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.
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.
All mod cons
Is European Modernism any different to what we’ve inherited in Australia and made our own? In our own rush to be a modern nation, did we also forget to learn its exclusion clauses, without those special exceptions to the rules that mostly applied?
The heart of seeding First Nations sovereignty
The demand for treaty – or, more accurately, the demand for many treaties – must be driven by the cultural authority of each sovereign First Nation. This process must be underpinned by cultural protocol and custom that recognises the many tribal clans within the First Nations.
A compassionate country
More immediate, however, are disruptions to essential public health control measures such as the provision of insecticide-treated bed nets and seasonal malaria chemoprophylaxis campaigns. As a result, WHO fears the annual death toll from malaria could double.
Unit K13: Life and unrelated studies
Cassie’s standing astride the Ducati, waiting under the street lamp that only works sometimes. It’s working right now. He takes off his helmet, kisses you once, then pushes the helmet down onto your head.
Distance and disaster
We found solidarity in our communities, memorised nationalistic songs and saw Lebanon as a place where we would not be judged for things that were often beyond our control: our surnames and skin tone and ways of being, the very things that made us who we were.
Finding peace in a pandemic
It’s often a good day when I can go into a shop and not feel as though I’m being watched. Being visibly Aboriginal, I’ve had a magnifying glass put on me in shops for as long as I can remember. Everything about the way I shop is influenced by the possibility that I could be viewed as stealing.
The skies of Middle Europe
Prague. A mess of absinthe shops and pork knuckles, but just as much, the driveway where Heydrich’s son was run over outside the castle, and the bullet-shredded window of the basement of Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral where Heydrich’s assassins hid (before the inevitable).
Black Russian
In what sense aren’t we a colony? The best thing I can say about all of that is that the modern nation state of Australia is an adolescent entity, with all the aggression and self-doubts and bluster of an adolescent – and the defensiveness.
Biyala Stories
ONE DAY LAST August I was standing on the banks of Moonee Ponds Creek, near Racecourse Road in Flemington,...
