Heartbreak? Romantic woes? Secret crushes? Submit to Farragossip for advice from our Farragony Aunts!
We sat down with Laura (sans the Hell Cutz) to have a chat about the band, their influences, and what’s next! To keep up to date check out @ lauraandthehellcutz on YT or @lauraandthehellcutz on Instagram.
after a stellar set with opening act Mia Pisano—we talked about Clairo, making music videos, the writing process and more!
Sabine
15 Economic
Zeinab Jishi
of the World, Unite!
Jesse Allen
29 Uzbekistan not Pakistan: Being Uzbek in a Country That’s Never Heard of Us
Maftuna Khasanova
30 Something’s Gotta Give
Amaya Sachdev
31 Waterlogged
Isaac Thatcher
32 The Dumbphone Renaissance
Alex Saveski 36
Comes Out as Bisexual Amid Discussions of Homophobia in
Zeinab Jishi
Farrago is produced and published on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of this land and to all the lands on which our University operates: the homes of the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Yorta Yorta
and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. We acknowledge that the University of Melbourne is an inherently colonial institution, built not only on stolen land physically, but on the systematic exclusion of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous systems of knowledge. As the University’s student publication for 100 years now, we
Breath
Charli Davies 51 Man and Dog
Richie Huang
pool
Bella Hall
52 Mud
Lily Woodberry
53 Poppy Seeds
Lily Woodberry
54 Homemaker
Alika Mogilevsky
60 Anything Under 1 Minute
Aaron Agostini
61 SAY IT AIN’T SO
Eleanor Waters-Jones 66 Robot Cop
Maxwell
67 The Friend: This Frazzled New Yorker Can’t Write for Shit!
Sabine Pentecost 68 Honey Don’t Believe the Hype
70 The Quiet Devastation of Sorry Baby Junae
In the Heights: the Heartfelt Hip-Hop
Nicholls
78
Lana Del Rey Found Repairing a Tractor in Remote Mechanics Shop in Jamaica plains, Boston Massachusetts
Aaron Agostini
Neuroimaging Reveals Shocking Truth about Popular Procrastination Technique
Amandi Fernando 79 Better Help to Commence Sponsoring UniMelb Lectures
Jayden Alexander
Puzzles
LF & Sophie He
recognise our complicity in such systems and strive to actively resist and unlearn colonial ideologies, both our own and the University’s.
Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
ABRIDGED SPEECH TRANSCRIPT from the Farrago Centenary Gala 11/09/2025 @ Trades Hall
Marcie
As of this year Farrago has been around for a century, a once in a lifetime milestone. It is a testament to the passion of students whose works have been printed in edition after edition that Farrago still carries on after all this time. Today, we celebrate the works of these students and alumni, and all the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into each edition over the years.
Sophie
Our University is a paradox. It is at once a bastion of institutional privilege and a crucible of challenging and radical initiatives. Perhaps it is this constant collision of forces that keeps campus such a reactive environment. Like many in this room, my first year of undergrad was shaped by unprecedented industrial action from the NTEU. Throughout those semesters, the efficacy of collective action was impressed upon me. I found this lesson vastly more instructive than the Jobs Ready seminar leader who, describing himself as a “trauma-inducing bag of charisma”, told me to just make a LinkedIn and get networking (he was actually very nice to me, but that doesn’t suit the narrative I’m spinning). At times, being at UniMelb can feel punishingly lonely. Perhaps we are siloed due to economic incentives, VSU or recent protest restrictions. Regardless, at Australia’s pre-eminent university, our mundane routines see us socially stratified by class or citizenship and academically divided as we compete for what we perceive to be limited chances at success.
Perhaps this individualism is why the more cynical of our peers caricaturise our publication as the callow prattlings of pretentious left-leaning Arts students. I would like to invite the jaded to see the value in so many contributing to a project dismissed by so many others. Farrago relies on an un-apathetic university community. A century is a success; one that is quite literally impossible to achieve alone.
Recently, Melbourne University Publishing announced that it would be shuttering literary magazine Meanjin. I struggle to imagine our Australian literary, publishing and media landscape without it. Rather fittingly, I want to invoke AA Phillips’ “The Cultural Cringe”. Writing in the 50s, he claims, “The most important development of the last twenty years in Australian writing has been the progress made in the art of being unselfconsciously ourselves”.
