GR Online AS I WRITE this essay the cicadas are shrill outside. The air is heavy and even in my cool study I am sweating with the heat. Later today it might rain; tonight it is quite possible that a storm...

GR Online IS IT POSSIBLE to feel too much? For millennia, stories from around the world have had as their explicit task the expansion of the human heart. Only in the past two decades have some stories been prefaced with the...

In ConversationIf Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.

Fiction A STRANGER RODE into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind...

Essay  The Queen? The Queen never been fuggin walk around here! Uncle Jimmy Pike, Walmajarri artist[i] IN 2002, BUNDJALUNG songman Archie Roach released ‘Move It On’, a jaunty twelve-bar blues number about his childhood in Victoria. He sang: Well I was born in...

ReportageWinner, 2013 Walkley Award for Print/Text Feature Writing Long (Over 4,000 words) Winner, 2014 George Munster Award for Independent Journalism     The opposite of poverty isn't wealth. It's justice. Bryan Stevenson – US death row attorney   FOUR YEARS AGO I moved with no great...

MemoirEverybody talks about the weatherbut nobody does anything about it.– Mark TwainTALK OF A hotter, wetter climate is all the go, but I beg of you, don't talk to me about rain. Since moving on to thirteen slushy hectares...

EssayWILLY IS A young Palm Island boy, full of life and with more than a fair serve of natural chutzpah. His grandmother, Aunty M, whose house I'm camped in, tells me he's good at maths as well as footy....

EssayTAKE A TRIP down the old corrugation road with some Bardi people and you'll soon find out something about globalisation, indigenous people and the exact location of your own tailbone. Dubbed Australia's "second-worst road" by locals – who measures...

GR OnlineWRITERS MATTER A little bit, but great stories told well matter hugely. There has never been a civilisation that has managed without fiction, and this is because the best fiction changes us in ways that we often only dimly...

FictionIT IS A truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck. And if it isn't, then it fucken well should be. For here came five-year-old Timbo wandering...

ReportageSelected for Best Australian Essays 2010THIS IS WHAT we know about the death of Jai Morcom.On the morning of 28 August 2009, Jai, a fifteen-year-old Year 9 student, was involved in a fight at Mullumbimby High School, in far...

EssayTHINK OF ABORIGINAL bodies. Think of Cathy Freeman, standing and waiting on the track in Sydney, lean, still, and nothing in her face except what's needed to be The Best. Think Kyle Vander-Kuyp. Nova Perris. Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. Patrick Johnson....

FictionJO WRAPPED HER arm around the square green veranda post of the Billinudgel pub and cursed her best friend to hell and back. Being Therese's latest pet project was like being clobbered by an avalanche of goodwill. She had...

EssayEARTHSPEAKING? YOU WILL think of it as a big story, a national story. Native Title. Salinity. Landcare. Turn the rivers backwards or find that inland sea. It's Burke and Wills, it's the Bushtucker Man, it's drought and flooding rains,...

EssayTHE INVITATION HAD come, but did I really want to spend Christmas in Phnom Penh? An introvert's introvert, my idea of travel is a swim at an empty beach, a short walk and back in my own comfortable bed...

Fiction ‘LIKE THE BROLGA Dancers at the Mullet Run,’ Murree grinned, squatting easily against the base of a gum tree not far below the Botanical Garden. He released a stream of dark tobacco juice onto the grass. A short distance away,...

GR OnlineI grew up in a Queensland still so saturated with racist ideology that my own identity was hidden from me until as a teenager I started bringing home questions about our family’s tan skin and curly dark hair. Forty years later I was very well aware that non-First Nations writers usually mine a vast well of ignorance and stereotype when they attempt to bring Aboriginal characters or themes into their work.