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.
There is a green hill
I’D BEEN IN the house on Abbeyfield Road in Sheffield less than a week when Jack first arrived. It...
Returning value to profit
AS THE CONSCIENTIOUS middle child of Holocaust survivors, my objectives as a young man were narrow and conventional: to...
Verdigris
COPPER IS AMONG the earliest of metals to be used by humans, and has been smelted, cast and moulded...
The professor and the word
Every thinker thinks one thought. The researcher needs constantly new discoveries and inspirations, else science will bog down and...
Out of time
MY DESIRE TO live in Rome germinated on a European holiday almost twenty years ago. I exited Trastevere train station,...
Island stories
SANDY AND BERYL Stone had ‘a really lovely night’s entertainment’ one Tuesday in Melbourne in the late 1950s – according...
The breathing artist
I WORKED AS part of an ever-changing small team of lighthouse keepers in 1973, on three uninhabited islands off...
Strangers in a familiar land
THERE ARE THINGS you miss about Australia when you live in London, but you need never want for Australian...
Red plague
You taught me language, and my profit on’tIs I know how to curse. The red plague rid youFor learning...
Shadow life
I WAS LESS than five when I left Hungary for Australia, yet many of my formative experiences had already...
Belonging
WE’RE ALL PART of a family, and often more than one. Even without kids, I turn up on several family...
London calling
WHEN I TOOK my first job in advertising in 1994 – in my home town, Melbourne – the last thing I...
