2017 Edition 5

SEX | SURREALISM | ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

FARRAGO EDITION 5 2017

RADIO FODDER 2017 SEMESTER 2 TIMETABLE NOW ONLINE! TUNE IN, SPACE OUT

RADIOFODDER.COM

CONTENTS COLLECTIVE 02 03

COMMENTARY

contributors editorial

18 19 20

CAMPUS 04 05 06 07 08 08 09 09 10 10 12 13 14 17

22 24 26 28 30 31 32 34 35 36 38

news nuggets august calendar home system 5 chancellor cheat sheet fishy business full house the new quad entitled iUSELESS split opinions mature age shame breaking (the) news OB reports unimelb field guide

classism is never classy lonely city: new york governing melbourne's soundtrack fleshing it out life in parkville 5 the torch hamilton is not that great pupils 5 the dirt on clean eating loose: a nelly furtarticle on the origin of strangeness 5 steal now, pay later winter pisses me of scream queens

CREATIVE 39 40 42 45 46 48 49 50 52 53 54 56 58 60 61 64 65 66 67

i ventured 8 steps on the road less taken three poems in a house on a hill the grass is always greener the world is fucked pt.5 jerusalem, 1:42am dip in the pool the firer pinecones another nightmare? plight of the hunter a cup of tea in nepal tense recollections 5 little red gumboots existentialism chroma your life is your bitch for and against: ed sheeran

ARTWORK BY ILSA HARUN 01

COLLECTIVE

THE FARRAGO TEAM EDITORS Alexandra Alvaro Amie Green James Macaronas Mary Ntalianis CONTRIBUTORS Kergen Angel Eve Asquith Harry Baker Alexander Baky Tran Ashleigh Barraclough Daniel Beratis Stefan Boscia Hui Qin (HQ) Chan Lief Chan Megan Cheong Ben Clark Chelsea Cucinotta Martin Ditmann Claire Exinger Natalie Fong Sam Hansford Sophia Harrison Wing Kuang Jordan Lane Jasper MacCuspie Claire Miller Ruby Perryman Sarah Peters Tamara Reichman Ella Shi Morgan-Lee Snell Reilly Sullivan Linus Tolliday Jessica Tsin Ti Peter Tzimos Trent Vu Lucy Williams Caitlin Wong Jialin Yang

SUBEDITORS Elizabeth Adams James Agathos Lucy Andrews Kergen Angel Harry Baker Amy Bartholomeusz Amelia Bensley Daniel Beratis Sue-Ann Chan Esther Crowley Noni Cole Esther Le Couteur Sebastian Dodds Katie Doherty Alessia Di Paolo Simone Eckardt Victoria Emerson Esmé James Annie Jiang Celine Lau Vicky Lee Maggy Liu Caitlin McGregor Sinead Medew-Ewen Ellen Muller Jeremy Nadel Jesse Paris-Jourdan Ellie Patton Sarah Peters Ed Pitt Lara Porczak Jeffrey Pullin Claudia Seers Alf Simpson Felicity Sleeman Morgan-Lee Snell Reilly Sullivan Caleb Triscari Peter Tzimos Matt Wojczys Alice Zeng Stephanie Zhang

GRAPHICS Charlotte Bird-Weber Ella Hope Broadbent Edie Bush Leung Chin Ching Ewan Clarke-McIntyre Cornelius Darrell Lynley Eavis Anwyn Elise Veronica Fernando James Goh Minahil Munir Hamdani Ilsa Harun Darus Noel Howard Kyaw Min Htin Carolyn Huane Lauren Hunter Winnie Jiao Clara Cruz Jose Esther Le Couteur Sarah Leong Sarah Fang-Ning Lin Lisa Linton Hanna Liu Eloyse McCall Lilly McLean Rachel Morley Amani Nasarudin Sam Nelson Wasinee Phornnarit (Gwen) Elena Piakis Ruth Simone Rathjen-Duffton Amelia Saward Nellie Seale Morgan-Lee Snell Sophie Sun Selena Tan Jasmine Velkovski Reimena Yee

ARTWORK BY LILLY MCLEAN 02

COLUMNISTS Madeline Bailey Anwyn Elise Ilsa Harun James Hazeldine Carolyn Huane Claire Longhouse (online) Tessa Marshall Harry McLean Monique O’Rafferty (online) Danielle Scrimshaw Claudia Seers (online) Benjamin Smart (online) Linus Tolliday WEB Jenny Huynh Jack Kaloger Cathy Weng SOCIAL MEDIA Elizabeth Haigh Ilsa Harun Annie Liew Monique O’Rafferty Acacia Pip Ramone Taanya Rohira Mega Safira Maddie Spencer COVER Jialin Yang 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, Yasmine Luu. The views expressed herein are not necessarily the views of UMSU, the printers or the editors.

Farrago is printed by Printgraphics, care of efervescent 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.

COLLECTIVE

EDITORIAL

W

elcome to Edition Five! Week 2 of Semester here at University is UMSU Sexplorations Week, so we asked people to send us the questions they never got the answers to in their high school sex ed.

What’s the weirdest kink you’ve heard of?

AA: Calling kinks 'weird' is not nice and I’m not here to yuck someone’s yum. Don’t fuck dead people though.

JM: I think all kinks are simultaneously completely weird and completely normal – Schrodinger’s Kinks. Turn-ons are the most subjective thing after art and the taste of coriander.

MN: I think probably furries? The people who dress up as anthropomorphised animals. But I’m not kink shaming.

AG: Heterosexuality.

How do I tell if I have a condom lost inside my vagina? I think my discharge smells like latex!

AA: Please go to a doctor! It can’t get lost but it might be out of your reach! Weird smelling discharge can mean lots of things.

AG: Once I was cleaning my belly button with a cotton bud and it snapped in half and I forgot about it and found it a week later. It could happen to you too – go see your GP. Can you use a ziplock bag or cling wrap as a substitute for a condom?

AA: Do not do this! Sperm are wiggly and non-latex materials can be perforated. Also ziplock bags have sharp edges and vaginas don’t like that.

AG: No, I too carry my lunch to work in a condom – it’s very economic.

Why do lesbians enjoy phallic shaped objects (like dildos) when they're not into peen?

MN: Okay, so firstly, some women have penises. Secondly, dildos and phallic shaped sex toys are not penises. Finally, genitalia does not equal gender and liking or disliking penetration does not determine your sexuality.

AG: A lot of things are phallic shaped if you think about it. Towers, columns, various fruits…this question needs specificity. Next.

JM: I like columns. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian ...

Can the pill give you depression?

JM's Mum (a GP): There is a possible association between the pill and depression but the connection is not completely straightforward, so it's always a great idea to talk to your GP about what you are feeling before stopping contraception. The GP should take a full history, including asking about a range of symptoms related to depression and enquire about your past and family history too.

If I use a vibrator am I still a virgin?

MN: Virginity is a social construct used to commodify women and shame people who don’t have sex, or who have what society deems to be too much sex.

AG: Did you mean a Virgo? Virgos should definitely self pleasure in the month of August – the moon is your sign right now, ramping up your emotions as your ruling planet (Mercury) is opposed by Pluto, challenging you to confront problem areas.

Confront your areas – go nuts!

Why does cum smell like pancake batter?

AA: You lucked out.

ARTWORK BY RACHEL MORLEY PHOTOGRAPHY AND STYLING BY LYNLEY EAVIS 03

I was looking for my Nintendo DS in my Mum's bedside table and found Chocolate Ripple flavoured condoms and a half-empty bottle of body paint instead. What do I do?

AA: Give your mum a hi-five.

JM: Get a new Nintendo DS. My housemate keeps having her girlfriend over and having aggressively loud sex. I asked her if she could keep it down and instead she started leaving her bedroom door open and leaving sex toys scattered around the house. HELP! MN: Clearly your housemate is trying to establish dominance. Have you tried biting her ear?

AG: You’re salty because your sex life sucks.

Don’t be bitter, be better (download Tinder).

What are the sexiest articles to read in this Edition of Farrago?

AA: Claire Miller writes about the new housing project being erected by the University in ‘Full House’ (pg. 08). You can also get to know the new Chancellor – the daddy of University Council – in ‘The Chancellor Cheat Sheet’ (pg. 07).

MN: If you’re looking for something educational, check out ‘Fleshing It Out’ (pg. 22) by Ella Shi for a breakdown on how the patriarchy determines which sex toys are socially acceptable. Or if you want something looser, you can flip to pg. 32 for Claire Exinger’s defence of female pop musicians in ‘Loose: A Nelly Fertarticle’.

AG: Check out the latest installment of Harry McLeans ‘Life in Parkville’ (pg. 24) where things get really heated!

JM: There’s a lot of intense emotions in this edition – from the earthy imagery of Sarah Peters’ poem ‘Pinecones’ (pg. 52) to the understated absurdity of Harry Baker’s ‘The Firer’ (pg. 50).

Feel it. Love it. Love yourself. Fuck yourself. xoxo – Alex, Amie, James and Mary.

CAMPUS

NEWS NUGGETS TO CADMUS AND BEYOND The University is currently looking to address ghostwriting of assessments outside of Cadmus software. Suggestions at the Teaching & Learning Quality Assurance Committee included incorporating exams with higher weight and the use of timed assessments.

ALL EQUAL Students will soon be able to access their certified documents through new software, eQuals, in response to a review into University Services. Recall of academic transcripts currently incur a fee.

SMARTY PANTS The University of Melbourne has written up a proposal for a project called Smart Cities, which would take place in Melbourne’s Innovation Hub. The project would involve the creation of a ‘Living Lab’, and would operate in partnership with RMIT, the City of Melbourne and the Queen Victoria Market.

GROWING EXISTENTIALISM Australian Catholic University has warned a Senate Inquiry that cuts to higher education poses an “existential risk” to smaller universities, some of which are already operating at a deficit.

A N-EWEN ERA UniMelb’s new Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous) is Professor Shaun Ewen.

WIN FOR UNIVERSITIES Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton has backed down on aspects of the new rules concerning 457 visas, meaning Vice-Chancellors and lecturers will still be able to obtain ENGAGING WITH a four-year temporary visa and the INTERNATIONAL SU opportunity for permanent residency.

MASTER OF MYSTERY The University of This comes after lobbying (THIS IS AN AUSTIN Melbourne’s next Pro Vicefrom Universities Australia POWERS REFERENCE) Chancellor (Engagement) will be and Group of Eight The University of Melbourne is Professor Su Baker. Su has been Universities. currently looking at providing Director of the Victorian College ALL DRESSED an International Master of of the Arts and Melbourne UP Journalism, alongside HEYO AO Conservatorium of Music Group of Eight chair, its current Master of UoM Provost since 2010.

Professor Peter Høj has said Journalism.

Margaret Sheil has that whilst the government’s added been awarded AO funding to schooling is a good start, in recognition of her the effects will be “dampened” through services to research cuts to the higher education sector. “It and higher would be like being ‘all dressed up education. with nowhere to go’ for students DEATH graduating from the improved OF THE ATAR school system,” he said.

According to the latest 1800RESPECT Department of Education There is now growing and Training figures, just pressure to create a 1800 under half of students starting hotline for victims of campus bachelor degrees are accepted on sexual assault after End Rape on ATAR the basis of their ATAR scores, Campus Chair, Sharna Brenner SHMAYTAR with institutions looking to claimed that she no longer feels A Higher Education other aspects to determine comfortable referring victims to Standards Panel discussion eligibility.

1800RESPECT due to waiting paper has indicated that times and delays in seeking students accepted into their trauma counselling. courses using ATAR are more likely to drop out of their course.

ARTWORK BY CLARA CRUZ JOSE 04

CAMPUS

AUGUST CALENDAR WEEK 1

WEEK 2

WEEK 3

Monday 31

Monday 7 1pm: Constitutional Working Group 1pm: Activities – Monday BBQ @ North Court

Monday 14 Women in Higher Education Week

Tuesday August 1 10am-2pm: Enviro – Bike Co-op 1pm: Activities – Tuesday BBQ @ North Court 1pm: PoC – People of Colour Collective @ Training Room 2 1pm: Queer – Trans Collective @ Training Room 2 5.15pm: Enviro – Play With Your Food

Tuesday 8 10am-2pm: Enviro – Bike Co-op 1pm: Queer – Trans Collective @ Training Room 2 5.15pm: Enviro – GreenScreen (movie screening)

Tuesday 15 10am-2pm: Enviro – Bike Co-op 1pm: Activities – Tuesday BBQ @ North Court 1pm: PoC – People of Colour Collective @ Graham Cornish B 1pm: Queer – Trans Collective @ Training Room 2 5.15pm: Enviro – Play With Your Food

Wednesday 26 12pm: Women's – Women's Collective @ Women's Room 1pm: PoC – People of Colour Collective @ Graham Cornish B 1-2pm: Mudcrabs – Rowdy Laughter 1pm: Queer – Queer Lunch @ Queer Space

Wednesday 2 12pm: Women's – Women's Collective @ Women's Room 1pm: Queer – Queer Lunch @ Queer Space 1-2pm: Mudcrabs – Rowdy Laughter 7pm: Activities – Union House House Party

Wednesday 9 12pm: Women's – Women's Collective @ Women's Room 1pm: PoC – People of Colour Collective @ Graham Cornish B 1-2pm: Mudcrabs – Rowdy Laughter 1pm: Queer – Queer Lunch @ Queer Space 7pm: Activities – Trivia

Wednesday 16 12pm: Women's – Women's Collective @ Women's Room 1-2pm: Mudcrabs – Rowdy Laughter 1pm: Queer – Queer Lunch @ Queer Space

Thursday 27 12pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective @ Mary Cooke A 1pm: Creative Arts – Creative Arts Collective 1pm: Queer – Queer Games @ Queer Space 2pm: Ethical Working Group 4.30pm: PoC – Moana Screening @ Rowden White Library 4.30pm – Farrago Edition 5 launch @ Tsubu Bar 5.30pm: Ed Pub – Ed Pub@Pub @ Tsubu Bar

Thursday 3 12pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective @ Training Room 1 1pm: Creative Arts – Creative Arts Collective 1pm: Queer – Queer Games @ Queer Space 6pm: Creative Arts – Pot Luck Open Mic Night (PLOM)

Thursday 10 12pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective @ Training Room 2 1pm: Creative Arts – Creative Arts Collective 1pm: Queer – Queer Games @ Queer Space 2pm: Ethical Working Group

Thursday 17 12pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective @ Training Room 1 1pm: Creative Arts – Creative Arts Collective 1pm: Queer – Queer Games @ Queer Space 4.30pm – Wordplay 5 @ Media Office

Friday 28 1pm: Queer – Women Loving Women Collective @ Training Room 2

Friday 4 Enviro – Fair Trade Fortnight begins 1pm: Queer – Women Loving Women Collective @ Training Room 2

Friday 11 1pm: Queer – Women Loving Women Collective @ Training Room 2

Friday 18 1pm: Queer – Women Loving Women Collective @ Training Room 2

Monday July 24 Burnley – UMSU Stall @ Burnley Disabilities – Round 2 Auslan Classes begin this week 1pm: Constitutional Working Group

Tuesday 25 10am-2pm: Enviro – Bike Co-op 1pm: Activities – Tuesday BBQ @ North Court 1pm: Queer – Trans Collective @ Training Room 2 5.15pm: Queer – Queer Presents: Movie Night!

5.15pm: Enviro – GreenScreen (movie screening) 6pm: Creative Arts – Mudfest Program Launch Party

WEEK 4

05 Reverse this calendar to see Anwyn Elise’s ‘Home System’. Each edition will piece together to form an eight part artwork.

CAMPUS

CHANCELLOR CHEAT SHEET WORDS BY MARTIN DITMANN & ASHLEIGH BARRACLOUGH ARTWORK BY RACHEL MORLEY

THE CHANCELLOR: THE COUNCIL, PHILANTHROPY AND HECS

I

n November last year, prominent businessman and barrister Allan Myers was named as the new Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Recently, the team at Farrago had the chance to catch up with him and to ind out a little bit more about the man behind the title.

The Life of the Chancellor Although Myers is currently worth approximately $680 million, 52 years ago, he was just your typical prospective Law and Arts student.

After leaving his family home in Dunkeld, he found himself at Newman College, where he stayed for the next seven years, ive as a student and two as a tutor.

“I’m the irst of my family and the irst of the township of Dunkeld, as far as I know, to ever attend university,” he told Farrago.

After graduating from university, Myers then went on to study Civil Law at the University of Oxford. He later became a barrister, representing prominent igures and organisations such as Gina Rinehart, Kerry Stokes, Andrew Forrest and BHP Billiton.

Some of his other notable achievements include chairing the University of Melbourne’s 'Believe' campaign, a philanthropic mission that has raised a whopping $500 million dollars in two and a half years, half of the original allocated time.

While Myers no longer chairs the Believe campaign, he still possesses strong opinions on philanthropy and the level of appropriate access to University administrators that should be given to donors.

“I don’t know what excessive access would be. If someone is going to give some money, they’re entitled to ask exactly how it should be spent,” he says.

Myers sees the involvement of donors as a positive, but acknowledges that their inluence changes the University.

On 1 January 2017, he oicially became the University’s Chancellor, succeeding businesswoman Elizabeth Alexander.

His role as Chancellor Myers does not believe that anyone runs the University. Instead, he sees himself being a part of and leading a cohesive University Council.

That said, Myers does want to be a igure that stands for the “best values” of the University.

07

“The University is involved intimately, inextricably, in all aspects of our society that are touched by education and research”.

As a former college student, he also wants to see an equivalent level of pastoral care provided for every student that needs it, particularly those from regional, interstate and international backgrounds.

“If I hadn’t had the support of living in college, I wouldn’t have survived. No question,” he says.

Heading the council In terms of his role in the council, Myers wants to emphasise that it is not his ‘one man show.’ Instead, he is a member of a larger team that works together to interact with the students.

As for future improvements, Myers wants the Council to be more culturally diverse and “properly balanced.”

Only by reining the council, can it continue to maintain control and accountability.

“Institutions aren’t for revolution, institutions are for the opposite of revolution. They’re about keeping the foundations of society steady, not blowing them up,” he says.

The HECS and welfare systems Myers was one of the lucky few who had his education paid for him. He also received a sizeable living allowance from the government due to his family’s low socioeconomic background.

“In those days the living allowance enabled one to live a decent life as a student, pay college fees and not have to worry about taking outside employment,” he said.

He believes that the current HECS model is in dire need of reform, and supports the idea of means testing university fees.

“I don’t see why, if you’ve got the means to pay yourself, you would expect someone else to pay…I don’t see why a billionaire’s son or daughter should have their university fees paid, even if they’re clever.”

Myers wishes to see students from low inancial backgrounds to “have all of their fees paid and an allowance so they wouldn’t have to stack shelves 30 hours a week”.

He described government assistance for students as a “balancing issue” which politicians must deal with.

CAMPUS

FISHY BUSINESS

FULL HOUSE WORDS BY CLAIRE MILLER ARTWORK BY AMANI NASARUDIN

WORDS BY RUBY PERRYMAN ARTWORK BY AMANI NASARUDIN

T

he University of Melbourne is currently considering purchasing a site at Fishermans Bend, a large urban renewal project site located south of the Yarra River, a 20-minute drive away from the Parkville Campus.

