Featured in

- Published 20250506
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF


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
More from this edition

Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’
Non-fictionWhen we hear publishers, broadcasters or gallerists describing creative work as content, we know immediately that their approach is transactional. When we hear people describe their own work as content, they have already become complicit in their own exploitation. Social media profiles the world over feature bios identifying their owners as ‘content creators’: people who produce interchangeable matter to fill someone else’s space. Social media accounts are available free of charge on the basis that we will keep creating the work that feeds and evolves the algorithm, provides a culturally authentic context for ad placement and keeps us all scrolling – our number-one self-selected addictive behaviour.

The art of appropriation
In Conversation When Brandi Salmon taught herself to paint as a teenager in country Victoria, she never imagined she’d grow up to be a full-time visual...

A half-century of hatchet jobs
Non-fictionAuthors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.