2018 Edition 4

FARRAGO EDITION FOUR • 2018

CONTRIBUTE EDITORS@FARRAGOMAGAZINE.COM

VIDEO /FARRAGOMAGAZINE

RADIO /RADIO_FODDER

MAGAZINE /FARRAGOMAGAZINE

ART BY CATHY CHEN

CONTENTS CAMPUS

COLLECTIVE

4 5 7

2 3

7 8 9 10 12 14 16 17 18 21

News in Brief May/June Calendar Respect Taskforce Recommendations Nurul Juhria Binte Kamal and Wing Kuang Radical Education Ruby Perryman Campbell Arcade Under Threat Caitlin Cassidy A Damning Doco Wing Kuang Fake Doctors’ Certificates Jasper MacCuspie and Stephanie Zhang Melbourne Model 2.0 Alain Nguyen Locked Out Of A Lockup Lauren Sandeman Change The Rules Rally Photo Essay Cameron Doig Commitment Isn’t Convenient Lauren Sandeman Office Bearer Reports The Grub

CREATIVE 6 22 23 36 42 44 45 46 48 50

NONFICTION

52

24

53

25 26 28

30 31 32 34 38 39 40 68

An Exhaustive List of Whom We Shall Kill on the First Day of the Revolution Otis Heffernan-Wooden Fodder Feature: Moon Tunes Trent Vu Lawful Neutral Luke Macaronas Reviews Alex Epstein, Danielle Scrimshaw, Medha Vernekar and Trent Vu Adventures in Student Cooking Ailsa Traves Faux-Wokeness Veera Ramayah I Love Age of Empires II Kaavya Jha Ghosts of Tenants Past Alex Epstein The Physics Behind Ball Tampering Rohan Byrne Other People’s Issue Katie Doherty Cheese Nick Parkinson For and Against: The Gig Economy Andie Moore and Luke Adams

Editorial Team

54 55 56 57 60 61 63 64 66 67

Seasons / Winter Poorniima Shanmugam Bard Times: Part Four James Gordon At the Back of Rowden White Tian Du Photography Caroline Voelker Photography Morgan Hopcroft writing in vain Natalie Fong Down at Eagle Creek Estelle Sutherland Mengambil Semula Annie Liew a kiss, sunshine and lights Sarah Peters Night of the Beast Zhuo Tong Lin Changeling Jocelyn Deane Judge’s 7+7 Alston Chu Christmas Eve Abigail Fisher Classic Darcy Cornwallis Art Tzeyi Koay Bananas Alaina Dean Hello Haiku & Unicode Jack Bastock Bruise Sarah Bostock My Old Fire Lucinda Harrison Sirens Alyssa Moohin Flash Fiction: Fantasy and Fables Expose / Austria Caroline Voelker and Ilsa Harun

ART BY QUN ZHANG

COLLECTIVE

EDITORIAL

W

e’re meant to go to print tomorrow we are I mean going together in the fun near-future tense it’s a week later today.

Esther’s slowly fucking a hole in the wall with a pencil while the third-floor printer jams. The plaster’s coming loose and flaking off in her fingers so she coats her fingernails with it like mothy chunky come. Ash got plants for her birthday (the edition two launch) and the one on the desk is slowly spreading tiny mites around the room.

The wall is made out of asbestos so it won’t burn, like a ‘70s kitchen or Caroline Voelker’s lush and dreamy greens (36). In the short-term it keeps us safe: when we got into office there were three evacuations a week and the fire trucks were covered in limp tinsel. Dead squids underfoot. Jesse sips iced coffees under a perennial in the cold. A pube catches between your bum cheeks and stings.

Unlike Justin ‘The Human Ken Doll’ Jedlica, we got locked out of the federal budget media lock-up so Lauren Sandeman asked the shadow government and other journos why (14). Back on campus, there’s been a wave of expulsions because of fake doctors’ certificates so Stephanie Zhang and Jasper MacCuspie looked into exposing what’s going on (12).

Everyone takes their part of the whole and polishes: we down seven litres of Pepsi Max in one proofreading. On the Instagram explore page Moni plays a video of a guy scraping off a popcorn ceiling. Our own dusty stucco looks like David Zeleznikow-Johnston’s curdling cheese (40): if you look up with your mouth open it’ll sting your tongue. Alaina Dean’s characters bite into bananas and get dry mouths (57).

Martin was editor three years ago and brings us chocolate in brown paper bags. Alex was editor last year and has lost her new retainer in the media space: all her teeth will move back to where they used to be if we can’t find it. Esther scans a card she bought her sister at Big W that says: “He took the road less travelled. But he brought a helmet and a tiny shopping cart. And that made all the difference.”

Everything you face this year is all the ways you’re not grown up yet so get on it lickety fucking split. All the OBs come up one by one and hug our chairs while we’re not in them. Babies crawl past like ants and the dead mites under our fingernails itch. We stare at Tzeyi Koay’s art until our eyes dry out (56).

“It’s been a cracker of a week,” the email from someone who has lawyers starts. “We accept Walkens,” our legal department’s sign says when they’re open. Luke Macaronas swings by because he’s had brunch with Benjamin Law (26), while Kaavya Jha analyses her love of Age of Empires II (31).

Someone in our building has scabies and a guava cruiser, while Tian Du transcends time in the Rowdy (23). Adriana brings her puppy in and resigns from students’ council. The queer magazine CAMP launches in a week and is beautiful. The women’s mag Judy’s Punch is looking for editors and will change your life.

We ran out of bluetack so you put contact lenses in and tape your eyelids shut. Fuck the free press in a hole through the wall through me. Slide us open like a door meant to go to print tomorrow we are I mean we are going together on the NTEU strike day today (16). Hi. Send us an email. We love you.

Ashleigh, Esther, Jesse and Monique

COLLECTIVE

THE FARRAGO TEAM EDITORS Ashleigh Barraclough Esther Le Couteur Monique O’Rafferty Jesse Paris-Jourdan

CONTRIBUTORS Luke Adams Jack Bastock Sarah Bostock Caitlin Cassidy Alston Chu Darcy Cornwallis Michael Davies Alaina Dean Jocelyn Deane Kareena Dhaliwal Tian Du Alex Epstein Abigail Fisher Natalie Fong Darcy French James Gordon Lucinda Harrison Nurul Juhria Binte Kamal Wing Kuang Angela Le Joel Lee Annie Liew Zhuo Tong Lin Jasper MacCuspie Alyssa Moohin Andie Moore Alain Nguyen Nick Parkinson Ruby Perryman Sarah Peters Lauren Sandeman Danielle Scrimshaw Estelle Sutherland Medha Vernekar Trent Vu Tharidi Walimunige Stephanie Zhang

SUBEDITORS James Agathos Kyra Agathos Kergen Angel Elle Atack Georgia Atkinson Harry Baker Daniel Beratis Rachael Booth Kasumi Borczyk Jessica Chen David Churack Noni Cole Nicole de Souza Alaina Dean Jocelyn Deane Katie Doherty Emma Ferris Abigail Fisher Belle Gill Jessica Hall Jessica Herne Kangli Hu Jenina Ibañez Esmé James An Jiang Annie Jiang Eleanor Kirk Ruby Kraner-Tucci Angela Le Tessa Marshall Alex McFadden Valerie Ng April Nougher-Dayhew Isa Pendragon Ruby Perryman Sarah Peters Lauren Powell Rhiannon Raphael Danielle Scrimshaw Elizabeth Seychell Chiara Situmorang Greer Sutherland Catherine Treloar Sophie Wallace Nina Wang Mark Yin Stephanie Zhang Yan Zhuang

GRAPHICS Alexandra Burns Lief Chan Minnie Chantpakpimon Cathy Chen Bethany Cherry Renee de Vlugt Nicola Dobinson Cameron Doig Rebecca Fowler Lincoln Glasby Ilsa Harun Morgan Hopcroft Carolyn Huane Lauren Hunter Ayonti Mahreen Huq Winnie Jiao Clara Cruz Jose Asher Karahasan Tzeyi Koay Sharon Huang Liang Lisa Linton Hanna Liu Kira Martin Rachel Morley Amani Nasarudin Alain Nguyen Monique O’Rafferty Nellie Seale Poorniima Shanmugam Sophie Sun Dinh Vo Caroline Voelker David Zeleznikow-Johnston Qun Zhang

COLUMNISTS Katie Doherty James Gordon Neala Guo (online) Ilsa Harun Kaavya Jha Luke Macaronas Ashrita Ramamurthy (online) Veera Ramayah Ailsa Traves (online) Trent Vu

SOCIAL MEDIA Zoë Alford Ilsa Harun Richard Hinman Jack Langan Angela Le Annie Liew Christopher Hon Sum Ling Alex McFadden Lara Navarro Lauren Powell Jade Smith

COVER Alexandra Burns

Farrago is the student magazine of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU), produced by the media department. Farrago is published by the general secretary of UMSU, Daniel Beratis. The views expressed herein are not necessarily the views of UMSU, the printers or the editors. Farrago is printed by Printgraphics, care of our mag mogul, Nigel Quirk. All writing and artwork remains the property of the creators. This collection is ©️ Farrago and Farrago reserves the right to republish material in any format.

ART BY SHARON HUANG LIANG AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ILSA HARUN

3

NEWS

NEWS IN BRIEF LORD MAYOR The University of Melbourne teamed up with The Age to host the Melbourne lord mayoral by-election youth forum.

You can find Farrago’s liveblog of the event on our website.

UMSU AGM The University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) held it’s annual general meeting (AGM) on 1 May. The AGM, which served to approve office bearer mid-year reports, went for only three minutes.

RECYCLING The University executive has approved converting to 100 per cent recycled paper across the University. Currently, only 29 per cent of paper is recycled.

GRANTS The University of Melbourne has received $6.15 million in grants for six University researchers from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

MUSLIM PRAYER SPACE The UMSU People of Colour department is setting up a muslim prayer space in Union House. Contact the department for more information.

VCA VACANCY Nicholas Lam has ceased their term as the Victorian College of the Arts campus coordinator, after missing three meetings of students’ council in a row. There is now a casual vacancy for the position, and all VCA students are welcome to apply.

THE HUNTING GROUND The UMSU women’s department held a screening of US University sexual assault documentary The Hunting Ground on 2 May, followed by a panel discussion with Nina Funnell, Kate Crossin, Molly Willmott, Kareena Dhaliwal and Rose-Monet Wilson Scott.

The panelists spoke about the failure of universities to adequately address sexual assault.

BUDGET Treasurer Scott Morrison announced the federal budget on 8 May. The ABC has declared older Australians, taxpayers and small businesses the “winners” of the budget. The “losers” are welfare recipients, the ABC itself, and cash users.

PROTEST FOR CHANGE The George Paton Gallery held their exhibition Amplified, Redefined: Protest for Change from 26 April to 11 May, which looked at the history of UMSU’s autonomous departments: women’s, queer, Indigenous, People of Colour and disabilities.

LABOR POLICY The Australian Labor Party is saying that it will commit $9 billion over ten years to restoring the demand-driven funding system for Australian universities.

DROP OUTS New reseach has revealed that one in four university students drop out of their bachelor degrees.

CAMPUS

MAY/JUNE CALENDAR WEEK 12

SWOTVAC

EXAMS

EXAMS

MONDAY 21 MAY

MONDAY 28 MAY

MONDAY 4 JUNE

MONDAY 11 JUNE

Swotsnacks in the women’s room

TUESDAY 22 MAY

TUESDAY 29 MAY

TUESDAY 5 JUNE

TUESDAY 12 JUNE

12pm: Activities—MDRN Love + BBQ 12pm: Women of Colour collective 1pm: Trans collective 1pm: Environment collective 4:15pm: Anxiety-support group 5:30: Judy’s Punch collective

1pm: Trans collective 1pm: Environment collective 4:15pm: Anxiety-support group

4:15pm: Anxiety-support group

4:15pm: Anxiety-support group

WEDNESDAY 23 MAY

WEDNESDAY 30 MAY

WEDNESDAY 6 JUNE

WEDNESDAY 13 JUNE

12pm: Women’s collective 1pm: PoC collective 1pm: Lunch with the queer bunch 1pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy laughter

1pm: PoC collective 1pm: Lunch with the queer bunch

Queer study group

Swotsnacks in the women’s room

Queer study group Swotsnacks in the women’s room

THURSDAY 24 MAY

THURSDAY 31 MAY

THURSDAY 7 JUNE

THURSDAY 14 JUNE

12pm: Queer PoC collective 12pm: Transfemme collective 1pm: Arts collective 1pm: Disabilities collective 6pm: CAMP Magazine launch

12pm: Queer PoC collective 1pm: Arts collective 1pm: Disabilities collective 11:59pm: Farrago edition five submissions close

1pm: Disabilities collective

1pm: Disabilities collective

FRIDAY 8 JUNE

FRIDAY 15 JUNE

Swotsnacks in the women’s room

FRIDAY 25 MAY

FRIDAY 1 JUNE

12pm: Mudcrabs writing

Swotsnacks in the women’s room

ART BY RACHEL MORLEY

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ART BY POORNIIMA SHANMUGAM

NEWS

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT

RESPECT TASKFORCE RECOMMENDATIONS NURUL JUHRIA BINTE KAMAL AND WING KUANG TALK TO UMSU WOMEN’S

T

he University of Melbourne Student Union’s (UMSU) women’s department has issued 12 recommendations addressing the prevention of sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus. These recommendations were presented to the University’s Respect Taskforce on 21 March.

The recommendations were done in response to the results of the national survey from Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on sexual assault and sexual harassment on Australian university campuses last year.

“These recommendations give the student voice a place in discussion around sexual assault and harassment and how we proceed in stopping it,” said Molly Willmott, UMSU women’s officer.

“This document was written and influenced by student activists and experts from all around Australia, and they will act to base what we, as a student union, are advocating for our students in coming years.”

Survivor-centric measures have been recommended

by UMSU to support victims of sexual violence on campus.

UMSU has suggested improving reporting mechanisms to allow internal and external investigations. In addition, UMSU has proposed implementing a trauma-informed supporting framework, highlighting the current lack of resources and support given to the University’s Counselling and Psychological Services. This results in long waiting times for students in need of these services. UMSU suggested to have more funding for crisis care and prolonged support over survivors’ time in the University.

UMSU additionally seeks for the University to take a productive approach in educating students about sexual assault prevention. They have also emphasised the importance of providing adequate information to international students about which insurance providers do not cover sexual violence.

A mandatory evidence-based education module has also been recommended by UMSU, in addition to first responder trainings to staff and student representatives. While similar trainings have been adopted by the University’s Safer Community Program, Willmott expressed her concerns of its ineffective enforcements.

“We could be doing more. Dealing with issues of sexual assault and harassment is a massive and ongoing task. It’s going to take continued pushing and review for changes to be made,” she said.

According to Willmott, the training is currently not extended to all student representatives. Departments such as the women’s department are usually first responders to disclosures, but they are unsupported and untrained to handle them. Having adequate training would allow them to properly respond and advocate without the fear of legal and psychological harm to survivors.

The University has also commented on UMSU’s recommendations.

“The Respect Taskforce was pleased to finally receive the recommendations from UMSU,” said a University spokesperson. “[We] will continue to work with UMSU representatives and others on a range of initiatives and actions to address the AHRC Report findings and recommendations, and UMSU’s recommendations will inform this thinking.”

RADICAL EDUCATION RUBY PERRYMAN ON RAD ED WEEK

R

adical Education week is an initiative by the University of Melbourne Student Union’s (UMSU) environment department that ran in week five, from 26 to 29 March 2018.

This is the second time Rad Ed week has occurred. It aims to educate University of Melbourne students about radical ideas, and prompt them to think about their degrees in new ways. It hopes to challenge the growing corporatisation of Australian universities and universities around the world, and to create a critical dialogue about the capitalist systems that make this happen and how they affect students something which is not covered in general curriculums.

Several UMSU departments, including welfare, queer, women’s, education (public and academic) and People of Colour, held discussions and events throughout the week at the ‘Rad Ed Hub’, a venue on South Lawn. UMSU environment office bearers and organisers Lucy Turton and Callum Simpson were in the hub all week to help coordinate events and overseeing the catering provided by the Melbourne University Food Co-op. They spoke to Farrago on how it went.

“It was a fabulous week of workshops and conversations about radical ideas, theory, and how to re-vision our broken education systems,” said Turton and Simpson.

“It’s only all too clear that the corporatisation of our universities is corrupting our education system and our experience at uni. This impacts both students, who are being forced to pay ever-increasing fees while their needs aren’t met, and staff, with the tertiary education sector becoming increasingly casualised … As well as this, it means that Melbourne University feels that investing in the world’s biggest polluters and weapons manufacturers is an appropriate decision.”

UMSU Education (Public) Office Bearer Conor Clements believes Radical Education week is of utmost importance, agreeing that students may be uninformed about the consequences of the increasing commercialisation of the University.

“The commercialisation of our university has a bunch of ramifications for its students—the most obvious of this is that it allows more of a corporate voice within the way universities teach,” he said.

“One of the things that concerns me most about commercialisation is the impact it has on university services— the Uni is encouraged to spend big money marketing themselves, which leaves things like counselling and psychological services under increasing pressure to run as cheaply ... to free up more of a budget for advertising.”

ART BY MINNIE CHANTPAKPIMON

7

CAMPUS

CAMPBELL ARCADE UNDER THREAT CAITLIN CASSIDY ON THE POTENTIAL PARTIAL DEMOLITION OF MELBOURNE’S CREATIVE HUB

C

ampbell Arcade, a haven for creatives nestled in the Arts district underneath Melbourne’s Degraves Lane, is under threat of partial demolition as a result of current plans released by the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority (MMRA) and Cross Yarra Partnership (CYP) to accommodate for the multibillion dollar Metro Tunnel project due in 2025.

The proposed plans involve the complete destruction of all but one tenancy on the eastern side of the arcade, including heritage shopfronts, and all but two tenancies on the western side to make way for a direct underground connection between the new Town Hall Station and Flinders Street Station platforms via the existing subway.

Campbell Arcade was built in 1955 as a unique example of art deco curvature architecture. Although it has always operated as a shopping arcade, since 1994 it has been an established fixture on Melbourne’s art scene. The resident Platform Artists group displayed art until 2015, when The Dirty Dozen took over. The Dirty Dozen is managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces Program.

Notable stores to be affected include niche record store Wax Museum, a 50-year old hairdresser and Sticky Institute, a not-for-profit self-publishing zine hub that has resided in the arcade for the last 17 years.