Currently, the University will not provide a proposed timeline for Fishermans Bend purchasing or information on the prospective development there.

As it is an industrial site, Fishermans Bend is primarily used for manufacturing and development.

There has been much speculation regarding what exactly the University wishes to relocate to Fishermans Bend if they are indeed able to purchase a site there.

According to a University spokesperson, the University is in discussions regarding the possible purchase of a site at Fishermans Bend to provide more space and more opportunities for industry engagement for researchers and students.

The University is pushing recruitment for the School of Engineering in order to expand the faculty. The University predicts the Melbourne School of Engineering will grow to over 6,000 students by 2020, for which the current Parkville campus might not have enough room. Rumours are circulating that the Engineering Faculty could be moved to the Fishermans Bend site, especially considering its current large drain on the CBD’s energy grid.

A University spokesperson has however clariied that facilities and space to accommodate the growth in Engineering students and staf numbers will be developed on the Parkville campus.

They will also be developed on the new innovation precinct on the former Royal Women’s Hospital site, which was recently purchased by the University.

It has already been announced that the old Women's Hospital site is set to become the STELaR (Science Technology Engineering and Leadership and Research) Lab. This will be a joint $13 million project between the University, RMIT, the Defense Institute and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin is a military research and weapons manufacturing company from the United States, and has been the target of several student protests since its partnership with the University was announced.

Some speculate that the University may wish to relocate the STELar Lab to Fishermans Bend. As it is industrial site, engineers would be able to test luid dynamics and aerodynamics in the space with Lockheed Martin.

The University would not conirm or deny speculation at the present time.

A

new student accommodation facility will be built by the University of Melbourne in partnership with student housing operator UniLodge, a company whose housing facilties students have described as overpriced and unsanitary.

The Bouverie Street facility is the University’s response to an unmet demand in student housing, and aims to provide 6,000 accommodation places for students in locations situated within walking distance of the Parkville campus by 2020.

Project Lead on Major Projects in the Policy and Projects Division of the University’s Chancellery, Alex Kennedy, said the University’s goal is to provide accommodation that is high quality, safe and afordable.

The current price of a studio apartment at another UniLodge facility on Bouverie street is $373 per week for 12 months. The University has not speciied what students will be charged to live in its latest development. Kennedy has said that the Bouverie Street development will be “targeted at a particularly afordable end of the market”.

An anonymous student found that the cost of rent at a UniLodge facility in the city overly expensive.

“A lot ind it expensive, including me, a lot of my friends think with the same price, they can live in a much newer, better place but without a good location which is near campus,” he said.

According to UniLodge occupant and student at the University of Melbourne, Jun Wen Chan, the standard of cleanliness at the building where he stays may not be the same as what the University is striving for.

“At night, or even on quiet afternoons, you can ind mice running along corridors, sneaking around, and picking up food scraps in the kitchen. Cockroaches roam around everywhere during warmer seasons. Bathrooms sometimes sprout fungi in crevices.”

Despite the conditions in which the students live Chan emphasised the strong feeling of community amongst the students.

President of University of Melbourne Student Union, Yan Zhuang, said student housing is an area where studentsare easily exploited.

“UMSU believes that not only does there need to be a wider range of afordable student accommodation, but that those providing such accommodation need to be held accountable to the standards they purport to deliver."

From 2019, students will be able to apply for accommodation through a centralised process which will enable students to select preferred locations, price points and accommodation types.

08

CAMPUS

THE NEW QUAD

ENTITLED

WORDS BY WING KUANG ARTWORK BY ANWYN ELISE

WORDS BY DANIEL BERATIS ARTWORK BY ANWYN ELISE

T

he University of Melbourne has announced a restoration project for the Old Quadrangle, as part of its ongoing ‘Growing Esteem’ campaign.

The campaign is a strategic plan to provide better education, research facilities and learning spaces to students and staf across campus by 2020. According to the University, the renovation of the Old Quad is a step in this process.

A spokesperson for the University said the restoration would focus on rebuilding the original features of the Old Quad, and improve the teaching and learning infrastructure inside the building.

“This work will create a number of lexible spaces, including an exhibition and gallery area to house cultural collections and venues for events and celebrations, including public lectures, seminars, launches, receptions and ceremonial events. It will also reinstate teaching space along the ground loor of the east wing, accessed directly of the cloister,” the spokesperson said.

Third year Bachelor of Arts student, Jessica Chan was excited that the University is attempting to improve current on-campus facilities.

“The restoration project sounds like a good plan to revitalise the space, and repurpose it to be used for a wider range of events,” Chan said.

Third year student Natalia Naa was unsure if creating exhibition spaces is a priority for students, as current facilities do not seem to meet the increasing demand from students for study spaces.

“Libraries and current study spots are not enough to accommodate everyone,” she said.

The Flexable Academic Programing Green Paper for Optimising Phsical Infrastructure released earlier this year also recommended the University increase the number of informal study spaces on campus. The plans do seem in line with students’ desire for more workspace.

“Having the additional teaching space should enable more subjects to be taught in Old Quad and give more students the opportunity to study there,” Chan said.

According to a University spokesperson, the restoration team has been working with the University to minimise disruption to staf and students. However, oicial measures are yet to be decided.

Access to Old Quad has been closed since 26 June for the restoration, with aims to complete construction by November 2018.

The Old Quad is the oldest building on the Parkville campus and is included in the Victorian Heritage Register. The building contains one council chamber, six seminar rooms and examination venue, University Hall.

U

niversity of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) President, Yan Zhuang, has challenged the accuracy of The Australian’s reporting of the 'How Privilege Manifests in Tutorials' workshops that UMSU ran as part of the University of Melbourne’s Diversity Week.

The article, 'Uni holds workshops on ‘male privilege’', claimed UMSU had used the workshop to develop a report arguing that “Men should…acknowledge that being born male and white afords them certain privileges” and that “recommendations were given to staf at the University” by UMSU. According to Zhuang, despite what has been published in The Australian, no male students have been instructed to modify their behaviour on campus and University staf have not received recommendations as a result of these workshops.

“The document that The Australian refers to regarding this report is an Oice Bearer report that had been submitted to Students’ Council: a regular accountability measure that we have in place for all Oice Bearers," she said.

“The Oice Bearer report was the notes taken from that meeting rather than any kind of recommendation; it was a relection of what students were saying rather than a relection of the Union’s position.”

According to the Oice Bearers’ report, the workshops were “student-led” and examined “the ways in which privilege and unconscious bias permeate tutorials and seminars”.

The article that appeared in The Australian quoted views that were expressed in the workshop and recorded in the Oicer Bearer report; “men should … not speak with absolute conidence when they are in fact not sure or expressing an opinion”.

The Australian cited criticisms of “extreme political correctness” and fostering a “snowlake culture” leveled by think tanks.

“By asking men to tone down and speak like women, [UMSU] is simultaneously discriminating against men and patronising women,” Dr d’Abrera, from the Institute of Public Afairs, said.

Similarly, Jeremy Sammut from the Centre for Independent Research stated “[Students are] being told to not only watch what they say but how they say it…If these students can’t handle the exchange of difering views, how will they ever go on to become a CEO or the Prime Minister of the country?”

Sinead Manning, UMSU Education (Public) Oicer, established the workshops in conjunction with People of Colour Oicers, Ella Shi and Hannan Al Daqqa.

Manning said that more workshops could come. “Ideally, we’d like to run more. I think it was actually a really valuable experience for everybody who participated.”

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CAMPUS

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iUSELESS

SPLIT OPINIONS

WORDS BY CHELSEA CUCINOTTA ARTWORK BY LEUNG CHIN CHING

WORDS BY JASPER MACCUSPIE ARTWORK BY LEUNG CHIN CHING

he Graduate Student Association (GSA) is becoming increasingly frustrated with the exclusion of international postgraduate students from iUSE concession Mykis.

Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade, Philip Dalidakis, announced on 4 May that the trials on iUSE would be extended to the end of 2018 for full time international undergraduate and VET students. However, postgraduate students in Victoria are still ineligible to use the pass.

Launched in 2015, iUSE partners with 21 Victorian educational institutions to ofer students a 50 per cent discount of the cost of an annual Myki pass, for the zones in which they study. The government covers 25 per cent of the student’s transport expenses, while the participating institution funds an additional 25 per cent.

According to Dalidakis, “The discount is one of the many reasons that around a third of all international students who come to Australia choose Victoria over other states, with no discount available in New South Wales.”

Newly elected President of the GSA, Georgia Daly, disagrees with the exclusion of postgraduate students from the iUSE program.

She believes that it fails to recognise the contribution international postgraduate students provide to Victoria, and ignores the inancial tensions with which postgraduate students already struggle.

According to Daly, a 2015 report suggested that the growth in Victorian international student enrolment is largely driven by the growth in postgraduate students.

Additionally, nearly 70 per cent of full-time domestic postgraduate coursework students have a mean income of less than $30,000, and 45.6 per cent have incomes below $20,000.

International students are in a similar position, with the average annual income for a full-time international postgraduate coursework student being $18,200.

“Being asked to pay the full fare makes a really signiicant diference in the bottom lines of these students’ budgets,” says Daly.

International student, Jane Lee, agrees. “The lack of support for postgraduates in this way, only adds to the inancial diiculties of students. By not being able to receive concession for public transport, postgraduate courses seem an unnecessary endeavour.”

The GSA has lobbied on this issue since 2008, through the Fares Fair campaign. The student-led campaign involves members from the Council of Australian Postgraduate Association, the GSA, Monash, VU and Swinburne.

Daly asks all undergraduate students who intend on continuing study at postgraduate level to oppose the exclusion.

“Get involved now and help us change this before you have to start paying an extra $20 per week just to get to Uni.”

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tudents and staf may be disadvantaged by new employment contracts proposed by the University in its collective bargaining agreement, currently being negotiated with the National Teaching and Education Union (NTEU).

For students, the most worrying potential changes are those to casual employee rights. Sara Brocklesby, secretary of the Melbourne University branch of the NTEU, said a ‘signiicant’ proportion of casual employees are students in their own rights – graduate students employed as tutors, research assistants and many other positions.

Documents produced by the University in regards to these negotiations claim that the impact will be small for these employees.

“There is no reduction to the casual hourly rates of pay contemplated in the University’s draft agreements,” the document reads. However the NTEU is currently working to improve job security for casual workers.

“We believe there are a number of employees who have spent too long on casual contracts, creating unnecessary uncertainty.

We have proposed a new employment ‘periodic’ category and are committed to reviewing existing casual engagement to identify opportunity to transition casuals to ongoing or ixed term periodic employment,” Brocklesby said.

According to Brocklesby, these contract agreements have already impacted students.

“When you see particular types of work within the University devalued, staf morale is diminished. It is very hard for professional staf to deliver the services that students need to do well at uni.”

“Some staf here are too stressed [by the negotiations] to give the help to students that they want to give,” Brocklesby said.

The University’s proposal also separates the contracts into two separate agreements: one for academic staf, and one for support and administrative staf. The University believes that this separation will enable more eicient and relevant agreements. An internally circulated document from the University addresses this point.

“We believe there are suicient diferences between the academic and professional employees, to warrant separate agreements. Separate streams of bargaining will be more eicient and better address the speciic terms and conditions of the respective occupations.”

Brocklesby says split agreements in other Universities have seen a range of issues arise.

“We ind that when the agreement is split, professional staf can deteriorate. You also have situations where pay rises are set at diferent percentages.”

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Listen up mes enfants – democracy is the new sexy and elections are the new now.

From 4 – 8 September, the future of the student union is in your hands, so – vote! Vote like your life depends on it. Exercise your democratic right in the same way you'd flex angst in opposition to decay. The student union needs you and you need your student union – it's like the whale and the little fish, or the bicycle and the bicycle repairperson. Elections are the only thing keeping the arthropods at bay, so get down to a voting booth and cast your ballot, damn it!

If you'd like to run in the elections, nominations open Monday 24 July and close on Friday 11 August.

More information can be found at umsu.unimelb.edu.au/elections, or by contacting the big guys upstairs at returningofficer@union.unimelb.edu.au.

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MATURE AGE SHAME WORDS BY MEGAN CHEONG ARTWORK BY RUTH SIMONE RATHJEN-DUFFTON

WHY WE SHOULD HAVE A LITTLE EMPATHY FOR MATURE AGE STUDENTS

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private health insurance). What were these people still doing here?

My friends and I warmly welcomed 30 in its early days. I clearly remember at least two separate occasions on which two of my closest friends and I were sipping gin and tonics and chuckling smugly over insecurities dead and gone with an almost corporeal sense of self and a pleasantly surprising wash of contentment. As a fellow mature-age student put it, at 30, “You don’t feel the same pressure to make friends.” Five months in, and the same friends have seek.com permanently open in their browser at work and I’m back at the University of Melbourne where I was supposed to be making a good start on adulthood 12 years ago.

This is not so much intended as a warning as it is, I hope, a reassurance. With the disclaimer that that this interminable search for a vocation is in all likelihood a very irst-world symptom of some deeper generational issue, the idea that the years, though they may age you, will at least gift you with greater decisiveness, or that once made, the Great Decisions of Life will silence the questions you torture yourself with in order to arrive at them, is bullshit. If you’re someone who’s interested in life in the sense of living, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever stop questioning what it is you choose to do with your time.

Of the adjectives used by others to describe my decision to take a year of from full-time work in favour of part-time study, my favourite is “brave”. After spending several years labouring under my decidedly underdeveloped adolescent notions of success, I’m ready to consider that it might be brave to interrogate your occupation and preoccupations. It may even be courageous to try that thing that has nothing to do with anything or anyone else but yourself.

he most empathetic student feels at least a little impatience with the mature-age student who’s got their hand up yet again, or whose so-much-longer-than-everyone-else’s response causes the tutorial to trail past the allocated inish time.

I’ve accordingly tried to stem the low of opinions (which, having had an additional 10 years to ferment and solidify, threatens to burst forth at any moment) by limiting the number and length of my contributions during my second-year creative noniction tute.

However, despite my attempts to remain incognito, I’ve discovered that I’m wholly unable to prevent myself from blurting out “matureage student” during introductions, as if it were some kind of confession. Luckily, the undergrads I share my classes with have responded with an open friendliness suggestive of a complete lack of prejudice (one girl even went so far as to reassure me, “Well… you don’t look it!”).

More than that, throughout the semester, they’ve demonstrated an all-inclusive consideration for one another and a maturity that, I’m sad to say, I cannot retrospectively perceive in my 20-yearold self. As is so often the case, I’ve realised that the source of the judgement which has given rise to the shame I feel at inding myself back at the University of Melbourne at the age of 30 is not external, but a younger, altogether more sanctimonious self.

When I try to remember the exact nature of the gripe I had with mature-age students as an undergrad, the discomfort that comes to mind strikes me as somewhat more complex than impatience. The real issue, I believe, was their failure to meet my then criteria for success at 30-plus years of age. At 30, I thought, one should have a career, one should have established oneself (this having something vaguely to do with earning enough money to be able to aford

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BREAKING (THE) NEWS WORDS BY PETER TZIMOS ARTWORK BY MINAHIL MUNIR HAMDANI

UNIMELB TO INCREASE LENGTH OF ROWS IN LECTURE THEATRES

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he University of Melbourne has recently announced new upgrades to campus buildings, with bigger lecture theatres to be introduced so all students can sit at the ends of rows.

According to information gathered exclusively by the Farrago investigative reporting team, construction work will once again disrupt students coming into Semester 2. The expansions are set to begin in late August.

The renovations, which will see all lecture theatres almost tripled in size, will cost the University upwards of $12 million.

Vice Chancellor, Glyn Davis, assured Farrago that the changes would be worth the money.

“We ind that a lot of students avoid their classmates in lectures, and prefer to sit on their own so they can fully immerse themselves in the class content. This new initiative seeks to maximise productivity and eiciency. I think we’ll see a spike in attendance like never before,” he said.

When asked about how this new seating plan would afect student wellbeing, University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) Welfare Oicer, Ryan Davey, praised this step forward by University administration.

“The majority of students hate their classmates. Making fake friends in lectures is almost as bad as those ‘Fun Facts About You’ introductions we’re forced to do in tutorials,” he said. “Bring on the endless labyrinth of rows and aisles, I say."

After approaching over 100 students, the Farrago reporting

team was able to gauge just how students received the news of these changes. Many students were unable to answer, as they claimed never to have attended a lecture in person.

Students who did attend lectures gave varied responses to the proposed construction site. Bachelor of Arts student, Mikaylah White, was excited by the thought of being able to have more privacy in what can often be a tightly packed lecture theatre.

“Now I don’t have to put my brightness on low when I’m on ASOS. I can inally buy my dashikis and headdresses without having some liberal wanker breathing down my neck,” she said.

Some students even went as far as to threaten abstaining from lectures altogether. Third year Bachelor of Science student, Alan Perez was one such student.

“Fuck it, I might not even show up to class at all. Soon enough, tutorials will have more tables than students just so they don’t have to share. How is a tutor supposed to take attendance if he can’t even see the back wall of the room?” he said.

When asked if perhaps it was the lectures themselves that were deterring students, Davis stressed that intensive research had been done to quell any such suspicion.

“I think we would know if our students didn’t like coming to lectures,” he emphasised. “That’s what the SES surveys are for.”

'Breaking (the) News' is Farrago's satire column and is not to be taken seriously.

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OFFICE BEARER REPORTS PRESIDENT | YAN ZHUANG Welcome, and welcome back to another (hopefully) gut clenching, blood pounding semester that'll leave you all tingly inside! If it’s your irst time here, I sincerely apologise – these themes keep getting harder and harder, and it's been a real pain in the ass cumming up with all these puns.

In the irst few weeks of semester, we have a bunch of events bound to stir the blood in your loins. Week 2 is Sexplorations Week, or as I like to call it, the sex ed I wish I'd gotten in school.

And just when you thought you couldn't take any more (events), we have Women in Higher Ed Week coming up in Week 4. And on a less sexy but equally important note, the results of the nationwide sexual assault survey conducted by Universities Australia will be released on 1 August. We aim to keep you in the loop about what the data means for the University of Melbourne and where we go from here, so stay tuned.

GENERAL SECRETARY | YASMINE LUU Your Genital Sexretary has been working really hard all break to bring you a sexy Semester 2! UMSU is cockablock full of events and activities during O Week (read: ohhh ohh OH week) and the rest of semester. There will be the usual C*nstitutional working group and Ethical working group. Don’t forget to cum on down to Students’ Council as well, it’s always a little fun.

Make sure to take part in the sextivities of Sexplorations 2017, and learn everything there is to know about consent, intimacy and relationships. As always, I’m giving you the reminder to get involved with UMSU. Join a club (a sexy club!), be a volunteer (a sexy volunteer!) or start your own student initiative (a sexy student initiative!). There are so many opportunities and they’re all out in the open, naked for you to ask consensually to be a part of! Stay sex positive kids!

