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.
Living in kayfabe
On free-dress days, I wore my sister’s dance tights to school because they made me feel like I was a real wrestler. I would’ve worn my Speedos if my mum let me. Other kids stared at me and asked ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’d tell them that this was my wrestling gear.
Unaccompanied minor
THE FIRST TIME I fly to Melbourne to see my father alone I am four years old, and I’m so little...
At the end of the line
THE CALLS STARTED the night I was released from hospital. My lungs again. I’d coughed so hard inside my motorcycle helmet that I’d blacked out as I slowed down for a traffic light, slipped off and under my bike, and out into a rain-slick intersection.
Speaking my language
MY AUNTIE HAS stopped speaking to her siblings. Rifts like these are commonplace in my family, where people fall...
Moonwalking
The first woman on the Moon will have to think carefully about her first words, as they will resonate for generations into the future. Neil Armstrong chose his famous ‘one giant leap’ line himself; but in this case, knowing what’s at stake, there’s bound to be a committee who gives this long and considered thought.
The banksia revolution
IT IS FRIDAY morning in a moderately busy, inner-suburban Melbourne supermarket and I am standing a little awkwardly in the...
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...
