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.
Talking about generations
Gen X is fed benign time-capsule material: curated accounts and BuzzFeed lists featuring feral perms, lethal playground equipment, rollerskates, cassette recorders, butt-faced Cabbage Patch Kids, View-Masters, Game & Watches and so on, while millennials enjoy montages of neon acrylic phones, Beanie Babies, butterfly clips, Tamagotchis, portable CD players and Polly Pocket.
Gutenberg babble
In his essay, ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’, British columnist James Marriott argues that the recent decline in literacy – and book-reading in particular – amounts to a civilisational crisis. That he does so on Substack, in X-friendly paragraphs that unfurl beneath headings such as ‘World without mind’, ‘The end of creativity’ and ‘The death of democracy’, is not in itself a reason to dismiss his argument. But nor is it an irrelevant detail.
Finer details
The team at GR HQ had some thought-provoking conversations while selecting the cover art for Griffith Review 91: On the Money. Of course, there are obvious symbols that convey this evergreen theme – bulging wads of cash, a bank, gold bullion – but these felt like low-hanging fruit. In the age of Amazon, online shopping and next-day delivery, how could we represent contemporary commerce?
Decayed words, decayed thoughts
Orwell observed that a kind of literary laziness had emerged among writers and orators of the time, whose articles or speeches contained pre-defined phrases, meaningless words and dying metaphors. He argued that this decayed writing produced a decayed thinking; as words lost their meaning, so too did their power to engage people politically.
My bookshelf contains multitudes
I recently had the joy of working in a bookshop for the first time in almost ten years, while also reading a lot more narrative non-fiction than usual. Walking around the aisles with piles of stock for shelving, I found myself interested in where non-fiction books end up on the shelves, and why.
Beyond brokenness
I’m convinced that, along with the unfinished claims of 1970s feminism, the long shadow of neoliberalism fuels artistic representations of maternal ambivalence. I have learnt that parenting, community-building and caregiving are not just magnificent but intellectually challenging and historically shaped in a way that I rarely see taken seriously in contemporary art.
The lemon tree, in winter
I couldn’t figure out why sending children out of reservations into dormitories was the right thing to do. To me, it felt like a repeat of them mission days – scars of assimilation woven and buried within the schooling system. Today, I find myself grappling with the younger version of myself who didn’t know how to stand up for herself and her Aboriginal and Islander friends more.
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.