Beck, a representative of Sticky Institute, said, “There’s a lot of community down here; we’re like a little neighbourhood in and of ourselves.”

“What would be heartbreaking ... is if they do have to knock down this shop and the barber’s shop. Because they’re a set, like a tea set … it [is] nicer when you have the whole thing on a tray.”

The MMRA website states that “the new Town Hall Station at the southern end of Swanston Street will improve access to some of Melbourne’s most iconic and important tourist destinations including Federation Square, Southbank, the Arts Centre, St Paul’s Cathedral and other culturally significant landmarks.”

8

Though acknowledging the importance of the project, the Melbourne Heritage Society have said that, “Besides consideration of built heritage impacts, the destruction of nearly half the shops and placing most behind the ticket barriers (of the station) presents a serious loss of cultural fabric for the city.”

At a meeting in December 2017 between the National Trust and the CYP, the CYP said that, “The proposal to connect the Town Hall to Flinders Street Station via Campbell Arcade aims to utilise existing infrastructure that is somewhat currently under-utilised, particularly in comparison to access points at Elizabeth Street and Swanston Street.”

The National Trust, however, remain “strongly opposed” to the current proposal, arguing that the arcade has “contemporary socio-cultural significance of the tenancies and use as an art space over the past two decades.”

“Any heritage assessment for this site should include a consideration of the architectural and aesthetic significance of the fabric, as well as the social and historical significance of the place, including its cultural value as an art space,” said the National Trust.

The CYP has been in continued dialogue with the shop owners in Campbell Arcade. According to Beck, the MMRA will relocate the shops if need be.

Feedback to the CYP has been submitted by the community and is awaiting response. Plans will then go through the State Minister for Planning Richard Wynne for approval. For now, there is nothing for the shops to do but wait.

Sticky Institute expressed that the new rail loop will ultimately be good for Melbourne as the city continues to grow and expand, although they hope that there are no more heritage building casualties.

“We all agree it’s going to be good when it’s here,” Beck said, “but getting there is the hard part.”

ART BY ALAIN NGUYEN

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT

A DAMNING DOCO WING KUANG TALKS TO UNI ADVOCATES

U

niversity sexual assault advocates have called for government action against sexual violence on international students after the launch of Al Jazeera’s documentary Australia: Rape on Campus last week.

Released on 26 April, the documentary revealed the issue of international student sexual assault on campus, and their difficulties in seeking help. In response, leading advocacy groups End Rape on Campus Australia, Fair Agenda, National Union of Students (NUS) and Hunting Ground Australia Project released a joint statement, demanding more support for international students from the government.

“The ongoing revelations about sexual violence in universities demonstrates that there is a systemic and ingrained problem,” said Renee Carr, executive director of Fair Agenda.

“I think the Al Jazeera documentary is further evidence that the federal government needs to step in and establish a taskforce to ensure the safety of all students at our universities,” she said.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s report last year, 5.1 per cent of international students were sexually assaulted from 2015 to 2016. The report also found that in comparison to domestic students, international student survivors were less likely to know where to report their assault, and more likely to feel too embarrassed or ashamed to report it.

“With international students they’ve got an added level of fear, because lots of students think that by making a report to their university or the police, there could be an impact on their student visa,” said End Rape on Campus Australia Director Sharna Bremner.

NEWS

Bremner also said the complexity of police and legal procedures and the lack of culturally appropriate support services at universities have become barriers for international students when reporting sexual assault and seeking support.

NUS Women’s Officer Kate Crossin said universities are failing to provide detailed and accurate information addressing the issue for international students.

“There are already a federal law and code of practice that universities have to follow which very clearly state that in order to be a registered educational body that educate international students, you must supply them information about around legal issues around medical issues in all those sorts of things,” said Crossin. “I think that universities are breaking the law, they are not meeting these codes of practice.”

Bremner also suggests that universities are not providing useful information to help international students develop a comprehensive understanding of Australian culture.

“We see a lot of educational lectures or seminars held in o-week that meant to be about Australian culture, but maybe what they touch on is simple things like slangs,” said Bremner.

“They don’t really talk about cultural differences in relationships and dating and things that 19, 20 year-old will be doing.”

International student representatives expressed support for both the documentary and the advocates’ proposals.

“The documentary shines a light on an issue that is quite prevalent but not spoken about too often by the general public,” said John Hee, University of Melbourne Student Union International president.

“The issue of sexual harassment and assault is not something that can be dealt with overnight. The continued cooperation between different stakeholders across the University, staff and student alike, is key to building a safer community on campus,” said Hee.

NEWS

FAKE DOCTORS’ CERTIFICATES JASPER MACCUSPIE AND STEPHANIE ZHANG INVESTIGATE A WAVE OF STUDENT EXPULSIONS

S

everal students have recently been expelled due to the provision of fake doctors’ certificates, according to the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) advocacy and legal department.

“This year we have already seen a total of 15 cases of academic misconduct due to fraudulent medical documentation across five different faculties,” explained head of the advocacy and legal department, Phoebe Churches.

“This is equal to the number of similar cases recorded for the entirety of 2016 and suggests that the service will see an unprecedented increase in cases of this nature in 2018,” she continued. Indeed this issue has now proliferated such that University administration has taken particular note of this activity in 2018.

Director of students and equity, Elizabeth Capp, revealed, “The University of Melbourne is concerned about the issue of academic integrity on many levels, and students presenting false documentation to gain academic advantage is one aspect of this.”

“While we noted an increase in the number of cases of fraudulent medical certificates in 2017, these numbers are still extremely small in the context of our entire student population.”

However, there is a clear group of students who are disproportionately and adversely affected by this issue, namely international students. Churches identified one key reason that international students are far more vulnerable to the lure of this fraud.

“The cost of a medical appointment for an international student can be between $70–$100 and online fake certificates can go for as little as $20.” Combine this with the University’s requirements for special consideration for medical reasons, which state that a student must see a doctor “within four days of the affected assessment.” This often leads to applications being rejected for medical conditions that have resolved

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without treatment.

“For various legitimate reasons, students may struggle to obtain the required documentation,” Churches said. “So, while we are not saying that any of these factors legitimise the purchase of fraudulent documents—we do suspect that this context creates a market for them.”

The welfare of affected students is of concern to UMSU, and President Desiree Cai called attention to the need to identify the underlying problem.

“The increase of fake medical certificates is obviously a concern for UMSU,” Cai said. “Fraud is not good, and it’s a sign of a problem when multiple students feel the need to commit fraud with fake doctors’ certificates when applying for things like special considerations or extensions.”

Students have even been directly targeted through social media platforms such as WeChat, indicating an awareness of wrongdoing on the part of the providers.

“There were a small number of cases where students were advertised to on social media about ‘online doctors’ who were providing invalid or fake medical certificates, and consequently, these students knowingly or unknowingly used these certificates,” Cai explained.

The difficulty for international students is compounded even further by services like Qoctor—permitted by the University—where a student is assessed by a medical professional over Skype, and then provided with a medical certificate. This service and those disallowed share profound similarities, and it is understandable why some students may be caught out.

A similar string of terminations for fraudulent medical documentation occurred four years ago as well. The UMSU advocacy and legal department speculates as to why these incidents seem to be cyclical in nature.

“It was late 2013, and early 2014 when the advocacy service last had cause to note a large number of academic

ART BY RENEE DE VLUGT

NEWS

misconduct matters involving students facing allegations that they had presented fraudulent medical documentation to the University,” Churches said.

“It has been four years—the average undergraduate lifecycle of a student—after the initial spike. Now we are wondering—has the message finally faded as those students exposed to our message, and word of the harsh penalties for this misconduct, have finished up and moved on?”

The advocacy service’s quarterly report for October– December of 2013 has a section entitled ‘Desperate measures—foolishness, fraud and HPR form forgery’, where this issue is discussed. This document questions the University’s special consideration requirements and speculates that they may have been partially responsible for this issue.

“Without in any way trivialising the students’ responsibility for their own actions, it is hard not to speculate that the extremely high threshold the University sets for acceptable documentary evidence for special consideration may be in part responsible for the surge in this practice,” the document states.

The document suggests that “critical evaluation of whether the [special consideration] threshold is too onerous is warranted.” In the subsequent quarterly report, the department follows up on the issue, noting that students who posted in online forums asking for “advice about how to handle the pressures of study” were “directed to the person offering the fraudulent HPR forms.”

In response to this issue four years ago, the advocacy and legal department produced a series of posters, published warnings on their website and distributed information to clubs about this issue and its associated penalties. UMSU and the University even collaborated to create a series of videos in English, Mandarin and Indonesian about the problem. These are available on YouTube through the ‘Service Commitment— University of Melbourne’ channel.

In the course of our own investigation into the issue, we looked into online discussion about fake medical certificates on Chinese search engine and media platform, Baidu. Through this, it was easy to identify that there were ongoing discussions about how to obtain fraudulent certificates.

For instance, students concerned about the repercussions of being caught are directed to specific clinics which seemed to issue certificates to students who were not actually sick.

Another forum warns students against flocking to the same few clinics; it is implied that this would arouse University suspicion.

What our research made clear was that this issue may very well be bigger than the statistics of terminated students suggest, with similar issues manifesting in other tertiary institutions as well. The University of Sydney, for instance, also experienced a rise in expulsions for falsifying medical records; whilst fewer than 15 cases were recorded in 2015, the number has since jumped to around 25 a year, in both 2016 and 2017.

So, where to from here? With this year’s spike suggesting the rise of such practices, the University has increased their scrutiny of medical certification. However, University administration is also attempting to aid international students who may be unaware of this trap.

“The University takes a range of actions to ensure authenticity of student documentation, including preventative and educative measures, and has worked with international students over many years to provide advice about unscrupulous operators who offer such services,” Capp said.

“We also maintain a register of medical practitioners and websites of interest in this regard, and have this year implemented more rigorous systematic auditing of medical documentation,” she concluded.

Churches was far more explicit in her message to students who might be considering resorting to this tactic.

“DON’T. Really, seriously—no matter what. Do. Not. Do. It.,” she asserted. “It is a mistake that you will always regret and there are other alternatives. Anyone who feels their studies have been affected by something unexpected and out of their control—whether it is illness, mental health related or another trauma, being the victim of a crime, or any serious disruption to their studies—should contact the advocacy service for advice on how to manage it, and support to engage with the University’s special consideration processes and other available supports.” Students in need of such support can access it through www.umsu.org.au/advocacy

NEWS

MELBOURNE MODEL 2.0 ALAIN NGUYEN ON THE POSSIBILITY OF DOUBLE DEGREES AND A BACHELOR OF HEALTH

D

ouble degrees and a new Bachelor of Health may be on offer to University of Melbourne students as soon as 2019 as part of the second phase of the Melbourne Model. Referred to as the Melbourne Model Evolution, this mature successive phase aims to rectify issues in the first decade of the process, with initial draft documentation outlining six new distinct improvements.

The Melbourne Model came into effect in 2008, and today at the University most students are studying under a Bachelor of Arts, Biomedicine, Commerce, Science, Music or Design (formerly Environments). However, its history of implementation has been riddled with intriguing machinations, a desire to be a global player and scenes of controversy.

From protests to lodgings of official complaints to the dean of business and economics at Monash University stating that it was “one of the best things to ever happen�, the elephant in the room is that this unique university structure still lingers within the minds of students and staff alike from both the past and present. But that is all about to change if proposals to the model are approved by the academic board.

In February, a draft paper titled the Melbourne Model Evolution was released by the University containing six major recommendations, outlining the next steps for the second phase of the Melbourne Model: A New Undergraduate Degree: The Bachelor of Health Taught under the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, this new degree would not be clinically focused, but instead have an emphasis on social and behavioural contexts of health and healthcare and global trends in the industry.

Strong links with employers would be stressed. This degree will potentially be available from semester one, 2019.

Double Undergraduate Degrees This would allow high-achieving students to concurrently study undergraduate programs in Arts, Commerce and Science. This proposal is aimed at students who do not wish to pursue postgraduate study, permitting students to graduate in four or five years with two undergraduate liberal degrees.

Currently Melbourne permits students to study both a liberal and a professional degree over time, but not two liberal degrees at the same time.

Guaranteed Pathways High-achieving school leavers will be given greater

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reassurance that they will obtain entry to their chosen course, this being the biggest deterrent for school leavers who are certain about the professional degree they would like to pursue at Melbourne.

This development will also include increased flexibility in deviating from the professional course in which students first enrolled. For example, if a student enrolled in Science and Engineering, but wanted to switch to Chemistry and complete a Masters of Chemistry after two years of study, this would be permissible.

Fast Tracked Degrees Undergraduate degrees could be compressed into two years of study rather than the standard three, as a range of high-quality summer and winter subjects are increased, and overloading subjects is made more accessible.

Students taking this option would study the same number of subjects, but with overall study time reduced, allowing students to enter the workforce one year earlier than usual.

Accelerated Degrees with Cross-Crediting High-achieving students would be allowed to carry subject credit across their Bachelor and Masters degrees in certain cases, minimising the total number of subjects they are required to undertake to graduate.

This may involve offering future students direct entry into a combination undergraduate and graduate courses, allowing them to graduate sooner with this qualification, with less subjects and time taken.

Scholarships The University would increase offers to high-achieving school leavers, students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students from a diverse range of countries, improving equity and access.

These proposed changes appear to already be in demand.

A significant portion of students at the University of Melbourne are taking more than the usual three years to finish their Bachelor degree through Concurrent Diplomas in Languages, Mathematical Sciences, Music or Informatics. For many, this is the closest they can get to receiving a double degree under the current Melbourne Model, with the Diploma acting as a second or third major.

Whilst many welcome the new proposals, some feel as if they have been underhanded by the University over this

ART BY LISA LINTON

NEWS

decision. Danielle, a final-year Arts student, is frustrated by the timing of these proposals as she is close to finishing her Bachelor of Arts before going into the Master of Teaching.

“I am disappointed that it happened at the time that I graduated. I could have gone into teaching much earlier than I anticipated at this moment and be in the workforce at a prime time,” said Danielle.

Danielle chose Melbourne as she was offered a guaranteed offer in the masters of teaching due to her high achievements at school. She was required to extend her degree by almost a year to achieve her prerequisites to teach English and Drama at a secondary level.

Had the fast-track or cross-crediting acceleration proposals be implemented earlier, Danielle could have become an accredited teacher within four years rather than the anticipated six she must now face.

Meanwhile, Jack is a first year Design student undertaking a concurrent diploma in French. He believes a fast-tracked degree would be beneficial and welcomes the changes.

“I’d absolutely take it!” said the new student. Just a few weeks earlier, Jack was looking to overload subjects so he could finish his degree in three years rather than four. “For some reason, I just feel in a rush … any fast track option would be welcomed by me.”

The proposals in the 2018 Melbourne Model Evolution paper are a far cry from the ones made in 2005 and later 2008. According to an article in 2010 from The Monthly, the original Melbourne Model intended to discard all degrees and amalgamate all specialisations into a Bachelor of Arts and Science.

No longer would there be the popular Bachelors of Laws, Medicine/Surgery or Engineering (which would later become their own respective postgraduate degrees), and there were even calls for the Bachelor of Commerce to be scrapped.

The new proposed changes show a change in direction for Melbourne, as the current Melbourne Model encourages students to commence an initial broad undergraduate degree followed by specialist postgraduate study.

Melbourne’s strongest competitors, Monash University and Australian National University (ANU) both offer double degrees at an undergraduate level, attracting a number of “high achieving students who wish to graduate with two degrees… but have no desire to pursue graduate study,” as stated by the Melbourne Model Evolution paper.

Monash University enrols approximately 500 students in their double degrees annually—a number previously matched by the University prior to the rollout of the Melbourne Model,

which abolished double degrees. Undergraduate degrees in Medicine, Engineering, Education and Law are popular at Monash University, which are only accessible to University of Melbourne students as a postgraduate option.

When asked why they decided to choose Monash instead of Melbourne, many students emphasised their preference for the versatility of the courses. “Monash programs are flexible and you could take it with another degree,” said Nir, an Engineering and Commerce student.

However, Monash has gone through many changes with its double degree structure. Daniel, also an Engineering and Commerce student, has had to adjust his study plan numerous times due to the university’s experimentation with double degrees. “I had to overload some of my subjects because they kept changing first year foundation year in Engineering,” said the student.

So, has the Melbourne Model affected the enrolment rate and desire to go to the University of Melbourne? From 20082010, first preferences plummeted from 11,774 to 9,936. They then resurged after the Commonwealth Supported Place cap removal and are continually rising into 2018-19.

Responding to an email to Farrago, deputy vice-chancellor (graduate) and deputy provost, Professor Carolyn Evans expresses that, “At this stage, we don’t have any comment other than to say that the Melbourne Model is always evolving to meet changing patterns of student expectations and workforce needs,” citing the recent introduction of the Bachelor of Design to supersede the Bachelor of Environments.

“The University works to ensure it continues to have the most innovative and distinctive curriculum in Australian higher education,” said Professor Evans.

The six proposals outlined in the Melbourne Model Evolution paper are set to be tested in the next coming weeks, with a priority on guaranteed pathways, cross-crediting and scholarships. The new Bachelor of Health and undergraduate double degrees will be considered over an extended period, and look to be implemented in 2020 at the University if approved by the academic board.

Such changes might not limit Melbourne’s iconoclasm in Australian higher education. In regards to academics, many would say the Melbourne Model is a trailblazer model whilst others might believe it is diminishing in quality. Regardless, its rankings have remained consistent over the past few years since its induction. What remains unanswered is if the model will truly revolutionise skillset building, pedagogy and future employees in the long-term future to come.

ART BY LISA LINTON

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OPINION

LOCKED OUT OF A LOCK-UP LAUREN SANDEMAN LOOKS INTO STUDENT MEDIA BEING BARRED FROM THE BUDGET LOCK-UP

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he second consecutive year of student media being prohibited from the federal budget media lock-up has brought incredulous disbelief from student journalists and the shadow government, as well as criticism from the mainstream media. This ultimately creates a sense of foreboding regarding the future for young Australians and their perceived worth within the Australian government.

The federal budget media lock-up occurs in the hours before the budget is announced to the public by the treasurer.

Selected media representatives are locked into a building for six hours without internet or mobiles and are given a copy of the entire budget. They then have that time to dissect and scrutinise the budget pre-release, with uninhibited access to treasury officials to discuss and explain the budget, as well as answer their questions. At 7:30pm when the doors are opened and the budget is released, the journalists are then able to inform the public on the positive and negative aspects of the budget, and how it will impact them for the coming year.