What does it say about our attitudes toward Australian literary productions when one of our wealthiest universities will not fork over a paltry sum to protect one of our most valuable cultural outputs?
Over the course of my degree, I have repeatedly remarked that the people who have provided me the most value for my debt-
ridden education have been those for whom the University has done the least.
It is beautiful that we can gather so many people to celebrate a century’s worth of collaboration. Perhaps it is bittersweet because that’s how much work seems needed to achieve recognition.
As many present will know, editing Farrago isn’t an easy ride. Every week I find a new reason to quit, and every day, returning to reporting I re-find my reason for continuing. While I often question whether anyone reads our news pieces, I have never questioned that they are needed. I know that student journalism matters when stories of students and staff repression go unreported. I know that student journalism matters when professional publications DO cover campus affairs and they do not report the truth, they spread disinformation and too willingly take statements from the university at their word.
The genocide in Gaza, the destruction of universities, the targetted killing of over 275 journalists, all of this has been conducted with the effective support of the University of Melbourne–who have been ruthless in their attempts to repress students and staff and evade accountability.
In another hundred years, I have no doubt the University will be busy marketing our historic resistance as the appeal of a counter-cultural campus life, and I hope, at least, that Farrago will still be here to document the truth and tell students stories.
I came to Farrago by way of the Maldives. My first newsroom wasn’t a student office with over-caffeinated editors; it was Jazeera News, in a small island democracy at a time when being a reporter wasn’t just difficult—it was frightening. I covered the 2023 presidential election, and before that, the terror bombing that nearly killed former President Mohamed Nasheed in 2021. To be in those moments—feeling the pressure of history and the risks that came with telling the truth—was terrifying. It was frightening work—often isolating, occasionally unsafe— but it planted in me a conviction that has only deepened: we don’t do journalism because it’s easy; we do it because truth has consequences. I came to this newsroom with the scars and perspective of reporting in a small, fragile democracy. And I carry that perspective with me every time I sit down to edit, to write, to argue over a headline.
Tonight, we celebrate one hundred years of Farrago—a century of editors and contributors who learned the same lesson in their own ways—a century of stories, voices, and relentless commitment to student journalism. Farrago has always asked awkward questions of comfortable institutions. It has chronicled our University’s triumphs and failures, celebrated student life, and held Student Union politics to a standard higher than factional instinct. As an editor, I’ve come to appreciate just how
vital Farrago is: not only as a publication, but as an institution of accountability. That responsibility is heavy, and at times, it can be lonely. But looking back across the decades—at editors who once barricaded the office to protect it from hostile student politicians, at staff who slept on the floor to meet impossible deadlines—I know we are standing in a long tradition of resilience.
Of course, the challenges we face are not unique to Farrago Student journalism across Australia is under threat.
The pressure, of course, is not just here. Globally, press freedom is contracting. In the Maldives, my first beat, a proposed media control law would hand broad, discretionary powers to the state—threatening fines, jail terms, and shuttering outlets that criticise the government. Journalists there understand the stakes: control the press, and you control the political weather.
If you want to know what is at risk when the press is muzzled, look to conflict reporting. Over the past year, Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history. Some died with cameras in hand; some killed with their children in their arms; others were buried under rubble still in their ‘PRESS’ vests. The roll calls grow longer even as the world argues over semantics. As the war correspondent Marie Colvin reminded us, “A journalist’s role is to bear witness.” Their courage reminds us
Covers: Mathilda Stewart
that journalism is not simply a profession. It is a public service. It is, in its purest form, an act of defiance against silence.
Journalism is a civic act, sometimes a dangerous one, always a necessary one. When universities threaten print budgets, when student unions lean on editors, when governments legislate control—what is really being negotiated is the public’s right to know.
So tonight, as we celebrate Farrago’s hundredth year, let us tie all of this together. From the student reporters who fight for print budgets to the professional correspondents risking their lives in war zones, we are united by a single calling: to tell stories that matter.
