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.
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.
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.
