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.
Return of the rings
IN THE MID-2000s, my elderly parents died within eighteen months of each other. First Donato in his mid-eighties and...
Child
DAWN IS RISING in a pink and grey shriek of galahs. Child, already out of close warmth of swag,...
Old women’s business
MY PARENTS, OR 'your parents' as we siblings call them, had very conflicting ideas on child rearing.My dad's idea...
Happily ever after
I DON'T REMEMBER much about my twenty-first birthday besides being heartbroken. A few weeks before my birthday, my boyfriend...
A touch of silk
DURING THE 1970s and '80s I taught meditation in a dozen or so countries throughout East Asia and the...
Three bunyips
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with a bunyip was in a School Paper, the monthly supplement to the Victorian School Readers:...
A world in a grain of sand
THE GUNS WERE the first to catch my eye. One, two, three of them, looming larger than life on...
In a fix
I FLY TO Wadeye with wary curiosity. People say the generation of elders there has lost all authority, that...
Field notes on death
I WAS IN a foul mood a few weeks back. In a flash of bleak insight, I wrote on...
Top girl
'The best man in England.' Ronald Reagan on Margaret Thatcher'For £3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a...
On the rigs
The environment is unapologetically male. It is also isolated and basic: all everyone does is sleep-eat-work. I found it relatively easy to acclimatise given my studies and interests, but I underestimated the impact that being the only woman for most of my time, in a group of between twenty and sixty men, would have on me. I found it more challenging than I expected to navigate work/life nuances on the rigs. There are not many other places in the world where a woman is made more aware of her gender: where you must learn to find the balance as a woman in such an overwhelmingly male world.
The up and down nature of ladders
MARY AND I spend a long time tying the sign on the hood of her rusty station wagon. It...
