IN 2022, THE American culture writer Jordan Calhoun penned a column in The Atlantic that I still think about. In his piece, Calhoun recalls the financial precarity of his college years, where he began ‘the first of many adventures being surrounded by people I felt were rich while I pretended not to be poor’: stealing food when his study allowance ran out, scanning the pages of textbooks in a bookshop when he couldn’t afford to buy his own copies. No one he knew talked openly about their income or spending habits – so as Calhoun grew older and sought to overcome his ongoing struggles with money, he turned to pop culture in the hope of gaining insight into what ‘“normal” finances’ looked like. 

No deal: film and TV characters, he realised, tend to talk around money or blur its contours; this fiscal coyness is so entrenched that it’s become a trope: undisclosed funds. In Friends, recovering rich girl Rachel gasps in dismay at her first Central Perk paycheque, but we never glean the amount; in Succession, the Roy family, who exists in a wealth-cushioned cocoon of moral turpitude, speaks in economic abstractions or discusses figures so inconceivably huge that they’re rendered meaningless to the average viewer. 

The reason Calhoun’s piece has lodged itself so stubbornly in my mind is that I, like him, entered early adulthood with no sense of how other people did money and a burning desire to find out. This desire has been largely cultivated by my own catastrophic financial instincts alongside the confounding sense that everyone I know has an innate ability to live within their means while I’m usually sweating bullets until next payday. Like Calhoun, I’m also desperate for cold, hard numbers rather than subtler codes of prosperity or penury. Yet all I’ve really learnt from the hours I’ve spent scrolling through posts about earnings and expenditure in Reddit’s r/AusFinance community is that whatever your income is, and however you choose to (or have to) spend it, someone, somewhere, is going to judge you.

IN THE SPIRIT of, shall we say, more emotionally open accounting, this edition of Griffith Review seeks to lay the books bare. The essays, fiction, conversations, poetry and visual art in On the Money expose the complications and contradictions of our relationship with capital and cash. You’ll discover the alarming schism between banking and democracy; rethink the way Australia funds literature; explore the connection between teeth and poverty; consider the manifold moral failures of effective altruism; delve into Big Tech’s neocolonial machinations; gain new perspectives on volunteering, universal basic income and the economics of care work; chart the complexities of class and status in the publishing and legal professions; be amazed by how tax reform can change the world; learn what meme coins may mean for the future of money; and so much more. On the Money also features the first of our remarkable 2025 Emerging Voices competition winners: Miriam Webster’s striking and surreal short story, ‘The real deal’. 

This edition’s contributing editor is the wonderful Daniel Nour, an author, journalist and member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement; he commissioned a visceral and affecting short story by emerging writer Victor Guan Yi Zhou. Daniel and Victor, it was a delight to work with you both and to help realise your vision for this piece. Team GR is also very grateful to the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund for its support of our contributing editor project in 2026.

Perhaps one day I’ll be good with money; in the meantime, I’m happy to keep reading about it, and I hope you are, too. Whether you picked up this edition via your subscription (thank you!), bought it from a bookshop, borrowed it from a mate, checked it out of the library or found it abandoned at a bus stop, I can guarantee you’ll get literary bang for your buck.

–December 2025 

_{Image: William Warby from Unsplash}