Featured in
- Published 20230801
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-86-3
- Extent: 200pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
About the author
Jonathan O’Brien
Jonathan O’Brien is a writer, software developer and housing advocate. He was the recipient of a Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artists Fellowship...
More from this edition
History in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Poetry Because they spawn near each otherdiscover one another’s dog-scoutsSparta and Gandhi are contemporariesthe Eurotas river and the Gangesmuddying into the Indian Ocean, barbariantriremes appearing...
‘A world we must defend’
Non-fictionSchools across Australia banned Pokémon in an attempt to regain control, but this only caused the franchise mania to intensify. Now Pokémon wasn’t just fun – it was also illegal, which meant it was dangerous, which meant trading cards on campus made you a risk-taker, which meant you were seen as fearless, which meant that you were dangerous.
Oh, the shame of it
Non-fictionModern leisure emerged in the West in the early 1700s when French and English cities developed new forms of society built around urban amenities – parks, cafés, fairs and shopping districts – servicing an expanding class of people with discretionary time and income. Public museums as storehouses of national culture appeared a little later in the nineteenth century where they contributed to the development of so-called ‘rational recreation’, a species of serious leisure intended to ‘civilise the masses’.