EDUCATION (ACADEMIC) | CALEY MCPHERSON & ROGER SAMUEL Semester 2 is here, and we're proud to announce that the Counter Course Handbook is online and ready for you to funnel your enthusiasm, rage and helpful tips for fellow students into. Check it out at: https://umsu.unimelb.edu.au/counter-course-handbook/ Our pursuit of a fairer lecture recording policy has been turning up exciting results; a report and re-write of the current policy is being put together by senior Chancellery academics in collaboration with UMSU, and will hopefully soon become a reality.

Work on improving assessment feedback and student disengagement is progressing, and may involve some focus groups with cash incentives; contact the UMSU Education Facebook page for more information. We have also been investigating new teaching tools aimed at improving lecture participation, which are still in early stages. WinterFest has been a wonderful welcome to an excitement-illed semester, and we can't wait to share it with you.

EDUCATION (PUBLIC) | SINEAD MANNING Submission and Dominance with Education (Public Afairs) (Senate) Submission I wrote an UMSU submission for the Senate Inquiry into the Higher Education Bill. UMSU opposes the proposed changes (fee increases, funding cuts, lowering the HELP repayment threshold) and calls on the Senate to do the same.

Dominance (education empowers) Knowledge is power. Get intimately acquainted with our department, campaigns and events via Facebook. Working together, students are in control whilst the University is all tied up!

WELFARE | RYAN DAVEY & TERESA GORNALL Semester 1 was a HUGE success for the Welfare Department. Our breakfasts just kept on growing. We hope the cold weather doesn’t diminish the size of our events, for WinterFest is nearly on top of us. For our Winter Wonderland, we will have s’mores and mulled cider to keep you warm – but if that doesn’t get you going, we have a huge sausage fest to satiate your appetite. Snow use trying to resist. Come along and get down to our Winter Wonderland. In Semester 2, our weekly classes will be back to keep you limber – Yoga, Zumba and Meditation.

Fill all of your deepest desires with our eggs and bacon and keep your toast spread…with penis butter, jam and vagimite.

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DISABILITIES | ALSTON CHU & CASSANDRA PRIGG Don't try to draw out your O Week too long, it's time to get amongst the new semester!

The next round of level 1 Auslan classes will be starting Week 1 for anyone who likes getting in and out before the semester gets too hard. For more mature patrons, a Level 2 class (as well as a second Level 1 class) will be starting Week 7. Sexplorations (the event formerly known as Rad Sex and Consent week), is coming up to give you a golden experience. Look out for (hopefully) workshops on sex with physical disability, navigating relationships with mental illness and more. Last up, we're getting together a disabilities conference if you wanted to get a little closer with fellow disabled students.

Keep your passion (and ideas of what you want out of the university environment) building for that little getaway on the weekend starting 15 September.

INDIGENOUS | MARLEY HOLLOWAY-CLARKE & WUNAMBI CONNOR Marley and Wunambi did not submit a report. Oh no!

PEOPLE OF COLOUR | ELLA SHI & HANANN AL DAQQA Welcome back to Semester 2! Or hello if you’re new here! We hope you’ve had a relaxing break illed with fun times *eggplant emoji* We’ll be screening Moana on Thursday Week 1 at 4:30pm in the Rowdy and it will be a great chance to chill and meet new people.

The usual programming also continues for the People of Colour department including collective with more delicious food and our Race and Diaspora reading group. Keep an eye out for our event schedule in the Farrago calendar or via our Facebook and Instagram (@ UMSUpeopleofcolour). In lieu of a sexy pun, we just want to say that you don’t need to put up with people who fetishize your race, and remind you to dismantle European beauty standards.

QUEER | BLAKE ATMAJA & EVELYN LESH Surprise! We’re back and even more queer than before, probably! Also hello to my aunt Jan, the two new Destiny’s bébés that Beyoncé has blessed us with, and anxiety, who holds a special place in my heart and bed. It’s time we all sat down, got comfy and had the talk about SEXY times. That is, ‘Students Engaging e(X)tracurricularly, Yes’ times, and they can be had any way you want or need with the Queer Department! Leading up into the second semester is the foreplay of Winterfest, two weeks of snow-time delight that’ll tantalise and leave you wanting more show bags and goodies. The Queer bunch is putting on a show for you with tea parties, movie nights and giveaways so there’s going to be something that you can sink your teeth into. Moving into the semester we’ve also got our annual Sex Week, in which you can brush up or even learn new ways to mingle with friends, lovers, whomever! I hope you enjoyed the break, cause the next few weeks are going to get bumpy!

WOMEN’S | HANNAH BILLETT Welcome back to Semester 2! The last few months were just foreplay – now it’s time for the main event. I hope it is illed with lots of lovely orgasms, if that’s what you’re into. Make sure you get the most of your semester by cumming to the Women’s Room. For a woman to visit Union House without stopping by the Women’s Room, near the elevators on Level 1, would be like getting it on without appropriate protection – a very bad idea. We have everything you need to have a fun and safe time – condoms, dams, lube and hair ties (yes, hair ties – they have many uses). We also have a wall full of books by amazing women authors, many of which feature fascinating feminist insights on sex, sexuality and all manners of related things, if that lights your ire. Knowledge is hot, okay? We all have funny stories to share and maybe even a few questions. The Women’s Collective on Wednesdays at 12pm in the Women’s Room is the perfect place to have these chats. We provide a welcoming and approachable environment and more than enough snacks. So here’s to a sexy semester and let’s hope it doesn’t inish too soon.

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ACTIVITIES | JACINTA COOPER & LYDIA PAEVERE Welcome back friends! Hope you’re feeling funky fresh after the break and ready for a semester of your favourite activities! Activities will be kicking of Semester 2 with the sexy UNION HOUSE HOUSE PARTY in Week 2. It’s gonna be a BIG one. Tickets are on sale at Carnival Day or at the info desk of Union House – check out our Facebook page for more details!

We hear that in Week 3 it is going to be hard to not attend a single event, there are just so many.

Keep an eye out for large erections on campus Tuesday morning! And there will be a BBQ on both Monday AND Tuesday that week *wow reacts only* brought to you by the amazing UMSU Entertainment Department! We hope you have some endurance left for Trivia on the Wednesday.

CLUBS & SOCIETIES | GULSARA KAPLUN & KAYLEY CUZZUBBO Is your mind and body all recharged from the break, ready to be thrown back into studies?

Having fantasies of all those H1s you are going to score? Instead, you should let clubs seduce you to the dark side. Prepare your body for a semester of club fun by checking out our exposè of clubs on Concrete Lawns who have been put on display purely for your enjoyment during WinterFest.

Earlier that week, swing by carnival day to get a little bit more familiar with your Oice Bearers, promise we don’t bite, unless you ask nicely. If you are too busy to appreciate our assets during WinterFest, the irst two weeks of semester is our “welcome back” period and all our clubs will be more active than usual trying to satisfy your co-curricular needs.

CREATIVE ARTS | HARRIET WALLACE-MEAD & SARA LAURENA Mudfest, the week long festival of emerging student art is fucking cumming.

Our spicy program features over 60 saucy original works by MU students and includes moving image, performance, live music, visual arts and a handful of FREE workshops, guest speakers, trainings and interactive events! Whether your preference is for lying solo or getting it on in a group, there's a work for everyone.

We've erected our program, check it out here: mudfest.art

ENVIRONMENT | ELIZABETH NICHOLSON & KATE DENVER-STEVENSON Hello. Enviro report nudie edition. Welcum back. The Enviro Collective just came back from Students of Sustainability. Those lefty babes sure know how to use a padlock and chain, if you know what I mean. They’re a real disobedient bunch, in the civil way. A minimum wage and fair working conditions. Talk dirty to me.

Fair Trade fortnight 4-17 August. Get your chains pulled tight, and squirt lube all over @ Bike Co-op: Weekly on Tuesdays 10am - 2pm. *Warning* these ilms are explicit, explicitly anticapitalist. NSFB (Not Suitable for Wealthy Bourgeoise). GreenScreen: 25 July, 8 August 5:15pm.

Come *Play* With Your Food: 1 August, 15 August, 5:15pm

BURNLEY | JESSICA PEELER It’s time for round two!

What’s news at Burnley? We successfully rehomed 40 plus spotted marsh frogs from a completed PhD project, and held a huge workshop where students built enclosures and learned how to care for their new friends. We had our irst joint event with the wonderful Forest Ecosystems Student Society (FESS) and Melbourne University Geographical Society (MUGS), an end of semester party at Prudence Bar in North Melbourne.

What’s coming up? Check out the UMSU stall at Burnley on the 24 July, and keep an eye out for gardening and sustainability workshops throughout the semester.

P.S. In case you didn’t know, there’s a whole stash of free sexual health products in the old phone booth in the Student Amenities Building. Enjoy!

VCA | NICHOLAS LAM Cat got Nicholas' tongue!

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COLUMN BY MADELINE BAILEY ARTWORK BY REIMENA YEE

EDITION 5: THE BATS IN THE MSD

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here are ten bat colonies living around the University of Melbourne, and each one represents a diferent Bachelor degree. The Bats of Arts live in Baillieu (third loor ceiling); the Bats of Commerce hang in The Spot; and the Bats of Science stay close to the Bats of Biomed, because they are not quite sure if they are separate colonies.

After the croissant trend caught on (and students started queuing at the MSD photocopiers to try and print cross-sections of their brunch), the bats began scanning their wings. Some scans get blurred, because the bats move when the machine lashes. But most are so clear that you can see every bone. You can tell which bat they belong to by the texture of the ink.

The Bats of Design live in the MSD. There are lots, so they are scattered around the loors. Some roost in the basement, where there are concrete walls and two looming, limestone statues.

Others rest in the Architecture library. They sleep in the day time (of course), but they’re rarely seen by students because they are contemporary bats, and this means that when you see them clinging to the ceiling, they just look like CCTV cameras or smoke alarms.

The Bats of Design have webbed wings, silver fur with pink patches, and large ears for echolocation — which is the sonar system they use to ind things at night. Given they are contemporary bats, their senses are also synced with the Uni’s wireless network, meaning they can hear library books. Each book echoes diferently depending on its call number. For example, Green Building and Renovating (690.8 HA) sounds quite pitched when compared with Gothic Architecture (726.50940902 FRAN). The ten bat colonies might live in diferent buildings, but they can still listen to the books in one another’s libraries.

At night, they swoop around and snatch up insects, which is why you never see spiders inside the MSD. They also rattle through the vents and lutter around the workshops, but they are gentle and never gnaw wires or insulation. They hover over the benches, above the glue, wood, and foam, and admire those complex cardboard models that the Architecture majors are always bringing on buses.

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CLASSISM IS NEVER CLASSY WORDS BY KERGEN ANGEL ARTWORK BY CAROLYN HUANE

“W

hich school are you from?” Peter asked.

“Fitzroy High School,” I responded naively.

“Oh, never heard of it,” he said, drawling, “I’m from Scotch College. It was nice to meet you, but I have to go.”

That was my irst ever conversation with a person I had met in a university tutorial. Only three words in and I already felt shame, anger and disbelief that someone would choose to withdraw from a conversation with me because of where I was educated. In my mind, it wasn’t even a bad school. Peter, whose name I’ve changed out of nonreciprocal, public school courtesy, had almost instantly created the atmosphere that I had always been told lingered over the pristine, green, semi-suburb that is the University of Melbourne.

It was a brief but whole conversation, layered in assumptions, coated with a venomous tone and conducive to a larger sense of classism. Classism is a word I don’t see thrown around too much in an age where levels of privilege are criticised endlessly and individual liberation is a core millennial value. The bloated and malformed lesh that once coated gender is being stripped away to expose Scooby Doo’s average Joe hiding underneath, ‘I would’ve gotten away with the patriarchy too if it wasn’t for you meddling feminists!’ Ideas surrounding race, heritage and ethnicity are constantly challenged, as white privilege has a black-light shone on it, showing the sputtered marks of self-congratulation and ‘guilt’ resting upon its alabaster stomach.

I ind though, particularly at a prominent institution such as the University of Melbourne, that classism is more often seen but not heard nor talked about, quite frankly. From its high ATAR entry scores to the words I’m sure we have all heard – ‘Australia’s Number One University’ – the sandstone buildings and centuries-old pathways embody the very essence of privilege. The only times I’ve heard its reputation be contested is by those particular tossers in Year 12 parties you meet, saying, “I would go to the University of Melbourne, but if Cambridge is an option of course I would rather go there.”

What we lose by attending this university is that we’re separated from the wider world of people facing vastly diferent battles than a late essay or slow lectures. We aren’t caught in homerooms anymore with that one kid who hasn’t washed in several days and who’s come to school with no lunch, nor do we take English classes with that one guy who’s still iguring out how to write full sentences for lack of opportunity to learn when he was younger. In an educated, elite university, we allow an echo chamber of opinions to enclose our ideas and our perceptions of a world outside career climbing and personal progress.

This isn’t to say that we don’t deserve to be here or that I’m not grateful to have this opportunity. Hell, one of the coolest things I got to experience in my O-Week was being around a large amount of people who spoke other languages on campus and interacting

with the amazing tutors and lecturers who had dedicated a large part of their lives to pursue a career in academia.

But my experiences during tutorial discussions, learning beside those people who received privileged tuition, is that there is a very clear line between those who have faced greater struggles and those who haven’t. It’s that one girl in your politics class who talks about poverty like it’s a buzzword, as another classmate sits there shocked that a person can be so ignorant of her reality of growing up rurally with a heroin-addicted mother while still managing to succeed academically. It’s becoming tiresome to enter tutes and always have those few people who grew up in a stable environment, were probably in the ‘accelerated stream’ (whatever that means) at their bougie school and talk like they know it all.

Go to the west side, sit in the Sunshine court and see what leads a person to commit a crime.

I think this naïve, arrogant privilege that many are endowed with is best exempliied by the corporate mansion that is the Myer department store. What I saw was almost dreamlike as I made my way through double-beds layered with intricately designed pillows and sheets coated like frosting, and a 10-foot tall living Christmas tree laden with shimmering baubles and tinsel laying across its branches like a plump and brightly coloured anaconda. Young and bright-eyed new parents pushed prams in the shape of carriages around the shopping centre, dressed simply yet, with a polish that made their light-blue jeans and well-itting shirts look designer. All the attendants smiled as you passed and everyone there seemed to walk with a sense of comfort and conidence as they browsed the latest Apple computer or hand-made picture frames.

I left with a crowd that lowed out the door, neatly in parallel with the people streaming in and up the building. Where the two rivers of people separated sat an elderly disabled man in a wheelchair, calmly holding up a copy of The Big Issue and watching the crowd. Dozens of people passed by him, and even though I knew that many of these people were leaving with hundreds or thousands of dollars of purchases, the $7 for a magazine, tokenistic or not, was well within their reach.

With our education, the money aforded to us by the government (or not) and the steps that have led to us just being able to read this article, I implore you, dear reader, to go to the city and talk with a homeless person. Go to the west side, sit in the Sunshine court and see what leads a person to commit a crime.

Understand the reality that for all our academic privilege, we are not invincible nor better nor more equal than others, but that we are all human with an ability to give and to understand.

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LONELY CITY: NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIALIN YANG facebook.com/jialin.yang.54

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GOVERNING MELBOURNE'S SOUNDTRACK WORDS BY BEN CLARK ARTWORK BY WASINEE (GWEN) PHORNNARIT

LAW-MAKERS AND BUSKING IN THE CITY OF MELBOURNE

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n Melbourne’s Bourke Street, an elderly Japanese man in a two-piece tuxedo drips with sweat as he reaches the virtuosic crescendo of his violin concerto. The lilting tenor of a bearded hipster soars above his reverberating Stratocaster, intermittently broken by the rattling of trams and a burly Big Issue salesman’s pitch. Metallica rifs are furiously plucked by a man in a Super Mario costume, the distortion biting the frosty air and the bourgeois sensibilities of rushing professionals.

Across Melbourne’s CBD, buskers provide much-needed melody to the rhythm of hurried footsteps and hurtling trams.

For Regan Lethbridge, guitarist for blues-roots band Bonjah, this soundscape was his Melbournian baptism. “When we irst moved to Melbourne from New Zealand in 2006, we couldn’t get a gig,” he says. “We were walking through the city one day and we just saw buskers everywhere. We said, ‘We’ve gotta do this.’”

"I am a bit sick of really badly talented buskers, let me tell you," Doyle told 3AW in 2008.

For the next seven years, busking was Regan’s main source of income. “These are some of the best memories for us as a band,” he says. “It was literally our livelihood.” Bonjah later toured the world, were promoted by Triple J, and supported The Who, Paul Kelly and other big names in concert.

However, some fear Melbourne’s world-renowned busking scene is losing accessibility. Late last year, the Melbourne City Council faced public backlash from the CBD’s buskers and music fans, fed up with changes to zone boundaries which shut down popular busking locations. A petition demanding the lifting of CBD

busking bans soon reached over 27,000 signatures, and a silent protest was held on Bourke Street. One protester’s sign read, 'I’d rather be entertaining you than protesting against absurd rules'.

As the populations of urban centres swell, reconciling the rights of buskers and the amenity of residents has proven increasingly problematic. Internationally, cities such as Dublin and Wellington have seen strict busking laws watered down after community backlash, whilst US courts have ruled most busking restrictions unconstitutional, interpreting public performance as a form of free speech.

The Melbourne City Council is currently reviewing the city’s busking regulations, with a new regulatory framework expected before year’s end. Will the Council follow the global trend of championing street performance, or kowtow to noise complaints?

“Fair enough there are other businesses around, but you need to support young people starting out their careers,” Lethbridge says.

“They need to embrace the arts a bit more. I think most people do, there is just a select few that don’t. Thankfully, we got in just before the clampdown started to really happen.”

The clampdown began with one man – Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Following his election in 2008, the former Victorian Liberal MP had promised to crackdown on “loud” and “annoying” buskers.

"I am a bit sick of really badly talented buskers, let me tell you," Doyle told 3AW in 2008. "We are… just assaulted by a whole lot of diferent sounds every 10 metres along the footpath. I don't want the city to be a bogan magnet.”

In August, the Council unveiled a three-month trial of a ‘Non-Ampliication Zone’ on Swanston Street, following 264 noise complaints in the preceding three years. In one of Melbourne’s most popular busking locations, performers were barely audible above the chattering masses, and the city’s urban soundtrack was efectively muted.

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and gone, and I’m pretty sure given the serious backlash, not just from buskers themselves but from music industry representative bodies, we’re not going to see this sort of thing happen again.”

“Melbourne’s CBD didn’t used to be a place for residents, but now we have tens of thousands, and their amenity is important,” says Leppert. “The ampliied busking ban was just a bit of a blunt way of dealing with their amenity complaints. I think we can go about this in a much more nuanced way, after proper community consultation. What I don’t think we’ll be looking at is any more blanket, street-wide bans.”

For Melbourne’s performers, this is music to their ears.

“Common sense will always prevail,” says Lethbridge. “The public generally like walking through the city and hearing good music. It puts a smile on people’s faces, and more importantly it supports the arts and supports people’s livelihoods.”

According to The Australian Guide to Careers in Music, a high-quality performer in a favourable location and season can earn $200-300 per day in Australia’s major cities. Thus, legal restrictions can signiicantly impact professional buskers’ material wellbeing.

As Lethbridge says, “Busking supports people’s livelihoods – they can buy groceries, they can go on tour… not everyone can get a grant or get signed to a label, and busking is a way of giving young acts a start.”