The national post-budget conversation is dominated by that evening’s coverage, and in particular the coverage from media outlets which were able to access the budget early in the lock-up. Last year, 580 media personnel were allowed into the budget lock-up. Some used this opportunity to film comedy skits and behind-the-scenes coverage of the lock-up.

Upon request to join the budget lock-up this year, all student publications were immediately rejected.

“Due to space restrictions, the lock-up is limited to professional news publications only,” read treasury’s reply to the applications of student media.

Student media were allowed into the budget lock-up in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Farrago’s requests for further explanation on this issue have been ignored.

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The 2017–2018 budget lock-up last year, when student media was first excluded, housed a budget that further hindered young Australians through university funding cuts, fee increases and a reduction in the HELP repayment threshold. The 2018–2019 federal budget, described as “BabyBoomer friendly”, followed the same detrimental path.

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh MP, who edited University of Sydney student publication Honi Soit in 1993, agreed with this.

“This is not going to be a budget that is good for young Australians. This has been a government which has taken active decisions which have hurt young Australians at every turn,” he told Farrago, prior to the release of the budget.

The rationale behind student media’s exclusion instigates incredulity both inside and outside the student community— even amongst fellow journalists.

Josh Gordon, former state political editor of The Age, understands firsthand what it is like within a lock-up and finds the government’s justification weak.

“Having covered 18 federal budgets and numerous state budgets, I can, however, understand the concerns about space—up to a point. It is crowded in the lock-up. This does not, however, mean that some access for those with a track record as student journalists should not be granted, within reason.”

Likewise, Dr Alex Wake, senior journalism lecturer at RMIT, with over 30 years’ experience in journalism and 2011 Asia Pacific Academic Fellow for the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, cuts right to the chase when approached for comment.

ART BY MONIQUE O’RAFFERTY

OPINION

“I don’t believe for one moment that it is a space issue, I believe it’s to keep out parts of the student body that they fear may be disruptive.”

Access to the budget lock-up would give student media access to scrutinise the budget on issues directly impacting students and enable them to discuss these details with treasury officials. The exclusion from this opportunity limits the analytic quality of these issues for students. It also hinders student media from bringing up contentious issues in the national debate immediately alongside other news sources.

The value of student debate contributing to the larger national conversation cannot be underestimated.

“If you look back through the big debates that have been led by students, they’ve proven to be on the right side of history … the voices of students needs to be heard. Today’s students are going to be more affected by the decisions we make in the budget than older Australians,” Leigh stated.

One of the trademarks of successful democratic debate is the equal inclusion of all parties. Gordon concurs that facilitating the engagement of young Australians can only further benefit society.

“I think it is a very positive thing if younger adults are included in the political debate. Attending the lock-up could be considered part of that inclusion.”

This poorly disguised exclusion of student media is symptomatic of a larger and more troubling fact that the government is knowingly screwing-over its younger citizens and trying to suppress the backlash for its decisions. Wake channeled this conclusion.

“It is distressing that the government doesn’t acknowledge the need for young people to have appropriate information about the budget produced for them … a government committed to a free and independent press should also be committed to the education of student journalists. The prime minister and education minister should be insisting that Treasury support student journalism attending the budget lock-up,” she said.

Student media remains the megaphone through which we speak truth to power of the issues impacting our generation.

Leigh agreed that being provided an equal opportunity to critique our government demonstrates a government that has faith in its own policies.

“The mark of a great government is the willingness to be criticised, so regardless of whether student media is writing positively or negatively about it, we have an obligation to broaden the democratic conversation as much as possible,” he said.

Students will build the future on the foundations created from policies today. By blatantly refusing student media any position within the budget lock-up, the government is purposely trying to silence this generation, as well as inadvertently admitting their lack of faith in the budget of their own creation.

“I think [this] is a government which knows deep down that their solutions have not been good for young Australians and is frightened of criticism,” Leigh said.

Student media is one of the oldest continuous forms of journalism in Australia, having outlived many mainstream publications over the years. It has, and always will, voice the concerns of the demographic it represents and call out those who unjustly or underhandedly try to take advantage of its generation. We, the young Australians of today, are a part of this nation and deserve the respect to have representation within the budget lock-up, as well as the respect to have our concerns on policies heard. Especially when those policies have been made by politicians long out of touch with the youth of today who cannot relate to what it means to live in this era as a student.

Furthermore, this continued attempt to silence our voice has made us louder and has demonstrated that the government is afraid to give us an equal opportunity to critique their policies impacting young Australians.

As the old saying goes: “If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.”

ART BY MONIQUE O’RAFFERTY

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CAMPUS

On 9 May, University of Melbourne striking staff members joined other unionists and workers for the ‘Change the Rules’ rally in the Melbourne CBD, which turned out up to 100,000 people. The University staff strike was the result of 16 months of negotiations between the University and the National Tertiary Education Union for an updated enterprise bargaining agreement.

ART BY CAMERON DOIG

OPINION

COMMITMENT ISN’T CONVENIENT LAUREN SANDEMAN ON THE UNIVERSITY’S SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENT FRAMEWORK

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he recent release of the Sustainable Investment Framework (SIF) by the University of Melbourne calls into question the true priorities of the institution, especially amid growing concerns about university commercialisation. The SIF has revealed that the University of Melbourne is continuing to prioritize its financial position over the long-term welfare of its students and the community by continuing to invest in the fossil fuel industry.

The SIF was prepared on the basis of contributing towards the goals outlined within the University Sustainability Plan and Sustainability Charter, as well as aligning the University with its agreed commitments to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. According to page 10 of the Sustainability Plan, the University is “prepared to set bold targets and ambitious priority actions to model sustainability and resilience through our operations.”

Despite this grand statement, the SIF falls dramatically short of committing to divestment, stating that, “A strict exclusion approach might compromise the University’s financial strength by narrowing the options for possible investments, and such an approach would lead the University to forgo its ability to engage with or influence investee companies (via its Fund and Portfolio Managers) in discussions around climate change risk management and disclosure.”

The University of Melbourne will continue to invest in the fossil fuel industry so long as it views the industry as a financially beneficial option. These statements make clear that the University will place financial priorities over taking genuinely ambitious action against climate change. By refusing to cease or phase out investment in some of the largest coal, oil and gas companies in the world the University is financially assisting these industries in continuing their contribution to climate change.

As such, the University finds itself in the paradoxical position of wilfully investing in some of the largest contributors to climate change purportedly in order to reduce their own contribution to climate change.

Discussions and assessments seem to be the sole concern of the SIF rather than initiating action on climate change. The University is using its investments portfolio to respond to the predicted impacts of climate change instead of utilising it as a tool to reduce and mitigate those impacts.

This is a major setback for the entire student community during a period that could have been precedent setting.

How can the University claim to set itself towards numerous sustainability goals but refuse to translate that into not only who they partner with, but how they make money?

Does true sustainable practice not apply when it comes to making money?

Drastic action is needed to mitigate the severity of the impacts of climate change. The University claims it wants to be a global leader for sustainability, but to seriously become one it needs to make tough calls now for the long-term future.

The UN Environment’s Emission Gap Report 2016 noted that the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 2.9 to 3.4 degrees Celsius this century, including consideration for pledges made at the Paris Climate Summit of 2015.

That’s the problem with pledges and statements: they’re just words. The University applauds itself whenever it releases a new “sustainable” document and calls itself a pioneering world leader, but refuses to commit to change where it really matters—the bottom dollar. The University is letting students down in the biggest way by failing to demonstrate real commitment to change.

Climate change is the defining problem of this generation.

We, the students, did not choose to inherit this problem, nor have we been the main contributors to its accumulation; but it will be us who will face the consequences of it.

It’s easy to do nothing and continue doing what you’ve always done. Commitment isn’t convenient, nor is it easy; if it were, everyone would be doing it. As one of the top ranked universities in the world, the University of Melbourne holds the potential to set a new standard for committing to the future— our future. Our motto: postera crescam laude—“we shall grow in the esteem of future generations”—reflects that sentiment.

Now is the only time to create the future we want.

The SIF shows a serious lack of commitment to sustainable action to combat climate change. In today’s capitalist society, the dollar is the most influential tool at one’s disposal, and the University would rather use it to benefit financially from climate change than contribute to proper efforts to mitigate it.

Noble Laureate and University of Melbourne scientist Professor Peter Doherty once said, “Universities can contribute massively to building a more sustainable world.” It’s true. They just need to put their money where their mouths are.

ART BY DINH VO

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CAMPUS

OFFICE BEARER REPORTS PRESIDENT | DESIREE CAI As we approach the end of the semester, there is still time to get involved with all things UMSU! Come join one of our events, get some free food, and as we get to the stressful exam period, remember that UMSU is here to support you. During SWOTVAC, the welfare department will be running free snacks, and the UMSU Advocacy department Exam Support Stall will be happening as always for all your exam needs. On a different note, some of may have heard that staff at Uni are going on strike. UMSU supports all staff action. Any improvements in staff working conditions reflects improvements in our learning conditions as students, so stand with us in supporting Uni staff.

GENERAL SECRETARY | DANIEL BERATIS It might be reaching the end of semester, but the heart of your student union is going stronger than ever! Make sure you get involved with UMSU in every way you can; there’s a bunch of new friends waiting for you no matter where you go! Your elected representatives are also hard at work: check out the UMSU website to see when they’ll next meet for students’ council, where they make decisions that affect the whole union. There’s a bunch of new policies flying off the shelves as well, so check ‘em out and see how your union is being run!

ACTIVITIES | JORDAN TOCHNER AND ALEX FIELDEN No OB report submitted.

BURNLEY | JAMES BARCLAY Meaning. The single fundamental pursuit transcending all social bounds. Those without purpose are more often than not inclined toward states of depression and nihilism. It might sound cool to question the very nature of existence, to stare boldly into the void and say, “I’m not afraid because none of this truly matters”.

But if existence is meaningless then why question it to a degree that imposes philosophical title? Nobody cares more about the state of their own existence than a nihilist, they cannot come to terms with their own existentialism. What worse way is there to torture your own state of being than by denying the existence of its meaning? Nihilists expect meaning to come from an authority, religion, government etc. They don’t realise that it comes from within. The meaning of life is for it to be discovered.

CLUBS AND SOCIETIES | MATTHEW SIMKISS AND NELLIE SEALE We just had clubs carnival which was a massive success and allowed us to showcase the best that clubs could offer. With stalls all around clubs were given the chance to show what really makes them shine and entertained all the people who came. Thanks to activities the masses were fed and the event was smooth sailing, save the items that literally went sailing in the wind.

While clubs were out and about we were working tirelessly behind the scenes processing grants, checking asset and membership compliance and holding working groups to try and improve how clubs operate. But that’s enough for this report, time to get back to answering your emails!

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CAMPUS

OFFICE BEARER REPORTS CREATIVE ARTS | FREYA MCGRATH AND ASHLEIGH MORRIS This past month creative arts have been very busy creative-arting!

Last week we ran a boozy crafternoon session in collaboration with the queer department. Coming up, we have a life drawing workshop and we are also very excited to launch our TOTT-Shop series (Tricks of the Trade Workshops)—an exciting new professional development series for emerging artists. The first instalment of this series will focus on how to write a solid grant application, hosted by an professional hot-shot producer on the 16 May (with Cupcakes!). And with your new found grant-writing skills, you can apply for a creative arts grant of up to $500 to fund your very own student arts project (apps close 18 May)!

Get amongst the learning and art loving!

DISABILITIES | JACINTA DOWE AND HIEN NGUYEN Hello from the disabilities department! This smooth ship is sailing over turbulent waters of week nine like a glorious swan. Or something. We have several events coming up for Rad Sex and Consent Week(s): Sex & Disability, featuring guest speaker Jax Jacki Brown, Autism and Relationships, and Mental Health and Dating.

We will also be running an event for Disability Pride again featuring Jax. Like us on Facebook for more info and come to our weekly collectives: Tuesdays 4:155:15 and Thursdays 1pm. If you like free food, resources, and complaining about Centrelink, this is the place for you.

EDUCATION (ACADEMIC) | ALICE SMITH AND TOBY SILCOCK Hey everyone, the most boring department in UMSU keep on keeping on. We are working with the University to make Stop 1 better for semester two, but we need your feedback to help guide our response. Do it here: bit.ly/helporhell Come see us every week out in South Court, we are here to listen to your concerns and problems with Uni and can point you in the right direction to get help. We may even have a lollipop to give you. We also run a collective during odd weeks of semester in Graham Cornish B on the second floor of Union House. Come grab a free lunch and have a chat about education at UniMelb.

EDUCATION (PUBLIC) | CONOR CLEMENTS On 9 May, UMSU Education joined forces with the local National Tertiary Education Union branch to march in solidarity with them to the Australian Council of Trade Union’s Change the Rules rally. Keep your eyes peeled for any further industrial action from the union that represents your teachers, and remember that they’re doing it so that they can secure working conditions that will ensure the quality of our education.

Meanwhile, we’re starting to run some actions within Union House. We’ve released a survey that enables people who work for businesses in Union House to report on their working conditions as part of our campaign to teach people on campus about their employment rights. If you’re interested in joining in, feel free to give us a buzz!

ENVIRONMENT | CALLUM SIMPSON AND LUCY TURTON Well what a massive semester it’s been! Together we’ve explored all the sustainability projects on campus; we’ve cooked up a storm at Play With Your Food in the Food Co-op; we’ve put out the Uni’s ‘dirty laundry’ (fossil fuel investments); and we’ve questioned the gross corporate structure of universities.

Assessment period getting you down? Want to be anywhere but university? Then join the environment collective for a weekend pre-SWOTVAC getaway to plant trees and save endangered wildlife (26–27 May).

If you’re still hungry for some radical environmentalism, then we’ve got the perfect winter-break activity! The Students of Sustainability conference is in Melbourne from 6–12 July, an annual gathering of students, activists and all those who care to learn about environmental and social justice.

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CAMPUS

OFFICE BEARER REPORTS INDIGENOUS | ALEXANDRA HOHOI Hey Mob! End of Semester! We are almost there!

Hope you are all buckling down and are into the study grind. Lots of congratulations are due! Firstly to you all for getting this far in the semester. Also to our netball team for doing so well this semester. Finally congratulations to our Indigenous Games team for training so hard.

Head to our Facebook Page ‘Indigenous Unimelb’ to keep up to date with our teams, and to keep up to date with our events.

PEOPLE OF COLOUR | REEM FAIQ AND HIRUNI WALIMUNIGE With the semester coming to an end and exams fast approaching, the PoC department’s got your back with relaxing Stress Less Week events (along with our regular activities) to keep study-related stress at bay. Keep an eye on our social media for event details.

Special thanks to our presenters for their informative and engaging Anti-Racism workshops which covered a range of interesting topics. If you missed out (or would like to hear them again), audio recordings are now available on the PoC Facebook page.

Submissions to Myriad’s 2018 issue will be opening soon. Send us your art, commentary, short fiction and more, and see your work published in the PoC Department’s official publication. Application dates and further details will be available on our social media.

QUEER | MILLY REEVES AND ELINOR MILLS In theory we’re all here at uni to study, and we know everything is better if it’s queer—so the queer department has started our end-of-semester study days.

In weeks 11, 12, and SWOTVAC, we provide a space to hole up with a cup of coffee, all your queer mates, and smash out some study away from the crowded/ heterosexual nonsense of the big libraries. After a semester’s worth of hard work, our beautiful magazine child CAMP is launching at our end-of-semester party— swing by the Ida on 24th to witness her birth into the world. We’ve also been organising a contingent to attend Queer Collaborations, a national conference for queer students. And we’ve got some amazing stuff in the works for semester two!

VCA | POSITION VACANT WELFARE | MICHAEL AGUILERA AND CECILIA WIDJOJO A helpful little Q&A from your local Welfare OB’s: Q: Stressed? A: Stress Less Week Q: Still stressed?!? A: University Mental Health Day (1st May) Q: Getting screwed at work? A: Syndicate Action Group Q: Hungry? A: Free breakfasts . . . Every . . . Day . .

WOMEN’S | MOLLY WILLMOTT AND KAREENA DHALIWAL Hey gals and non-binary pals! In week 11, we’re collaborating with the creative arts department for Stress Less Week. Our regular collectives will be extra special in Week 12, with extra food to celebrate. We have the last Judy’s Punch collective of semester two. Judy’s Punch is a studentmagazine like this one, but with no men and with more feminist rage! Editor applications are open now. Also open now: grant applications for the NOWSA (Network of Women Students Australia) conference. This valuable experience brings together women students from all over the country. Finally, we’ll have study snacks in the Women’s Room during every day of swotvac (swotsnacks, if you will). Good luck with assignments/exams, and have a safe and restful winter break!

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THE GRUB

SECOND-YEAR POLITICS MAJOR WITH WAM OF 52.5 CONTINUES TO MOCK MONASH STUDENTS AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY F resh from a holiday in Europe funded by his Liberal-voting parents, politics major Connor Johnson continues to stay in touch with his elitist roots by constantly reminding all of his friends that his solid P Weighted Average Mark (WAM) is equivalent to an 80-plus average at other institutions.

The second-year’s constant virtue-signalling in tutorials of claiming to be aware of his class privilege has had no real impact in this thinking, as the student is insistent that academic standards at the University of Melbourne are much higher than at other Victorian universities.

“Why do you think the entry requirements for studying here are so high? I’m not making this shit up. You can even look at the Times Higher Education rankings—it’s just fact.”

Friends close to Johnson told The Grub that in the days following the release of semester-two exam marks, Johnson’s

ridiculing increased by an average of three comments a day.

“We’re getting sick of his fragile ego. He brings this up almost as often as he talks about his 99 ATAR.” Johnson declined to respond when The Grub requested him to comment on surveys that show that Monash, La Trobe, RMIT and Deakin consistently rank higher in terms of student satisfaction, campus culture, graduate opportunities and welfare programs.

Johnson also declined to comment when questioned on how he feels about having to spend another tens of thousands of dollars and wait three more years to study law, instead of just doing a double degree.

An anonymous source has also told The Grub that Johnson is in talks to become a spokesperson of the university’s new campaign: “UniMelb Number One—Fuck the Rest”.

TOTAL DROPKICK DESPERATELY TRIES TO GET PICKED FOR THE ONE TUTE QUESTION HE CAN ANSWER I

n a pathetic attempt to salvage as much of his unavoidably dismal tutorial participation mark as possible, local dropkick John Lin has reportedly leapt at the opportunity to answer the easiest of seven tutorial questions.