We don’t do this work because it is easy. We do it because it is necessary. Because without journalism—without truth-telling— democracy withers, communities fracture, and power goes unchecked.
Here’s to a hundred years of Farrago. And here’s to the next hundred years of stories worth telling.
Designers: Sophie He (main) and Ruby Weir-Alarcon (Reviews and Culture)
Sub-editors: Sophie He, Emily Macfarlane, Helani Munidasa, Erin Ibrahim, Astara Ball, Bridget Collier, Emily Couzins, Ren Richards, Isaac Thatcher, Agnes McCallum, Andi Misa, Sam Sweeney, Audrey McKenzie, Jaymie Nohejl Willis, Jamille Jayo, Ruby Weir-Alarcon, Hayley Yeow, Angela Nacor & Zeinab Jishi
Managers: Angela Nacor & Felicity Bayne (Photo/Video), Sabine Pentecost (Social Media), Hallie Vermeend (Creative), Maria Quartel (News and Design), Madeline Barrett & Emily Macfarlane (Nonfiction), Hayley Yeow & Ruby Weir-Alarcon (Reviews), Tom Weir-Alarcon, Janice Hui & James Muller (Archives), Beth Muir & Arshinie Saravanan (Events), LF (Puzzles)
Your 2025 editors are Mathilda Stewart, Sophie He, Ibrahim Muan Abdulla and Marcie Di Bartolomeo.
Farrago is the newspaper of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU). Farrago is printed on recycled paper by Kosdown Printing. Please recycle this magazine. Farrago is published by the General Secretary. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of UMSU. If you want to raise an issue with the Union, contact the President and General Secretary at president@union.unimelb.edu.au and secretary@union.unimelb.edu.au respectively.
Taylah Stojanovski
University
of Melbourne Student
Loud declarations of “fake news” have become all too familiar to anybody with a social media account, and it seems as though every corner of the digital landscape is riddled with either misleading information or blatantly hateful content. The prevalence of extremist ideologies, misogynistic influencers and political untruths is becoming increasingly
demoralising. Serious concerns are being raised by media authorities for the integrity of our political landscape and wellbeing of those easily influenced by harmful online material. To make social media platforms a better place, we need increased moderation which regulates the dissemination of misinformation and distressing content, balancing freedom of speech and protection of its users.
Rampant misinformation on social media sites is incredibly damaging to democratic practices, in both the Australian and
international political landscape. Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are hubs for spreading political information–and misinformation.
Scarily, researchers have found that 97 per cent of Australian adults are insufficiently able to identify misinformation online. We all witnessed the impacts of online misinformation with the defeat of the Voice to Parliament in 2023. Indigenous leaders cite “lies in political advertising and communication” on mainstream and social media as a key contributor to the disappointing outcome of the referendum, which ultimately reinforced harmful racist and colonial ideologies in Australian society.
Yet, political misinformation goes far beyond Australian politics. ‘Fake news’ spreads rapidly on social media platforms, and misleading information going unchecked by in-house and government moderators will continue to have terrifying effects on democracies worldwide. Voters in the US are experiencing an increased distrust in electoral practices, with a third of Americans believing Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election was due to voter fraud, and these beliefs are largely uncorrected on social media platforms. This lack of faith in democracy is driving up political dissent amongst right-wing voters, which will only amplify political instability and support for populist and authoritarian governments with each election.
Additionally, social media algorithms are shown to feed increasingly extremist content to their users, resulting in a growing normalisation of dangerous ideologies. Adolescents, in particular, are easily influenced by harmful content they view on social media.
Research has demonstrated that social media sites will push radical misogynistic content towards teenage boys regardless of if they search for it or not. This is having a terrifying effect on the social climate of our current generation, with an increase of sexism and sexual harassment amongst Australia’s youth.
The recent Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 sought to address misleading online information in Australia but was not successfully passed.
The longer we go without policy on moderating misinformation and distressing content, the more we will see the consequences of harmful rhetoric throughout social media platforms. Further legislative action needs to be taken to protect the democratic practices which underpin the political freedoms
President Joshua Stagg
Well, this is it. Unbelievably, we are rapidly approaching the end of the year. I wanted to take this chance to speak on a few recent updates.
