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.
Audacious visions for the Antarctic
IT WAS EARLY 1984. It started with a phone call: can you do an environmental impact assessment of the...
Inside, and outside
On the ship it’s a mix of hurry up and wait – cabins cleaned, bags packed and stacked in the halls, people standing in cabin doorways chatting – the uncertainty of farewells. Especially the twenty-odd Mawson-bound expeditioners – not knowing who to farewell and when.
Silence is the song
DURING THE LONG winter of 2020, and due to fortunate happenstance, I found myself locked down in a somewhat...
Last rites
I COLLECT MY father on a hot Friday morning from a funeral home in Preston. He’s waiting for me...
Living cultures under the acts
IT IS EARLY evening. The family is together at the home Mum bought and paid for with cash savings...
Being here
BACK IN 2015, when we were getting the local language work going here at the Aireys Inlet Primary School...
My mother’s silence, my nation’s shame
ON 4 FEBRUARY 1942, stripped of all identification, hands wired behind his back, my grandfather and some 160 other...
Writing back
SIR SAMUEL GRIFFITH was my great-great grandfather. He was one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Australian Federation, a premier...
Dune coons and crescent moons
FIRST WORDS Kes emak. Your mum’s cunt. Don’t judge. I learn them from my mother. She is at Coles in Redfern,...
Following the song
Click here to listen to Lisa Fuller read ‘Following the song’. Western knowledge is increasingly problematic because of its dominance over other...
‘I will not be doing it again’
I’VE BEEN TEACHING at Australian universities for twenty-five years now. I began when I was twenty-seven – I’m now...
Sacraments of guilt
IT’S THE LAST Tuesday of May and the coldest day of the year so far. The temperature has fallen...