Prior to making an uncharacteristic appearance in the subject’s week-seven tutorial, Lin began to frantically skim the week’s reading, making slapdash mental notes of anything underlined, bolded, or at the end of a long paragraph.

“I mean, obviously it would be great to have read all of the readings and understand them within the context of not only of this week’s lectures but also the subject’s bigger picture,” Lin told The Grub. “But unfortunately, I didn’t manage to catch this week’s lecture. I’m a bit behind on lectures actually, but I’ll catch up soon, don’t worry.”

On seeing that the first question written on the board was to simply summarise four important principles, Lin reportedly

thrust his hand into the air with incredible fervour.

“You know, you just gotta show that you’re enthusiastic about the subject to get that rapport with your tutor,” said Lin of his eagerness, immediately before being asked by the tutor whether he was in the right class.

On his selection, Lin was said to let out a small sigh of relief, followed by several verbose, recursive definitions delivered in between glances at his computer screen.

However, Lin’s thin veil of apparent competence was shattered in the second half of the tutorial, where the tutor formed four groups and tasked each with analysing a section of the reading.

“Um, yeah, I’m not really on top of this week’s stuff to be honest,” stammered Lin to his more knowledgeable groupmates. “You guys might have to do the heavy lifting on this one, haha.”

ART BY CATHY CHEN

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BARD TIMES: PART FOUR JAMES GORDON PRESENTS: “ONCE MORE I’LL READ THE ODE THAT I HAVE WRIT” It was 1578. William Shakespeare was 14 years old when he left school. Then he disappeared. Between 1578 and 1582, there is no documented evidence linking the bard to any job or location. Nobody knows what Shakespeare did in those years. Until now.

S

hakespeare looked at his laptop. He shifted uncomfortably and read once more the task he had to end: to write 15 lines of poetry for his creative writing subject. He hadn’t written much; he was sort of gazing at the wall and remarking how pale and white it was. He looked back at his screen to read what he’d writ. From. An excellent word for an hour of work. The bard dropped his head on the desk. So fruitful, so influential, so ingenious, he was told. It strained him to write a 15-line poem for his end-of-semester assignment. How will he ever write the plays that torpor might still snatch into nihility?

“Such pressure doth plague my brow. How I dream to resign to a slumber, to a dream within a dream, yet professors will beat my mind wherever it hides.”

“It’s alright, mate.” Chloe was studying quietly in the chair next to his. “Exams will be over soon.”

“That is not the cause of my woe.”

“Well I’m sure you’ll feel better once they’re done.”

Chloe wavered a bit, unsure how to transition back into study, slowly curling up into her formative state. She was rocking on her chair and staring fearfully at her essay, now just a smattering of assorted quotes and slabs of text in different fonts and sizes. Shakespeare looked back at his screen and added a word. He felt the full power of some magic spell in his finger as he dipped it on the letters of his laptop and they came into sight. He gasped a sort of bleat as the glowing paper obeyed his command. His poem now read: from fairest. He smiled and muttered “alliteration” to himself. Chloe muttered some profanity. Darkness clouded the windows of the library and white light splashed around the room as the two friends stared helplessly at their laptops.

Shakespeare stood up and marched around the desk to stretch his legs and briefly ease his mind. A paper cup of coffee was on the edge of the table gasping puffs of steam.

He watched the way the waves danced and curled through the room, such shapes of beauty hidden in the shadows of the vapour, a fading trance dissolving in the air. The bard sat back down, afresh with an idea. He carefully typed the word creatures, a dumbfounded utterance accompanied every tap of a letter.

“Mate, you don’t have to make that noise every time you type something.”

“Marry, ‘tis an involuntary cry.”

“Mate, ‘tis a fucking annoying cry.”

The bard shut his mouth and fixed his eyes to the screen, carefully plodding through the remaining lines of poetry.

Slowly, after some moments of time, he gently massaged his face. It was finished.

Shakespeare tentatively accessed Turnitin. He knew what to do and how the system worked; this foreign world was no longer new to him. He pressed on squares of grey and blue and checked a box to confirm what he’d writ was his own original work. Then it was submitted. His essay soon shot back awash with red, like it had blood, injured after submission to the enemy, returning home disgraced and weakly.

“This is 100 per cent plagiarised. Source: The Sonnets of William Shakespeare” Shakespeare chuckled. An academic joke, he assumed. Chloe, nearby, gasped.

“Oh no! Mate, that’s bad!”

“You are unfit to make such ill comments of my work before indulging thy mind to its music.”

“Mate, you’ve plagiarised that whole thing, the Uni is gonna fucking disown you.”

“Fool, I wrote this with my own mind.”

“It doesn’t matter what you did, the Uni will think you plagiarised it.”

Shakespeare smiled and smugly walked to a shelf and pulled out a book of his own poetry. He turned his fingers through the pages and opened it to the front. The poem he had just written, already printed and published in a book. The bard then understood he’d heard no joke. He went slightly pale.

ART BY BETHANY CHERRY

AT THE BACK OF ROWDEN WHITE

BY TIAN DU Muffled music from a faraway reality, lost in a room of souls.

Stories heard through rufflings, as pages turn to reveal lithographic characters – an inked past.

A spacious, well-lit, and illuminated afternoon that carries one forward through morose times of dreary, unanswered dreams.

Pondering a future of realised potential, those epic fantasies that stir the heart and innervate the mind.

But the future is just another place in time.

Inhabited by the likes of us, equally banal and morally ambiguous tied down by their own historical amnesia.

Partitioned on grand armchairs as falsetto echoes learned breaths caress the minds of tomorrow that are so tortured and at peace with today.

Waiting to be satisfied, we lap at bitter acceptance whose sweet murmrings quench, and quietly slide to numb our throats.

A cough, transmitting our perpetual disease, denying, drifting, a melody now deafening.

ART BY ILSA HARUN

23

AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF WHOM WE SHALL KILL ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE REVOLUTION OTIS HEFFERNAN-WOODEN WANTS BLOOD — Private school boys who use their passports to get into nightclubs because they never got their learners but go to Europe every winter break.

— Anyone who has ever bought University of Melbourne merchandise.

— Anyone who says in a tute, “This reminds me exactly of what Donald Trump is doing.”

— People whose Instagram bios are just emojis.

— Anyone who claims to have never even thought about a Contiki.

— People who claim that “vinyl never left” but owned an iPod Nano in 2006.

— All four listeners of Radio Fodder.

— The Liberal Party Club.

— The Labor Right Club: they gave us Kevin Rudd.

— The Labor Left Club: they stuffed up so badly Kevin Rudd came back.

— (Note: the Greens Club will not be killed because no-one wants to get that close to the Greens Club) — Anyone caught carrying a Courtney Barnett tote bag will be executed on the spot.

— People who touch off their mykis on trams.

— People who don’t jaywalk at the Swanston Street tram stop.

— Every stall holder at the Wednesday farmers’ market, apart from the falafel place.

— Mature age students: there is no time for question-asking in the new society.

— Anyone who posted a picture on Instagram of them in front of those stupid NGV skulls.

— Ed Sheeran fans.

— People who claim The Wombats haven’t been good since their first album.

— People who like Clive Palmer’s memes.

— Anyone who won’t admit to pretending to be Mad Max when walking through the South Lawn carpark.

— People who bought a Co-op membership in their first semester of first year.

— Vloggers.

— People who think John Howard was a good Prime Minister because “he got rid of the guns”.

— Tasmanians.

— The woman at that sushi place near my work: I ordered three rolls but only received two soy sauce fish packets.

— People who use the story feature on Messenger.

— People who transitioned their year-12 blazer into everyday wear.

— Whoever designed the bathrooms in Alice Hoy and the ERC. — All girls with low battery on their rose-gold iPhone.

— People who lose 30 Newspolls in a row.

24

ART BY ASHER KARAHASAN

NONFICTION

TRENT VU PRESENTS...

FODDER FEATURE: MOON TUNES S

ome of you will know me as a co-host of Snappy Hour on Radio Fodder. But semester two last year saw me try my hand at producing another show. After meeting Kergen Angel in the media office one day, I forced myself on him to be the producer of Only One Kernoby, the show he was co-hosting with Noni Cole and Ruby Perryman. I met Noni and Ruby soon after and probably scared them with my zeal.

“This is Trent,” said Kergen, introducing me to his co-hosts.

“Hi, I’m Noni.”

“Like Noni Hazlehurst? She’s such a queen,” I replied. I’m so good at making friends. “I’m going to be the producer of your show.”

“Um, okay!” Ruby said with a slightly-to-moderately terrified look in her eyes.

Mission accomplished. I had now successfully become the producer-slash-fourth-wheel of Only One Kernoby. All was going well with their show until one day it just Harold Holt– style vanished into thin air.

This edition of ‘Fodder Feature’, I talked to Noni and Ruby about what happened to Only One Kernoby. We also talked about their new show Moon Tunes and their burning love for Missy Higgins and Camp Cope.

First question—who is your number-one queen of music?

Noni: Missy Higgins.

Ruby: She was both of our first concerts. Obviously I’m from Darwin and Noni’s from Sydney, so in different places, but we’re pretty sure it was on the same tour.

Noni: Also Georgia [McDonald] from Camp Cope.

The next question I need to ask... What happened to Only One Kernoby?

Noni: Only One Kernoby... It just sort of combusted.

Ruby: It came to an end. She died of natural causes [laughs].

But no, we all had a lot to do last year. We all got really involved in other things ... Our current show is a lot less timeconsuming.

Speaking of which, tell me about your new show, Moon Tunes.

Ruby: We go to the gigs of women and gender-diverse artists in the Melbourne music scene and then talk a little bit

about it, talk about the artists and play their music.

Noni: It was sort of off the back of Only One Kernoby. We didn’t really have much time, so we wanted to do something that was easier to prepare for. It was easy to talk about things we already do, gigs that we go to, gigs that are on and play music that we both really like.

Which is better? Only One Kernoby or Moon Tunes?

Noni: None of us had really done radio before Only One Kernoby, so we just wanted to get a hang of how to use all the radio equipment and engage with a new type of media platform.

Ruby: Moon Tunes is probably better because we have the hang of things now. But don’t tell Kergen.

Noni: And because of our new show, we get to go to a whole bunch of new cool gigs. And it gets us looking for other gigs that we might not have been to normally. But Only One Kernoby was a fun thing for us to do as friends.

Trent: And your producer for Only One Kernoby was really great, wasn’t he?

Ruby: Yeah, he was excellent.

What have you enjoyed most about your first season of Moon Tunes?

Ruby: Camp Cope dropped a new album, so we’ve been flogging that. And we’ve been to a few of their gigs this year already and talked about that.

Noni: We give exposure to a lot of different artists.

Ruby: But we love Camp Cope.

Trent: I swear you’re on their promo team.

Noni: Another thing I’ve enjoyed is just not talking about men for an hour of our lives.

Where can Farrago readers find you?

Ruby: We don’t have any social media.

Noni: But you know where you can find us? At a Camp Cope gig. Or Missy Higgins probably.

The first season of Moon Tunes has ended, but keep your eyes open for the semester two Radio Fodder schedule to find out when you can hear Ruby and Noni gush over Camp Cope and other female and gender-diverse local artists.

ART BY AMANI NASARUDIN

25

JOURNALISM

LAWFUL NEUTRAL LUKE MACARONAS TALKS WITH BENJAMIN LAW ABOUT GAY VOICES IN JOURNALISM AND HATE-FUCKING POLITICIANS

S

ince September 2017, Benjamin Law has been the subject of a smear campaign led by some of the nation’s most influential commentators. Across the Murdoch press, in Australia’s national broadsheet and local tabloids, Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt headed a beat-up that accused Law of every ethical misdemeanour from glorifying rape culture to promoting hate speech. His transgression? Twenty-four words on Twitter.

“Sometimes find myself wondering if I’d hate-fuck all the anti-gay MPs in parliament if it meant they got the homophobia out of their system.”

It’s no surprise that the attack on this risqué tweet coincided with the release of Law’s Quarterly Essay, Moral Panic 101, on the failures of Australian journalists—in particular those at News Corp—in fuelling the media scandal that came to surround the Safe Schools program.

As Law would later justify, on Twitter and to me, “hatefucking” involves consensual sex for the mutual gratification of two resentful parties. Characteristic of Law’s online presence, the tweet was a caustic gag that satirised the comically disingenuous anxieties of those politicians opposed to marriage equality.

Speaking with Law about the last six months, which have been marred by the messy ideological clash that came to engulf both the Safe Schools program and the marriage equality debate, I realise that the significance of Devine and Bolt’s response is twofold. First, it serves as a testament to the validity of the case Law makes in Moral Panic 101. The fact that even the chief detractors of Safe Schools refused to engage with his argument is an admission of their own guilt, says Law: “The worst thing that could happen is if they tear my essay apart and they find a flaw in it—and they didn’t, and they couldn’t. So they go after bad words on social media.

Or they completely misrepresent you, hilariously, thinking that no-one can google what hate-fucking actually means.

For all of people’s complaints that traditional news media is dying—it’s like, well, your traditional reader base is dying off and you’re not engaging young people in good faith. You’re not even willing to be across their language. You’ve got no right to complain really.”

Conservative pundits wanted to make the debate over Law’s tweet about political correctness, but their reaction to his writing hints at something broader: a deep-seated determination to talk over those voices that fall outside the palatable walls of convention. In both his Quarterly Essay and his tweets, Law had transgressed the same limits Safe Schools had threatened, promoting a perspective that was frank about the sometimes-funny, sometimes-bleak realities of LGBT life. Ironically, Law found himself the subject of the same

26

inflammatory and homophobic reporting he sought to call out.

The conservative response became an attack on the explicit pride in Law’s work as a gay, Asian-Australian Queenslander.

His refusal to apologise is a refusal to undermine the struggle to have gay voices heard. “I can’t disentangle myself from my sexuality,” he says. “It’s not like I’m conscious of writing in a queer way; I just am queer and that’s my neutral. I’m sorry if it’s not yours, but it is mine … When we talk about ‘queer perspective’ … there can be a subtext that the heterosexual cis voice is a neutral, and I just don’t think that it is.”

For all the rambunctious tweeting and irreverent reporting that defines Law’s playful public identity, in person he is more sincere than facetious. Approaching his work with earnest, Law resists my attempts to complicate or dramatise his experiences. When I ask about some of his most harrowing interviews, he brushes off my sympathy. “You’re exhausted and shattered because these people have led exhausting and shattering lives, so what right do you have to be exhausted and shattered? … You’re not living their trauma—they are.”

Having travelled from the sun-soaked beaches of Bali to the bleakest corners of Myanmar, speaking to some of the most powerful people in Australian politics and most demonised children in the country, Law has become a kind of ethnographer of modern gay culture—his Twitter is simply one part of a writing that continuously centres queer voices, from his gonzo-style memoirs to a sex advice column written with his mum, Jenny Phang, for The Lifted Brow. Telling powerful stories with simple words, it is a writing that refuses to talk down to its audience. Instead, Law explains, “I expect readers have come to my work because they are curious. And when I’m a reader I expect there to be a little bit of work there for me as well; it’s not just a passive experience.”

Reiterating a passage from his Quarterly Essay, Law recalls attending the Minus 18 Formal in 2017—a student ball designed to give queer kids what their high schools don’t.

“There’s one per cent of you that really hates them for having it, because, ‘How dare you have this thing that I would have killed for.’ And then 99 per cent of you is just utter admiration for their courage and their joy of just being able to enjoy who they really are.” I feel like Law’s outward-eye has missed the impact his own writing has had on other people in the same way. Even in researching this article I’ve been told how Law, from some of his earliest writing in Frankie, or in his memoirs, had a significant effect on other people’s lives. He plays a huge role in celebrating queer voices, helping to build a community where we feel heard. And Law understands the power of each person’s story he writes: “It really is an honour that someone has trusted you so much to do it, and you better fucking get it right.”

ART BY AYONTI MAHREEN HUQ

REVIEWS

REAL DEATH

WE WERE THERE

ALEX EPSTEIN REVIEWS MOUNT EERIE AT THE MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE

DANIELLE SCRIMSHAW REVIEWS ‘WE WERE THERE’ AT THE MIDSUMMA FESTIVAL

W

hen Phil Elverum breaks into the second or third chorus of ‘Now Only’—“People get cancer and die”, all poppy and sing-song—the audience laughs. I laugh. “Why’s that funny?” he asks us; he loses his place for a few bars, humming the melody instead. But the truism sticks in my mind: people get cancer, and people die. We all know it, but it needs repeating.

On stage, Elverum is a self-effacing presence. He walks alone onto the wide, three-storey-tall stage, dressed in a t-shirt and loose pants, only a guitar in his hands, his hair greying and unkempt. The untimely death of his wife Geneviève has consumed all of his creative efforts since mid-2016. The subject of a heart-wrenching LP last year, A Crow Looked At Me, and another upcoming, Now Only, this event is explored in a series of humble recollections, cataloguing Elverum’s memories of their lives together, and his personal grieving process. He’s almost contrite when he sings these private stories—it feels, in moments, like we’re watching him grieve through his bedroom window. “Telling the banal details and hoping they add up to a deeper statement” was how Elverum described his approach on Crow to Bandcamp Daily. But like he’s always tried to persuade us, life is anything but banal.

‘Tintin in Tibet’, the last song, tells the story of his first, impossibly romantic moments with his future wife: meeting her, sleeping on her floor swaddled in blankets, being awoken by her peeling an orange; sleeping in his truck and being awoken by the police; reading the titular comic in French aloud to her on a rocky shore; the ecstasy of togetherness. “We had finally found each other in the universe,” he sings. These vignettes continue until Elverum finally eulogises her: despite all her life, her accomplishments, for all his memories of them together, for all her virtues and possessions and habits, she has become nothing but molecules dancing somewhere above Hergé’s windy Himalayas.

When he’s previously talked about death—on songs like ‘I Can’t Believe You Actually Died’ (Song Islands) or ‘Uh-Oh, It’s Morning Time Again’ (Singers)—he carefully skirted around its essential horror. We all avoid confronting death; because the pain and existential angst we experience is not worth what we might learn. The songs he writes now, on the other hand, bear this inevitable confrontation like figureheads on their bow.

At the end of ‘Tintin in Tibet’, Elverum thanks the crowd, and walks off, leaving an empty stage backed by fairy lights.