National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence
important to Australia.
Unfortunately, social media companies currently lack incentive to regulate their content, and more responsibility should be placed on governments to compel companies to regulate harmful or misleading material.
Billionaire tech moguls can stand to benefit from misinformation on social media when it aligns with the views of their political allies and themselves. Furthermore, they are unlikely to censor harmful or deceitful content if it drives user engagement, and consequently, profit.
Elon Musk, owner of X, has previously described himself as a “free speech absolutist”, despite being accused of censoring journalists who are critical of himself and Donald Trump. Similarly, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out against government pressures to censor disinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s difficult to trust politically partisan social media conglomerates to fairly censor misinformation when they have openly prioritised the monetisation of user attention over the protection of public interests. Understandably, this may spark fears of chilling effects on freedom of speech. Safeguarding freedom of speech is imperative for the functioning of a healthy democracy, yet some restrictions on online speech will ensure citizens have access to the truthful and accurate information they need to make informed political decisions.
We should push for this to be achieved without government overreach–and it is possible. Recent research demonstrates the positive effects of externally moderated content flagging on social media sites in quickly reducing harm caused by dangerous content whilst maintaining transparency, and this could be further implemented by the Australian government and media authorities.
Ultimately, we should be pushing for mandatory co-regulation involving media platforms and government initiatives, with public interest at the forefront. Prioritising the wellbeing and education of social media users over profit will result in a safer and healthier digital environment and democracy.
As active participants in democracy, we too play an essential role – we must uphold kindness, education, and the truth when navigating online spaces filled with hate speech and ‘fake news.’ As tricky as it may be to stay vigilant and informed on social media, the distressing future of our socio-political landscape will leave us with no other option.
On the 25th of August 2025, the Federal Government passed legislation to implement a mandatory National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence. This has long been anticipated by UMSU and represents progress towards ending gender-based violence in our community
University of Melbourne found to have breached Victorian privacy laws in tracking students involved in pro-Palestine protests
Many of you would have seen the recent news regarding the Victorian
Information Commissioner’s report that found the University of Melbourne had breached two information privacy principles (IPPs) via ‘a combination of student Wi-Fi location data, student card photographs and CCTV footage to identify’ protestors. Following the report, the National Union of Students and I released a joint statement calling for an independent review of the sanctions imposed on students that used evidence in breach of privacy law.
People across the country are engaging in peaceful protest against the death and starvation in Gaza. On Thursday, the 28th of August, at 12 pm there was an UMSU Special General Meeting (SGM), following a student petition served upon the General Secretary. This SGM discussed matters relevant to Palestine. We met to demonstrate our solidarity with Palestine, but it also serves to bring our community together in peaceful assembly, a practice under attack by protest restrictions.
Esther Hiu Wai Luk & Ewan Bezzobs
C&S had a wonderful and successful Awards Night on the 26th of August, where we celebrated clubs’ achievements throughout the year. It was so amazing to hear about all the hard work each club puts into providing enriching non-academic opportunities on campus! We highly encourage clubs to continue dreaming up creative and unique events, and we can’t wait for next year’s Awards Night. Apart from that, C&S has recently granted initial approval to several new clubs, and is continuing to improve administration tools and requirements for the benefit of club executives. We are also looking forward to new club IGMs and Clubs Council. Don’t forget to check out some club events on the UMSU website events calendar!
Jayde East & Helena Mücke
UMSU Enviro launched our new initiative this semester, Meat Free Mondays! Each week we pop up in a new location on campus and giveaway free plant-based meals to students so you can get to enjoy a wide variety of options and cuisines through planet friendly meals. In Week 5 we ran one of our key events of this year ‘Plates for Change’ with presentations and a panel discussion from plant-based athletes, dieticians and researchers which was followed by a free dinner. We have also been running fortnightly Enviro collectives for students passionate about sustainability, and we encourage you to join us!
Viraj Patel & Sonika Agarwal
Hello readers! EdPub has two bits of amazing news to start off withFirstly, owing to our successful advocacy, we have confirmation for a 24/7 study space for SWOTVAC and exam period in THIS semester! No more getting kicked out, as someone said in our survey, “like a sad child” at midnight!
