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.
Silence
When I was taught history as a primary and secondary student, it was as though Australia sprang into being when James Cook sighted a beach in 1770. An easy date to remember with all those sevens, I had thought, supposing ‘history’ to be largely about the memorisation of facts.
Heartplace
Despite growing up in Western Australia, I’ve been infatuated with snow since childhood, beguiled by stories of frosted kingdoms accessible through wardrobes, of pearl-capped peaks and sleighbells and dragons, of the ever-present possibility of magic.
Nothing more to say
Inaction on climate change is not because we do not know what’s going on. It’s not because we’re waiting for someone to write just the right essay about why we should care. It’s not because we want to die in a fire.
Hum
It’s hard to find a way to justify falling asleep in the park, book splayed on my abdomen, as exercise – even within ten kilometres of my apartment. But the sun was just so warm on my thighs; it straddled heavy on me.
A recombinant history of Australian camels
The image of the camel is consistently drawn from Australian archives (consistency, like visibility, is one of Calvino’s ‘six memos’ or values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into our millennium).
Tipping the seesaw
The drivers that have dominated Australia’s climate landscape for so long are now being overshadowed by the black sheep that is climate change. Every time variability attempts to govern the Australian climate like it used to, climate change steps in and takes total control.
A new year
The idea of taking care of place has a significant weight in the Torres Strait Islands. Our people have always upheld the responsibility of care required to maintain and understand the lands and waters where we live.
Atmospheric pressure
Often lauded as ‘the cleanest air in the world’, the composition of the air that arrives at Cape Grim from across the vast Southern Ocean is called the baseline signal. Like the resting heart rate of the planet, it has been rising as humans have added increasing stressors to the Earth system.
Leaving Coonabarabran
It was my first experience of a catastrophic bushfire and it was terrifying. I’ve never felt such visceral, primal fear. Go through it once, and you’ll always carry a knot of apprehension in your stomach when the weather feels as it did on those days.
All our landscapes are broken
Land is surveyed, enclosed and assigned a value for an elite minority who can own it and leverage it as capital against debt. It can only have value through limitability and excludability, so the majority must be denied access to the land that most people on Earth still lived upon until just a century ago.
Community control
I arrived in Melbourne as great uncertainty, confusion and a sense of impending dread settled across the world. These were the moments before the first Australian lockdowns were announced, but whiffs of existentialism and nostalgia were already appearing around radical shifts in the look and feel of everyday life.
The impossible election
Weeks ago, unable to bear the strain, I withdrew from all American news, sticking my fingers in my ears and screaming like a six-year-old when Trump’s face popped up on my television. I reckoned that I had already done my part – a postal vote mailed to California in mid-September – and needed no additional agitation.
