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.
Double bind
Language is central to the way we experience the world and is how we interact with one another, share ideas and knowledge, understand history and patterns, and protest. It’s also how we understand our psyche. I deploy language daily in my therapy rooms to explore how people understand themselves and the world. Without speech, there is no collective; when democracy starts moving towards oppression, speech is always one of the first things to be policed.
Heart and history
Yasmin Smith is a poet and editor of South Sea Islander, Kabi Kabi, Northern Cheyenne and English heritage. Her work has appeared in Overland, Meanjin, frankie magazine, and Island. In 2024, she won the Nakata Brophy Prize for her poem ‘Dawning in the Rivulet of My Father’s Mourning’ and the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for ‘The Burial Feathers’. In addition to her writing pursuits, Yasmin works as an editor.
Menopause™
Because I was not yet forty-five, my doctor asked the pathologist to look at my fertility hormones. The results showed that while my ovaries were still producing oestradiol, the strongest form of oestrogen, my levels of follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinising hormone were high. These results indicated I was perimenopausal – I would likely go through menopause sometime in the next two years.
Rent-a-grave
Renewable or limited grave tenure is considered a niche burial option by the few cemeteries in New South Wales that offer it. I hadn’t heard of it until I began looking into sustainable deathcare after a conversation with a friend about water cremation (or alkaline hydrolysis): a process whereby the body is broken down in a steel vat of hydrogen peroxide and water, heated to 93 degrees.
A diasporic dilemma
I was confined within the borders of a country, practising a borderless art in the only language I could express myself in: Turkish. Everything I wrote back then merely imitated the works I was familiar with – Turkish classics I had to study in school, and some prominent writers from Iran, Russia and Brazil. It wasn’t until my late teens – when I discovered writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Tan and Ahdaf Soueif – that I realised there were stories that existed beyond the boundaries of any one nation’s literary traditions.
Ghostwriting in the machine
Ask ChatGPT a few basic questions, and the responses all begin in the same way: That’s a really insightful question! That’s a deep and fascinating question! When asked if it lies to please people, it still responds with flattery: That’s a tough but important question . . . You calling that out is actually helpful. LLMs don’t challenge the ideas and beliefs shared by the humans using them. Their programming won’t let them.
Grin and bear it
Girls are taught to be quiet and competent, accommodating and pleasant, nurturing and helpful. Eldest daughters shoulder the burdens of everyone around them. From the womb to the urn, women fix and soothe; the archetype is wired by social constructs and our environment.
Hold fast to yourself
There was once some reward for effort on social media, when our carefully curated feeds allowed our curiosities to roam and discover points of cultural interest that appealed to us. On today’s platforms, the act of choosing has been ruthlessly substituted by the act of receiving.
Why books burn
Epistemicide is the systemic annihilation and devaluation of knowledge and knowledge systems because of broader political pursuits. These pursuits are sought by a group of people whose aim is to disconnect another group from their cultural identities, histories and futures.
Ladies who doth protest too much
TERFs speak with self-appointed authority about the mental health and wellbeing of trans women but fail to explicate reasons for their own obsession with another’s gender. The real question, then, is why are TERFs so concerned with trans women and the way they live their lives?
Shrapnel
On your way home, a postcard on the footpath. You pick it up. On the front is a photograph of the Goulburn Boer War Memorial (unveiled in 1904): a soldier wears a slouch hat, his arms firmly down by his sides, stuck in time.
All creatures great and small
Most American adults can now identify more corporate logos than native plant species, and primary schoolchildren in the United Kingdom can name more Pokémon characters than species of British wildlife
