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.
Private life of a public man
Eulogy delivered at Donald Horne's funeral, September 21, 2005. I HAVE TO confess that my first meeting with Donald was...
Lying for Bruce
SOMEONE IS HAMMERING on the door with hard knuckles. Or maybe a fist. The back door slams and I...
Coming home
How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la, la!That every boy or gal,That's born into the world aliveIs either a...
The ugly cousin’s visit
WAS THIS WHEN it began? I was talking to my father on the phone. I was in Australia and...
Small candle flames
WHEN I WAS four I had an urgent desire to go to Sunday School. I believe I nagged my...
The story my mother tells me
I started going to yoga classes in the hope that the physical preparation would make the birth a little easier. I spent a lot of time watching the other women, the new arrivals who barely showed any signs of pregnancy, lying next to the old hands who only had a matter of days to go. We were like lemmings walking towards the edge of the cliff. I was somewhere in the middle and that was where I wanted to stay, but there was no way of halting this horrible progression towards being the most pregnant one, the one who didn't turn up next week, the one who just disappeared.
Gift of the gods
Yvonne and I spent a lot of time on the phone over the next few days. And the news I received was – to say the least – staggering. My daughter was a clinical psychologist, married with two young children. Suddenly, out of the blue, I had become a grandfather.
Distance between worlds
A COUPLE OF years before her death, I took my great-grandmother, Gabi, to St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. She'd...
The ballad of Frank and Hazel
EARLY IN THE summer of 1978, I drove from St Kilda to my home town of Eildon in rural...
Our man up there
GIL JAMIESON SAT looking over Three Moon Flat, a shotgun across his sarong-covered knee as the sound of the...
From a moving car
IT'S 1979 AND I'm 15, fucked up and restless. My mother and I are living alone after years of...
Return of the camel lady
DARWIN IS COMING up somewhere ahead, in the dark. Thirty hours semicircling the Earth to get here, in which...
