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.
The spirit of place
IN CONTRAST TO Western Australia’s wondrous Indian Ocean sunsets, there have been many false dawns in the quest for...
Grow up with your country
THE SIREN CALL ‘Go West, young man’ has a long history in Australia, Canada and the United States. In...
Just locks of hair
Response on reading ‘Former glory’, the novella by Cate Kennedy published in Griffith Review 46: Forgotten Stories – The...
Swamp
Under this site was a swampThe waters remainonly run deeper still– Plaque at Perth railway station A SMALL BOY is...
On ‘Carpentaria’, by Alexis Wright
Wright’s reflections on her own creative process show that in working on Carpentaria, she was keenly aware of the need to invent a way of writing that could embody both the negative effects of colonialism and her proud Aboriginal heritage.
How forms inform us
IT SEEMS WE are regularly filling in forms of one kind or another: forms for banks, the government, rental...
Maids at work
IT IS SUMMER 2008 in downtown Beirut and in the tiny bathroom of an upmarket rooftop restaurant a young...
A reluctant heroine
DEEP IN THE lush green, the sun has just set behind the soaring mountains. The town of The Third...
Baby steps
AT 10 ON a Tuesday morning on a busy street in Melbourne’s inner north, a young woman in black...
Artificial flowers The opposite of work
THEY’D TAKEN OVER a week to drive from Lake Garda, moseying into obscure glacial valleys (he liked poking around)...
From blackboards to e-learning
I STARTED TEACHING in 1974 in suburban Melbourne. I had a class of twenty-eight grade two children whose average...
We say: a work of art.
THROUGHOUT HISTORY INTERPRETATIONS of the exact work an artist is responsible for have changed dramatically. And yet what audiences...