Lethbridge now manages buskers-turned-superstars Tash Sultana and the Pierce Brothers. “The proof is in the pudding, with Tash having global success on a major level, and the Pierce Brothers touring the world,” says Lethbridge. “They cut their teeth on the streets of Melbourne and that should be embraced and supported, rather than saying ‘You can’t busk here, and you can’t do that.’”

On Swanston Street, a Bolivian pan-lutist with a black cowboy hat serenades passing shoppers. A harmonicist’s bluesy chords mingle with the dulcet baritone voice of an acoustic guitarist.

The Japanese violinist is still perspiring profusely. This eclectic cornucopia of sounds washes over a ceaseless lurry of rushingabout, a brief musical reprieve from the daily grind.

With a more positive note struck by authorities, Melbourne’s buskers are continuing to do what they do best. “It is one of the best things about Melbourne,” says Leppert. “Everywhere you go there is music.”

“The amp ban was awful,” says Patrick Coyle, a 21-year-old singer-songwriter. “Swanston Street is one of the busiest busking spots in Melbourne, and you can’t be heard without an amp in that area, because it is so noisy.”

Tensions lared again in December, when the Council banned busking outside the Myer Christmas windows. As the apex of the Melbourne busking scene, where performing is most lucrative, the vicinity requires special licenses to ensure performance quality.

Whilst families splashed cash on Christmas presents for loved ones, Melbourne’s most talented buskers had far fewer coins in their cases.

“Busking supports people’s livelihoods – they can buy groceries, they can go on tour."

“It was the same deal when they banned busking outside Myer over Christmas,” said Coyle. “Everyone locked to all the other busking spots, and it caused a lot of chaos and competition for those other spots, so it was harder to make money.”

Coyle inds the Council are otherwise very supportive. “The Council workers who work with us directly are amazing,” he says. “I think they just want Melbourne's buskers to be of a decent standard, to maintain good relationships between the businesses in the city and the buskers.” Coyle’s comments echo a recent study by the Melbourne University Law Review, which found that most buskers in Melbourne and Sydney support the fair and clear regulation of their profession.

Initially, the Council showed no remorse. “I ring up our street trading people and tell them to go down and shut them up,” the Lord Mayor told the Herald Sun. However, the Council eventually backed away from making the Swanston Street ban permanent, and have remained tight-lipped on the matter since.

Greens Councillor, Rohan Leppert, is now leading the push to rewrite Melbourne’s busking rules. As a musician who formerly busked in Canberra, he is a strong supporter of the local music scene. “Melbourne is a very musical and creative city, and I think that is one of our city’s great strengths,” he says.

Leppert is quick to distance himself from last year’s controversies. “I was dead against the trial of the ampliied busking ban,” he says. “Unfortunately, the decision was made under delegation and no vote was taken on the matter. That trial has been

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FLESHING IT OUT WORDS BY ELLA SHI ARTWORK BY LISA LINTON

ROBOTIC SEX TOYS AND THE PATRIARCHY

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ex robots? In your vagina? It’s more likely than you think.

Or at least, sex robots with vaginas seem to be just on the horizon if reports on the developments in the industry are true.

Robotic sex dolls with artiicial intelligence (AI) allowing them to speak, display facial expressions and potentially respond to touch will be on the market soon. The frontrunner, named ‘Harmony’, is expected to sell for $15,000 USD. The majority of the prototypes in development are female and aimed towards heterosexual men, though a couple of male robot dolls are also in development.

Technological achievements aside, the reports surrounding these sex robots have been disturbing. From comments about creating the perfect woman – docile, submissive and always sexually available – to assertions that they’re not just a replacement for sex but they’re potentially also a replacement for a real partner and that us women better watch out. In response, many women (and men) have pointed out that the men who were hoping to replace us with robots probably weren’t at the top of our list of potential partners. Also that AI sex robots were fucking creepy (no pun intended) and weird.

While the discussion around sex robots has clearly just begun, the varying responses so far – from excitement to derision – foregrounds another discussion on the difering social attitudes and levels of acceptability which currently exist towards diferent types of sex toys.

Men’s Rights Activist movements have gone the other way and pushed for male liberation through the further objectification of women.

At a quick glance, sex toys marketed towards cisgender women, or people with vaginas, have reached a stage of unabashed acceptability if not outright popularity. Discussion within many female friendship circles about owning sex toys is pretty ordinary. Meanwhile, iltered through Tumblr blogs and cool artsy Instagrams, pastel or gemstone dildos and sparkly vibrators have become part of a subculture for young women.

A quick search on Etsy yields items such as cute vibrator stickers (captioned ‘Good Vibes’) to vibrator enamel pins, earrings as well as dildo cross-stich crafts.

In comparison, leshlights and other variations of fake vaginas and blow up dolls have not gained the same cultural traction. In speaking to a few male friends, the common consensus was that, while there may be some exceptions depending on the friendship group, men – especially heterosexual men – are typically not open about owning sex toys. While there are further discussions to be had about diferent types of sex toys and diferent social expectations in non-heterosexual or cisgender contexts, the general observation is that toys for people with vaginas seem to have reached a greater level of cultural acceptance than toys for people with penises.

Most obviously, there is the common stereotype that heterosexual, cisgender men are simply bad at sex. For example, a recent study showed that heterosexual women have the least amount of orgasms.

It follows then that it’s perfectly acceptable for women to use sex toys.

An accompanying stereotype for cisgender men is that despite being bad at sex, they are also expected to be able to have A LOT of sex, to demonstrate their masculine dominance and social status. Hence, owning any kind of vagina substitute can be interpreted as a sign of failure to fulil the expected social expectations.

The rising acceptance of sex toys for cisgender women can also be linked to certain brands of feminism which emphasise the female body

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COMMENTARY as a source of empowerment and freedom. Alongside the campaign for women’s autonomy and sexual liberation, sex toys such as vibrators and dildos became associated with independence and progressive attitudes.

However, this link between sex toys and feminism runs deeper. Under capitalism (sorry I’m an Arts student), we are encouraged to express identity through ownership of objects, where our personal value and values are derived from the objects we purchase. The commodiication and commercialisation of feminism under capitalism means that owning a sex toy is now a way of demonstrating sexual independence, progressiveness and a feminist philosophy.

In contrast, there hasn’t been a comparable push for men to achieve sexual autonomy via this path. If anything, Men’s Rights Activist movements have gone the other way and pushed for male liberation through the further objectiication of women. Rather than challenge traditional heteronormative and masculine stereotypes, from their perspective, sexual autonomy and self-identity for men can be derived from the objectiication of women rather than the use of sexual objects.

It is possible that women using dildos is considered acceptable because in a culture of phallic worship, it is expected that phallic objects fulfil female desire.

This is further complicated because the acceptance of women using sex toys doesn’t just stem from other women, in a sign of feminist solidarity, but also from men. Women using penetrative sex toys play a large role in pornography aimed at men, and is a vision for male desire and gratiication.

Dildos are a key example. Given that we live in what is, and has been, a patriarchal society, phallic symbolism has long been admired and desired.

It is possible that women using dildos is considered acceptable because in a culture of phallic worship, it is expected that phallic objects fulil female desire. The perception of vaginas as gross and dirty has equal historical and cultural precedent. In a subconscious way, perhaps we view owning a penis substitute as a normal, even noble, desire while the derision of vagina substitutes stems from the perception of it being inferior genitalia.

The argument that the acceptability of women owning dildos stems from male titillation can be historically accounted for. An early cultural example of the ‘dildo’ can be found in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In this comedic Ancient Greek play, Lysistrata laments that they can’t ind their ‘dildos’ or ‘six-inch Ladies’ Comforters’ (depending on your translation).

Though this refers to female desire, women in Ancient Greece were not allowed to perform in theatre. The roles would have been illed by men and the audience would likely have been predominantly men. Historically, women using dildos has been as much the subject of male sexual fantasy.

The vibrator was also invented by men to fulil a purpose constructed by men. It was initially used as a medical device to treat hysteria in women – a made-up medical condition which was used to explain a plethora of real and non-existent symptoms from insomnia to general irritability. The vibrator fell out of medical use when male doctors realised they had been accidentally giving women orgasms all along, but emerged in popular culture again from the late twentieth century onwards alongside sexual liberation movements. Despite more recent developments, the original promotion of vibrators by a group of boring misguided dudes probably normalised them earlier.

In contrast, sex toys aimed at cisgender men have had much less cultural traction. While early sex dolls were used by Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century on long voyages, they often caused the spread of syphilis as sailors shared the same doll. Hardly sexy or liberating, and certainly not something you would write home about. Meanwhile, the leshlight remains relatively new, not invented until 1998, and has never been promoted by the medical community.

Evidently, there are a number of historical and contemporary cultural factors at play when it comes to the varying attitudes towards sex toys.

Ultimately, people shouldn’t be shamed for exploring their sexuality and more open discussions around why we hold certain attitudes would break down taboos. But don’t spend $15,000 on a creepy inanimate fuck toy.

Please, just don’t.

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THE TORCH WORDS BY STEFAN BOSCIA ARTWORK BY MORGAN-LEE SNELL

TWO INTERVIEWS ABOUT THE TORCH, A PROGRAM FOR INDIGENOUS ART

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x-MMA champion Robby Wirramanda looks like he could snap you in half with a sidelong glance if he so desired. A mountain of a man, you cannot help but notice his tribal tattoos that snake down both arms and his perfectly round, shaved head. Wirramanda’s rugged exterior, however, belies his kindhearted nature, immense artistic talent and deep pride for his Indigenous heritage.

A part of the Wergaia Nation of northern Victoria, he is quick to note that he has been fortunate to have learnt his elders’ stories and traditions from a young age.

“I still live on the country where my ancestors walked for 40,000 plus years. I’m still living here on my grandmother’s country,” he proudly boasts.

However, it wasn’t so long ago that the Chinkapook native was far away from his traditional home, locked in a prison cell thanks to a drug traicking conviction. Conined for three and a half years, Wirramanda had become trapped in the insidious cycle of incarceration so common amongst Indigenous Australians.

Victorians with Indigenous backgrounds are 12 times more likely than non-Indigenous Victorians to be imprisoned during their life time, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Nearly 90 per cent are likely to reofend. These igures are a part of a nationwide trend which sees First Nation Australians hold the tragic distinction of being the most incarcerated people on the planet (per capita). The ABS reports that 2,346 out of every 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are imprisoned, a igure which is almost six times higher than the imprisonment rate of African Americans in the United States.

Despite royal commissions and vast sums of money being thrown at the problem, more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to be thrown in jail than ever before. However, a new program that seeks to keep Indigenous ex-ofenders out of jail by helping them connect to their culture and heritage is showing promise in Victoria.

Barkindji artist Kent Morris is the founder and CEO of The Torch, an innovative program that works with Indigenous men and women that are either currently incarcerated or have recently been released from prison. The project is ostensibly just an art program for prisoners, something that has been common in correctional facilities for decades around the world. However, The Torch does so much more for its 300 participants.

“The program’s really built around taking in information about language groups and cultural identity,” Morris explains. “It’s about learning your culture, expressing it and maintaining a cultural practice. Then to share that practice with the broader community.

To develop those stories and put them out in the world for people to connect with.”

The state-sponsored initiative was instrumental for Robby Wirramanda’s rehabilitation by helping him reconnect to his heritage, while also giving him a forum to rediscover his childhood

passions of art and music. He also praised The Torch for always being there to support him on a personal level.

“The Torch are always there for you. For a yarn, for support.

They’ve always got someone there,” Wirramanda exclaimed. “As well as that, just to see other people doing well is great. It really does give people hope to believe that they can make a bit of a living [after prison].”

Wirramanda is now making a living by selling his art on the outside, thanks to his range of paintings and sculptures that fetch thousands of dollars each. Many of his works depict swarms of dragonlies, a symbol which has deep cultural and personal meaning for him.

“When I was younger, my nan always said that the dragonly was a symbol of change and good seasons ahead. It’s also for me a symbol of rebirth. The dragonly was a really big part of my journey in prison, as well as on the outside,” he said.

Initial state government evaluations of the program found that there was a 53 per cent reduction in recidivism amongst ex-prisoners who were involved with The Torch. Moreover, the evaluation also found that men who had been involved in these arts and culture activities were more engaged with subsequent programs that dealt with substance rehabilitation and vocational training. Morris attributes the success of the program to the sense of achievement, pride and self-respect that it instils in its culturally deprived participants.

Morris explains that a majority of the inmates prior to starting at The Torch have very little idea of their family’s cultural heritage.

He describes it as “that uncomfortable feeling you have when you don’t know who you are, and you don’t belong anywhere.” Fixing this unconscious feeling of unworthiness, he believes, is integral to rehabilitating many Indigenous inmates.

After gaining access to the archives at the Koorie Heritage Trust, men and women in the program are taught about their family tree, family history, culture and community. From there, they are encouraged to paint the traditional stories of their forebears by evoking traditional imagery from their own tribe. This process is often the beginning of a stark transformation, and a chance for inmates to gain conidence within themselves.

“It’s great when they see that they have the potential to do something positive, to reconnect where often they had not thought that it was possible. There’s a lot of shame associated with being Aboriginal in this country. One fella said to me ‘I was ashamed of my culture’. It’s just shocking. He was able to put his cultural identity back together, express it through art and he’s now on release and doing well,” Morris recounted.

Wirramanda now ensures that his children also remain connected to the traditions and stories of the Wergaia Nation. He aims to foster a keen sense of pride and self-respect in his three boys by helping them maintain a close connection to the land of his ancestors, and by leading them away from the path that he once followed.

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WORDS BY MORGAN-LEE SNELL

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n 2015, there were an estimated 36,134 prisoners in Australian prisons. Of those 36,134, Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for just over a quarter (27 per cent) of the prisoner population. During that time, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders accounted for only two per cent of the total Australian population. One could argue that fragments of colonialist behaviours have snuck themselves into 21st century Australia, creating a cycle of oppression and misunderstanding that can be linked back to the massive overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples within the criminal justice system.

The Torch program is now in its eighth year, and it provides an environment wherein it is not only safe for Indigenous artists to practice their culture, but also draws the public attention to the high levels of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in correctional facilities around the country. Coordinator Kent Morris believes that the incarceration of Indigenous peoples is greatly owed to the lack of connection to country and culture.

“I don’t think you should underestimate the power of culture in the rehabilitation process for Indigenous ofenders,” he says on the program, created to engage inmates and encourage them to change their path.

Roger Sims is one of the many artists given a new lease on life because of the Torch program. As a child, art was Sims’ sole interest, and as a young adult he took to giving his friends tattoos in his back shed with a sewing needle and the ink from an old pen, later graduating to a real tattoo studio and a real tattoo gun.

First incarcerated at eighteen years old, Sims has spent a number of years in and out of prison intermittently. Briely after his irst stint in jail, he was made aware of his Indigenous heritage. Having grown up with adoptive parents, it was not until he made contact with his birth mother at 19 that he knew about his background and developed an interest in creating traditional Indigenous artworks.

In 2016 and 2017, his artworks were displayed in the seventh and eighth annual Confined exhibition. I sat down with Sims to talk about his art and incarceration.

When was it that you first started creating art? Is it something that you have always done or something that you found later in life?

I’ve always had an interest in art – it was the only subject I did well in at school. In 1988 I met up with my birth mother, and learning about my heritage really opened up a whole new world of art for me. It was only in recent years that I started to actively pursue art as more than a hobby.

Tell me a little bit about your art.

I tend to work with wood and wood burning a lot. Recently I’ve been playing with diferent forms of “canvas”, so to speak. I create a wooden shield and then use a wood burner to carve out a variety of Aboriginal symbols, native Australian wildlife and patternmaking. There is something deeply satisfying to me about the smell of burning wood. Like I know I’m in the midst of creating a masterpiece.

What does your art mean to you, particularly as a Wurundjeri man?

I think for me, my art is a form of protection, which is why I think using a shield as a canvas has become a recurring theme in my work.

When I’m creating my art I can escape from anything else going on in my life and feel safe. Further than that, my art has consistently focused around reconnecting with my culture and family.

How do you feel your art has affected or altered your own life? I know you were incarcerated for a period of time; what role do you think your art had in your rehabilitation?

When I went to the 2016 Confined exhibition opening at the St Kilda town hall, I was buzzing, inally getting to see all my hours of work paying of. It’s made me proud to be me. I think that night made me feel like there was more out there for me, what really motivated me to work hard and stay out of prison. It played a massive role in my rehabilitation, and the money I made at the exhibition meant that the transition from life in jail to life on the outside was one I felt like I could really make.

How do you feel your art has affected those in your immediate community?

Being behind bars doesn’t do much to build a father/daughter bond, and creating art more actively has kept me too busy to get me into trouble, so I’ve been able to get to know my kids. It’s also been a great line of communication between myself and my birth mother.

It’s something we can really talk about and connect over.

Sims’ reconnection to his culture has reignited his love of art and allowed him to turn over a new leaf and step away from a life in prison, ofering him opportunities to rebuild relationships, rebuild a life and, in his words, “earn some moola on the side.” His birth mother, Maureen Moore says the program has “brought [them] a little closer together and forced him to get his act together.” Sims is a perfect example of the power of understanding your cultural identity and how programs like Torch can help Indigenous people get out from behind bars and stay out.

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HAMILTON IS NOT THAT GREAT WORDS BY DANIEL BERATIS ARTWORK BY VERONICA FERNANDO

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amilton is not great.

It’s certainly a good musical. As a piece of musical theatre, it captured the zeitgeist in a way that hasn’t been done so for at least two years. That’s very nice and shouldn’t be discredited. But, zooming out, checking the macro – Hamilton as a piece of theatre, as a hip hop chronicle of the United States of America’s founding – is not excellent and it is not great. It is simply good.

This is wildly incongruent with conventional wisdom, of course. Hamilton is, allegedly, a revolutionary musical (about a revolution, no less) that stormed the Tony Awards, changed the musical theatre game and propelled composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda to international stardom. Unfortunately, its praise is greatly exaggerated. Hamilton as a musical is well-written and wellperformed and that makes it good. Not great. Just good.

The world doesn’t treat each new opening as an earth-shattering revision and reclamation of theatre as we know it. It’s just another show.

But, some would say, it’s so artistically beyond what anyone else has done. It uses new forms of music in a way unseen on Broadway before, and in incredibly efective ways – it’s got hip hop, it’s got rap, it’s got colour-blind casting.

This is not a new statement. We’ve been here before, many decades ago. Oklahoma!, the brainchild of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III, stormed the stage when it irst premiered in 1943. Here was a musical that actually dared to further plot, character and narrative in song. It was the summation of a new kind of musical, the ‘book musical’, and would become “the single

most inluential work in the American music theatre,” according to historian Thomas Hischak. All that from a musical named after a state. Rodgers and Hammerstein, they were absolute madmen.

Yet we don’t think much of Oklahoma! nowadays. So it invented the modern musical? No big deal.

And here comes Cabaret and Company, two musicals that would catch musical theatre up to where plays had been for a while.

These were two musicals from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that incorporated contemporary techniques in musical theatre. Directly addressing the audience! Commenting on the dramatic action!

