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.
Away from the edge
MY MOTHER EMIGRATED to Australia on the SS Australis in 1967 as a ten-pound Pom. I first opened my eyes...
For all we do in the dark
I DEAL WITH grief the way I deal with most trauma. I keep it locked away in a dilapidated archival box –...
When the heart speaks
I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Invisible histories
IMAGINE YOURSELF A bird, huge, flying out of time through a smoky sky, back, back through millennia. Further than...
The pleasure cure
THE SOUND OF waves just behind me filled my ears. My bare feet on the hot sand made me...
Elemental summer:
A season of change
This is the first essay in a new series to be published online across the 2020-21 summer. Bearing witness...
Hillock of peace
TO THINK TOO long about someone’s suicide feels like trespass. To imagine the moment’s tableau with any kind of...
My life with the wave
I WANT TO tell you about a difficult place that I visit regularly since moving to my suburb in...
Demonstrating defiance
I NEVER SAW a key to the front door of my childhood home, though I’m sure my father had...
Journey through the apocalypse
HALF BURIED IN the sand, uprooted stalks of kelp are like splashes of dark blood against the white quartzite,...
How to preserve a turnip
THE GIRL WAS born to snow. Her mother, hot with the pain of a sideways birth, stumbled into the virgin drift and squatted, barefoot and angry as a nest of wasps. Her screams echoed off the white face of the mountains and back across nearby Trbinc Hill.
Effeminacy, mateship, love
THIS YEAR – 2017 – is the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Australian writer Henry Lawson. Lawson...