Secondly, Talya De Cleene from Welfare committee has been successful in getting a Working Development Scheme set up for next semester (It
allows students in financial stress to get their fines (myki, parking etc) paid off if they go to class. I know it sounds unreal- I didn’t believe it the first time I heard it either).
Our newly launched initiative of Club Career Grants was a huge success with over 15 clubs applying and most of them getting accepted. Overall the department has been working great, our collectives have run smoothly and we are still working hard on Know-Your-Rights online version. We are continuing the fight for removing the interim Special Consideration policy although that is proving to be slightly harder than getting the uni to pay myki fines. Behind the scenes, we are also working on making the union transparent and accountable. We have started doing weekly coffee catchups in the IDA bar so come along to share your thoughts and get a free large coffee! We have much planned ahead for the last stretch of this semester and we hope to see you soon. Exams are coming closer and as always, your Education department is here if you face any troubles. Come find us on Level 2 of Building 168 or email us at education@union.unimelb.edu.au.
Kunal Dewani & Filia Cahyadi
Hey everyone, your Welfare team here!
We’ve had a fantastic semester so far, and Union Mart has been running smoothly — all thanks to our amazing volunteers!
This semester, we’ve expanded our Free Food Services to Burnley and Werribee, with the generous support of the UMSU Burnley Officer and the Veterinary Students Society of Victoria. These expansions mean better accessibility and support for even more students across our campuses. We are also running the Mental Wellbeing Survey to build a clear picture of student wellbeing at the University of Melbourne. We want to understand how academics, friendships, loneliness, and the cost-of-living crisis are affecting students, so we can better advocate for your needs.
Academic Harrishman Shobanan & Rhea Sankar
We protecc, we attacc, but most importantly, we EdAc! Here are our updates:
1. 24/7 Study Space - EdPub and us have been fiercely advocating for this to open at least during SWOTVAC and Exam period. Fingers crossed this goes through by the time this reaches your eyes…
2. For those who lug around large instruments and have nowhere to store them at Parkville, we’re working to get storage spaces for you + more multipurpose rehearsal rooms for large ensembles!
3. Travel Passes - we’re funding a program to provide 30-day passes to students facing significant financial disadvantage ^^ Email education@union.unimelb.edu.au if you need access to the travel passes - although they are limited we might be able to help!
UMSU General Secretary, Activities, Burnley, Creative Arts, Disabilities, Indigenous, International, People of Colour, Queer, Southbank and Women’s did not submit reports.
Sophie He
The Fair Work Commission has ruled that the University of Melbourne, when hiring for continuing positions, must conduct an internal hiring process among existing casual and fixed-term staff prior to any external hiring.
In a June decision, Commissioner Ben Redford determined that the University of Melbourne’s 2024 Enterprise Agreement, which regulates the terms and conditions of employment at the University, bars the University from simultaneously fielding internal and external job candidates for continuing roles.
Rather, the University must first exhaust its internal pool of casual and fixed-term applicants, and is only permitted to proceed to external hiring if no suitable candidates are present.
The current Enterprise Agreement was enshrined following the NTEU’s unprecedented industrial action throughout 2023.
“For too long, talented and dedicated staff were kept in limbo–semester after semester–while permanent jobs were quietly handed to external hires,” said UniMelb NTEU Branch President David Gonzalez in a union press release.
Anti-Abortion Club Barred from UMSU Affiliation
Mathilda Stewart
Anti-abortion group Hope for Life attempted in August to affiliate with UMSU as a club, but was denied. The decision was made by the UMSU Clubs and Societies Committee at a meeting on 13 August who determined that the proposed club’s activities had the potential to overlap with those of the UMSU Women’s Department, although the Women’s Department does not currently
take an anti-abortion position and UMSU has traditionally taken a firmly pro-choice position.
Posters for an anti-abortion protest, named March for the Babies, were seen being put up within the UMSU building in late September by the same individuals who attempted to affiliate Hope for Life.
Sophie He
UniMelb lunch staple, Heart of Carlton on Elgin Street, has reduced its prices from $5 to $4 per meal. This reduction allows the cafe to remain competitive following the Campus Canteen’s establishment earlier this year. The Canteen offers $5 meals to those who present their student identification card.