There is no encore. The lights come up before I can wipe the tears from my face. The audience, a mix of young and old, files out, muted, into the summer night.

28

I

spent my weekend debating whether I should shave my legs and obsessing over a woman at work who’s twice my age. I can’t do anything about the latter of these two except write shitty poetry about her and annoy my friends with constant updates until the infatuation comes to its end within a fortnight or so. As for my legs, it was hot outside and I wanted to wear my new embroidered skirt, so it was time for me to decide whether I was going to succumb to patriarchal pressure or stick to my feminist instincts.

I thought, Fuck it, I’m going to Midsumma, and so the hair remained.

The first thing you see when sitting down to watch Tilted Projects’ We Were There is a huge, floating white thing—is it a cloud? A hospital bed? To me it looked like an oversized sanitary pad, but somehow I don’t think that’s what they were trying to achieve. Four actresses (Leah Baulch, Perri Cummings, Olivia Monticciolo and Jodie Le Vesconte) walk onstage and dive into their narratives—sometimes interrupting or talking over each other, but always attentive and giving each other space to share their stories.

We Were There is a project that is produced from a series of interviews with women who experienced the HIV/ AIDS crisis within the 1980s and ‘90s, either as mothers, friends, nurses, or individuals still living with HIV today. The significance of this performance comes from its unique focus on women’s experiences, as HIV/AIDS narratives are mostly male-dominated, perhaps due to the perception that it is a “gay man’s disease”. I asked Hoult if this perception remains prevalent because these are the representations being consistently portrayed within art and society, to which he answered, “YES … It’s not just a male disease; 50 per cent of new diagnosed cases in Victoria are women.”

Regarding present stigma, Hoult said, “People know now it’s not going to kill you, but the vernacular around it hasn’t changed … ‘How’d you get it?’ … ‘Are you clean?’ … we have to open our minds, wake up, get tested, and get over ourselves when it comes to fear of ‘the other’.”

People are never going to get over this fear of ‘the other’— at least, not everyone. Stigma is one of those unfortunate constants of humanity to which some people stubbornly cling.

You can see it everywhere—from the smallest of actions to the loudest of silences. It’s why, as a woman, I deliberated over whether to bust out the razor or not, and above all, it’s the reason why so many stories of those affected by HIV and AIDS are left unheard.

REVIEWS

MEN’S FASHION HO

BEREFT OF HUMILITY

TRENT VU GOES TO VAMFF GQ AUSTRALIA MENSWEAR RUNWAY 2018

MEDHA VERNEKAR REVIEWS ORNY ADAMS’ ‘MORE THAN LOUD’

M

id-March, I decided drop into the media office to pay the Farrago editors a visit. My timetable this semester is atrocious, so I had a few hours to kill before my next tute.

The delightful Esther Le Couteur was sitting at her desk, busily drafting up a post for Facebook.

“Do you want to go to one of the Fashion Week events?” she asked.

I had a quick scan through the list, and immediately knew which event I wanted to attend.

“GQ,” I replied. “I want to stare at the hot male models.”

And so it was done.

After meeting up with the lovely Monique O’Rafferty (who, might I add, was wearing the most iconic pair of bell bottoms), we were ready to take the Royal Exhibition Building by storm.

Soon after we wrapped up our look behind the scenes with tour guide Bridget, Monique and I started to make our way into the REB. As we walked through the doors, reliving each of the traumatic exam experiences we’ve had in the building (mainly exams), Monique slapped my arm to get my attention.

“Oh my god! It’s Sophie Monk!”

There she was, serving looks on the red carpet (which was a dark grey). I convinced Monique to try to get a photo with her, but the bachelorette was whisked away by her entourage.

We took plenty of pics of her getting interviewed though.

As we neared our seats, I saw Sophie’s name written on a piece of paper in the front row; she was going to be sitting close to us. Like close enough to stare at all night.

The show itself was pretty amazing. One of the main reasons I attended the show was to see some hot male models. And boy was there some sweet, sweet eye candy. One model in particular caught my eye. He had the most incredible blue eyes, a gorgeous face and was rocking a buzz cut (I’ve been really into that recently). I also may or may not have used my incredible stalking abilities to find him on Instagram to thirst over his modelling shots after the show.

The show was coming to a close, with the models make one final walk down the runway. This was our opportunity to meet Sophie Monk. Monique and I marched up to her and patiently waited for Queen Sophie to take photos with the other peasants. We eventually got our turn.

“This is a look, ma’am,” I said to her, commenting on Sophie’s exquisite black off-the-shoulder haute couture dress.

I’m pretty sure it was made of rubber too.

“Thank you. I’m really sweaty,” she said. I love her. What a candid queen.

I

had interviewed Orny Adams a few weeks before his stop in Australia for his new special, More than Loud. During the interview, Orny claimed that none of his shows are repetitive and that every night brings about a different form of storytelling. Just like the musicians who inspire his stand-up change their rhythm every night. I was looking forward to seeing which Orny the Comic’s Lounge will be getting to witness.

Would it be the Comedian-era Orny? Or perhaps Teen Wolf’s eccentric Coach Bobby Finstock? Or maybe the insightful and humbling comedian I talked to on the phone? Maybe a mix of everything and a dash of chemical X? When Orny burst onto stage, it was electric. His characteristic energy shook the stage as he ran from one side to another, thumped the mike stand and poked fun at the audience members who were unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to land a seat in the front row.

About 10 minutes into his routine, a joke about not having feet cost Orny two beers as a man left the venue right after said joke. As we all turned around, we noticed he had a foot missing and turned our heads to Orny who had plumped down his chair and let out a defeated chuckle as he asked around the table whether he had left because he was offended by the joke. The star of the hour returned to his desk revealing that he had simply left to use the washroom as we all let out relieved laughter and got on with the show.

Halfway into his routine, I heard shouting and punches being thrown across the table. I turned around to see two men tugging at each other’s shirts and pushing each other down. It wouldn’t have been a brawl if they were both fully clothed; within a blink of the eye, one of them was shirtless.

He stood on the chair and shouted, “I’m just trying to have a romantic conversation,” while his partner used his shoulder to get on the table and shouted for management. The men then continued to flip over tables nearby and fought with security as they rushed over to escort them out the venue. Everyone within a ten feet radius of the conflict zone moved away.

Despite the startling scene, Orny advised we take a five minute break before getting back with the show as we formed little discussion groups about the brawl. Orny returned with a sombre tone as he reminded us what we all love about comedy, especially his brand of comedy. It never seeks to divide. It’s to make us all laugh. He looked at us and pumped his fist in the air (or at least that’s what it felt like) and sought to reclaim the night from the arseholes—one of whom couldn’t keep a shirt on.

29

ADVENTURES IN STUDENT COOKING AILSA TRAVES ATTEMPTS TO IMPROVE ON MI GORENG The chef — Really can’t cook, but tries hard — Would have already died in apocalyptic scenario — Good at picking My Kitchen Rules winners — Irrationally dislikes onion The setup — One small fridge with freezer compartment — Three gas stove burners (one is broken) — One microwave that burns the outside of frozen meals while failing to defrost the center

M

i goreng—the saviour of every university student. I first discovered this versatile dish after a friend gave me 12 packets. While she’s since moved on to bigger, better and presumably healthier things, mi goreng has become a staple in my pantry. As everyone knows, learning how to supplement this meal is essential to prevent crashing in the middle of a class and/or dying of malnutrition. So I decided to find the tastiest and most nutritious way to add to this classic with my limited supplies.

looked vastly different. Overall I wasn’t a huge fan, but it left me feeling full and it wasn’t overtly bad tasting so it’s definitely an option to get some extra protein in!

Rating: 4/10.

The Classic: To be honest, I’ve historically been super boring when it comes to my noodles. I usually do the following: 1. Boil water.

2. Put noodles in a bowl that’s too small.

3. Put flavour powder on noodles.

4. Pour water over noodles and put plate on top of bowl.

I leave them for a bit until I get confused and wonder why there’s a random plate on top of a bowl sitting on the counter.

Then I curse because I’ve let them go soggy. I eat them with the sticky soy packet, making sure to only add little bits of the soy at a time to achieve the perfect ratio.

I mean. This really isn’t healthy, is it? But it is usually reserved for 1am when I’ve just realized I’ve written my whole essay on the wrong topic, or when I’ve had three glasses (mugs, let’s be honest; I don’t own anything made of glass) of wine. Given that I’m really, actually, living on my own now, I figure I should learn how to make them into a semi-okay meal.

Rating: 6/10.

Attempt two: Satay noodles This was both the grossest and the fucking best. A friend made a more complex version of this on her Snapchat story once, but it included cutting up onions, and I reserve my tears exclusively for videos of dogs reuniting with their owners on Facebook, so I just did this version: 1. One big spoon of peanut butter (crunchy would probably be better, but I only had smooth).

2. A dash of soy sauce.

3. A pinch of flavouring from the noodle pack.

4. Hot water.

5. Noodles (obviously).

I just put all of the ingredients in a mug, poured in some hot water to melt the peanut butter and stirred. I then drained my noodles and stirred through the peanut butter sauce.

I mean, “stirred through” is a little generous. It mostly clumped together on my fork and on the bottom of the noodles and bowl. But oh my God, this tasted great, even though it glued my mouth together a little. I almost convinced myself it was an actual meal. You could definitely add some stir-fried chicken or veggies, but I’m too lazy. Anyway, it was later brought to my attention that a satay version of Mi Goreng exists. So I feel useless now.

Rating: 8/10.

Attempt one: Egg This is what’s on the picture on the packet, so, like, peak mi goreng goodness, right? Ehhh. It was pretty boring. I fried up an egg and placed it on top of the noodles à la packet photo.

I spiced things up by using all the flavour packs: the chilli in particular was a good addition. I feel like the flavour of the egg yolk overpowered the spices of the packet flavouring. Plus, egg breath sucks. I expect I did something wrong with my recipe (generous use of the word), given that egg on the packet

I’m not totally sure that I reached my goal; while my peanut butter version added some flavour and body, it’s not exactly a proper meal. If I ate this more than three nights in a row I might die of malnutrition. While the egg version was healthier, it didn’t taste as good. Obviously my standard recipe doesn’t fit the bill at all. I think that the real answer to this quandary is that if you want a better meal than instant noodles, cook something other than instant noodles. In conclusion: I am, as predicted, a shit cook. But maybe I’ll get better.

Read more at farragomagazine.com/adventures 30

ART BY BETHANY CHERRY

AN OPEN LETTER VEERA RAMAYAH ADDRESSES WHITE ALLIES

D

ear white allies, we need to talk. As a self-identifying brown girl activist, you can imagine that I have a lot to say.

We need to talk about the waves of social justice we all seem to be drowning in nowadays. Because it seems that, although you claim to be with us on the lifeboat, you don’t realise that you’re actually safe on shore.

Let’s start with ending the relentless apologies on behalf of all white people. The only thing more irritating than Instagram profiles with “woke #sjw” in the bio is your guilt. Especially when you expect us to pull out a Kleenex and tell you that it’s okay. I’m talking about you, white boy in my DMs, apologising on behalf of all colonial powers every time I post something about Partition. I’m also talking about you, tutor, looking directly at me, the only PoC in the room, acknowledging your complicity in institutional academic racism. We do not exist to make you feel better when you learn the truth about our realities. Ask yourself whether you’re #woke because of your moral compass or because your guilt needs some aloe-Veera.

White allies, we need to talk about stopping trying to let us know you’re “woke” within the first five minutes of meeting us. Having Kendrick and Chance on your Spotify does not give you “PoC clout”. Being woke is recognising your position of privilege, actively stepping into situations where injustice is occurring, and doing something about it. It is, most importantly, not one marathon-viewing of Dear White People during swotvac procrastination, and then retweeting solidarity masterposts.

We need to talk, because, to us, activism isn’t just a hobby.

It’s about endeavouring to level the playing field. Activism costs us everything, and we don’t have the luxury security of taking out a loan. As Liz Chao said, “Activism costs us everything: our time, sleep, self-care, mental and physical health, our desire to preserve and protect ourselves and our loved ones, our livelihood, our reputation, our job prospects, our self-respect, our silence and, in some cases, our lives.”

Actually being woke is exhausting. Being an activist is exhausting. But it’s not something we can clock out of after business hours. When you are confronted by racism, you can

stay quiet if you want to. Your privilege allows you to do that.

But who wins when we don’t speak? Not us. If you truly want to commit to the “woke” brand—to put it bluntly—listen and learn. Call out white people nonsense when you hear it. If you get called out, learn why and fix it. When you feel defensive when your ideas are challenged by a PoC, step back and think.

It’s not always about you.

I have often been told that the way I bring up race or talk about it in front of my white friends is divisive—angry even.

That being less bitter, changing my method of delivery by coating my tongue in a thick layer of sugar, would do wonders for our “cause”. But, if I have to seduce you, with honey-sweet words for you to acknowledge our “cause”, chances are, you wouldn’t be there when we wake up in the morning.

And besides, I really hate the taste of honey.

Because, to be honest with you, white activism is about not gaining anything. Laura LeMoon said it perfectly: “An ally should be personally gaining nothing through their activism. In fact, they should be losing things through their activism; space, voice, recognition, validation, identity and ego.” And, if being confronted by this makes you feel uncomfortable, welcome to the club, sis.

“Faux-wokeness”, as the internet calls it, is dangerous.

It makes PoC feel like they are being heard, and even understood—when, in reality, everything that is being said that is deemed as an attack on white people, is being tallied against them, to justify branding us as “angry brown people”. After all: “Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

White allies, please stop giving us sympathy votes in exchange for whatever validation you think we’ll give you. You don’t need social clout by piggybacking on us, nor will we fill your ethnic quotas so you can claim the infamous “I’m not racist, I have [insert ethnicity here] friends!”

Let 2018 be the year to educate yourselves. Ask questions instead of making assumptions about our experiences.

White allies, it’s never too late to start making resolutions.

Maybe you can include us on your list.

ART BY AYONTI MAHREEN HUQ

GAMES

I LOVE AGE OF EMPIRES II KAAVYA JHA ON THE EVOLUTION OF GAMING AND IDENTIFYING AS A “GAMER”

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onfessing my guilty pleasure—the 1999 video game Age of Empires II—always elicits one of two distinct responses.

Mild confusion from those who haven’t heard of the computer game, or nostalgic enthusiasm from those who have. However, even the latter group becomes lost as I elaborate: rather than playing myself, I prefer to watch professionals stream their gameplay.

Regardless of my friends’ reaction, I always backtrack with a defensive, “Haha, it’s not like I’m not a gamer or anything though!” Perhaps this rather unusual preference for watching video games rather than participating myself is the reason I am so hesitant to define myself as a gamer, despite checking into the online AOEII community several times a week. The term “gamer” feels loaded, conjuring stereotypes of dude teens hunched over consoles in basements, covered in hot Cheetos dust and hurling insults at strangers through headsets. Definitely not in line with my turtleneck-wearing, G&T-sipping, Instagram-feed-filled-with-brunch-pics self.

The word “gamer” acts as more than a label for a person who plays video games. Self-identification as a gamer means taking on a shared identity with other members of the gaming community. (Let’s not even start on the terrible creature otherwise known as the “gamer girl”.) Sometimes, it might not be up to an individual to decide whether they are allowed to use this self-definition, as it often feels as if there are a set of unspoken prerequisites needed in order to earn the title.

My reluctance to call myself a gamer is based on these two things: that I don’t match the perceived stereotype, and that my interest in Age of Empires II is too casual, or too unspokenabout in my social life for me to qualify to join the gaming community.

Like all industries based on forms of media and entertainment, the gaming industry is subject to trends and fads which typically arise from technological advancements.

Age of Empires II is classified as an RTS (real-time strategy) game, in which players build up a civilisation and army,

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focusing on both economic and military advancements to win. The golden days of the RTS genre were the late ‘90s and early 2000s, a period in which low-waisted jeans and Gwen Stefani reigned supreme—and, perhaps more relevantly, the computer was the premiere platform for gaming. PC games were most popular because, at the time, they were technologically supreme. Before that, the popular games were from the era of arcades and Street Fighter. As the internet became a thing, people were attracted to the potential to play against others across the world, or at least across their regional servers with the rise of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). Nowadays, first-person shooter games are the most popular genre across all consoles, such as Xbox, PlayStation, and even mobile with the rise of global sensation Fortnite. The free-to-play game, in which 100 players are pitted against each other in a battle royale, has broken out of gaming subculture and into mainstream popular culture. Now, when I hear mentions of Fortnite, it is no longer limited to discussions among serious gamers, but referenced casually in dating profiles (shout-out to ‘UniMelb Love Letters’) and witty Instagram captions.

Even celebrities like Drake and Post Malone are getting on board the Fortnite hype, sharing their gameplay alongside full-time gamers like Ninja. Even as the individual players and games gain widespread popularity, their platform for doing so, Twitch, remains relatively unmentioned in pop-culture discourse, despite the site attracting over 100 million monthly unique users.

But I digress. Let’s get back to my love, Age of Empires II. Twitch has enabled a new wave of interaction with video games by allowing you to easily watch other people play your favourite games. In my case, this goes a step further, as, due to the complexity of competitive Age of Empires strategy, I prefer to watch professional commentators, with a handful of people across the world able to make a full-time living off casting AOEII. Like a soccer match being shown on a TV

ART BY REBECCA FOWLER

GAMES

channel, these accounts switch between the player’s multiple perspectives and angles, blurring the line between the nature of sports and esports. AOEII casters also offer post-tournament interviews with players as well as professional insights into the significance of seemingly minor decisions—for instance, at eight minutes into the game, having two lumber camps for cutting wood instead of one can indicate that the player will attack with scout cavalry instead of archers in the Feudal Age. While the most popular esports such as Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends—the tournaments of which had a combined prize pool of almost $70 million in 2017—require lightning-fast reflexes and manual dexterity, the often-slow pace of Age of Empires II is what engages its wide range of casual players who come back again and again years after their introduction to the game.

Nonetheless, professional AOEII players can reach an APM (actions per minute) of over 400 (which is very speedy). My confused play-style is much slower, most likely due to the fact that playing requires a lot of clicks and I don’t own a computer mouse.

When attempting to quantify figures about gaming and gamers, frequency measures are the most factor for distinguishing a gamer. “How often do you play games?” is a much better suited for statistics than “How does gaming influence your social identity?” or “How do you engage with the broader gaming community?” The first question ultimately creates a self-prescribed label that is too one-dimensional and doesn’t incorporate the rise in the popularity of streaming. The term “gamer” should be allowed to encapsulate nuanced and multidimensional bonds between an individual and a game.

