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.
John Williams makes me get something in my eye
With just a few notes I can feel excited, thrilled, scared, sad, melancholy, soaringly happy and optimistic – I could go on. Frankly, I didn’t even know I came with those as factory settings, let alone being able to activate them with a few bars of music.
Motherhood and Madness
Some of us mask our Madness to avoid detection, but hiding takes its toll. Becoming a parent adds layers of complexity to managing one’s mental stasis: it can be terrifying to realise that you are responsible for the health and wellbeing of a tiny, precious human.
Witchy women
The ’90s saw a trend of witchy, occult or otherwise supernatural women on TV. Sabrina was joined by Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, gracing our screens with characters who took control using abilities unknown to man – and men. These shows formed part of the girl (magic) power movement.
Blak humour
When I use ‘Blak’ to describe Aboriginal humour, not ‘black humour’, I’m embracing it as a distinct comedic style. This choice makes it clear that Aboriginal Australian ‘Blak humour’ is its own unique genre, in line with self-determination and ownership that First Nations artist Destiny Deacon speaks about.
Animals in wartime
Tyhra starts hiding in the cellar. Like many people and animals in these frontline regions, her days are defined by the sounds of war. She may not understand what’s happening or why, but she feels that life now is about trying to stay safe.
My matrescence
Women have looked to their mothers and grandmothers for eternity as they’ve learnt how to mother. However, the ear-piercing noise of today’s digital world has interfered with the passing down of our family’s ways of mothering.
Queer in tooth and claw
The colourful clownfish is a sequential hermaphrodite – while clownfish are all born male, they carry male and female sex organs, and the change from male to female is essential to the species’ strict social hierarchy. The female is at the top of this hierarchy and is the largest fish in a group. The largest male in the group accompanies her; together they make the breeding pair.
Six words
On the first day I arrived at the inquest, my friend Charandev Singh said to me that coronial inquests exist to alibi state actors for the deaths they’ve caused, the lives the state has previously taken, and to protect the state for all the future lives it will steal. Every single one of these agents of the state is complicit in these alibis, too.
Making it work
Christine, who is labelling jars, has a visual impairment. So does Shannon, who seals the jars. Both can do this precision work by feel and sound. Young Henry, who until recently was at school, has autism and is very good at counting. It is only his second day though, so he is starting out labelling mints.
Time to catch a break
Surf Like a Woman is full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the tour, plus play-by-plays of surf heats... The opening pages hook us in with a riveting story of Pauls taking on six-metre Margaret River waves at a championship tour event in 1990: ‘As the hooter for my heat sounds, I’m jacked with adrenalin...'
Keeping it platonic
But an increasingly conservative media environment, in which sex on film has dropped by almost 40 per cent since Carrie Bradshaw and co.’s heyday in 2000, means there was valid concern about how younger people would respond to the rampant sex that saw the show’s quartet sleep with ninety-four men and one woman...
Seeing the bigger picture
Effective storytelling in short word limits is not just about running the red pen through extraneous adjectives, either. It demands creative problem-solving, like seeking out useful synonyms, rephrasing and reconsidering the core message. The more reading one does of well-structured short fiction, the more naturally one can recall the solutions others have deployed.