Mathilda Stewart
The Australasian Association has been disaffiliated by UMSU’s Clubs and Societies Committee for hazing. The initial complaint received by the UMSU described “very serious inappropriate and harmful conduct at camp” and was corroborated by images.
Farrago understands that hazing conducted by the Australasian Association is a long-running practice, with reports dating back to 2022. The University is conducting an investigation of their own into the conduct of students involved.
Mathilda Stewart
Three-day no-document extensions are expected to be implemented for students from 2026. While no announcement has yet been made by the University, UMSU President Joshua Stagg was informed of the University’s intentions by members of
the Provost.
A trial conducted this year within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology allowed students to apply for short extensions of up to three calendar days for written assignments without providing additional documentation such as medical certificates. The trial was expanded to the faculties of Science and Architecture, Building and Planning at the beginning of Semester Two.
More accessible extensions and special consideration processes has long been a goal of the Student Union. Stagg described the development as “a significant win for student advocacy.”
Otago’s Critic Te Ārohi Celebrates 100 years
Mathilda Stewart
Otago University’s official student magazine, Critic Te Ārohi, celebrated 100 years of publication in February 2025. Critic is the longest-running student publication in Aotearoa New Zealand, founded in 1925 as a newspaper before transitioning to a magazine format in 2001. Today Critic publishes twenty six editions a year, featuring news, culture, satire and profiles, with a strong focus on student life. Critic’s centenary was marked by an exhibition and an anthology, both incorporating the magazine’s extensive historic archives and interviews with past contributors.
Mathilda Stewart
The University of Sydney’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Lisa Adkins, has directed staff “to not make any further display of the Palestinian flag” from a shared space. Adkins threatened the revocation of shared offices for sessional staff within the faculty should the display of flags from windows continue.
The latest development forms part of an ongoing controversy at USyd regarding the display of Palestinian flags on campus. Earlier in the year the University confiscated a Palestinian flag hung outside academic Dr David Brophy’s office window which had been in place since 2023, citing their Flag Policy 2025 The policy, which was introduced in June, prohibits the “display of unapproved flags from University buildings.” Dr Brophy has replaced the flag with a keffiyah, the display of which does not currently violate existing policy.
Speaking to USyd’s student newspaper Honi Soit, Academic Vice President of USyd’s National Tertiary Education Union branch Nick Riemer stated that “‘in banning the Palestinian flag specifically, Professor Adkins has dropped the pretence that this is anything other than anti-Palestinian racism.”
“At a time when public opposition to Israel’s crimes has never been greater, [Adkins] has demonstrated her loyalty to genocide and her willingness to sacrifice education for it.”
Following the developments at USyd, some staff members at the University of Melbourne have displayed Palestinian flags from their office windows, including in Old Arts and Old Geography.
Ibrahim
Muan
A medical student from the University of Melbourne was caught secretly filming women at his shared accommodation, with police later discovering hundreds of images and videos on his laptop and phone.
23-year-old Bao Phuc Cao, who is studying to become a neurosurgeon at the University of Melbourne, was arrested after a woman saw a phone being held under her shower cubicle at RoomingKos, the student accommodation where he lives. Police reports suggest that up to 150 women may have been unknowingly filmed.
He pleaded guilty and received a Community Correction Order with mandatory sex offender treatment and no
conviction was recorded.
Cao was previously arrested a few months ago for secretly filming a woman in a public toilet at the District Docklands shopping centre. He pleaded guilty but was released without a conviction.
While the University has not commented on the matter or Cao’s enrollment, citing privacy reasons, a University spokesperson said, “We are committed to eliminating and preventing sexual misconduct from our community and have robust systems and supports in place for our students and staff.”
“Any experience of assault, sexual assault and sexual harassment within our university community is unacceptable.”
As the first cohort of nursing/ midwifery students under the Victorian Government’s “Making It Free to Study Nursing and Midwifery” initiative complete their degrees this year, approximately 2000 are facing 2026 without a graduate position, a steep increase from the 350 students in the same situation last year.
Graduate programs are supported by the Victorian Government, and provide new nurses with support and training as they transition to working life.