Despite not currently filling stadiums like other competitive video games, the Age of Empires II scene is growing as people reconnect with their nostalgic memories of the game from their childhood. Videos of matches between experts and community members often garner hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.

The 19-year history of AOEII is littered with many monumental moments, from selling over two million copies within a month of its original release—and then its highdefinition re-release on Steam selling almost five million copies—to the $140,000 prize pool for a tournament in 2014.

Age of Empires has been there to capture some of my favourite moments of my 19 years, too.

Like many people my age, I was introduced to the game by older family members and I spent countless summer afternoons in my childhood playing against my dad, sitting at the dining room table, with him in the study. When I was losing, which was practically every game, I’d sneak behind him and spy on his screen to see what he was up to.

In grade 12, someone passed the game around on a USB, leading to my entire economics class playing AOEII in the library during revision lessons. We’d brush past people in younger grades on account of “being seniors with important study to do”, and then laugh as we loaded up the game screen, nestled together secretly between the looming shelves of textbooks.

We didn’t care about who won or who lost, the novelty of being able to reconnect with a less stressful time was enough.

I remember stopping by a friend’s apartment after a night out to drunkenly play (sorry for lowering your multiplayer rating).

In a few years, Microsoft will be out with Age of Empires IV, hopefully bringing the RTS genre back into the spotlight in the gaming community. In a few years, the label of “gamer” will probably (hopefully?) lose its stigma as gaming merges into popular culture.

Until then, catch me procrastinating on my pre-tutorial worksheets by watching some random Norwegian dudes battle it out in a game of medieval siege at 2am. Yikes.

ART BY REBECCA FOWLER

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STUFF

GHOSTS OF TENANTS PAST ALEX EPSTEIN BECOMES A VIGILANTE PHOTO-RETURNER

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flew back to Melbourne on Boxing Day, predictably exhausted from the headwind landing and the month-long holiday season that preceded it. While I’d been gone, my housemates had been kind enough to move my things to our new house, and though everything sat disassembled and packed away, I was glad to be back.

It was a high-thirties week, one of many, and I was sprawled half-naked on the bare mattress when I noticed something: the bottom of the built-in wardrobe—raised about a foot from the floor—was not flat wood like I had assumed, but a set of three drawers, hidden completely from standing view.

From all our research into the property, it should have been empty. There was a new landlord, who’d bought it for just under a million the previous year; they’d refashioned the dining room into a fourth bedroom, and presumably cleaned the whole place from top to bottom.

In some childlike way I was hoping to find something astounding: a forgotten duffel bag stuffed with green and gold banknotes, the missing Tamam Shud pages, or the body of Harold Holt. The drawer on the right-hand side contained a bag of pantyhose and a few dozen plastic slip folders; the lefthand drawer was empty.

The middle drawer contained hundreds and hundreds of photographs (eight-millimetre negatives in orange Kodak envelopes and plastic albums), a Herald Sun from 1970 (‘Carlton cinches the Grand Final’), school reports, chequebooks, high-school netball scoresheets, one certificate of baptism, and a tiny love letter: “Thank you for Friday night. It is a memory that I will cherish forever. You will always be deep in my heart.”

Lena Vigilante was born on 31 December 1956, to Matteo Vigilante and Michangelina Pescatore, and was baptised in March 1957 at St Ambrose’s Church in Brunswick. In 1970, the family would move to Coburg North, to a house—then with three bedrooms—just off Merri Creek. Lena went on to graduate high school in 1972, scoring good marks in Italian and needlecraft. There’s a photo of her standing with a babyblue Chrysler Valiant Galant; one of the family roughhousing; the netball team; a group of friends smoking and drinking in a living room I recognised as mine. There’s marriages, parties, children in the snow, old folks, young folks; it felt like I was holding Lena’s whole life story in my hands. I’d imagined finding treasure in those drawers, but this was someone else’s

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treasure—a lifetime of memories printed onto little squares.

A Google search for her name showed me a death notice: a Lena Vigilante who had died in November, 1999. The name was right, and the age was plausible, but it didn’t feel fair, so I kept digging. A search of her last name turned up hundreds of Facebook profiles, and, with no record of any other family member’s names, finding the right family would be almost impossible.

It was her godfather, listed on her baptism certificate, who led me on the right path. Matteo Guerra was born in 1926 in San Marco in Lamis, in Apulia, the ancient region best known as Italy’s “heel”. Fleeing the imminent outbreak of war, the Guerra family arrived in Melbourne in 1937, abjectly poor, and did farm work in regional Victoria until they could afford to buy a 50-acre farm in 1945. Matteo was the sole provider for a family of eight by the time his goddaughter was born. He died at the age of 91, in September of last year.

Before he died, Matteo was a member of a social club, located just off Canning Street, in Carlton: the San Marco in Lamis Social Club, devoted to immigrants from the town. The organisation has a Facebook page, which led me to the Circolo Pensionati, a smaller club within the larger one, presided over by one Angelo Vigilante—who in turn, led me to a photograph of the red-haired Lena, smiling, and very much alive. I brought the photos to the social club the next day, hoping they would arrive in time for her birthday on New Years Eve—and they did. Her sister called me on the phone three weeks later, and dropped by the house with a bottle of wine for my trouble.

Photography embodies, in the words of André Bazin, a “mummy complex”: an act of resistance against the passage of time, an artificial means of preserving, storing, and displaying something which would otherwise be ephemeral, like some single moment, an object, or a life. I never spoke directly to Lena—even after she’d received the photos—but in all these photos of her adolescence, she really didn’t seem that different to myself. I’ve found lost wallets before, and flicked through their collections of cards and receipts, but this experience was incomparable. These photographs were a distilled and preserved version of a personal history, one in which lives happened and people loved and had kids and drove cars and drank together, and they doubtless meant more to her than they would ever mean to me. I didn’t go to lengths to return them out of charity or kindness: I returned them, because how could I not?

ART BY SOPHIE SUN

NONFICTION

ART BY CAROLINE VOELKER

SCIENCE

THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF BALL-TAMPERING ROHAN BYRNE LOOKS AT THE PHYSICS BEHIND THE TACTIC

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big mistake,” protested the team captain. “Contrary to the spirit of the game,” intoned the umpires. “A shocking disappointment,” quoth no less a personage than the prime minister himself.

Really—it’s just not cricket.

But cricket it was, and for two weeks mass media could not tear their eyes from it. A junior Aussie bowler, baggy green snug over his brow, facing down the intransigent Proteas on a blistering South African afternoon, and—desperate to outfox his foe with a curly delivery—vigorously scuffing up one side of a cricket ball with a bit of yellow sandpaper.

It was a disgrace to the sport, and none-too-salutary a moment for the gormless Cameron Bancroft either, who—in a legendary bid to close the gate after the horse had bolted— proceeded to shove the incriminating implements right down his tighty-whities wherefore to continue the apparently vital business of polishing his round one.

Ball-tampering. It’s a dastardly, unsportsmanlike deed.

And, to add insult to injury—it doesn’t actually work.

To understand why, we need to go back to the basics.

Cricket is a game where one team takes it in turns to try and knock over a pile of sticks (the wickets) with a shiny red leather ball, while the other team takes it in turns to defend said pile of sticks (the wickets) with a big fat stick (the bat), and also do some shuttle runs for extra cardio. The teams swap roles a couple of times and after about five days of exhausting spectacle they either call it a draw or someone gives up. This is cricket as it is played.

You would be forgiven for thinking it sounds dull. This columnist, at least, will forgive you—this columnist’s sportsmad spouse will not. Far from dull, a good game of test cricket is a tense affair of wits, wills, weather and wonky physics.

In a game of cricket, the bowler and the batter are separated by 22 yards of hard-packed grass—the “pitch”. It’s a long way to throw a ball, so bowlers are permitted one bounce on their way to wiping out the wickets. Over the multiple days of a hard-fought match, the pitch can begin to develop cracks and crevices. If the ball hits one of these, it can bounce wildly, taking the batter by surprise.

But contact with a coarse pitch can put wear and tear on the ball too—and this is where the real magic happens.

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Unlike most sports balls, cricket balls are not perfect spheres: they bulge at the equator, like the Earth. This equator—the raised seam that stitches its two leather faces together—has all sorts of effects on the flight of the ball. For starters, it creates a rotational symmetry that keeps the ball spinning parallel to the seam (in an “east–west” sense) rather than perpendicular to it (a “north–south” sense).

Because spin is actually a kind of acceleration (freaky but true), you have to do work to change the axis of rotation. This is the same force that keeps frisbees from flipping over in flight. Essentially, the seam of a cricket ball allows the bowler to choose which direction the ball is facing as it flies through the air—and which side hits the ground first.

Think about what that means. A good bowler can deliberately make the ball rougher on one side than the other. Better yet, they can choose which direction the rough side faces when the ball is in motion. The rough side creates turbulence in the air that “sucks” the ball toward it—what cricketers call “swing”. A good bowler can even enhance this effect by placing the seam so that it breaks the flow of air over the ball, or splits it evenly down the middle.

So in a sense, ball-tampering in cricket is not only not illegal—it’s the heart and soul of the game. But it has to happen fairly, by repeated contact with the pitch, the bat and maybe the bowler’s trousers—not at the hands of an idiot with a lurid scrap of sandpaper.

If the weather does not cooperate, the pitch will stay fresh and firm, the ball will remain smooth and shiny, and the batters will find it all-too-easy to dispatch the bowler’s best efforts with impunity. And this is exactly what happened to the beleaguered Australians during that test against South Africa.

In the end, Bancroft’s actions were not only against the rules: they were also ineffectual. After all, two minutes of furtive rubbing can hardly be expected to deliver the same result as hours of prolonged contact, as the 25-year-old ought to have learned (on and off the cricket pitch) long ago. After a brief consultation, umpires judged his ball-tampering efforts to be laughable, play resumed, South Africa belted home, and the green-and-gold went on to lose the test by a humiliating 322 runs.

And that is cricket.

ART BY LINCOLN GLASBY

OTHER PEOPLE’S ISSUE KATIE DOHERTY LOOKS AT OVERPOPULATION

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nvironmental journalist David Roberts wrote, “Anyone who’s ever given a talk on an environmental subject knows that the population question is a near-inevitability.” It’s the first thing many people jump to: the question of population growth in “developing” countries—and with the BBC reporting that India’s population will overtake that of China by 2022, and that “Nigeria will replace the US as the world’s third most populous country by around 2050”, they are not wrong that countries with lower GDPs are rapidly expanding in population. The world is expected to reach 9.8 billion people by 2050, and half of this growth is predicted to occur in nine countries, only one of which—the United States—would be called an “economically developed nation”.

The concern is understandable when viewed as a simple equation. More people consuming resources equals more resources consumed, equals more pollution emitted, equals the end of the world coming around much faster. In fact, there is a well-known formula for describing the impact of humans on the environment, generally written as “I = PAT”, or impact equals population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Population is certainly a key factor. However, it is not the only factor, and arguably not the most important one.

An extremely wealthy population will use far more resources, simply because they can afford to consume more things.

According to a 2009 study from Oregon State, the lifestyle of a child in the United States emits more than 160 times the greenhouse gases as a child in Bangladesh. Overpopulation alone clearly is not the issue when the planet could support 160 people if one person lived in a more sustainable way.

In this sense, the fact that population growth is generally occurring in “developing” nations could be seen as something of an opportunity. Yes, it is true that a country of over a billion people, if their lifestyles closely resembled those of many people in Western countries today, would be an environmental disaster. Countries like India and Nigeria must “develop” in a more sustainable way than the West did, in a way which is not powered by fossil fuels and does not follow such a consumerist ideology.

Developing sustainably will be difficult and expensive.

Many international climate talks have fallen over on the basis of these demands—the suggestion that countries which did not cause the problem should curb their growth in order to mitigate it: that they should not be allowed to strive for the same standard of living that people in the West currently experience. For this reason, Dr Richard Eckard from the University of Melbourne suggests that the onus still lies with the Western world: “[If we] choose to take electric cars, choose to use solar energy on roofs, choose to eat more plant-based

diets—and that becomes an archetype of what a sophisticated lifestyle is or what a wealthy lifestyle is—what you will find is those rising middle class will aspire to a different end point … You’re actually building a better house and inviting them across.” And this house can fit more people, without the same impact on the planet.

Focusing on overpopulation allows affluent Westerners, the cause of the problem, to excuse themselves from being part of the solution. It also smacks of an almost eugenics-y attitude—these growing nations that we are so concerned about are generally non-Western and non-white, and the desire to see their size limited could have a more problematic basis than simply concern for the environment. The same is true for “environmental” objections to immigration—proper infrastructure, resource use and environmental management would allow a country like Australia to support far more people than it currently does, and yet organisations such as the Sustainable Australia Party insist that preservation of our environment requires closing our borders: an act of thinlyveiled xenophobia.

This isn’t to say that overpopulation is not an issue that must be considered. The population of planet earth is growing rapidly, and at some point we will reach a ceiling on the number of people it can support. But the solution is not coercive population control, as has been attempted in some countries. The best way of tackling population growth (and many other political and social issues as well) has been shown time and again to be educating women. The autonomy and opportunity granted by education often means that they marry later and have fewer children—in addition to achieving a higher standard of living for themselves and their families.

The issue of access to birth control and reproductive health care is also a vital factor. A study by the Guttmacher Institute found that 40 per cent of pregnancies worldwide were unintended. This is not only a serious problem for the people who become pregnant but also a significant contributing factor to the global population. The study estimated that 38 per cent of those pregnancies were carried to term, which is a huge number of people who would otherwise not have been born. If we are seriously concerned about overpopulation, we should take real action and work to ensure women worldwide have proper access to reproductive care, and are able to choose if and when they become pregnant.

But overpopulation is posed as the problem so that we in the Western world can avoid taking responsibility for climate change and changing our own lifestyles, and so that the issues caused by our lifestyle cannot be effectively mitigated in time to prevent catastrophic climate change.

CHEESE NICK PARKINSON LOOKS AT ALL GOOD THINGS HOLEY

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ver heard of cheese nightmares? Nup? Well, count yourself lucky.

Last night I woke up panting, stomach churning and a cold sheen of sweat glistening on my forehead like Adam Rippon sparkling on the ice-skating rink during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. (You didn’t watch that? Nup? Well, maybe you’re not so lucky after all.) My heart still thudded from the massive T-Rex that had, only moments before, chased me through the dark intestines of Luna Park. The dream wasn’t all bad: I did have the body of Chris Pratt. Sadly though, that part of the blue cheese–induced fantasy is unlikely to come to fruition precisely because of cheese. Curse you, six-bucks Castello blue cheese from Woolworths. Curse you.

This nightmare wasn’t the only one I’ve suffered. So, looking to continue gorging myself on coagulated milk protein without the resulting poor sleep, I asked myself, “Is there any science behind these oneiric, dairy visions?”

An (admittedly dubious) study by the wonderfully named British Cheese Board suggested that different types of cheese evoke different dreams. Stilton brings about the psychedelic, surreal visions of Dali; Red Leicester provokes nostalgic reveries, and cheddar is the fangirl cheese—it supposedly incites dreams about celebrities. Behind this pseudo-science though, there might be some more tangible evidence behind a cheese-induced restless night. Cheeses contain tyramine, a substance that, in high levels, builds up blood pressure. This, alongside the indigestion cause by eating a family platter of assorted cheeses and quince paste (we’ve all been there),

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might have been what saw me flee from a T-Rex through the gaping, garish mouth of Luna Park the moment my head hit the pillow.

Cheese, then, has got a lot to answer for. Hell, I’m not even lactose intolerant; just sensitive in all meanings of the word (insert a terrible pun here about how I can’t camembert the goudaness that is aged, pressed curds). I could never forgive cheese for that time I engulfed at a whole brie before a lecture. I wasn’t planning to eat it all. “I’ll just have a few nibbles,” I said, channelling my inner Michelle Bridges. But, before I knew what I was doing, the whole block was gone, my cheese to cracker ratio meaning that I’d eaten the second half in both hands like those Mighty Whopper ads from a few years back. I could feel it coating the insides of my stomach, jostling about gleefully as it planned its escape. Unfortunately, that escape was during my late-evening lecture in a gaseous (and, to be honest, potentially solid) form. I tried playing it cool, looking about suspiciously and emphatically wafting my hand in front of my nose in the universal sign of yo-that-stinks-anddefinitely-wasn’t-me.

But it was me. It’s always me. This is what cheese does. It promises so much and then takes it all away in an I-just-shatmyself-in-a-lecture moment.

Maybe this year is the year I divorce myself from cheese.

True, it’s already well into the year. But as Miley Cyrus probably once said, “It’s never too late to turn it back around.”

Gouda bye cheese: you’ll be sorely missed (though less so by my stomach which will be considerably less sore).

ART BY DAVID ZELEZNIKOW-JOHNSTON

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ART BY MORGAN HOPCROFT

CREATIVE

writing in vain

BY NATALIE FONG

I am a single bedroom of bones whose white does not show under my skin a garden museum, if you will, a sense of closed-off heartlands and secret claws curling in the vessels of my painless planks.

I can do a good plank, a good minute of statue, so if you looked closer you would never have understood why I had shaken before; I have stained the best of my childhood by the bidding of a reliable impressionist, so obviously fruitful in her legion that I could not plant my feet into the soiled mango ghosts of summer dreams.

I give my stories manicure if they ask nicely although it hurts when they ask me to cut my nails too deep, and I am still trying to understand how you can come in, without blowing the attic apart.

The clutter is overdue, pregnant with spider webs, spirals, spheres of indiscriminate verses from an envelope spotted with age.

Where can I find the mystery that will be posted to nostalgia?

In my living room perhaps; I suppose it is an unused space where you run your spirits like passing through molasses; the telly has given its verdict: the world is too big to be contained in its chest and it cannot find a colour for its own blood so what else but spirited away?

Too many conversations happen that floorboards can memorise but they are never alone in my bones, for I guess I have a choice of removing myself in fiction, to a place more or less haunted by my ego manifest or a list of uninvited guests.

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ART BY NELLIE SEALE

CREATIVE

DOWN AT EAGLE CREEK

BY ESTELLE SUTHERLAND I see the lonely cattle graze under the ghost white gums.

I see the power-lines, the patchwork sheds, pieces of the burnt down church.

I hear the cries of the galahs four thousand feet above my head.

