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.
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,...
Out of nature
My deep connection with Australia lies in the natural environment. All the emotions are about home. I was born with an irrepressible need to return to my Europe roots; each pilgrimage back to Australia is followed by a deep sense of uprooting when I leave.
The corralling
During Covid we've become intensified versions of ourselves. With our horizons foreshortened, we are forced to focus on ourselves and our interests. What activities do I like? What is it that I value? This, too, can become a relentless cycle of its own.
On the margins of the good swamp
I AM IN the archives looking at a sketch of a creek drawn a hundred years ago. Firmly attached...
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...
