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 island
I GREW UP on an island in the Baltic Sea. It was flat and windswept, and I don't seem...
A bay of islands
OUT FROM THE shoreline of Brisbane lies a scattering of islands. Each particular, each with a feeling of its...
Masks of fiction
TRAGIC OR COMIC, feathered or jewelled, Harlequin or Pierrot, all fiction is a masquerade.We writers adopt disguises: we flirt,...
On the colonial veranda
BELEM IS THE name of the delicious egg tarts, pastéis de Belém, from a cake shop in the barrio...
The proliferation of island studies
I'M AN ISLOMANIAC. As Lawrence Durrell says, coining the term in his 1953 book Reflections on a Marine Venus...
Manna for the cassowaries
IN FEBRUARY 2011 Cyclone Yasi crashed, like Thor's hammer, into Far North Queensland's (FNQ) Cassowary Coast. Yasi was classified...
Fire words
To understand why our language about fire is so poor, it is interesting to look at a history of how this language developed.
Adapting for hope
THERE IS A single large tree on the wind-whipped salt-lake flats, the most marginal of marginal land. There are...
What does Fukushima mean?
'Harrisburg, oh Harrisburg, the plant is meltin' down, the people out in Harrisburg are gettin' out of town. But when the...
Ground cover
THAT WAS THE day the garbage didn't get picked up, and the day the house across the road burned...
Surviving peace
‘We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each...
Tragic intimacy
BY ANYONE'S RECKONING, World War I was an unprecedented, unmitigated disaster. Of course, it matters greatly who won or...
