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.
Retribution, reform, rehabilitation
THE PERIMETER OF the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and...
Seeing through the digital haze
THERE IS SOMETHING seductive about aircraft vapour trails, those long streaks – ice, carbon dioxide, soot and metal – that...
On suicide watch?
THE WORLD IS full of beautiful places. Beaches and oceans, cliffs, forests, mountains and valleys, deserts, rivers, islands, harbours...
Symbols, shorthand, signs
IN THE WINTER of 2018, the National Gallery of Victoria’s ground floor was given over to the MoMA at...
Settling and making a place
AUSTRALIA WAS THE last continent to experience the transformation wrought by new settlers arriving to make it their own....
Whispering in our hearts
LONG BEFORE 1873, when William Christie Gosse ‘discovered’ the six-hundred-million-year-old sandstone monolith at the centre of Australia and called...
Ties that (still) bind
TWELVE YEARS AFTER William the Conqueror sailed across what is now known as the English Channel to invade England...
Stories we tell ourselves
‘NATIONS TELL THEMSELVES stories,’ the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote recently. ‘They are not fully true, they are often...
Grooming the globe
‘I KNOW IT makes you sick to think of that word fairness,’ Arthur C Brooks, president of the American...
Intergenerational trust and betrayal
MORE THAN SEVEN hundred years ago a young poet commenced a journey that would define the human condition. Dante’s...
Born of reform
THE REFORM CLUB, the imposing Palazzo-style structure on Pall Mall, one of London’s grandest thoroughfares, has entered the popular...
Learning to read
THE AMERICAN WRITER on the festival circuit had refined his message into this decade’s preferred mode of communication: a...