In doing so, they singlehandedly invented the ‘concept musical’.

Beforehand, musicals needed plots, but now musicals just needed ideas, whether that idea was Nazism and power or marriage and relationships. Plot was just plot – these musicals were more.

We recognise Cabaret and Company’s greatness. Alongside Oklahoma!, they got their recognition. All three ind revivals in schools and companies. But, again, they invented a new mode of musical to which Hamilton owes signiicantly.

Throughout the history of the modern musical, pieces took a chance on diferent techniques and invented entirely new ways to do theatre. Hamilton is not new for following in their footsteps.

Even In The Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s previous musical, used techniques Hamilton would incorporate, like the staging of hip hop inlected composition. It would be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It, arguably, did Hamilton’s thing irst.

And yet, do we praise In The Heights as much?

Hamilton is a good musical for doing these things, but is it great? Is it really great? Well, at this point, you might protest: what about those awards? Hamilton set records for Tony Award nominations, and nearly beat The Producers’ win record. Surely that indicates greatness?

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Let’s look at the Tony Awards then. The big thing this season is Dear Evan Hansen, a play about mental illness, death, friendship – you name it. It’s a big thing. And that’s not the only big thing in recent memory – the memory still lingers on Book of Mormon’s ‘record-breaking’ Tony’s haul and success on Broadway. That is, until Hamilton rewrote the script.

And what’s become of Book of Mormon? It’s currently showing, right here in Melbourne. Audiences go to see it, every night.

And the world goes on, unperturbed and undisturbed. The world doesn’t treat each new opening as an Earth-shattering revision and reclamation of theatre as we know it. It’s just another show.

How are we supposed to measure the quality of theatre if its benchmark awards are useless?

This happens time and time and time again. The problem with theatre and awards, and especially the Tony Awards, is that they can’t predict the future. Pulitzer Prize-winner Sunday in the Park with George lost the Best Musical award to La Cage Aux Folles. Into the Woods lost to The Phantom of the Opera. All four of these shows are still well known even outside the theatre-going public, unlike Tony Award winners for Best Musical such as Contact, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and City of Angels. But the big thing doesn’t win every time, not by a long shot. The Tony Awards are practically useless when it comes to talking about big things, or theatre excellence, or theatre in general. They’re just awards.

So what are we to do? How are we supposed to measure the quality of theatre if its benchmark awards are useless? Let’s start with the obvious. We can’t call Hamilton great because of its ‘record-breaking’ haul. Hamilton is a big thing and the Tony Awards simply cannot even comprehend what a big thing even is. But that

goes to theatre as a whole. How do you measure the quality of work when performance is itself ephemeral? Each performance is diferent – how do you recognize excellence in a form as transient as the tides and the wind?

Well, time passes. Our memories fade. But one way to be sure is by waiting. If in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years or more, Hamilton is still being studied and listened to and revived, then perhaps that will elevate it to greatness. Maybe then. But it won’t be our feelings now that do it, a year after it blew down the record-breaking doors.

It won’t be how ground-breaking and stylistically new it is, like those words haven’t been used before. It certainly won’t be the accolades showered upon it, as if those accolades mean anything at all. It’ll be time. Pure and simple. If the ephemeral becomes permanent, if transience calciies – that’s the transition from good to great. Hamilton, Book of Mormon, Dear Evan Hansen and every other show needs time before they can achieve greatness, if greatness is their fate. It needs, to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lyrics, 'to wait for it'.

Perhaps Hamilton’s modern, cosmopolitan retelling of history will make it stick. Maybe the songs really are good enough to stand the test of time. Or will it be the colour-blind casting, where old, white Founding Fathers of America are portrayed by AfricanAmericans and Hispanic-Americans? The latter may be one of the most signiicant choices in casting of musical theatre and Broadway over the past decade. Certainly, no other production so publicly broke the rules and opened their pieces up to the same degree – but will it stick? There’s no way of knowing. Father Time knows, and he’s awfully slow. So, once more, we have to leave it up to history and memory.

We do not make great theatre. Time makes great theatre. We’re just along for the ride.

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THE DIRT ON CLEAN EATING WORDS BY LUCY WILLIAMS ARTWORK BY ELENA PIAKIS

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f you’ve ventured into the world of Instagram’s #smoothiebowl and #greenjuice tags, you’ll be familiar with the concept of ‘clean eating’ and its almost inescapable presence in modern food culture. Certainly, there are issues with what a lot of us are eating, however, this should be met with balanced advice from experts.

In reality, fad-diets have inundated society with theories of how speciic ways of eating can improve our health. While there is some logical guidance in between the superfoods and juice cleanses, they often include everything from increasingly restrictive and unachievable advice on food consumption to pure misinformation.

So why is clean eating a faulty ideology at best and what should you be eating instead?

Dr Alessandro Demaio, a nutritionist at the World Health Organisation, explains that “food-related disease, including obesity, has now become our greatest health challenge for the current century”. He goes on to explain that it isn’t simply “a question of calories in versus calories out but the food we eat, can aford and have access to – and how this is marketed, packaged and served – is a large dictator of our health”.

labelling is used by non-experts, and is ultimately rooted in guilt and avoidance.

Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, Sophie Medlin, calls clean eating “sensationalist promotion of non-evidence based and extremely restrictive lifestyles that demonise everyday food essentials”.

Food writer and chef, Nigella Lawson, argues that “clean eating necessarily implies that any other form of eating is dirty or impure and thus bad.” She also alludes to the shaming that such language can potentially induce, and how it actually prevents people from eating healthily.

Even those within the clean eating movement have their doubts.

Ella Mills of Deliciously Ella fame, explains the journey of meaning ‘clean’ has experienced, from what seemed initially to be ‘natural’ and ‘unprocessed,’ and which has evolved into a very loaded term.

It is vital to remember that food bloggers, speciically those that advocate for clean eating, are just members of the public voicing their opinions on food on the internet. Many have practically no legitimate qualiication and dangerously accrue audiences in the millions.

Gluten avoidance is a common theme across most varieties of clean eating. Gluten is one of the most demonised products within the clean eating movement despite being a healthy product for most of the community. Recent studies outline that gluten avoidance is a ‘necessity’ for up to ‘1.5 per cent of the population with celiac disease and 0.1 per cent with wheat allergies’. On top of this, up to 10 per cent of the population experience gluten sensitivity and would therefore beneit from such a diet.

Unfortunately, people increasingly rely on the media and internet, rather than a GP or specialist for their diet advice. Therefore, there is a worry that people who are symptomatic of gluten intolerance may be self-diagnosing and missing an underlying issue.

So what does a good diet look like? Kerin O’Dea, Honorary Professor of Population Health and Nutrition at the University of South Australia, recommends minimally processed foods and mostly plants. For those consuming meat, she encourages choosing the leanest cuts, including wild meats such as rabbit or kangaroo.

Concerning dairy products, she advises care in reaching for low fat varieties which often harbour more sugar. O’Dea explains a vegetarian or a vegan diet can be healthy, so long as people are very aware of the ways to ensure appropriate sources of nutrients.

She labels one of the clean eating trends of combining a vegan and gluten-free diet as absurd, and is skeptical of so-called superfoods that focus on individual foods rather than the diet as a whole.

Fruit and veggies, wholefoods, lessening your intake of highly processed foods – at its core healthy eating is relatively simple, though it gets clouded by mixed messages and misinformation.

It’s boring and we’ve heard it before but moderation is key. We live in a world of extremes, but the more we distance ourselves from the severity of the clean-dirty dichotomy, the healthier our attitude around healthy food will be. No one beneits from the extreme and unhealthy approach that many clean eating advocates seem to push. So don’t throw the kale out with the bathwater, allow yourself some cake (it won’t be the end of the world) and remember that variety is the spice of life.

However, these diets come along with some problematic side dishes of misinformation, pseudoscience and guilt.

It is fascinating that Dr Demaio mentions marketing because this is an area in which #cleaneating thrives. It is a highly marketable lifestyle, such that food journalist Hadley Freeman describes the phenomenon of “wellness” as striking “that crucial point on the Venn diagram between aspiration, self-love and slimness”. It moves away from the Weight Watchers points, a bit outdated and lackluster, to a more ‘efortless’ (with twice the efort, it would seem) way of eating, advocated by a band of bloggers who are almost universally wealthy, thin and lacking in dietetics qualiications.

One of the diiculties with analysing clean eating is the diversity of its manifestations and the lack of a general deinition.

There are those that exclude all grains, those that advise an ‘Alkaline’ diet and the ‘plant-based’ diet, which combines veganism and a gluten-free diet. The encouragement of an increased intake of vegetables and fruits and a move away from highly-processed products is beneicial when part of a balanced diet. However, these diets come along with some problematic side dishes of misinformation, pseudoscience and guilt.

Food scientist, Rachel Zemser, explains that there is value for brands in this lack of a ‘clean eating’ deinition, with an evergrowing list of what should be avoided, as it allows companies to “pave the way for untapped categories of food products”. The danger of having, at best, a loose deinition of ‘clean’, is that the diet continues to grow in strictness, and thus comes to consider more food groups comparatively ‘dirty’.

The language that we use to describe food is incredibly inluential, especially when the major audience of these bloggers and social media inluencers are young people who are still forming their understanding of nutrition. This all-or-nothing, clean-or-dirty

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LOOSE: A NELLY FURTARTICLE WORDS BY CLAIRE EXINGER ARTWORK BY LAUREN HUNTER

IN DEFENCE OF FEMALE POP MUSICIANS

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o one else made a fuss about Nelly Furtado’s latest album when it was released three months ago, but I felt I owed it to her.

In our early teens, my sister and I got ourselves into a state about our music collection and gave away nearly all our CDs. Among the discarded: two Avril Lavigne CDs, the irst Veronicas album, some Rihanna from when she still had long hair, Destiny’s Child’s Greatest Hits. But we kept Loose by Nelly Furtado.

distracted me for so long and listened obsessively to The Smiths.

The Serious Music Fan lifestyle requires dedication. The energy I expended on memorising 250-plus Beatles songs boggles the brain. I’m now kicking myself for not having spent that time listening to somebody like Sean Paul. Within the dominant standards of music journalism, artists like Sean Paul don’t seem to count, despite producing some of the most distinctive and fun moments in 2000's pop – and still getting seven-ish collaboration requests a day. This is because these standards are racialised and gendered. Serious Music has generally been made by white men, producing an aura of legitimacy from which white man music collectively beneits, in a self-referencing loop. Of course, the white male-dominated music I devoured as a teenager had a sinister side. Many of my idols had abhorrent pasts which I only discovered later. Lennon was a wife-beater, Morrissey a raging racist and Bowie committed statutory rape. These facts have done nothing to dull their hero status. Collectively, these men are positioned as immune from current-day criticism, because their contribution to music is just too important. I had been ashamed of my pop music habit, but every new revelation, every new toppled idol left me aghast. Serious Music eventually wears you out.

Lennon was a wife-beater, Morrissey a raging racist and Bowie committed statutory rape.

Things were dire for a time. Throughout my teens, I internalised music media’s derision towards anything not considered Serious Music, and turned against all the pop music I had loved as a kid. Unconsciously, I applied this new perspective to my own understanding of which music was and wasn’t inherently valuable, and often got it a bit wrong – such as when I replaced my Destiny’s Child with Wolfmother. I cursed female-driven pop music for having

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Nelly Furtado’s Loose, the jewel of 2006, is not a serious album.

It is an album where the beats are loud and stomping and allowed to resonate, from the decadent banger ‘Maneater’ – “it’s like having too much cheesecake, in a good way,” says Furtado – to the swirling, echoing and beautiful ‘Say It Right.’ Furtado has experienced depression since age seventeen, but laughter rounds out the album opener, ‘Afraid,’ an ode to overcoming social anxiety. In it, a group chants, slightly of-pitch: “So afraid of what the people might say, but that’s okay ‘cause you’re only human.” Furtado and producer, Timbaland, chatter away in an interlude, reminiscing and admiring “this beat – it’s so emotional, it’s wicked,” which after a few seconds launches into ‘Wait For You.’ This was both Timbaland and Furtado at their inest, yet for all its slick production, the album feels deined by its humanising moments of imperfection. I have not wavered on this point since irst buying the album 11 years ago.

Loose was inspired, according to Furtado, by being fourteen and dancing around in your bedroom to Janet Jackson.

Sean Fennessey of Pitchfork felt diferently. In a disdainful review, he described Loose as “scattershot in every respect, crippling in its inconsistencies” and “painful”. Fennessey rated the album a 6.4, lower than what he’d bestowed upon an Eminem Greatest Hits album a few months earlier. Then again, a USA Today article lamenting a dearth of ‘Serious Female Musicians’ in 2006 actually presented Furtado as a Serious Female Exception to the glitzy, overproduced, oversexed rule, but could not make this claim without underestimating certain artists – at its peril, since these included Beyoncé (unbelievably, when viewed with post-Lemonade hindsight). It would appear that diiculty arises when the governing standards of Serious Music, created by and

to serve cisgender white men, are simply extrapolated outwards.

Because they have developed upon the marginalisation and erasure of the contributions to music by women, people of colour, and LGBTQI+ people, these standards will at best divide and conquer, and at worst disregard these contributions, entrenching harmful power dynamics.

Furtado’s newest album The Ride, released in March, has met with critical and commercial ambivalence and a much more restrainedly patronising Pitchfork review – they now seem to realise that they’re dealing with a mid-2000s pop icon. There seems to be a general latent disappointment that even her collaboration with St. Vincent producer, John Congleton, couldn’t mould Furtado into a genuinely serious musical product. She stares into middle distance out of the front cover, dressed in overalls, gripping a bunch of lowers and surrounded by lat green, in total contradiction to the red hot Loose-era Nelly. Here, design and music alike are carried of with inesse but they don’t scream blockbuster. I recognise that while some tracks of it are excellent (in particular 'Pipe Dreams' and 'Live'), others are dreary. And in the end, I don’t have to care about these deiciencies in the slightest. In hanging on to my old Nelly Furtado album, I was reminded that I could love music for the sheer fun of it, and it would be a shame if my appreciation of her music were conditional on her living up to a paradigm invented by self-serving white men and enforced by music blogs.

One chorus on The Ride reminds me of Loose: “Have you just grown up and given up, and you don’t believe in magic anymore?”

Loose was inspired, according to Furtado, by being fourteen and dancing around in your bedroom to Janet Jackson. I made a mistake at fourteen in giving up on some of the inest pop music ever made, but the mistake was reversible. Furtado, and Destiny’s Child, and all others I once exiled, were welcomed back into my life as easily as I’d let them go.

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COMMENTARY

ON THE ORIGIN OF STRANGENESS COLUMN BY TESSA MARSHALL ARTWORK BY EDIE BUSH

PARENTS FROM HELL

A

h, Tasmania. The butt of jokes from smog-loving mainlanders and regularly omitted from the world map, it's Australia’s often forgotten state. Luckily, it has one famous resident to remind the world of its existence: the Tasmanian devil. Once a nuisance to European settlers protecting their livestock, this furry, squat little scavenger has become a Tasmanian icon and protected species. Yet while the name ‘devil’ may at irst seem unitting, the family lives and breeding practises of Tasmanian devils, do tend to more closely resemble Nightmare on Elm Street than The Brady Bunch.

Initially, the reputation of this awkward yet adorable marsupial as a ‘devil’ appears inappropriate. The Tasmanian devil’s thick neck and large torso, which gives it one of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom, also causes an irregular, waddling gait, allowing for a cute and far from menirst impression. While it is the largest meat-eating Tasmanian devils were acing marsupial, its carnivorous nature is also not always obviso named because of their ous, with baby devils, or ‘imps’, often spotted sunbaking rowdy mealtimes. They use alongside the lizards they should be eating. When a devil Trump’s campaign strategy is stressed, it produces a bad odour and opens its mouth – the loudest wins the spoils. in a wide ‘yawn’. If challenged by another devil, they try to scare them of with a staccato sneeze, but this causes them to lose their balance more often than it intimidates their opponent.

But, as is common knowledge to the owner of any puppy, kitten or toddler, appearances are deceiving. Tasmanian devils were so named because of their rowdy mealtimes – when they gather around a carcass, they hiss, growl and shriek. They use Trump’s campaign strategy – the loudest wins the spoils. However, their cantankerous feeding habits are just the beginning of their devilish traits.

Their breeding habits also reveal the devil’s jealous and possessive nature. After courtship, the male invites the female into his ‘den’ (which already sounds like the beginning of a bad horror movie). The morning after, he thwarts her attempts to ditch their one-night stand, by viciously guarding her for over a week, preventing her from leaving his den or even eating. Despite this attempt to prevent inidelity, the female often escapes. It is not unusual for devil litters to contain ofspring from four or ive fathers.

After a three-week gestation period, the mother gives birth to 30 babies. Deaf, blind, and smaller than a raisin, they battle through thick fur to the safety Sadly, we risk losing of their mother’s pouch. In that warm, cosy sanctuary the wonders (or horrors) of are four teats. Unfortunately, nature messed up the maths on this one: only the four babies that reach the Tasmanian devil reproduction teats irst secure their place in the pouch. The others if we do not combat devil unsuccessfully search for nipples until they die. They facial tumour disease. may even become a tasty snack for their mother.

Unfortunately, Google failed to satisfactorily answer my question ‘Why do Tasmanian devils have too many babies?’ The only explanation ofered was that producing jelly-bean sized ofspring is not particularly energy intensive, and so is not a disadvantage to the mother. Moreover, the race to the nipple ensures that only the fastest imps survive – a useful trait later in life when racing other scavengers to a food source.

Sadly, we risk losing the wonders (or horrors) of Tasmanian devil reproduction if we do not combat devil facial tumour disease, an infectious cancer that has obliterated 70 per cent of the devil population since 1996. The disease spreads when tumour cells are passed on through bites, which is only possible because the devil population has limited genetic diversity. Because every devil’s cells look similar, the immune system fails to recognise the cancer as a foreign invader, allowing fatal tumours to spread unchecked. Hopefully a vaccine is successful soon, so we don’t lose these fascinating creatures.

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COMMENTARY

STEAL NOW, PAY LATER WORDS BY REILLY SULLIVAN ARTWORK BY ELOYSE MCCALL

A

ustralians love to shoplift. Don’t believe me? It is now estimated that we’re losing 2.2 per cent of annual retail turnover, or $4.5 billion, to sticky ingers. Whether it’s sneaking avocados through at the self-serve checkout, slipping a shirt of the hanger and into a conveniently placed bag, or an even more elaborate heist, our appetite for ive inger discounts is insatiable. It comes as no surprise then, as more Australians than ever shoplift, that the naming and shaming of shoplifters has reached new heights.

In the pre-Facebook era, thieves only had to risk being caught in the act and perhaps some grainy video stills, which may or may not be printed and displayed at a store entrance. Now, the ubiquity of Facebook pages for even the smallest of businesses means ofenders are regularly being named, shamed and viliied by members of their local communities. While I traded small town Australia for the anonymity of Melbourne years ago, Facebook ensures I’m regularly updated on all the gossip regarding my own dreary hometown and its apparent abundance of shoplifters.

The public has forgotten about the tens of thousands of Australian mothers with empty wallets who must somehow buy groceries for the week.

