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.
Recognition
In the second of a series of intergenerational exchanges and reflections on the links to and legacies of the...
Supercut
Questioning the past is a vital part of my role as an artist. Art has the influence to shape the way we think and perceive the world, as it has throughout history. I’m motivated by the desire to improve and do better, and the same goes for how I want my art career to proceed. The need to do better in the future is predicated on the fact that to do so, we need to revisit and interrogate the past. This is especially important in a country such as Australia, founded on colonial violence and with a legacy of racism that persists today.
Radical hope in the face of dehumanisation
Our Elders are the epitome of these thousands of generations of existence and survival in this place, and if we’re thinking about the future of the world and our survival, we need to be learning from these people. They hold the most knowledge, the most intimate knowledge of not just surviving but of thriving and maintaining generosity in the face of all the challenges.
Enter the internationalist
What we can do is to look back on the time of Whitlam for encouragement – especially young lawyers and young citizens. Seize the moment: carpe diem. He sure seized the moment. That’s why learning from him in my own life – I think all of us can learn to be more courageous. Where there is injustice, we should seek to right the wrongs. That is what Whitlam demonstrated. That we could do a lot as a democratic nation.
The Whitlam legacy
In this first of a series of intergenerational exchanges and reflections on the links to and legacies of the...
The hopeful edges of power
‘UTOPIAN’ AND ‘RADICAL’ are unlikely words to spring to mind in everyday debates about law and governance – but what...
Nursing the economy
Dr Steven Kennedy is Australia’s nineteenth Secretary to the Treasury and the first to have worked as a registered...
‘A poem is a unicycle’
IN LATE 2020, Barbara Kingsolver published How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), her first poetry collection in...
Animal perspective
ERIN HORTLE: In Tasmania, there is a place where female octopuses emerge from the water and make their way...
Underwog
Journalist, author and political commentator George Megalogenis has made a unique contribution to Australian conversations about migration, politics and...
Listening to the Elders
With Acknowledgements of Country and Welcomes to Country becoming a more frequent element of institutional practice in Australia, where...
Working through the problems
WE WORK TOGETHER as co-directors of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, a research unit at the University of Melbourne....
