EssayAlthough Europeans had believed in the symmetry of the two hemispheres for nearly two centuries, they silently forgot the idea. They tolerantly accepted that when God created the world he had not wanted it to be symmetrical. Ernst van den...

FictionTHEN LIKE SO MANY human faculties that had been tested and failed in that new colony, the retrieval of accurate collective memory had been tried and found sorely wanting. Nevertheless, any tattered scraps of recollection salvaged about the day’s events...

Memoir‘STRAYLYA’. THAT’S HOW I can remember first hearing it – stray-lya – as if it was a place filled with strays. I wasn’t aware at that very young age of paying too much attention to the origins of the country’s name. But later...

GR OnlineTHROUGHOUT HISTORY INTERPRETATIONS of the exact work an artist is responsible for have changed dramatically. And yet what audiences expect from art and from artists may not have changed as much as theories about art and its relationship to...

EssayLONG, LONG AGO, there was a time – a long time – when people believed they would find a utopia on earth. A piece of heaven. A garden, an island, a spot of perfection where all would be well....

Fiction The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.– Michel Foucault THE FACT THAT the entire country had lost its...

FictionHE INTRODUCED HIMSELF as a photographer when he'd pulled away from a group of men to tell her how good she looked. The comment wasn't sleazy – just a matter-of-fact statement he'd followed up by pointing out what he...

MemoirAT NIGHT, WHEN the sun finally, reluctantly, sets in the stifling Beijing summer, the view from the apartment window takes on another form; layered silhouettes of tall buildings frame a sign that glows rich and red in the velvety...

ReportageArecurring dream had run throughout the half-century of her life – a dream where the foundations of the house she was living in were being washed away by high tides. The dream was not unusual, she knew – and...

GR OnlineOUT FROM THE shoreline of Brisbane lies a scattering of islands. Each particular, each with a feeling of its own, that in part comes from their topography.The mostly long, stretched sand islands that run along the outer edge of...

ReportageWHEN WE REACHED the woodchop we looked at the line-up and knew it was the old boys – the vets. There they all were, quietly lined up before their stumps. None impatient, most carrying guts. One or two looked...

Essay...this European self has never been self-sufficient: it has always learned, borrowed, or stolen from elsewhere. We need to...to think of images, certainly, but to understand the process of their being made as negotiated – and It has long sometimes contested – in various ways.– Tropical...

EssayEREWHON. SOUNDS WELSH – the soft ‘h’. That’s what I thought when I first saw the word on the higgledy-piggledy front fence of a bach in the South Island of New Zealand. But the word isn’t from Wales. It...