The public sector’s capacity for fresh recruits has not kept pace with the influx of nursing graduates following the Victorian Government’s 2022 announcement of free nursing and midwifery courses, resulting in the approximately 580 per cent increase in unplaced students.
These students’ scholarships are partially predicated upon working in the public health system post-graduation. Subsequently, those who have not secured graduate positions in public hospitals are facing the prospect of unexpected HECS debt.
Speaking to The Age, Professor Beth Jacob says that the cost-of-living crisis means current nurses are working more, decreasing the anticipated demand for
new workers.
Daniel Andrews’ Government launched its “Making It Free” initiative to incentivise growth in the state’s healthcare sector. The announcement followed projections of nursing shortages alongside the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact upon the industry.
The program guaranteed over 10,000 domestic students commencing nursing/ midwifery degrees in 2023 and 2024 a course-covering scholarship valued up to $16,500.
While students receiving the scholarship are given $9,000 during their study, the final $7,500 is dependent upon the student subsequently spending two years working in the Victorian public health system.
“If you’re in Year 12 and you’ve been thinking about studying nursing or midwifery–go for it. We’ve got your HECS fees covered,” said Andrews in 2022.
However, as Edith, a final year nursing student who has been offered a graduate position, highlights, “the course is only free if you are able to work in a public hospital for two years after you graduate. Lots of good candidates missed out so they will have HECS they weren’t expecting while also being unemployed.”
One of the initiative’s aims was to “reduce financial obstacles associated with undertaking entry-to-practice nursing and/or midwifery studies.”
While graduate positions are not necessary for successful nursing/ midwifery careers, they are highly recommended.
“If you want to work in a hospital or acute care setting, graduate programs are by far the quickest and most supported way to do that,” says Edith.
Alternatives to graduate programs include working in aged care, community health and private hospitals.
Edith expresses disappointment in the development.
Acknowledging that these other graduate pathways are “important necessary work”, she emphasises that “the main issue is that bachelor courses prepare you to go into a graduate program and don’t tell you about the other options.”
Rachel Thornby
Following Development Victoria’s announcement that it would expand its affordable housing program Small Sites in March earlier this year, two apartment complexes located at 127 and 147 Grattan Street have been earmarked for private housing development.
Helmed by Jacinta Allan’s government, Small Sites is a state-level initiative focussed on “unlocking surplus government land in established suburbs” and contracting private entities to develop medium-density housing. The Royal Women’s Hospital own the Grattan Street apartments.
The Grattan Street properties join the program alongside ten other “underutilised government-owned sites” in Melbourne. All will be sold for private housing development.
While the other sites identified by Development Victoria encompass abandoned buildings, empty fields and unused car park space, the Grattan Street locations see active use and habitation.
Prior to being designated as surplus land, the two properties’ 32 flats were operated by the Royal Women’s Hospital. The 16 apartments at 127 Grattan Street were rented out while the remaining half at 147 served as short-term accommodation for patients and families.
Now, patients are required to personally locate accommodation with a $45 per night allowance, making it much
“If they only have seven affordable homes on the site, then that’s an overall decrease in affordable houses in Carlton”
harder for rural patients to receive the care they need. The free accommodation service had been running for 27 years prior to its abrupt closure.
The flats next door at 127 Grattan Street are privately rented. Referring to the Small Sites program, Minister for Housing and Building Harriet Shing has said that “unlocking surplus government land is one of many ways we are increasing housing supply, because more young people should be able to live closer to where they grew up, and more workers deserve the opportunity of a home that’s closer to their job.”
“I loved living there because I got to be near uni and work and the rent was extremely affordable. But now I’ve had to move further away because I can’t afford to keep living nearby,” said Samuel*, a University of Melbourne student who previously rented a flat in the Grattan Street property.
The current tenants of 127 Grattan Street were given notice to vacate the property by March 2026, greatly disrupting the lives of some long-term residents who have otherwise been priced out of the Carlton rental market. “It is cruel to claim the site was underutilised when me and my neighbours are living here. To us, it’s
definitely not underutilised,” Samuel said.
The expanded Small Sites initiative promises to deliver 350 additional homes, with a minimum of 10 per cent required to be affordable housing.
