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.
Beyond the refuge of numbers
THE HUMAN MIND, when faced with the need to calculate figures higher than, say, the fingers of two hands,...
Home truths
WE DIDN'T WANT to go. The Gold Coast was a place for holidays, not living. Annual baths of intense...
Antipodeans in America: a cautionary tale
I LEFT AUSTRALIA in 1988 with a bad conscience. Eighteen months earlier, the trustees of the National Gallery of...
The Greek in me
MY FATHER IS George, a Greek refugee from Turkey. That requires some explanation. Until 1922, the western coastline of...
Born to run
Height (six feet six), quickness, balance, shooting touch – Ralph was the embodiment of the complete basketball player. Over the next few years Ralph, and another brother (Warren, who was six feet eleven), were not just among the best players in the New Zealand national league, they were widely considered NBA material. In those days, the US was a more distant shore than it is now and there were fewer navigation aids available, especially for a couple of kids from a tough background in Rotorua.
Learning from the bush
THE OPPOSITION OF the city to the bush was, of course, one of the great topics of late nineteenth...
Voodoo politics
IN THE '70s and early '80s, Terry Forrester was an inveterate street marcher who took every opportunity to put...
Growling at the sea
Ailanman never growl the sea or anything. Not say anything bad about the sea when you are on it....
A war, an attic, a gun
WHEN MY SON was young - six perhaps, or seven – my mother made him a promise. We were...
Journeying with nuns
GROWING UP IN Queensland, it was almost impossible to be unaware of the influence of the Sisters of Mercy....
Falling to earth
GRACE DIED THIS March , in her ninety-ninth year. We had been willing her towards the big one hundred,...
The last taboo
Sex is what you do, sexuality is who you are.– Anna Freud I MET J in a bathroom in the...
