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.
(See) Beijing youth daily
AT NIGHT, WHEN the sun finally, reluctantly, sets in the stifling Beijing summer, the view from the apartment window...
Capitals of the world
For BruceTHIS IS A story about a poor boy in Kathmandu. It is also about his friend and mine,...
On the economy of thongs
I CANNOT ENVISAGE a more conducive way of grasping the essence of globalisation and the post-colonial than to sit...
Hong Kong 1967: Summer of discontent
PERHAPS I SHOULD have seen a portent in the entrails, but I could divine only horror from the scene....
Living in a material world
Winner, 2005 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate This is not a comic-book...
Songs of childhood
How do you make a terrorist? I can't pretend to know the definitive answer to that question, and I'm...
The magic door to Judaism
I GREW UP in a Jewish Orthodox family and my first memories of Kabbalah flow from my childhood in...
That prolific mother of strife
he grand statue of Daniel O'Connell – the Liberator – interrupted the view of the city of Melbourne in...
A new land, 1976
SYDNEY. I LIKED its sound. I pressed my nose against the cold plastic window to look out over the...
A letter to my father
DEAR NEVILLE,I know you weren't that keen on poetry – apart from Henry Lawson's ‘Faces in the Street'– but...
Never Never Dreaming
WHEN I LOOKED at my father, I imagined Australia. In those first memories he is a tall figure in...
Mungo memories
ALONE IN MY parents' kitchen on a recent visit, I was drawn to the sheets of slides scattered on...