I hear their wings, their divine tools of escape, beat against the hard air.

I smell the red dust desperate for an inch of rain.

I smell the sweet, musty petrol, I smell him; half blood, half sweat and all silence.

I feel the broken fence posts splintering beneath my palms.

I feel the dead weeds between my fingers, too tired to keep living under the midday sun.

I taste the mud, the dread, the words left unsaid.

It tastes like hell, I’ll say that much.

And as he hammered his father’s father’s words into the ground, time seemed to slip into the distant horizon and the ute, crushed in half, sank deeper into Eagle Creek.

ART BY NELLIE SEALE

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CREATIVE

MENGAMBIL SEMULA ANNIE LIEW Kak. Bang.

Di manakah anda semua menyembunyi? Di tepi sudut dewan kuliah atau di belakang kelas? Sebagai seorang yang sentiasa senyap, anda tidak bergerak dan dengan sentiasa pandangan mereka berpaling kepadamu.

Tolong keluar. Sinaran matahari ini juga milik anda. Hidupan anda tidak mewujud di dalam bayangan. Bersihkan debu dari tempat sembunyianmu dan lihat ke atas. Dunia ini menyambuti anda. Cahaya matahari ini lebih baik jika boleh dikongsi denganmu. Jikalau anda ada di sini dengan aku.

Tapi aku faham kenapa anda menidur dalam kegelapan. Aku juga takut. Orang-orang ini kelihatan berbeza dari kita. Mereka tidak bercakap sesama kita. Mereka mempunyai sesuatu keyakinan yang mengalir dalam darahnya. Darahnya yang kita tidak mengongsi. Atau mungkin mereka ramai dan kita semua kekurangan.

Tapi ingat ya, semua ini memerlukan masa. Manusia bertindak balas perlahan-lahan jadi perubahan memerlukan masa and usaha. Aku boleh memberitahu anda bahawa mereka akan lupa anda. Kita akan menjadi seperti kertas dinding digunakan untuk mewarnakan penglihatan mereka. Mereka tidak akan mengingat nama anda. Dalam persepsi mereka, kita semua boleh ditukar ganti. Semuanya mata yang kecil dan kulit yang berwarna-warni.

Kadang-kadang cahaya matahari akan membakar dan menyakiti kulit anda tapi memang ada perbezaan di luar sini.

Walaupun kecil, ia akan memaksa transformasi. Raikanlah cahaya ini kerana inilah tanah airmu. Seperti semua orang lain.

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ART BY LIEF CHAN

a kiss I haven’t been kissed in so long.

When everyone is tucked between bedsheets stuffed with love and honeycomb (because even I know that the sweetest of loves crumble between dawn and dusk); I walk through trees singing to me about growth as I press flowers on my neck and the corner of my lips waiting for something soft, Again.

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WORDS BY SARAH PETERS

sunshine They call her sunshine even when she’s not in yellow, Holding doors open for people, hoping they’ll open too and embrace her, Talk to her, thank her.

But she stands still, silent.

Watching as everyone moves around her, Like tiny planets.

Their energy letting them hum and dance in circles with each other whilst she waits watching warming without welcome or arms to wrap around her to keep just for her even the slightest ray of sunlight.

lights I’m entranced by lighting stores imagining our kitchen and lounge and how it would feel when one day you were home.

ART BY ALEXANDRA BURNS

CREATIVE

NIGHT OF THE BEAST

BY ZHUO TONG LIN Have you heard about the Night of the Beast? It’s the day those creatures we cared for, creatures we treasure, and the creatures we hunted come back to our world. Clothed in the skin of the underworld, fit for a hot summer evening, they march down the streets, their legs returning them to homes where the memories of them subsist.

They chatter as if they were human, like family and friends that have known each other for a long, long time. A torch, a giant bonfire reaching towards the night sky and brushing the stars, acting as the beacon for spirits who wander too far afield.

But they aren’t always so friendly. Headless boars rise from their graves, rotting bodies swallowed by the earth. Laid down with the shift of a finger. Up come the deer with antlers shattered and broken; some of them even bare-headed. They rear their heads and howl.

Look! There, among the dandelions. They sway as the spirits begin to move.

ART BY WINNIE JIAO

51

CREATIVE

CHANGELING

BY JOCELYN DEANE A year from emigrating to Australia, we stayed on the Jurassic coast, wet but green. The soil there is moist with worms and squelching mud in the summer, my sister and I rolling about endlessly, naked and howling. Dorset in the rain smells so alive it’s scary. You scale one hillock, tumble over and then you’re lost in emerald feathers. You cry, loudly—like a toddler at Kew Gardens—to divert the fields’ attention.

I straightened. A boy my age was staring.

He was wearing a coat of leaves, the body and genitals covered in poultice. I’ve always known when mirrors lie. His face, though, was my dad’s fly lure, tremoring over a lake body, my gums reddening when I brushed too deliberately, the desire to chew with my mouth open, the wasps I’d seen fumigated by mum in our roof, their nest like a football. I gazed hungrily as he pointed to a mound of earth on my left—his right—nails bark-splintered.

“Dig.” Obeying, raking fingers. His eyes were yellow. I stopped when the first flash of teeth broke the earth. Yellowing smiles.

“Sometimes you forget,” he said, stepping towards me. “We’re taken, for His tally. You come, but forget.” He was clutching a bluestone rock. “You think you’re the real child,” The next thing I remember is my mum and dad, red-faced, gasping, swabbing me down with handkerchiefs before gripping me tightly. The rock was in my hand, sticky, smelling funny. The hole in the earth was bigger, white radiating from the mulch like a treasure hoard. I asked who they belonged to.

They didn’t look when they said naturally, “It’s a cow, bunny, just a cow.”

52

ART BY CAROLYN HUANE

CREATIVE

JUDGE’S 7+7

BY ALSTON CHU strange land where meat regrets the eater & it’s a rare strength indeed ain’t sweetened by a drop of honey raptor out of hand and out of sight treacle-down and sorghum-slickness testify a bird of prayer boanerges better the six-gun salute tuple mark (3) machinery turning any head eastward dirty henry bluffs none espousing the bull and the rhino differ on one important • point

ART BY CAROLYN HUANE

53

CREATIVE

CHRISTMAS EVE

BY ABIGAIL FISHER We always order the same pizzas from the store down the road: one Hawaiian and three Veggie Supremes (heavy on the artichokes) pile into the car and drive up the small ugly hill near my parents’ house.

My dad likes to boast that Mount Cooper is the tallest mountain in metropolitan Melbourne.

Mount Cooper is also a bald grassy mound a water silo, an electric fence and a terrible view of the Western suburbs.

It’s always cold and too windy up on the mountain.

We’re five adults now and don’t fit on the picnic blanket.

The dog loves it!

She finds bottles full of human urine or a half-full coke can and tears off over the horizon only to return sticky and licking her stained lips.

We huddle close and chew with our mouths open watching the sunset.

54

ART BY

CLASSIC

BY DARCY CORNWALLIS Time passes slowly through straits of heated air, and played slowly, viewed closely, like any great composition, its errors and quirks, its irregularities and subtle repetitions, can be teased out, toyed with, tested.

This is what the oracles understood, and it was easier for them, locked in a hallucinogenic cave for all their lives, spitting words in patterned streams with such awful momentum that cities fell, fleets clashed, emperors laughed on funeral pyres and bookshelves bask in their delicious dust-flavoured epithets.

On a clear, hot day like this, when memories shift uneasily in the breeze, and little sparks of half-imagined light disorient my contemplation of the ceiling, ancient yellowed voices call like sirens from the rocks.

Slipping from your sheets and into the sparkling Aegean or the beaches of Lydia and then back through the space between lines of battered text and into your room again, time seems not muddled so much as banal, like some pictographic script which looks so much more magical when you don’t know it’s just someone’s tax returns.

So Cyrus becomes Croesus and Croesus is Christmas and there are Persians carving Turkey in my dining-room, as is their want.

The daughter of Astyages runs a truly unique bottle-o on Bell Street and I hear a friend has contracted the Themistocles overseas.

The chickens outside add their moan to the lamentations in Corinth, tender memories of midnight assignations in suburban kitchens are invaded by Aristophanic men who want in on the action.

A car alarm breaks the stillness.

You roll onto your side and mutter something empty, the breeze carries flutes from Bacchic hills through the sometimes portal of your curtains, five bells toll in some distant church and the future, my love, can wait another day.

ART BY HANNA LIU

55

ART BY TZEYI KOAY

CREATIVE

BANANAS

BY ALAINA DEAN

W

ritten in wide chalk letters on the footpath beneath her flat above the pharmacy were the words, I SAW YOUR BOOBS. Sophia almost choked on her toothbrush. Toothpaste fell from her mouth and dribbled on the carpet. She had a bad habit of brushing her teeth in the living room. Rushing back to the bathroom, she spat out foam. She walked back out to the living room.

The living room looked out over Elgin Street. Her flat was flanked by an Indian restaurant and a car park. The boobs the chalk was referencing could only be hers. She flung open the window and leant out, as if the scent of the chalk writer still hung on the air and she could sniff them out.

“Mark!”

There was a groan from the bedroom. Mark had already snoozed his alarm twice. He walked, bleary, into the living room and leant out the window, reading the graffiti slowly.

“Who?” “I don’t know. I’m going to go clean it off before I get ready for work.”

“Okay. Anything for breakfast?”

Sophia pulled the straw broom out from beside the fridge.

She had bought it when she first moved in just in case she ever needed to shoo away stray cats that might hang around the bins out the back.

“There’s bananas. I haven’t been shopping.”

The morning was cool and light and grey. Summer wafted down the street sporadically. Sophia swept the footpath furiously. Chalk dust rose and clung to her bare legs. She stood back and leant on the broom handle. The words were gone, just pale smudges on the dirty concrete. With a nod to herself, she rushed around the back to the stairs. She hesitantly poked the bins with the broom. No cats.

Mark was dry retching over the kitchen sink when Sophia let herself back in. She dropped the broom and rushed over.

She rubbed his back.

“You okay?”

Mark’s arms were braced on either side of the sink. His whole body heaved. There was a half-eaten banana lying on the table.

“Do you want some water?” Sophia leant around him and filled a glass from the tap. Mark shook his head and convulsed.

“Are you choking?”

Mark took gasping breaths. His knuckles were white.

Sophia checked the time. She was going to be late. She rushed into the bedroom, pulling on her black jeans and the café’s checked button-down shirt. Mark was turning green when she returned. He turned towards her, his eyes wide. He hacked, like a cat coughing up a fur ball from too much licking, and spat into his hand.

“Look.”

Cradled in the palm of his hand and swathed in saliva was a tiny pair of pyjama pants. The tiny pyjamas had tiny blue and white stripes and a tiny elastic waistband. Sophia peered at the tiny pair of pyjamas pants.

“Why were they in your mouth?”

“They were in the banana.”

Sophia glanced at the banana lying smooshed on the table and snatched her keys from the bone china bowl she had snagged from a stall at the Fitzroy markets.

“I’m going to be late for work.”

She slammed the door, leaving Mark standing in the kitchen with the tiny pair of pyjama pants. * On her way home, weary and smelling like burnt coffee, Sophia stopped at Coles and picked up a basket. Letting it swing in the crook of her arm, she filled the basket with sweet potato and bread and spinach and beans and a few tins of crushed tomatoes. She hesitated at the pyramid of bananas, trying to remember if she had dreamt the pyjama episode that morning. She shrugged to herself and bought a hand of greenish bananas. She splurged on two avocados to have on toast and wandered down the street to her flat.

Mark was sitting on the lounge, still wearing the boxer shorts he had worn to bed.

“Did you go to work?”

Mark didn’t respond. He was slumped, staring at his hand.

“Mark.” Sophia put the groceries down and sat beside him.

He turned his palm slowly to face her. A tiny blue and white striped pyjama shirt was neatly folded in his hand.

“Another one?”

“Yes. Can you make dinner? I haven’t eaten all day.”

“Didn’t you eat the banana this came out of?”

“I had a mouthful.”

Sophia went into the kitchen and saw the two bananas going brown on the table. She threw the bananas into the compost and made avocado on toast with cracked pepper.

They ate on the lounge, Mark eyeing the pyjama set on the coffee table.

“We could frame them,” Sophia suggested.

“We’re not framing them. That’s absurd.”

Later that night, as Sophia was falling asleep, Mark turned to her.

“I need to show someone. Maybe I’ll take them to the museum in the morning. Or the Uni. The Uni is probably a better bet.”

ART BY BETHANY CHERRY

57

CREATIVE The next morning Mark was up before his alarm. He wrapped the tiny pyjamas in a tissue and placed them carefully in the interior pocket of his jacket. He flew down the stairs, swung a leg over his bike and pedalled off towards Parkville, not noticing the chalk letters on the pavement.

Sophia woke to a cold bed and brushed her teeth in the living room. She peered out the window.

I SAW YOUR BOOBS.

She screamed, but it came out as a gurgle of toothpaste.

She rushed outside and scratched frantically with the broom.

The little old man who owned the pharmacy below her flat waved as he flipped the sign on the door from CLOSED to OPEN. Sophia poked at the bins on her way back up the stairs. No cats. She called Mark but it went straight to voicemail. She got ready for work, pulling the curtains tightly across her bedroom window as she hooked her bra and buttoned her shirt. She called him again and didn’t leave a message.

She spent the morning at the café burning milk and misspelling names on coffee cups. On her lunch break she messaged Mark.

The chalk was there again this morning. Was it there when you left? Xx Mark replied two minutes later, NOBODY AT THE UNIVERSITY WILL LOOK AT THE PYJAMAS. TAKING THEM TO THE MUSEUM NOW. Her phone buzzed again, Can you pls buy Chinese for dinner?

And make sure you get prawn chips. * The kitchen bench was covered in bananas. Green bananas, organic bananas, perfect yellow bananas and splotchy brown bananas. Sophia pushed a bunch of impossibly straight bananas to the side and placed the containers of Chinese food in a stack.

“Mark?” she called. A grunt of acknowledgement came from the bathroom. Mark was gently washing pyjamas in the bathroom sink. His shirt sleeves were pushed up around his elbows.

“Babe? Did you go to work today?” Sophia flipped the toilet seat down and sat. Mark massaged a shirt gently.

“No, I told you. I went to the Uni and then the museum but no one would believe me.”

58

“You didn’t go to work after that?”

“No, I went to the Queen Vic market, and South Melbourne markets, and Preston markets. I need to prove these pyjamas are coming from bananas.”

Sophia leant her head back against the wall. “I bought Chinese food. Leave the pyjamas for a bit and come eat.”

Mark sat, his eyes heavy with exhaustion.

Sophia split the food between two plates.

“I was talking to the girls at work and they think I should report the chalk to the police. Invasion of privacy and all that, potentially harassment. What do you think?”

“Huh?” Mark was pushing a piece of sweet and sour pork around his plate.

“Should I report the chalk to the police?”

“It’s probably just a kid having a laugh.” * The smell of ripe bananas was overwhelming the next morning. Gagging, Sophia reached for the bottle of perfume on the windowsill and sprayed perfume on her finger so she could hold it under her nose. It was the bottle Mark had bought her when they got engaged. It was almost empty. She leaned out the window.

“Fuck me.”

She tore down the stairs, broom in hand and attacked the footpath. A cyclist pedalled past and dinged at her in her silk nightie. She flipped him off and fought off tears. She didn’t even think to check behind the bins for feral cats. Inside, Mark was still snoring. She checked her watch. She had enough time to make it to the police station before work. She got dressed crouching under the kitchen table and slammed the door when she left.

The police officer took Sophia’s details down slowly. She had to repeat her mobile number three times. The officer nodded and told her he would send out a patrol that way.

“In the morning? Between one and seven?”

“Yeah, sure, we’ll see what we can do.”

Sophia hesitated as if she had more to say, but instead thanked him and pedalled towards work. A tram whooshed past her and she wobbled dangerously. She steadied herself and pedalled on. * Sophia walked into the apartment and straight into a tiny pyjama shirt dangling across the doorway. She shied away from it as if it was a bat or a pigeon.

ART BY BETHANY CHERRY

CREATIVE “Mark? What the– ” Strung across the apartment were rows and rows of pyjamas pegged onto what smelt like mint flavoured dental floss. The pegs were tiny and wooden and coloured, the sort used in scrap booking. Sophia reached up and ran her hands through the pyjama garlands.

“Mark?”

She ducked under the makeshift clotheslines and made her way to the bedroom. Mark was sitting cross legged on the bed. His stomach bulged over the waistband of his pants.

Banana peels were piled high on her pillow, spotty and pungent. Mark was chewing softly. He looked up at Sophia standing in the door.

“So many pyjamas. Did you see them?”

Sophia stood, mouth agape. There was a smear of banana across Mark’s chin. It was going brown.

“You didn’t go to work today.”

“Fuck, Sophia, how do you expect me to go to work?”

Sophia shook her head. She crossed the bedroom and pulled her pillow out from under the mound of bananas skins.

She tugged at the doona. The bananas bounced. She pulled harder. Mark jerked and tried to gather the tiny pyjamas to him, like a hen collecting her chicks. Banana peels scattered everywhere as Sophia wrenched the doona free from the bed.

Sophia glared at Mark and draped the doona around her shoulders like a cape. She turned and left.

“Sophia,” Mark called after her. He glanced around the room and spying the glass bowl of potpourri, tipped the leaves out on the floor. He filled the bowl with the pyjamas and placed it back on the sidetable.

Mark followed Sophia out into the loungeroom. She was curled up on the floor in front of the big window, cocooned by the doona. She was staring down at the street below.

“You’re not going to sleep there.”

“No, I am going to catch whoever it is who is writing on the footpath.”

Mark ran a hand through his hair. ”C’mon, come sleep in the bed.”

“I’m fine.”

Mark got down on his hands and knees and brought his face down to hers. He moved to kiss her, but she screwed her nose and turned her head. His lips smeared across her cheek.

“Sophia.”

“Your breath stinks.”

Mark scrambled back to his feet. “Why don’t you see how important this is?”

Sophia kept her lips pursed tight and her gaze on the footpath. Mark stalked back to the bedroom and slammed the door. The bed was covered in tiny crumpled pyjamas and softly rotting bananas. He flicked off the light and crawled across the bed. Folding the pillow tightly under his head, he scooped the banana peels over himself. Under his makeshift blanket, he lay awake, anger pulsing at the sides of his head. * Sophia awoke with a start. The sun was tinging the sky. She checked her phone. Almost six. There was a slow, methodical scratching coming from outside. She sat up, pressing her face against the window.

