I’m sitting at a communal table in an inner-Melbourne cafe; from the back of the laptop opposite, a row of cryptic-looking cartoon characters—all heads, no bodies—are grimacing and mugging at me with odd-shaped mouths. A woman at the next table says ‘winter is coming’ and her companions laugh, because they are in on the joke. Out on the street, a child waiting for a tram is rendered a mere stick figure under his/her oversized, fluffy head-dress: yellow with big black eyes and rosy cheeks, instantly recognisable as Pikachu the Pokemon.

And I wonder: what does it all mean, this ocean of pop culture in which we’re drowning? With a view to DIY lifeboat construction, I stowed away on the good ship POPCAANZ19, aka the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand’s tenth annual conference, at RMIT University last week.