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.
Human rights
Within Australia – compared with many European nations – human rights are still not part of the lingua franca or aspirational framework of political and social discourse. Human rights are not widely seen to merit reflection, historical or otherwise. They do not feature as an organising principle of civic or history education on high school curricula, for example.
Every paddock has its problem
I discovered too how when we were flooded in, isolated for days or weeks, I felt a kind of delighted wonder. Everyone on our side of the creek was ‘in it together’... An external force was responsible for our isolation and I felt accompanied, a solidarity with the locals I knew from firefighting and funerals.
One minute past midnight
We know, some of us, that confronting books are losing their power, flooded by an industry of trauma stories and books on mass casualty events and individual atrocity... Truth-telling and shock are one thing... But how do we make it clear that what we write of is a vast and interconnected world that also implicates all our readers as the cracks in its colonial mortar grow?
Travelling with Mary
It was the year of Australia’s Bicentenary when I first met Mary Durack. My memory is unclear, but I think it was at the Katherine Susannah Prichard house, the heart of Western Australia’s writing community. She would have been seventy-five – younger than I am now; a smallish woman with hair coloured coppery brown...
We are all deaf during the pandemic
For me, every day is an online conversation, with or without a pandemic. Sentences are broken. Loud noises interfere. There’s a lag as I try to decode what someone has said. I am permanently exhausted from the huge amount of processing my brain requires to function in the world.
Before the flood
The memory doctor. It’s a misnomer, because whatever I might be able to do, I can’t fix memory. No one can. Bones regrow, cuts heal, but memory – once lost – is usually gone for good… We are essentially born with all the neurons we will ever possess. Unlike other cells in the body, those in the brain do not replicate or reproduce.
A new normal in Italy?
There were forecasts that the collective experience of facing this plague would make people more aware of life’s essentials. Heeding the maxim ‘never waste a good crisis’, some have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to create a more just, equitable society.
Getting to the end
The correct term for the post-mortem examination is ‘necropsy’: to look at the dead. The more popular ‘autopsy’ implies looking at the self, although it’s usually translated to see for oneself. And it takes a certain kind of intestinal fortitude to undertake this work.
The delicate pleasure
Nostalgia is often twinned with sentimentality, but many Baby Boomers I know...have an uneasy relationship with the food of their childhoods. Any discussion is ironically underpinned with acknowledgement that we deliberately left the corned beef and fairy bread behind...
This isn’t theoretical
‘This is the first time we’ve ever taught the history of pandemics while an actual pandemic is upon us,’ I tell the class, to nervous laughter. We are still at the nervous laughter stage, which will quickly be overtaken by the ‘just nervous’ stage...
Note to self
Safe to say, I wasn’t in a good headspace. There was no space, actually, inside the head. The head was a churn, nauseating as the Tilt-A-Whirl, gurning away from 3 am each morning, blankly exhausted during daylight hours, marinating in cortisol and adrenaline.
Mortality’s hour
Urban solitude – retiree solitude – is tough. Especially if one is unaccustomed to domesticity, for solitude is, at its core, domestic. And in old age, solitude insists on vigilance. A pragmatic, fierce vigilance of the flesh.