Because I have several older relatives who are conirmed busybodies, I’m frequently treated with store footage of shoplifters in my feed, shared from the pages of local businesses. Since we all love to sit on our moral high horses and shame the poor saps caught on camera stealing a pair of shoes, the commentaries on these posts can be downright abusive. Did it ever occur to the commenter that the person they just called a ‘low life’ and ‘scum’ for stealing sports goods may have a compulsive disorder like kleptomania? Have they considered that the woman they labelled a ‘stupid bitch’ for stealing a paperback book may not be a heartless criminal but merely one of the 2.9 million Australians now living below the poverty line?

Somewhere, between disgracing and defaming the ofenders, the public has forgotten about the tens of thousands of Australian mothers with empty wallets who must somehow buy groceries for the week. Another piece of brutally dissected footage depicted two women shoplifting with a child, although the store had the good decency to blur the child’s face. Luckily, children are of limits to public shaming, never mind that the Australian Council of Social Service estimates 17 per cent of Australian children are now also living in poverty.

You’ll be pleased to know, however, that the perpetrators of this vitriolic online commentary aren’t disconnected young people with no sense of social decency. Curiously, it’s more often than not our friend’s mum and the man who serves us every day at the bakery naming and shaming. Recently, a post from a clothing store in a town of barely 20,000 people depicting two individuals’ thievery received

over 95,000 views. In the comments, not only were the ofenders publicly identiied and slandered as ‘low lives’, one commenter even bemoaned ‘faith in humanity is becoming harder to believe in.’ Jeez, never mind the string of IS bombings, the wars and famines currently occurring across the globe – this man considers a woman stealing a $50 t-shirt as evidence of humanity’s great decline.

And while the commenters were certain in their vilifying of people who do things like that, I had a sneaking suspicion they or someone they knew were probably guilty of equal or greater sins. It’s almost as if they used the share and comment buttons to separate themselves from those who do wrong. I wonder, how would these self-righteous individuals feel if evidence of them making racist statements, cheating on their taxes or physically abusing their spouses were left for community discussion?

There will be those, especially who have worked in retail, who would assure me not to feel sorry for those who are shamed for feeling the urge to steal. Sure, it isn’t exactly Les Miserables level depressing – nobody is being thrown in jail for ive years for stealing a bicycle helmet!

Still, a disturbing instance of social media shaming of a shoplifter quite literally hit close to home. As a child, my second storey bedroom window faced the street below, and I would often wake up to the people of my neighbourhood driving or walking to work. For years, one of those people was a middle aged woman who worked nearby, whom I often saw diligently carrying a basket of belongings to work and saying good morning to my dad.

Years later, a Facebook video of a woman shoplifting from a local store was aggressively shared, and the woman was soon identiied and publicly humiliated. To the delight of the store, this identiication led to a charge, which they happily shared in a second post.

Commenters disclosed the woman’s identity and work place among other details, so much so that I realised it was the same lady who I observed making her way to work each day.

After that, I got a little angry. Who actually believes they are of such moral ibre that they have the right to publicly humiliate anyone over such a common ofence? I would instruct anyone who is considering turning someone in for shoplifting publicly on a social media platform to irst make sure they themselves are an upstanding member of their community. The hypocrisy of sinners publicly tut-tutting those caught stealing, which is often carried out under severe economic desperation, is enough to make me wonder if this kind of shaming hints to deeper issues in our society. From the frequency I see footage in my feed, it sure as hell isn’t curbing the issue of shoplifting.

I can’t help but feel these kinds of social media lynch mobs are less of a relection of the people doing the crime and more a relection of the communities, denigrating people with a blatant disregard for circumstance or the long term repercussions of their words. While nobody is being thrown in jail for stealing an avocado or a pair of jeans, the slandering and shaming ofenders endure on public platforms can often carry a lifetime sentence.

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COMMENTARY

WORDS BY TRENT VU ARTWORK BY BONNIE SMITH

SEVEN AND A HALF THINGS THAT I HATE ABOUT WINTER

I

have a few bones to pick with winter. Granted, I love getting to hide my comfort food weight gain under layers of black clothes. I also love Wynter Gordon (‘Dirty Talk’ is a bop), but that’s a whole other thing. But there’s so much more to hate about this season.

Probably not for the reasons you think, though. Allow me to indulge in seven and a half winter-themed rants.

Pube jumpers Obviously people need to rug up to keep warm in the winter. I get that. There are a multitude of clothing options: jackets, jumpers, sweatshirts, thermals, coats and so on. So there’s no excuse to wear what I have coined the ‘pube jumper’. They’re those lufy women’s jumpers that have those long strands of material sticking out of them. Basically, they look like someone’s shaved of their pubic hair, knitted it together and marketed it as ‘fashion’. What’s even worse is that they come in a range of diferent colours, patterns and cuts.

They’re fugly and gross – there’s just no other way to put it. Ever since these hideous creatures were irst birthed into the world a few years ago, they have become a women’s fashion staple. And winter marks the time when they’ll be brought out from the back of the closet (where they belong) to see the light of day.

People mixing seasonal fashion On a related note, nothing ticks me of more than when I see people mixing their seasonal fashion. I’m talking about people wearing scarves with t-shirts. That kind of messed up shit. It’s all kinds of wrong. Mainly because I don’t understand how someone’s body temperature could mean that their head is cold enough to wear a beanie, but their legs are feeling warm enough to wear shorts. Don’t even get me started on when people wear a full summer outit on a 10 degree day. You’re lying to yourself if you say you’re not cold.

Umbrellas People often complain about winter because of the rain. I’m not that bothered by the rain in all honesty, but there are a few things that do piss me of about umbrellas. Firstly, there’s buying the perfect umbrella. You have the choice of purchasing either a massive one that’s a pain to carry around with you, or a fold-up one that its in your bag but will get rekt by the wind within ive seconds.

In the end, they aren’t even that much more convenient – after you’ve inished walking in the rain, you can’t even put the umbrella back in your bag, because you’ll get everything else wet.

Also worth noting is that opening up your umbrella in the rain among your friends is like opening a pack of gum or a bag of chips.

People will all crowd around you and grab at your umbrella to try to stay dry. As a result, we’ll often end up awkwardly being half under the umbrella and half in the rain, meaning we’ll all get wet anyway.

This pisses me of, because I was the one who took the initiative to buy one and carry it around with me. To my umbrella-less friends: piss of and buy your own one.

Pee shivers Have you ever gone to the toilet and randomly shivered as you’re peeing? Well you’re not the only one. After many conversations, I’ve established that pee shivers are a legit thing. I’m not sure what the science is behind the phenomenon, but I have my own hypothesis. Obviously it’s cold in winter, and going to pee involves exposing your genitals to the cold air. And what happens when you’re exposed to the cold air? You shiver. Like that Natalie Imbruglia song. You might be wondering what frustrates me about this so much. Well, just imagine the mess a guy can make if he shivers while peeing. Trust me, it’s not fun to clean up urine of the toilet loor at seven in the morning.

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COMMENTARY

Heating During winter, people swear by heaters. Like, I'm kind of surprised there isn't some obscure cult that worships a heater as their religious idol. Or there might be. Who knows? But heater worshippers have this slightly manic look in their eyes, and will not hesitate to glare at you angrily if you accidentally block their exposure to warmth. I've been the victim of much vicious gutter talk when I've asked to have heating turned of or threatened to turn it of myself. Heaters make people crazy.

Another reason I hate heating is because I dress myself in winter for the cold weather. So I'll layer thermals, jumpers and jackets to beat the wintry conditions outside. Then when I step into a 22 degree room, I'll have to take of everything. Which also sucks because I won't be able to hide my winter weight. But it also means that I'll probably get sick, because my body constantly has to adapt to diferent temperatures. Dealing with Melbourne weather is enough stress, you rude heater bitches.

Snilers and Snorters I wasn't sure whether to count people sniling and snorting as one or two items on the list. I felt like they needed to be addressed as two separate issues, but since they are borne of the same problem, I decided to count them as one and a half.

I feel like people who catch public transport regularly are so used to this by now. But next time you get on board a train, just listen. Once you start hearing the sound of people sloshing around their snot, you'll never be the same. It's kind of like this awful public transport passenger symphony. I get that winter is the season of sickness. But if you're sick, stay at home – or at least blow your nose. And I think it's the fact that when you're sniling, it means you're breathing your nasal discharge back in your nose to prevent it from dripping. Snorting is even more disgusting. It's pretty much sucking all your snot down your throat. The worst part is that people are so nonchalant about it, like they don't even know they're being gross; they'll just sit on the train and snort repeatedly without a care in the world.

Soup Some people froth it, and others (like me) would consider it warm baby food for adults. I understand why people like it – soup provides a warm contrast to the cold weather. But nothing about blended up vegetables is appealing to me. There's just no texture at all; it's just a gloriied smoothie. And don't even get me started on people who treat a soup as an adequate meal. It's not. In this regard, I put it in the same boat as salad. Maybe it'd suice as an entree, but don't pretend you're satisied with a bowl of pumpkin soup for dinner. You're lying to yourself. Or at least show me your ways, because I still need to get rid of this winter weight somehow.

PAGE 38 CONTENT WARNING: IMAGE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

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SCREAM QUEENS BY JASMINE VELKOVSKI 38

CREATIVE

I VENTURED 8 STEPS ON THE ROAD LESS TAKEN WORDS BY NATALIE FONG ARTWORK BY NELLIE SEALE

i. pick a chunk it is part of the poet you really are looking at. a gall bladder, a silver hair, a distance between two moles on the neck. sometimes you have to cradle it, standing under the japanese crab apple tree, and wait for your shadow to ii. read it aloud. until you soliloquise will it make sense, you will ind it in your mother tongue to iii. describe its form. seek a posthumous examination of the fallen stars. (they were rearranged, it is your job to iv. ind the weirdness.) heated Braille lifts territories of meaning, one at a time, budding premature hills echoing v. poetic self-reference. the shepherds have no conclusive synonyms. they are in no hurry to vi. ind other ambiguities. plenty of hunters are in labour, (as if any good ever came of it) (the modern poet implies there's more than one gender, but for the triumphant mind that would be a spoiler), nothing ever creates— not matter not states, only more people to sleep under the stars, lying in waiting, while the neighbourhood puppeteers vii. totalise their daily inds. it’s in the words, they always say it's true. even the herds understood when they viii. repeat in a diferent order — so why can't you?

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CREATIVE

THREE POEMS WORDS BY SOPHIA HARRISON ARTWORK BY AMELIA SAWARD times not happened he spoke like you he even sounded like you my body dissolves i am only ears and eyes smells and touches it’s like loving a shadow it’s a half-truth with full strength double shot pain it’s like you stole his voice box, Max; and it’s barbaric and it’s ugly it reeks of non-sex of times not happened and words unsaid of scotland and london and valis and god it reeks of all those years.

i’m way too young for this middle aged pain and i cry as i write this and that’s ugly too

one day when i’m old and grey with two kids and a husband call me up and we’ll it the years in the middle into an evening and i’ll call it closure and you’ll call it cofee

loop the loop Begin again and again.

I live in the interim; Between what and what yes and no ums and ahs The moment after the breath in but before the breath out that’s me; a tight pause felt but not seen a quick glance a cough, a sneeze.

I wear anxiety with ease and there are so many I’d like to please

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CREATIVE

functioning Walk into the room, take of your hat, congratulate yourself on walking on two legs and thank your forefathers.

Pour your heart out then drink it up again, quickly before the pain sets in or just after if you’re adventurous.

Become obsessive, it’ll distract from your boredom and tickle your self-indulgence.

Love your friends as though they are your enemies; they’ll hurt you the most if you aren’t careful.

Rinse, repeat.

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CREATIVE

IN A HOUSE ON A HILL WORDS BY SAM HANSFORD ARTWORK BY SARAH LEONG CONTENT WARNING: SELF HARM 28 December We arrive at the summerhouse in three cars full of food and clothes.

The house perches on old stilts on a sloping, dusty shore. The lake is dotted with isolated campsites, hidden away from each other by blue gums and shrubs. I am standing by the open boot of my car, the sun already summoning sweat on my forehead. You skip up to me and lean against the boot.

– The lake is brown.

– It’s full of soil; it’s not dirty.

– It’s literally dirty.

– I mean it’s not dangerous.

– You told me it would be blue.

– I told you whatever I needed to, to get you down here.

You lick your hair and tsk at me. I pick up a bag of clothes, your bag. You grab a set of speakers.

Inside the house smells of mildew and old loorboards. The kitchen bench is packed with bags full of vegetables and breads. We walk past it and head up to the second storey. I ind the master bedroom and rest your bag on the exposed mattress of the double bed. A single-glazed window stretches across three walls of the room. Trees press in on the glass, obscuring the lake. You slide a panel open and eucalyptus glides in on the breeze. You come up behind me, – Where are you sleeping?

– There’s a room with four singles downstairs – Oh, right.

You drop the speakers on your bed. You look disheartened, or maybe I want you to look disheartened.

– Don’t be like that; you and Aaron have the best room.

– And don’t we know it!

Aaron is leaning on the door. His face is vibrating.

– This is going to be amazing.

I squeeze his shoulder as I leave you two alone. At the top of the stairs I look into the room. Your eyes meet mine for a heartbeat, then look away.

too thick with smoke and alcohol and I decide to head to my car.

The bouncers nod to me. Outside, Aaron leans against the brown brick wall, a group of men piss down the sidewalk next to him.

– What’s up?

– Hannah never got in the cab.

– What?

– No one knows where she is.

I can see his pulse is hammering in his temple. He’s about to ask something he doesn’t want to: – Could we…

– I’ll get my car.

Aaron hardly its in the padded passenger seat. His knee bounces, almost colliding with his head. As I drive, the car rumbles like it wants to consume the road. We scan the suburban backstreets.

They’re aggressively empty. Sometimes when it’s quiet enough I swear I can hear the silence.

– Why would her friends tell me she got in the cab when no one saw it?

– I don’t know.

– Like why the fuck would they do that?

– I don’t know.

– Shit man, there’s a big ass park there man.

I look out to my left. He’s not wrong.

– Should I pull over?

Aaron sucks through his teeth. I watch him jogging through the park calling her name. I can’t hear him but I see his voice billowing out in front of him in the freezing air. No phone, no money, no communication, no show. Fucking typical Hannah.

20 July 1 January I’ve started getting tired at midnight when I come to this bar. I think it’s a sign we come here too often. The conversation at our table is

42

New Year’s Day is thick with pollen and sleep. The air tastes like hot sawdust and it burns my lungs and dries my nose. You and I sit

CREATIVE on rain-stained patio furniture. It’s hard to imagine this place ever raining. The sun has pushed us under the awnings and we drink beer while we watch the others swimming in the shallows. They are largely out of earshot, but every now and then we hear a cry, a smatter of laughter.

We have sat out here for hours and you have your legs laid across my lap. My inger idly runs circles on your pale calf. You slap my arm, incredulous, – Get out.

– No, I’m serious.

– From the moment you saw me?

– Yes, from that moment I thought she looks like a woman worth knowing.

I know the expression you’re making despite your sunglasses: the smile that pulls your eyes back into slits.

– But I was so young.

– We all were.

I sip my beer and it falls bitter into my stomach. It chills me except for where your legs touch mine. I hope it takes the red out of my face.

– Well, you must’ve felt blessed when Aaron started seeing me, knowing I’d be around so much.

– Of course, my prayers were answered.

You push the auburn hair out of your face and laugh, biting on your tongue. A cricket picks up somewhere near us, and it’s deafening.

Aaron runs up the sloping shore, water running down his lean body.

I can see him squinting through the glare; we are hidden in the shade of the deck. He calls out to us, – You guys joining us anytime today?

I look to you for guidance. You call back, – No, maybe another day!

Aaron shrugs and turns back to the others eager to rejoin them.

– Maybe another day.

You say again, but you are looking at me.

Even when we try to stop and think, its vibration goes on. It shakes and shudders and carries us deeper into streets we do not know. I say what’s been on my mind since the call, – What happens when we ind her?

– What do you mean what happens?

– You two hate me; remember? Isn’t that where we stand?

Aaron stares ahead, jaw tight. The dashboard splays red light over his face. The digital clock counts every moment come and go, mocking us. I scof, – I knew it.

– We don’t – she doesn’t hate you.

– That’s not what I’ve heard.

– What would you know? When was the last time you even spoke to her?

My knuckles are white on the wheel, – I can’t. We don’t speak. That’s exactly my point.

Aaron is silent. The air of the car presses in on us shaking with the growling engine. Old leather and sun-cracked plastic ill my nose.

Outside the night is predatory and cold.

– How do you think she’ll react to me picking her up?

The growling grows louder.

– Does she even know I’m with you, Aaron?

Louder.

– Are you fucking serious?

– Jesus, I’m sorry that I care about inding her more than whatever’s happened between you two. Maybe it’s time you fucking make up anyway?

I bite my tongue, – You know it’s not going to be that simple.

Aaron turned to me now, his face half garish red, half shadowed.

– Whatever, we’re almost here.

Aaron stretches out of the car and swings the door shut behind him. He jogs across the empty road over to the pizzeria haloed in luorescent white and blue. He pushes on the glass door and Hannah runs across the tile loor to him. I watch their embrace.

The Princess and her Charming.

20 July I look to Aaron. We have sat in silence since she inally contacted him, a hurried phone call from a pizzeria. The car is always growling.

As we drive to her house they sit in the back. I can see them in my mirror. Aaron sits low in his seat, his head laid back against its rest. His hand rests on Hannah’s knee. Hannah sits taut and upright. Her hair, which had been a mess when we found her, is tied tight in a bun. Her sharp face is still as marble. Aaron dotes on her; his eyes shine with a hungry depth. Hannah looks out the window unfocused and motionless. I try to meet her eye. She does anything but.

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7 January We stand in the kitchen and watch the dusk settle on the lake.

Purples and reds shine on the muddy water and sandy turf. We drink cheap gin and cheaper beer. We go home tomorrow. Our drunkenness deepens with the night and we forget that there is a world beyond these papery walls. It is bliss, for a time. Someone starts playing ‘90s rock and we were only young then but we love it iercely and it ills our chests like we have balloons for hearts. We turn it up until dust falls from the eaves.

Aaron and I start cooking as night slips into morning. We dice tomatoes and garlic and fry bread to make bruschetta. The house is dark but we are loud. The oven glows hot like a hearth and in the living room an ancient lamp putters out parchment-thin light.

I watch you dancing, your bangs lying about your face. You buckle over laughing and you don’t even try to hide your crooked tooth.

You cry and you hug me. Your arms linger cold on my neck. By the time Aaron and I serve, you are gone.

Later, much later, we stomp through the house like heartbeats. In a heap of hot swirling heads and limbs we all collapse breathless in the master bedroom. From the loor the trees around the window are peering down at us in judgement. They scrape at the windows with thousands of green ingers. Green. Trees should be brown in summer. Squeezed between the leaves and the ceiling is a sky heavy with stars.

– There’s so many.

– I know.

– Way more than back home.

Someone heads for the door.

– Where are you going?

– To get a better look, come on.

Suddenly I am alone on the loor. I listen to the trees lapping at the glass until another sound breaks their pattern. It sounds for a second like a gasp, then quiet. The trees stop to listen. There again, an exhale that could not be contained. A long silence passes. Then, a choked rasp that leaves the lungs like sandpaper.

