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.
Your life’s work II
In 2020, I wrote an essay entitled ‘Your Life’s Work’ in which I indulged in what was, at the time, a healthy addiction to YouTube vloggers. In it, I observe that transformation of one’s private life into a work product – filming and uploading oneself going shopping, spending time with children at home or visiting the dentist – represents the collapsing of barriers between work and life.
R U OK, Bartleby?
Mental Health, it is routinely said, is in crisis. As with all of capitalism’s crises, vast quantities of profit, suffering, enjoyment and contradiction ensue. The current preoccupation with mental health/illness (antonyms that are often used interchangeably) reveals a discursive inconsistency.
Mouse jiggler
My colleagues were always ‘reaching out’, ‘circling back’ and ‘going forward’, and occasionally offered to ‘tick-tack about it offline’. These expressions were not literal, because almost everything occurred on Teams or by email. The meaning of other popular phrases – such as ‘workforce capability uplift’, ‘social prescribing’ and ‘vulnerable, highly mobile cohorts’ – were harder to ascertain.
Everything is everybody else’s fault
Around 2009, the first glimpses emerged that these companies had secretly known for decades that the science was correct. Gradually, a new narrative developed: leading climate commentators started asking why the hell individuals should be meticulously calculating their carbon footprints when the entire fossil fuel sector was not only the biggest emitter but also doing everything to delay action.
Deskbound
As the man starts sharing intricate details about central figure of his novel – an Aussie soldier starving in a prisoner-of-war camp in Papua New Guinea – I know something is wrong. Scanning the surrounding desks while he speaks, I realise that I’ve accidentally entered a different floor of the department – easy enough when each level possesses an uncanny familiarity and staff logins work on all company desktops.
The ghosts of labour past
I was one of few in my university cohort to study labour history. Writing my thesis on the Green Bans, I realised the memory of this movement was more complicated than today’s romanticised and oversimplified narratives suggest.
Uncorrected wrongs
The research here and overseas into the mental health of prison officers has them showing a significantly higher incidence than the general population in areas such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide and risk of suicide, and alcohol and drug dependence. When occupations score so high on these issues, it is generally an indicator that all is not well in the work environment.
The museum of the future
The Museum of the Future is not a futuristic museum – a museum as it might look in, say, the twenty-second century. It is a museum devoted to the idea of the future: to the future’s past, in other words. Its exhibits are evidence of a remarkable, and peculiarly human, ability: to speculate on what tomorrow might bring.
(re)Verbing the archive
When I think about the archive, my mind wanders to trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers long before it gets to brick and mortar. All things hold and carry on memory and knowledge – an inheritance for the younger generations.
I write of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers at the State Library of New South Wales. A prose poem on the final day of a work trip where I present a paper as a trained librarian-archivist. Too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but with a gnawing in my belly. There is an energy in this space that unsettles as much as it warms. The violence of invasion lives there under concrete and traffic, in the bones and sinew of the Land and her peoples. And so, I write. Of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers – of my place as descendant and future-Ancestor who carries millennia of knowledge and culture and kinship. I am always writing about archives when I write this way. I cannot separate myself into contexts. The archive and ancestry are one and the same.
Portrait of the artist as an archive
I began to hate JM Coetzee during the month I spent in his archives. It was January 2015 and the archives were still relatively recently opened, acquired in 2012 by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scholars who had visited were abuzz with enthusiasm.
Rising tides and archival inundation
In January 2022, in the receding wake of a record king tide, the buried remains of a Kaurareg woman were exposed in the dunes above Long Beach, on Muralag (Prince of Wales Island) in the Torres Strait. The huge tide – ten centimetres higher than when monitoring began in 2015 – eroded swathes of beach and sand.
Vanishing acts
I don’t know when my sense of smell vanished, exactly. It left without fanfare, sometime during the days of fatigue and snot and rattling 4 am coughs. But I clearly recall the first time I noticed it was gone.