On the street was a man, bent in half at the waist, a jumbo piece of chalk clutched in his hand. He was halfway through drawing the O in YOUR. Sophia lunged across the room, shedding the doona. She threw open the window.

“Hey!” The man ignored her. He scooped a U onto the footpath.

He stood and stretched, his back to Sophia, and bent again to draw an R with a flourish.

“Oi, stop that!”

This time the man turned. He looked up at the window, and seeing Sophia framed by the light, smiled. He flicked his fingers in a slight wave. Sophia’s stomach flipped. The man turned back to his work and started tracing over each letter methodically.

Sophia thought about grabbing her straw broom and shooing him away like a stray cat, but stray cats always come back. What he needed was a good clear photo of his face to take to the police. She shouted at him again, her phone ready, but he kept his back to her.

She glanced around the loungeroom. It looked like a laundromat for tiny, sleepy people with all the clotheslines of pyjamas strung up. She pulled them down and bundled them together into a messy ball. The tiny pyjamas were very soft.

Mark must have used fabric softener when he washed them.

Sophia shouted again, a wild scream that came from somewhere deep inside her and hurled the ball of pyjamas out the window. It caught in the early morning breeze and began to unravel. By a stroke of luck, or miracle, the pyjamas landed on the man, tangling around his head and shoulders.

He jerked as if he had walked through a spider’s web, but the jerking only made him more tangled. He began to howl, panicked. Sophia pressed record on her phone.

Behind her, Mark emerged from the bedroom. Bananas skins clung to his bare chest like starfish.

“Sophia?”

Sophia pulled down another string of pyjamas and tossed them out the window. Mark yelled and crossed the loungeroom in two long strides. He groaned as if in physical pain as he looked out the window. The man was writhing across the footpath. Pyjamas lay scattered and crumpled.

Some were floating with cigarette butts in the gutter.

“What– You’re tossing science out the window!”

Mark took off towards the stairwell and ran barefoot in his boxers to the chalk graffiti artist. He reached for the strings of pyjamas still snarled around the man’s head. The man shied away, hesitated and then bent quickly to pick up his chalk. He took off towards Brunswick Street, his legs a cartoonish blur.

Mark roared and chased after him, bits of banana flicking off as he ran.

Sophia watched them run until they were out of sight.

She walked across to the door and slid the deadbolt across. It settled with a satisfying clunk.

ART BY BETHANY CHERRY

59

HELLO HAIKU & UNICODE

BY JACK BASTOCK

angels on headstones {scrolling dead people’s profile pages†} wrapped in faux fur: cover of Vogue from icy wintour

skin eXXXposed while the sun is sweating

morning jog in a business suit¿

‘Sexiest Wo/Man Alive’ — quickened pulse & a hormonal high tide

boy in a suit @ a special occasion — impressions of a gangster

look twice — ©️elebrity features on the face of a stranger

60

ART BY KIRA MARTIN

money on the ground; play it cool

strangers carry flowers to his place of rest†

clock strikes ~30yrs ‘Congrats, you’ve made it.’

Dear Lana: Find enclosed more songs for you

an enornonymous inheritance

masterly strokes of a brush ,,, gather dust voice of soul in early morn, empty dive bar

ART BY KIRA MARTIN

61

The first time I came out of myself it was not how they had described.

A hum under the surface, weighted and distant.

I opened up and expected the drop Expected to form another.

It was not easy; lying on synthetic carpet, eyes to beige walls.

This was when I was supposed to grow tough.

It was not a reformation.

It was raw.

I still find fibers in my thoughts when lost.

The second time was need above all else.

A transcontinental shed.

Acrid taste of vomit, sweet barbecue tofu, smell of wild orchid and tarmac freshly laid.

A body among warm wet concrete air.

I bubbled up this time.

Climbed out in small bursts.

I still feel sick in greenhouses.

Third chance I rest at the edges.

First time: a misleading phrase.

It implies a last rather than a continuation.

I dip in and out of myself now, come back for visits to taste clay and let myself be still.

Bruised earth well heeled, made in unrest.

I am no longer waiting for something more.

This is all.

BRUISE

BY SARAH BOSTOCK

CREATIVE

MY OLD FIRE

BY LUCINDA HARRISON

I changed my lipstick three times ironed my shirt borrowed my mum’s shoes.

I itched the inside of my elbow Paced the house Clenched my jaw And later I almost cried I almost sobbed sitting up above it all on the hill with a best friend telling her how nice it was to hold your hand.

How different things could have been had I been up there on that hill crying my happy heart out two years ago.

We would have been different people you and I. And we are different now.

Even if all we did was get to know each other all over again and sip flat whites, to the general disdain of the mothers on the next table over, I feel so damn alive having wasted a day with you.

ART BY NICOLA DOBINSON

SIRENS

BY ALYSSA MOOHIN

L The rocking chair swayed back and forth like water against the hull of a ship.

Through the window, she could see that the night was still. In the valley below, the soft glow of the town stretched all the way to the shore.

The front door closed softly behind her. Dry grass crackled underneath her bare feet as she made her way along the winding paths towards the town’s heart.

Within minutes, she heard the sound of scratchy music and drunken shrieks from the balconies. She continued on.

Sometime later, she found herself slipping down the sand banks of the beach; feeling almost drunk on tiredness. She staggered closer to the water, and the damp sand cradled her knees when she fell. She stayed there, waiting for the song that called her to the shore most nights.

64

ou’s hands clenched the wharf’s rotting timber railing. Before her, the world gave way to the sea. The smell of salt and foam washed over her. The town’s buildings were in varying stages of decay: the paint chipped and faded, the verandahs slanted.

Today, the harbour was crowded with bodies. Men carried supplies to and from small fishing vessels, talking loudly. But her gaze was settled on the third of the four docks, where a ship towered over them all.

The Fortune was built for speed. With ten guns, a narrow hull and three masts—she could outrun any slave ship or Spanish man-of-war.

Lou’s eyes scanned the disembarking men, searching for two familiar figures. Felix, the freckled farmer’s son from down the road. And another man, with short dirty-blond hair and the fitted black overcoat Mother had sewn years before.

A hand came to rest on the small of her back: Mother’s. “Have you spotted him?”

Lou shook her head. Her thoughts drifted to the stories he had told her, curled up on his lap as a child. Stories of pirates and privateers and all the places he’d seen. One day, she would’ve convinced him to take her aboard.

A man limped down the wharf. His walk was more laboured than it had been the last time the ship had docked. Felix.

He didn’t return her smile as he stopped in front of them. A question formed on her lips but she saw the apology in his eyes even before he tipped his head and muttered, “I’m sorry.”

The rowboat rocked gently against the rhythm of the water. Lou sat opposite Felix, a few hundred metres from shore. The harbour could be seen far off to the right.

Felix lounged back, his arms crossed behind his head. Under the sun, his hair looked more red than brown, and his freckles stood out against the paleness of his thin face. A handsome face, she had realised in recent years, still thankfully unmarred despite his line of work.

They had sat in the same boat as children, back when she followed him around town, much to his initial annoyance and embarrassment.

He would be twenty soon; she seventeen.

Her gaze focused on the delicate dip of his collarbones at the base of his throat. She looked away.

When Felix arrived at her house this morning to pick up the clothes Mother had sewn his family, she had walked him out. “I need to get out of here,” she told him.

The silence of home was maddening. Each day, Mother sat stoically at her workbench, mending and creating. And, each day, it was becoming harder for Lou to hold her tongue. Felix had nodded, telling her to meet him at the beach.

“When do you leave again?” she asked him.

“Two weeks. I think we’re headed to the Caribbean.”

To intercept Spanish ships in the name of the Queen. The life of a privateer—somewhere between a pirate and a sailor. They fell silent.

Lou draped one arm over the side of the boat, her fingers skimming the surface of the water.

“Do you know what happened to him after he left?” she asked.

Felix stilled. She felt his eyes on her face as she moved her gaze to the coastline. “No.” “I do.” She felt her mind reel. What was the woman’s hair colour? Black like Mother’s? A wild brown like her own? She tried to dismiss the painful thoughts each time they arose, finding it easier to imagine pirates slitting his throat, or slave-owners capturing him off the Mediterranean coast.

“Sirens,” she found herself saying instead.

“Sirens.”

She turned to face him, took in his cautious expression. “You don’t believe in them?” she asked, cocking a brow.

“Do you?”

Her mouth twisted into a sad smile.

“Lou…” She detested the pity that coated his voice.

Felix opened his mouth to say more but she stood abruptly, the boat swaying then jerking violently as she jumped overboard. Millions of tiny bubbles rushed to the surface, and she savoured the fleeting feeling of them against her skin.

ART BY LAUREN HUNTER

CREATIVE

Each morning, Lou delivered the clothes Mother had sewn. She fetched fabrics from the market place. She ripped weeds from the gardens and sprinkled seeds like raindrops as the chickens swarmed. Then, when it was time to eat, she would collect the axe from where it rested against the side of the house, feel the unsympathetic weight as she brought it down in an arc on a chicken’s neck.

Some days, she found herself staring in the direction of the harbour, looking at the sails that were as full as storm clouds. Looking for the lost man. She’d turn the axe on him if he ever returned.

Silence.

She climbed to her feet, not noticing the sand clinging to her skin. Her eyes scanned the dark, struggling to make out the shapes of the breaking waves. She stepped closer.

Foaming water washed over her feet, rising up her calves. Sand shifted underneath her, sucking her further out, until the loose fabric of her shirt floated around her waist.

The safety of shore became an abandoned memory.

The day before Felix was set to depart, she walked along the dirt path to his house. Wheat fields swayed either side of her.

She found him sitting on a bench on the porch, his feet stretched out, head tipped back. Felix never simply sat: he lounged, unafraid of commanding space. He smiled wide and bright when she climbed the two steps. “Ah, I was wondering when you’d come see me off.”

She sat beside him. “Are you excited?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Somewhat. Never been to the Caribbean before.”

She’d never been further than the town’s border.

“Will you miss me?” he asked jokingly.

“Not if I come with you.”

He laughed, but when her expression remained serious, his mirth died. “We’ve been over this.”

“Felix—” “It’s too dangerous for you.”

Her gaze travelled over his clothes: the trousers and loose cotton identical to her own. “Why is it always only too dangerous for me, not you?”

He remained silent.

Lou rose to her feet, pinning him with a disgusted look. Then she was jogging down the steps, across the lawn.

She heard his uneven steps follow her and felt his hand fall on her shoulder. “Wait.”

“For what?” she exclaimed as she turned to face him. “I’m done with waiting at home for you and him to return.”

Felix’s large hands rose and gently cupped her face. “Do you know what happens to women on ships, Lou?” he asked softly. A thumb glided over her cheek and he studied her face as though imagining what it would look like swollen and bloodied. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

She felt his sincerity, but it could not soothe her. She stepped back and his arms fell to his sides.

She turned away, yelling over her shoulder, “Safe travels.”

The run home was a blur on uneven dirt roads, burning calves and watery eyes. Her breasts moved against her chest; she hated them. She would rid herself of them if she could and don the skin of a man like Felix. Then she’d take a ship to the edge of the horizon or hunt down the lost man to demand why their family hadn’t been enough.

The front door slammed behind her. Mother jolted from her sewing station.

Lou stood in the living room, shaking, panting. Her eyes focused on the ruby fabric and needle in Mother’s hand. Would that be Lou in a few years? She wouldn’t let it come to that.

“What’s the matter?” Mother asked.

Had she ever wanted to take to the sea with him? Had she ever wanted more? For as long as Lou could recall, Mother had been where she always was, doing what she always did.

“He didn’t love us anymore, did he?” she asked quietly. In his absences he had become a stranger, but Lou would rather him dead than with another family.

Mother placed the materials on the table, sighing softly before she faced Lou. “No, I don’t think he did.”

She could make out the fading shape of The Fortune as it made for the horizon, its sails full.

She turned away.

The waves broke against her chest and saltwater flooded her mouth. Her head turned this way and that, searching for that voice that pulled her from sleep. But there was just her, the sea and an empty bay.

ART BY LAUREN HUNTER

65

FLASH FICTION PROMPT FOUR: FANTASY AND FABLES THE MYTHIC AND THE FABULAR FANTASTIC IN 100 WORDS AND UNDER

L

ong ago, Snow White’s ancestors invaded a beautiful, sunny land. There she lived in the Queen’s care. The Queen asked her magic mirror, “Who is the fairest in the land?”

It replied, “If you mean fair as in pale, it’s Snow White.

But don’t hold yourself to the beauty standards of your oppressors. Love yourself.”

Snow White knew the Queen was jealous of her vanilla yoghurt complexion. She ran away. Out in the hot sun, without melanin or sunscreen to protect her, her skin grew red and shiny as a ripe apple, and she shrivelled up like an old witch.

BY KAREENA DHALIWAL

VICTORY MARCH eary trumpets heralded his approach.

From her vantage point on top of the paved roof, hidden in the shadows of the chimney, she observed the prince leading the procession.

The dying sun caught the gold woven into his clothes as he waved at the cheering crowd, his chin held obnoxiously high.

His skin was pale and unblemished, as though he had spent the entirety of the war campaign inside his tent, unlike the ragged soldiers following behind.

With swift, practised hands, she notched her bow. Let the arrow fly towards that pompous face.

BY ALYSSA MOOHIN

W

C WHAT LURKS IN THE WOODS All the better to see you with Red was twelve and half years old An idiot, she was not This was clearly a furry It had to be!

What self-respecting wolf would willingly wear grandma’s clothes?

He had almost fooled her His costume truly was impeccable Red would’ve enquired about his tailor Had he not given off creepy stalker vibes Are you after my baked goods?

Mm… Yeah I want your goods Oh! You don’t need such big teeth for cookies!

All the better to eat you with ...what… …I’M NOT INTO VORE!!!

BY THARIDI WALIMUNIGE

inderella fucked out of the party early. She was going to find her prince but he was nanging it up in Tin Alley so she went to Thursgay instead.

BY LIANE

FOR A.C. Odysseia begs the thorns stay still above him and his ball.

A thorn sticks his sleeve like foam.

Petals slip the bloom

BY MICHAEL DAVIES

S

now White was enthusiastic in the group chat but got huffy when she actually saw the chore wheel on the fridge.

That night she ate her sparrow-and-spinach triangles in her room (leaving the burnt tray in the oven) instead of getting UberEATS and watching Kath and Kim together. She never did clean the bathroom. Soon afterwards there was that drama with the apple, so everyone felt too awkward to mention it.

Then of course she woke up, met some guy and moved out immediately. A few months later the dwarves unfollowed her on Instagram and forgot the whole business.

BY ABIGAIL FISHER

SEND US YOUR TINY WORDS: NEXT EDITION’S PROMPT IS PUZZLES, RIDDLES AND LIMERICKS Send your 100-word and under playful puns and terrible games to editors@farragomagazine.com

66

ART BY ILSA HARUN

FOR AND AGAINST: THE GIG ECONOMY FOR BY ANDIE MOORE

T

he gig economy has become the new piñata of regulators and unionists alike. I am not going to pretend it works for everyone or for every profession. However, it is indisputable that gig work suits some people, particularly those least likely to get work. Here is how.

It is not easy to get work. For each new job opening, there is a new cover letter to draft, another 30-minute application, another anxiety-inducing interview, with no guarantee of employment. Finding a job requires time and energy which not everyone has. If you are an honours student smashing out a thesis, you hardly have time to fire off dozens of applications.

If you are a stay-at-home parent supporting several children, the situation is similar.

To score even a retail job, employers ask for experience.

There is the “permission paradox”—that more and more young people cannot get jobs, because they are inexperienced, and cannot get experience because they cannot get jobs.

Work access is not any easier if you find yourself in a minority group. Employment discrimination is still commonplace in waged labour. Unconscious bias can often determine whether you get selected.

One of the major benefits of the gig economy is instant income. Take Uber or Deliveroo, where you can sign up in minutes and find opportunities to make money, picking up someone from the airport or delivering them KFC. The unemployed and underemployed are not left penniless while they wait for businesses to get back to them.

While wage work provides income security, it requires regular time commitments some people cannot make.

Students have exams, children have school holidays—one’s free time fluctuates throughout the year. Gig work allows people to structure their work around their life demands, choose when their work times and workloads.

Not everyone wants to have their projects and timetables dictated to them in a large firm. Consequently, we have seen the rise of freelance platforms for services and consultancy, where people work project-by-project by their own volition.

I agree gig work is not suitable for all work. Casualisation can certainly be harmful. But we cannot ignore the indisputable benefits the gig economy provides. We need a smorgasbord of different work options, and if gig work suits some people, why should we disallow it?

68

AGAINST BY LUKE ADAMS

W

e have been brainwashed into viewing casual or parttime work as a blessing, giving us the ability to willingly chose what, when, where, and how often we work. While the gig economy likes to present itself as a more flexible alternative to full-time employment—especially for young workers juggling work with study—the long-term financial and health (both physical and mental) effects of long-term precarious work are potentially catastrophic.

The gig economy has given rise to new social demands whereby financial constraints are being placed on individuals under the guise of personal freedom. Unlike their full-time counterparts, precarious workers are denied the rights of full-time employees—such as sick, family and compassionate leave—and are susceptible to more dangerous working conditions and job insecurity. All of which undermine the future prospects of precariously employed workers.

The pitfalls of the gig economy were epitomised in the recent Fair Work Commission case involving multinational ride-sharing company and champion of the gig economy Uber, in which the company won a case to classify their drivers as contractors, not employees. This ruling allows to Uber to avoid paying their drivers a minimum wage or any other compulsory worker entitlements typically paid by employers to employees.

The individualisation of late modernity has resulted in people coming to fully accept the responsibility of employment opportunities themselves, despite having little control over the job market in which they seek employment. Limited job opportunities, uncertainty and risks have become internalised as erroneous notions of meritocracy are used to justify growing levels of inequality and exploitation. We have been taught to admire the determination of individuals to push through extreme obstacles rather than question the regulatory inadequacies of our free-market system.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny the crucial role the gig economy has played in providing job opportunities to a generation of young (and old) people, overeducated and underemployed. However, this does not presuppose we accept the gig economy as it currently exists. In order to ensure and protect our economic future, we must first acknowledge the limitations and threats the gig economy, and its so-called “liberating” workplace arrangements pose to the short and long-term future of all workers.

ART BY DAVID ZELEZNIKOW-JOHNSTON

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