It came from the bathroom.

I approach the door on the landing. Outside, a shout bounces across the lake chased by a crowd’s laughter. The bathroom door has a sailing boat detailed into the wood in blue and yellow. I put my hand over the boat and push. Inside I ind you kneeling thigh deep in the bath. The air is thick with steam and heat and sweat.

Scattered around the room is a razor, battered and bent, but its blades are still safely locked in their frame. A sink illed to the brim, dissolved makeup dyes the water like skin. In your hand, a hair dryer whose cord will not reach the bath. Your clothes are glued to your thin body and your hair is lank. Makeup bleeds down your face and your pallid eyes stare glassy. I do not know where you were looking; but it was a black, faraway place. You go to make that sound again – that sandpaper scream – but you swallow it laming back into your lungs. You drop the hair dryer, useless, and it starts whirring on the sopping tile loor. You choke, – Don’t tell him.

– I won’t.

– Don’t tell him.

20 July Aaron and Hannah stand by her front door. They are waiting for her dad to let them in. I am supposed to be gone. They are wrapped in arms and breathe shadow-soft words onto each other. The car is of now. Its growls have stopped. Now the only sound it makes are tiny clicks as the metal cools. The hot leather and red light are gone.

Hannah’s tiny porch light is white, almost blue. A cold light. I watch them and remember a shore, thick with pollen, and another day that never was.

The door opens and they are covered in light. When the door closes, they are gone.

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THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER BY HUI QIN (HQ) CHAN www.instagram.com/hq.chan/

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CREATIVE

COLUMN BY DANIELLE SCRIMSHAW ARTWORK BY SAM NELSON

PART 5: FIFTY SHADES OF BLUE

I

t turns out that Tony Abbott can throw a mean left-hook, unfortunately for George. He collapsed, hiding his face in his hands, muling cries of abuse I hadn’t heard since 2013.

I clung tightly to a Country Road bag full of onions, engaged in a ierce tug-of-war contest with the now crazed former Prime Minister. Don’t bother asking me for details. I can’t exactly explain what the hell he was doing beside Mordi Creek or how George and I had gotten into this mess – we assumed snatching onions from Tony would be simple, considering his pallid, scrawny appearance and the fact that having been a wealthy politician he probably got so used to people doing shit for him that by now he’d be a soft little butterly with delicate hands and weak muscles. This was not the case. He was struggling against my weight, frothing at the mouth from the physical efort. Or was he infected with some plague? Suddenly I didn’t feel that hungry for onions.

Tony’s ears pricked up before I heard anything, so he must have expected the girl who had snuck up on us. I faltered at her approach, which allowed Tony to wrench the bag from my grip, onions spilling everywhere. He shrieked in dismay before scuttling away, chased by the mystery girl who tried but failed to throw a net over him. Tony was out of sight within moments, and, reluctantly, she stormed back to us just as I helped George up from the ground.

Her hair was short with jagged edges, probably due to DIY haircuts, and seemed to be dyed with as many possible shades of blue colouring she could find, proving a vivid contrast to her dark brown roots.

She scowled at us. “Idiots. You scared him off.”

I wanted to point out that it was actually her that scared him off, but George interrupted me.

“Scared him off? Did you even see that shit? We’ve just been personally victimised by Tony Abbott.”

She scoffed. “So has the whole country. Get over yourself, Boy George.”

I think it was then that George decided to hate her forever, or perhaps it was after when she realised his name was indeed George and had an asthma attack from laughing so much.

I, on the other hand, was entranced. “Are you Hazel?”

For a second she stared at me in shock, before she must have realised and said, “Are you that Tinder girl? I thought that must have been a trick, like you were a cannibal or something. What was your name again?”

“Roella.”

“Like the bird?”

“No, Roella.”

She frowned. “That’s a pretty weird name.”

“You're named after a shrub,” exclaimed George, ever to my defence.

She shrugged and, throwing the net over her shoulder, began to walk off. George shook his head at me but I followed her anyway, hearing him huff in frustration before running to catch up.

Hazel said that she was ‘collecting’ Tony for this place she called The Sanctuary, where he often escaped from. She’d find and return him in exchange for fresh water, plant seeds, one hour to recharge her iPhone and food scraps. The Sanctuary, she said, was a huge blocked off zone built out past Dandenong, full of Australia’s richest individuals enjoying all the luxuries of a preApocalyptic, capitalist lifestyle.

George raised his eyebrows at me, not needing to voice his scepticism. I also found it pretty hard to believe – how would a scrawny man like Abbott make it all the way, on foot, down to Aspendale from Dandenong, equipped only with budgie smugglers and onions?

“Ro, forget this. We are not going to follow this arsehole hipster on some wild Tony Abbott manhunt. Let’s go back to Mordi – your mum is probably freaking out.”

Hazel, who had ignored George’s insult and continued her Aragorn-style search – “You need to listen to the earth,” she murmured, pressing one ear to the ground and caressing the soil – came to a halt and spun around. “Your mum’s alive?”

I nodded, and then felt bad, realising that I held a sacred privilege over the others. Hazel might have had an iPhone – which I was too poor to buy even before everything went to shit – but I still had a living relative. And it had been an entire day since I’d seen her.

“Um, yeah.”

“Why aren’t you with her now?”

George beat me to an answer. “Because Ro thought it’d be cute to have a girlfriend to share this beautiful, end-of-the-world experience with so now we’re trekking through this fucking swampland, after already rowing through a literal river of shit, to find Australia’s creepiest Prime Minister ever on some off chance that there’s some stupid Sanctuary where you get the PostApocalyptic equivalent of Centrelink payments.”

I resisted the urge to kick George and turned to Hazel. “Come with us.”

She shook her head. “No. I know that Tony’s around here somewhere. Can’t you smell the onions?”

We paused to take a deep breath. George frowned and said, “All I can smell is smoke.”

Our eyes turned to the horizon; the smoke was coming from Mordialloc.

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JERUSALEM, 1:42AM WORDS BY TAMARA REICHMAN ARTWORK BY SOPHIE SUN smoky glass army past foreign danger feeling old Cinderella leaving midnight ugly sisters leaving cold cautious stares foreign glares city streets grey and brusque Kippot headbands caps and scarves a cover between God and us blowing smoke incense rings arm around my ribcage sings blinded by the yellow light metal burning spotlit sight blank skin street art naked David in the park headache fumes empty rooms Mercedes drives in concrete tombs grunge to grey black to paisley dates sweet leaves unfurl cigarette smoke rotten strawberries sweet like Ashkenazi curls bleached blonde in the crowd full of no one dancing loud square letters, limbs fettered ancient words newly learnt you kissed a girl in a gay bar pink scarf smashed glass on the loor nothing more glittering pharaoh irst borns you missed that girl in a gay bar in your dreams no one sees stroking thumbs darkness comes legs entwined holy wine alley ways exit days doors locked ingers shocked pillows squashed keys lost dreams mocked cars stop

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DIP IN THE POOL WORDS BY LINUS TOLLIDAY ARTWORK BY EWAN CLARKE-MCINTYRE

a volvo that stinks of 17yo sweat and rolling up to the nearest kfc because the servo didn't have a place for your pepsi cola piss – and get your kicks damp at 11pm with 2hrs driving to go so you can sell fake pebbles out of crushed vitamins to the aquarium drunk dialling again – shark on the line – paddling through the parking lot a in shooting out of your wallet and a ishing rod shooting in

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THE FIRER WORDS BY HARRY BAKER ARTWORK BY WINNIE JIAO

G

unther woke up feeling sick. He got dressed in a rush half asleep – a shirt lew on, pants rushed up and his hair made itself look presentable. He lung himself to the cofee machine and whilst preparing his cofee found a cheesecake sitting on the kitchen bench. A note lay folded next to it.

To Gunther. Happy Birthday.

Colleen x

It was his birthday. He had forgotten. How old was he this year? 27? Maybe 28. It made no diference – it certainly did not change the fact that the fridge was empty and cheesecake was a remarkably unsuitable breakfast food. He decided to skip breakfast and just have cofee, which never helped if he was feeling sick. He left his apartment in a whirl, the cofee sloshing around in his stomach.

The building he arrived at was the kind of building that made you question whether you had got the street numbers mixed up. Dust-ridden lamps cast depression onto the walls and the carpet looked to be woven from the pubic hairs of the dead. The reception was a wonky trestle table with an unplugged rotary dial phone sitting on top. Behind it sat a receptionist who looked as if he put far too much efort into a job that required very little.

“Hello there,” said Gunther. “I was wondering if I was at the right place. I’m looking for Techno-Vision and Associates.”

“Then welcome,” said the receptionist. “Are you Gunther?”

“Yes.” “Wonderful, Rebecca isn’t expecting you.”

“Lovely.”

“I just need you to ill out a form with a few details.” He passed over a form requiring more than a few details. “And also another one detailing your preferred method of payment. As discussed, it’s a lump sum of $32,947.”

Gunther took the forms and a seat. He illed them out with a calligraphy that was worth more than administrative paperwork.

When he was done, the receptionist led him down a dim hallway to an elevator that was barely wide enough to accommodate one person.

“I won’t come up with you. Just make sure you close the door behind you.” He pressed the button and the doors opened. “Good luck.”

Gunther turned at an angle to squeeze into the lift and watched the concerned face of the receptionist disappear behind the closing doors. Gunther realised he hadn’t been told which level he was going to. There were only two options – Ground and Level 1.

Level 1 was much like the corridor leading to the elevator on the loor below. It made Gunther long for the beneits of good architecture. There were four rooms on the loor, only one of which had a name tag.

Rebecca Downey CEO He knocked and stood in silence. After a few more seconds, he knocked again.

The voice came hammering back from behind the paper-thin

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door. “What is it?”

Gunther, deciding the voice would be annoyed regardless, opened the oice door and stepped in. The smell of smoke clung to the room like it could sense Gunther had just quit. In the centre of the room was a large mahogany desk and behind it sat a woman with a prominent fringe and grey eyes. She looked young. Maybe Gunther’s age, but that depended on whether it was her birthday.

“Miss Downey,” said Gunther. “I am Gunther Coleridge. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Who let you up here?”

“Your receptionist. May I take a seat?”

She didn’t respond so Gunther took a seat anyway. She lit up a cigarette. She ofered him the packet.

“I quit, but thanks, that’s very kind.”

“Your loss.” She shrugged.

“Miss Downey, I’ve been sent here on behalf of the board of your company, Techno-Visions and Associates.”

She exhaled and watched the smoke loat through the air.

“You work for TVA?” “No, they’ve hired me as a contractor.”

“A contractor. Right. So what work do you do then?”

“I’m a irer.”

She took the cigarette out of her mouth.

“Excuse me?”

“A irer. I’m hired to ire people.” Gunther adjusted his shirt.

She took a drag and stared at Gunther.

“So TVA hired you to ire me?”

He nodded. “Efective immediately.”

She stopped and looked around the room. Gunther tried to igure out what she was looking at but the room was so sparsely

decorated he couldn’t tell.

“When did they make the decision?”

“Several months ago. Apparently none of them could bring themselves to tell you once the decision had been made.”

Rebecca put the cigarette out against the mahogany desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was one of the small bottles they sold at front counters. She downed it in one go.

“Cowards. How long have I got?”

“You leave when I do.”

They sat in silence for a while. She lit another cigarette, turned away and opened the window. A million sounds from the bustling street below illed the room and washed the haze away. Beeping horns, the sound of high heels, and the laughter of workers on a lunch break. She looked out the window and let out a sigh.

Gunther watched a tear roll down her cheek.

“Do you like your job, Gunther?”

“It pays the bills.”

She let out a stiled laugh and wiped away the tear.

“Typical. Do you have many friends, Gunther?”

The question caught him of guard.

“Not particularly.”

She stubbed the second cigarette next to the irst and stood up.

“Me neither.”

She left the oice. Gunther listened to the lift trundle down to the ground loor. He walked over to the window. A few minutes later, he watched as Rebecca Downey pushed her way through the crowds and walked out of sight.

He realised she hadn’t taken anything with her. Gunther shut the window and left the oice. He closed the door behind him and called for the lift.

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PINECONES WORDS BY SARAH PETERS ARTWORK BY HANNA LIU I could it a whole pinecone in my chest.

Force it between my ribs and spine all its scales piercing my skin from outside in the pain still wouldn’t match you.

Sometimes, I want to burn it down to dust a forest swept from our memories, The only trees standing fake, in the company of others.

We no longer smell natural.

I still feel you in every branch I touch against my ingers and hands, (Was I not tall enough for your standards?

Fuck you, you know I’m scared of the dark) I’m constantly trapped in the dead of us.

I wish we could crumple down to compost, and start again.

Instead, here I am.

Choking on chip bark memories.

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ANOTHER NIGHTMARE? BY LIEF CHAN www.instagram.com/li__ef/

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1

2

INT. SHADOWY CARAVAN – MIDDAY

BLAKE The main thing was a silly misunderstanding the department covered up. And by silly misunderstanding, I mean accidental shooting. And by accidental, I mean fully intentional and you’re damn right I’d do it again.

BLAKE BIGCOCK sits in an armchair by the window.

Light comes in, patterned by half-drawn Venetian blinds. A woman, BABY VAN BABYCHEEKS, sits across from the detective. The vehicle is moving.

BABYCHEEKS Shut up, you fool! We need something less provocative than that! How else will we recoup our budget at the box office?

BLAKE BIGCOCK (V.O.) I had van Babycheeks in my office. The weather was cool and so was the mood. I was feeling…uneasy.

BLAKE (CONT’D) Tell me, Babycheeks, why did you call in?

BLAKE Well, I also found out my father is not my biological father.

BABY VAN BABYCHEEKS I need to know your progress, Detective.

BLAKE Well, Babycheeks, probing my records, I found some unexpected dirt on me.

The detective looks out the window introspectively. Babycheeks retrieves a notebook from her pocket, props glasses on her face and begins writing, like a counsellor.

BABYCHEEKS Do tell!

BABYCHEEKS And how did that make you feel?

3

4

Blake turns back with tears in his eyes.

BLAKE Just you, silly!

BLAKE Daddy didn’t love me!

BABYCHEEKS Now now, Detective, I’m trained as a vapid supporting character, not a counsellor.

The detective miraculously has no tears in his eyes, as if nothing happened.

BLAKE Of course.

The caravan swerves.

FIFI Come here and give Daddy a kiss.

Blake approaches Fifi and begins voraciously making out with the slug. The slug disappears from sight. After a moment, Blake stops.

BLAKE Oh my God, I just ate Fifi!

FIFI (O.S.) Not so fast, Blakey boy!

BABYCHEEKS My God, Blake! Who’s driving?

Blake rolls onto his back and Fifi bursts from his chest, Alien-style. Blake screams but the slug latches to his lips.

BLAKE Why, it’s Fifi the Talking Slug!

FIFI Shhh, darling.

We see the steering wheel. A very realistic slug is slumped on it, obviously unable to drive.

It wriggles to reveal Jared Leto’s miniature, nigh-unrecognisable face.

FIFI Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Blakey baby?

Baby van Babycheeks looks on in horror as the man she yearned to know makes desperate love to a slug. During the act, Blake plays an electric guitar and then high fives himself in a mirror.

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B

ack here at the oice, we were thinking about 'family movies' and how they seldom appeal to the entire family. So we decided to blend this ultimately playful genre with the most serious genre we could think of – ilm-noir.

The idea is this: a brilliant detective, Blake Bigcock, is enlisted by Baby van Babycheeks to compile a dossier of top secret information on an elusive mastermind. The twist? Blake is the mastermind. Get ready to go on the road this summer with an incredible journey of self-discovery, jaded masculinity and uncomfortable genre-fusion, where the only villains are untapped feelings. If that doesn’t sell it to you, maybe Blake’s wisecracking partner, Fii the Talking Slug, will! You all love dogs – why not slugs too? And, spoiler alert, they fall in love! This is the ultimate family movie!

And yeah, we kinda gave Jared Leto a role as a slug, because he’s just so darned transformative! He’s renowned as a bit of a character – gifting cast and crew used condoms, mailing a dead pig to the set on his day of and beating a defenceless child in a McDonald’s bathroom. Wacky, right?

COLUMN BY LINUS TOLLIDAY ARTWORK DARUS NOEL HOWARD

CREATIVE

A CUP OF TEA IN NEPAL WORDS BY JORDAN LANE ARTWORK BY KYAW MIN HTIN

T

he traveller stepped of the bus and thanked the driver, who smiled and nodded, many rupees richer. The traveller’s backpack weighed him down as he passed by stalls and shops and other tourists, but the smile never dropped from his face. How could it? He was in Kathmandu, taking a gap year, and he’d paid to be there. He enjoyed being surrounded by new things, interesting things. Even the light was diferent, relecting of the Himalayas and making his irst impression that much brighter.

But he decided he should go to the hostel before exploring. So he avoided eye contact with stall owners, smiling at the stone street, or his map, but taking only an olfactory tour of the city.

The hostel wasn’t anything to speak of, and the traveller wasted no time dropping his backpack onto his bunk, checking the door was locked, and thanking the receptionist again as he stepped into the street, looking around properly this time.

The city was magniicent. Bunting seemed to be everywhere, in bright but faded colours, and the spires of temples stood out, lording over the bowing brick. The street bustled. He particularly liked seeing people on scooters – often sharing the seat, sometimes in helmets, sometimes blaring their horns at speeding cars. He put on his sunglasses and moved upwards.

He made it about a kilometer before reaching a small square.

Here the other tourists were most visible, lashing cameras and wearing branded breathable shirts – which bore the city’s name, but stood out like someone on ecstasy at a funeral. Out of all the people there, though, he was the one that the monk spoke to.

“Would you like to know more about our city?”

The monk had a shaved head, thick eyebrows, and green eyes with crow’s feet that creased as he smiled. His robes were orange and old and brilliant. The monk himself was even older, and he stood in front of a crumbling temple, which was the oldest of all.

The traveller was interested, and had nowhere to be.

“I am a Tibetan Buddhist. They have a long history in Nepal, but did you know that we were twice sent from here? The refusal of Buddhist monks was only overturned a short time ago, in the consideration of this city’s long history. She breathed out, and the monks were told to leave, but now she has breathed in again. Many hope she holds her breath this time. Would you like to come in? Are you busy?”

The traveller stepped inside, taking of his hat, and the monk pulled the heavy wooden door closed. It was dark in the temple, lit only with candles, and they sat on the loor. A young Nepalese boy, wearing the same robes, and with the same shaved head, brought butter tea. The monk took his tea irst, and then the boy nodded at the traveller, who thanked him in a New Zealand accent. The traveller sipped at the tea, relishing the experience, as the monk spoke of Tibetan diaspora, politics and persecution.

After a lot of listening, however, the traveller began to feel drowsy. He’d had a long day of travel, he reasoned, and should be going soon. But the monk kept talking, and it would be rude to interrupt. So he kept listening, and began to feel gradually more tired, lightheaded and ill. Eventually, he nodded of, his hand cradling his chin. The monk didn’t seem to mind at all. Instead, he smiled, took the tea, and lay the traveller down on the carpet.

