The subject beneath the object

In 1990, a group of medical researchers theorised that Vincent van Gogh suffered from Ménière’s disease, rather than epilepsy....

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...

Wingspan

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart in 1948. She spent her childhood and teenage years in Launceston,...

Stories we tell ourselves

‘NATIONS TELL THEMSELVES stories,’ the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote recently. ‘They are not fully true, they are often...

Shell

For the second instalment of our summer of Sunday-reading, Griffith Review celebrates Kristina Olsson's 'Shell', an excerpt from her...

Alternative facts do exist

IT IS 20 January 2017, mere hours after President Donald Trump has been sworn in. The new White House...

The border

Robots do not hold on to life. They can’t. They have nothing to hold on with – no soul,...

The suicide-bomber Barbie doll

I WOKE UP at about midday. My head was still heavy from the drinking and some vaguely remembered sexual...

Outback rules

Lost geographies