg babble
In his essay, ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’, British columnist James Marriott argues that the recent decline in literacy – and book-reading in particular – amounts to a civilisational crisis. That he does so on Substack, in X-friendly paragraphs that unfurl beneath headings such as ‘World without mind’, ‘The end of creativity’ and ‘The death of democracy’, is not in itself a reason to dismiss his argument. But nor is it an irrelevant detail.
Finer details
The team at GR HQ had some thought-provoking conversations while selecting the cover art for Griffith Review 91: On the Money. Of course, there are obvious symbols that convey this evergreen theme – bulging wads of cash, a bank, gold bullion – but these felt like low-hanging fruit. In the age of Amazon, online shopping and next-day delivery, how could we represent contemporary commerce?
Decayed words, decayed thoughts
Orwell observed that a kind of literary laziness had emerged among writers and orators of the time, whose articles or speeches contained pre-defined phrases, meaningless words and dying metaphors. He argued that this decayed writing produced a decayed thinking; as words lost their meaning, so too did their power to engage people politically.
My bookshelf contains multitudes
I recently had the joy of working in a bookshop for the first time in almost ten years, while also reading a lot more narrative non-fiction than usual. Walking around the aisles with piles of stock for shelving, I found myself interested in where non-fiction books end up on the shelves, and why.
Beyond brokenness
I’m convinced that, along with the unfinished claims of 1970s feminism, the long shadow of neoliberalism fuels artistic representations of maternal ambivalence. I have learnt that parenting, community-building and caregiving are not just magnificent but intellectually challenging and historically shaped in a way that I rarely see taken seriously in contemporary art.
The lemon tree, in winter
I couldn’t figure out why sending children out of reservations into dormitories was the right thing to do. To me, it felt like a repeat of them mission days – scars of assimilation woven and buried within the schooling system. Today, I find myself grappling with the younger version of myself who didn’t know how to stand up for herself and her Aboriginal and Islander friends more.