The boy came back in, head down, and looked at the monk through his eyebrows. The monk raised a hand, thumb up, and then riled through traveller’s pockets, inding a phone, wallet, room key and lighter. Then a pack of cigarettes, which the monk grinned at before tucking into the folds of his robe. The boy slid the sunglasses from the unconscious traveller’s face, and stripped him of his belt and boots.

“Take this and go check,” the monk said to the boy, handing him the hostel key. “It’s the one further south, opposite the stall that sells spices.”

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The boy nodded and raced of, keeping his head down. After the door closed once again, the monk pulled out a mobile phone and dialled a number, speaking casually. The man that answered his call came out from a back room. He was dressed in a blue suit and a scarf, with his hair cut into a fashionable top-heavy style, combed to the side. He wore two subtle rings on his ingers, and pufed at a cigar as the monk explained how long they had. The drug was cut with all sorts of other things, so had been cheap to make, but would provide a quick overdose. The oral administration prevented a noticeable rush. The man’s blue eyes were dull, almost glazed, with deep marks underneath. He was uninterested. His lips turned down at the corners.

“Alright. Put his things in storage and deal with him. Your share will be with you on Monday. Do the rest of it right. Make it far away in case he’s out forever.”

The monk grinned and laughed, making a joke about the ease of it, now.

“Don’t tell yourself that. It’s bad for business,” said the man.

“Now get on with it. Clean up, and be back outside within the hour.

You did ine.”

The man left, his shoes loud on the stone loor, and the monk waited until the boy came back, letting in a sliver of the bright Himalayan light before hurriedly closing the door again. He had the traveller’s backpack with him, and on the monk’s instruction, he placed the stolen items inside before taking it into a side room. He came back pushing a wheelbarrow, and the two of them lifted the traveller into it. The traveller was slight and it was quick work.

The boy wheeled the traveller back into the side room, leaving the monk behind. They passed wooden shelves that were laden with phones, wallets and other assorted goods, stored here before it was safe to push them into the market. The room was well-lit by lightbulbs embedded into the roof.

The boy turned the lights of before opening the side door, and left the wheelbarrow in the dark as he leant out, checking that nobody was around.

The alley was empty, so he draped a blanket over the wheelbarrow and pushed the traveller out. Onwards through the back alleys, ducking under drying-lines, keeping his head down, hurrying past the crouching houses. The monk had told him to take the traveller to the edge of town and put him behind a stone, but instead the boy headed towards the hostel.

When he arrived, the boy left the wheelbarrow in the shadows, and then jogged to a side door, knocking twice. The door opened, and the boy said a few words to somebody on the other side before a ire alarm sounded. The boy heard voices and footsteps as he returned to the traveller in the wheelbarrow. He wheeled it to the door as his friend returned, then they lifted the traveller and carried him inside, down the emptied corridors and into his room, where the boy put him into the recovery position. The friend went to report that the alarm was triggered by accident. The boy then pulled the bedsheets over the traveller and checked his pulse.

There was a pen and some paper on the bedside table. The boy wrote down the number of the Australian embassy, which he knew by heart. Then he illed a glass of water in the bathroom down the hall, placed it at the traveller’s side, turned out the lights, closed the door, and left.

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TENSE WORDS BY MORGAN-LEE SNELL ARTWORK BY RACHEL MORLEY CONTENT WARNING: MISCARRIAGE

PAST I wanted a pony so bad, and a pink leather saddle for it too.

I said that I would have called my pony Starlight and my friend said that you could lose your virginity from riding a horse, or even a bike. In a dream, I was riding a dolphin wearing a pink leather saddle. It kept drooling and it couldn’t do any good tricks, but it galloped pretty well, if nothing else. When I woke up, I’d gotten my period.

I inboxed my best friend and said, “I think I’m in love with you,” and she left me on ‘seen’. I was sitting in front of the TV watching Dragon Booster and my butt cheeks were getting carpet burn. I felt all wrinkled up inside. I wrote in my diary, “I feel like a total walnut!”

I was living in a tent and my forehead was very pimply. My goldish had just died so my grandmother had taken me into the city to get avocado toast and strawberry milk. A kid was sitting at the table beside us and my grandma said, “Kids are so small.” I agreed. A swarm of bees came in through the front door and stung everyone in the café except us.

I was dating a boy who listened to dubstep and made me a bong out of an old orange juice bottle we found on the side of the road. We got high and then he ingered me in the bushes and I thought “Wow, I’m really A Woman now.” There was a twig poking into my butt and it was dangerously close to my asshole. I was fakemoaning and a dead possum was rotting in the leaves beside us.

The bath was too hot and I decided to give myself a stick and poke while I waited for it to cool down; “yours for now” on my inner thigh. Sitting on the edge of the tub left an indent in my leg.

Soaking in the water washed all the ink out of my wound and when I got out of the bath my tattoo was gone.

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PRESENT

FUTURE

I am opening my legs and Erin is making her hands into the shape of two eggs. She is sticking one hand in my pants and one hand in my open mouth — people look prettier with their mouths open. I am cumming and the fan is whirring beside me and I look like a swan.

It’s a Tuesday and I am standing next to the cofee machine at work and it explodes. I have blisters all over the left side of my body. I keep poking at them. They are leaking yellow pus and I accidentally get some in the vat of hollandaise sauce. My boss is iring me. He is yelling, “You can kiss that workers comp goodbye!”

It is Christmas Eve and I am in the SUV with mum and we are driving to buy ice and wine. I am snacking on sunlower petals and shuling my tarot cards. Today’s card is The Chariot. This means I have some hard work ahead of me. ‘Long and diicult’ are the words used in my tarot instruction booklet. We are driving home from the Big Bargain Bottleshop and we hit a bat with our car. Its leathery cloak is spread across our windshield and the sunlight is iltering in through its veins.

I am collecting all the dog hair on my bed so that I can spell out the word ‘SIN’ with all the fur. I am trying to decide if I will do it in cursive or capitals. I am running eight minutes late for class because I am collecting the hairs. I keep asking myself, “Why did I shave my dog on the bed? Why didn’t I shave him on a tarp or something?”

I am reading a book but I can’t stop thinking about bread. I am getting distracted and reading the same line over and over again; “it is the only salvation I know,” and I am thinking, “That’s so true.

What do we have in this world but bread?”

I will be lying in a golden Suzuki Swift, masturbating to robot porn. I will ind the lack of narrative disappointing, but I will be intrigued enough to keep watching. One day my kids will all have sex with robots and they will think it is strange that I only had sex with humans. I will think, “How does a robot climax?” and then I will look down and I will be holding a dove in my hands.

I will stand on the couch with bloodied hands and reach for the ceiling of balloons, and I will squeeze the balloons one by one between my hands until they are all popped, and rubber stained red litters the loor.

I will wake up in the morning beside my mother and she will be crying. I will put on her socks and her shoes and help her out of bed.

We will go to the supermarket and she will buy seven grapefruits and let them all rot in the kitchen. When she goes to sleep at night I will lay down in her walk-in wardrobe and sigh. The hems of her dresses will all move when I breathe.

There used to be a sugar cane ield on the land where my house is built. One day they will knock my house down and build an Olympic sized pool there and the girls will sit around it in their Target bikinis. One girl will hand her phone to another; “Can you take a photo of me?” Pose, smile, “fuck I look pale, can you take another?” They will turn pink under the UV. The married couple will be sitting across from me on the tram.

The married couple will be sitting beside me on the tram. Everyone will be married. I will go home and ask my boyfriend for a baby. It will be the twenty-ninth time we have had the Baby Conversation.

He will inally concede. Three months into the pregnancy, I will start leaking black and leshy. I will ind a tiny ingernail in my underpants. I will throw my messy undies in the trash and go to Sephora to buy green eyeliner.

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CREATIVE

LITTLE RED GUMBOOTS WORDS BY EVE ASQUITH ARTWORK BY ESTHER LE COUTEUR CONTENT WARNING: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

U

nder the cold, wet sky of a miserable Sunday, little Sam Baker buried her gumboots in the woods. It was a private ceremony. No witnesses. Just her, the soil and the corpse of something she used to love. At the tender age of ive, she would have declared the forest behind her house to be the greatest place in the world. Red boots clunking, she would trek there on cloudy afternoons and squish mud patties with her ists. The trees would stand over her like great green pillars and she would gaze up at their spindly boughs, planning to climb them all and claim each one as her own. She used to disappear there for hours at a time – leave home when the air was crisp, and return when it warmed, smelling of sweet honey. It would make her parents nervous.

She had only ever shown this place to one person.

Unintentionally, of course. She had never planned on sharing. It was the evening of one of her parents’ gatherings, a night where the music was tasteful and the adults wore their remaining youth like party hats; it was a rare time where they didn’t seem worried, where they relaxed and fell into themselves, or at least the old selves they used to be. Sam noticed this. She watched them babble in that excited, child-like way, and it made her tired; sick of waiting for grown-ups to inish their conversations and do something, of being told Just a minute, sweetie, of looking up with wide eyes only to be met with a lick of the wrist. She saw him then – smiling across the room and gesturing with a curled inger. She grinned back, thinking how nice it was to have someone to talk to.

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Later on, when she ventured into the dark, Sam found that this stranger had followed her into the woods. But she didn’t mind. He laughed with her, he listened to her. They played games. He said to keep them a secret. The night air was thick, and the moonlight was pale. For the irst time, the woods became cold. Gazing up at the sky, Sam wondered if the man on the moon was watching her, if he approved of what she had done. Afterwards, she didn’t know whether she felt better or worse.

By the turn of her sixth birthday, Sam had abandoned her old adventures. The forest was no longer of interest. It had changed and so had she.

There were nights when she would wake up sticky. Full of terrible dreams and feelings she didn’t understand. In the blackness, she remembered the wolves. How they grazed their teeth along her neck and nuzzled their snouts into her chest. How her heart throbbed so hard she thought her blood would bruise. When she woke up, the sheets would be sodden. They smelt sharp and animal.

In the morning, her mother would change them. She would sigh, It’s okay, Sam. It’s okay, and wrap the yellow sheets in a ball, chucking them in a basket. They landed with a thump.

When school came around, Sam was silent. She sat in class picking at crayons, scraping their oily lesh beneath her nails. The teachers worried about her; she knew they talked to her parents, told them things that they didn’t need to know. She’s struggling to adjust. It’s a big change. Is everything alright at home? They had betrayed her.

But worst of all were the boys. The ones with grubby ingernails who pulled on her pigtails and laughed when she cried. The ones who snuck into the girls’ toilets, crawling on all fours to see where her pee came from. Gross luorescent light caught the ine hairs on her skin and her thick-leathered school shoes slipped on the grime smeared loor. Everything was dead and painful, and Sam was no exception. She was often tormented by a boy with skinny ankles who would chase her and push her, lifting up her skirt to sneak a peek at her pink Barbie undies. Her thighs would tense up like quivering cement, and her knees would buckle. Yet, as the scrawnylimbed boy and his friends sneered, something would change. She would relax. They would look, they would giggle, they would leave.

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And she would feel ine. The smacking of a skipping rope echoed in the background and she would watch the other girls jump, their skirts ballooning.

Leaning against her parents’ bedroom door, Sam listened to them talk. They were angry. Not with Sam, not even with each other; she wasn’t quite sure what. A hard walnut lodged in the back of her throat. Her mother spoke quickly and profusely. She barely even speaks to us. She can’t hold a conversation outside the house. It’s like she’s not even there anymore, and her father wouldn’t know how to respond.

I just want to know what happened to our baby, her mother would say, voice breaking. And then there would be silence, and Sam knew they were hugging.

But their anguish couldn’t last for long, and her parents picked themselves up in a way that Sam struggled to understand. The conversation shifted, their voices lifted. It was like nothing had happened. Her mother’s concern drifted towards the evening: how she had to get ready for tonight, how the food still isn’t prepared, how she will be judged by the ladies in her division. And as the night drew on, everything was ine.

Until she saw him. Standing next to her parents. He was diferent now. Smoother-tongued than he had been in the woods.

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But as his meaty ingers wrapped around the neck of the beer bottle, Sam felt her stomach curdle. She watched as he would make a joke, and her parents would laugh. They would chuckle deep into the night, gradually losing focus and falling into the hazy rhythm that adults do – sip and laugh, sip and laugh. Then, rousing themselves from their trance, they remembered. Sam, come here, they would call. Say ‘Hello’ to the guests. And everyone would gush and aww, and she would look into their great big eyes and feel afraid. She was so small.

Fumbling with her skirt, even with her eyes on the ground she knew he was looking. She could feel him; his big shadow pressing down on her. It took all she had not to scream.

Outside once again, the tender thuds of her feet stamped the earth and the muck caked her skin. Sam took her red gumboots for one last trek. Bulbous, grey clouds smothered the sky – they hung heavily and looked as though they were about to weep. But Sam’s cheeks were already wet. Taking of her shoes, she dug and dug and dug until she was elbow deep in the dirt. She lay her boots gently in the hole. Then, spilling all the dirt back into the gash, she pressed it down, resting her palm over the earth for a small second. It was done.

Naked toes splayed against the soil, little Sam Baker turned on her heels. She walked home, barefoot and limping. Behind, she left her old companion to rest in their grave; a site that remained unmarked, but there nonetheless.

EXISTENTIALISM BY CORNELIUS DARRELL 64

CHROMA BLACK & WHITE ARTWORK BY CAITLIN WONG CURATED AND DESIGNED BY ILSA HARUN

Each edition of Farrago will include a photoset of a diferent colour.

Check out the next edition’s colour on the content list tab of facebook.com/Farragomagazine.

Submit your photos through farragomedia2017@gmail.com.

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CREATIVE

YOUR LIFE IS YOUR BITCH WORDS BY ALEXANDER BAKY TRAN ARTWORK BY ELLA BROADBENT

Your grace I serve a lamboyant existence Due to all your wealth You are wholly invincible Your barbaric mistakes pardoned by pounds You are a master of games You can enslave the law You will beat all those up Dare they cause you all blue and all sore You shove down your wealth Inside those cowardice mouths You lecture them that lesson You shut up the crowd But there is one little thing From which you can’t always hide There is this one tragic thing That gives you no sleep That in all of that silence you sob and you weep Now please do not kill me When I tell you something You would rather not hear Please do not kill me for it is death you do fear Though needn’t you worry Be not as grey as the clouds For on that day when you die We shall project our pain loud Atop your marble bed Inside the silk-woven shroud With rare golden thread We shall not forget We will sew you a pouch So thus within you can carry All of that wealth And all of that which Which made you so proud

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FOR AND AGAINST ED SHEERAN ARTWORK BY SELENA TAN FOR BY HARRY BAKER

E

d Sheeran is a serenading, ginger god who has descended from the heavens to conquer the musical world.

Rising to fame in 2010, Sheeran now has three albums under his belt and has become one of the biggest names in pop music. He consistently sells out stadium tours, despite performing solo with his acoustic guitar, and has become the most streamed artist of all time on Spotify.

And although Sheeran remains massively popular, people continually point to songs like ‘Shape of You’, ‘Sing’, or ‘The A Team’ as a way to discredit his music as ‘crappy pop’. However, it’s clear that his music is far more encompassing and has moved beyond catering only to the pop genre. In songs like ‘Don’t’ and ‘Runaway’, Sheeran takes elements of pop and R&B, and mixes them with his witty and ingenious lyrics to make something fresh. He appeals to the more tender side with love ballads like ‘Kiss Me’ or ‘How Would You Feel (Paean)’, and even dabbles in rap with songs like ‘Take It Back’ and ‘Eraser’. Sheeran is certainly not just a pop musician – he’s proved himself to be capable of adapting and mixing genres to his own style.

He’s also a master of live performance, using a loop pedal to create backing tracks and beats with his guitar. Arguably, Sheeran’s music improves when he plays it live. If you need proof, go watch a video of him playing ‘Drunk’ to a crowd of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium. Still not convinced? How about his 2015 Rock In Rio performance of ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’ featuring snippets of 50 Cent and Iggy Azalea? Or maybe his beautiful performance of ‘Give Me Love’ in 2012 at the Live Room for Warner Music?

AGAINST BY DANIEL BERATIS

E

d Sheeran’s face makes me see red. Not just because he’s got red hair – which is ine, red hair is great – but where do I start with the trainwreck of a cultural dumpster ire that is Edward Sheeran? Where do we begin with Edward Christopher Sheeran?

I mean, God. There isn’t even that much signiicantly wrong about Sheeran’s earlier music. Plus, and, to a lesser extent, Multiply, are both your fairly stock-standard indie folk albums, illed with the same six guitar chords under a whining vocal – and that’s not whining in the sad sense, just in how it sounds – and that’s ine. If you’re into that, that’s ine. Quality of the genre aside, that’s ine.

I’ll be screaming Lorde’s Melodrama at 3am while drunk in a side street and loving it, and how the everloving heck are you supposed to scream ‘Castle on a Hill’?

But Edward C.S. truly boils the blood with Divide. He truly makes the heart absolutely want to throw up. In pre-release interviews, Mr Sheeran admits that he wasn’t writing Divide to say something, or to make nice music, or for fun, or whatever. No, he writes songs based in part on if they’re “Radio 1 songs” or “Radio 2 songs”. As he told radio host, Chris Evans, this “comes into the equation”, writing songs not for any artistic purpose but for commercial beneit.

May God help me.

Oh, he’s relatable. He’s adorable. Whatever. None of these things actually mean anything if the persona behind it all doesn’t exist for any reason apart from anodyne existence. And it casts his entire discography into disrepute, because what is he here for, if not to make music? If his focus is how his songs will play on commercial radio, what’s the bloody point?

This is an argument on selling out, and it doesn’t even touch on why I, personally, can’t stand Ed Sheeran. I don’t like his voice.

I don’t like his face. I don’t like how he carries himself and I don’t like his music. Call me a hater, because I am, but I’ll be screaming Lorde’s Melodrama at 3am while drunk in a side street and loving it, and how the everloving heck are you supposed to scream ‘Castle on a Hill’?

I’m just thankful, I am just so thankful that he’s chosen a dumb way to name his albums. Plus. Multiply. Divide. Those are his irst three. All he’s got to go is Minus, Exponent and Parentheses and he’s done. He can’t torture us anymore. He’ll be finished. And the long national nightmare can end.

Unbeknownst to many, Sheeran has written a variety of hits for other artists, most notably Justin Bieber's ‘Love Yourself'.

Even if you’re not a fan of his music, you might be a fan of a song that he wrote for someone else. Unbeknownst to many, Sheeran has written a variety of hits for other artists, most notably Justin Bieber's ‘Love Yourself’, but also songs for One Direction, Rudimental and The Weeknd.

But forget the music for a second, because without any of it Ed Sheeran still remains one of the easiest people to like in the music industry. He’s been labelled as the ultimate ‘nice guy’, but certainly not in the negative sense of the phrase. You can watch any interview with him to see someone who is genuine, honest and just downright fun.

But at the end of the day, even if you don’t like Ed Sheeran or his music, you certainly can’t deny his talent as a songwriter and a powerhouse of the modern day music industry. His music is here to stay – just wait, in 20 years time you’ll be browsing throwback playlists illed to the brim with Ed Sheeran.

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