During a meeting with the development team, the current tenants of Grattan Street were told that Small Sites expected to double the amount of homes on the site to 70 apartments.
“If they only have seven affordable homes on the site, then that’s an overall decrease in affordable houses in Carlton,” said Samuel.
It raises the question of whether, amid this housing crisis, the Government is prioritising true affordable housing in the inner-city or merely seeking to sell public assets to the advantage of private developers.
The Small Sites program is expected to contract a commercial builder to begin development of the properties in 2027. The other Small Sites properties are located in Preston, Coburg, Alphington, Malvern, Croydon South, Heidelberg West, Baxter, Bendigo and Herne Hill.
*Not their real name.
Sabine Pentecost
The University of Melbourne has been found in breach of students’ privacy after campus Wi-Fi was used to track students and bring disciplinary action against student protesters, according to a report by the Deputy Commissioner of the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner (OVIC).
The investigation opened in July 2024, responding to use of CCTV and Wi-Fi to track student movements during the proPalestine Arts West/Mahmoud’s Hall sitin. Additionally, student card photographs and ten staff members’ emails were used to identify and reprimand protesters.
The function creep perpetrated by the University was described as “serious” and “antithetical to human rights” by OVIC and multiple Information Privacy Principles (IPP’s) were broken in their activities. IPP’s are “the core of privacy law in Victoria” and outline standard practices for how public sector organisations manage personal information under their radar.
The breaches were found as OVIC sought to determine whether the University “properly informed students and staff about how their personal information would be used” and whether the use of collected data was “consistent with the primary purpose of collecting
this information or was for an authorised secondary purpose”.
Despite a violation against students’ privacy outlined in the report, OVIC did not conclude that any breaches were committed in relation to the use of staff email accounts for tracking.
The University of Melbourne has responded to the report, with VicePresident and Chief Operating Officer, Katerina Kapobassis, maintaining that the University “was reasonable and proportionate” in their use of student data, yet have “cooperated openly and responsively” with OVIC’s investigation. Kapobassis states that the University acted appropriately “given the overriding need to keep [the] community safe”.
In response to the investigation findings, the University of Melbourne has updated its UniWireless terms of use to explicitly outline the potential use of student data for location-tracking purposes. The report also requires the University to create a separate “Surveillance Policy” to aid transparency for students and staff.
In short, the capabilities of the University to use Wi-Fi data to track students and faculty will remain unchanged following the investigation.
Since the updates to the UniWireless Terms of Use, UMSU has fielded a
significant number of enquiries from concerned students.
“Some students worry for example, that just being near a protest may see them caught up in the university’s surveillance,” UMSU shared in a statement on their website.
This worry may be unlikely to shift as the University is not bound by a compliance notice to make changes to its policies within a specified window.
The Deputy Commissioner ruled not to issue a compliance notice following the University of Melbourne’s adoption of the new “Surveillance Policy”, a decision described by student protest group U4P as “deeply disappointing”.
Taylah Xuereb & Mathilda Stewart
Publication of Australia’s second oldest literary magazine, Meanjin, will cease at the end of 2025, in a controversial decision by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) announced on Thursday 4 September.
From Meanjin employees to the University of Melbourne staff, this announcement has been met with grave disappointment from the Australian literary community. Meanjin’s two outgoing staff members, editor Esther Anatolitis and deputy editor Eli McLean, were made redundant on 4 September and allegedly made to sign non-disclosure agreements.
“I can’t help but feel there were political reasons for this decision,” writes McLean in Overland
“[E]ntrusting a literary journal–especially one such as Meanjin with a long-standing record of political integrity and radicalism– to custodianship of an institution like the University of Melbourne was bound not to last.”
“I can’t help but feel there were political reasons for this decision,” writes McLean in Overland.
While MUP chair Warren Bebbington insists the decision was made on “purely financial grounds”, Crikey has reported that MUP faced ongoing scrutiny from the University of Melbourne Council board.
A protest to oppose Meanjin’s closure was held outside MUP’s offices on Swanston Street on 11 September with support from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and Media, Entertainment, and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
Speakers called on MUP to transfer ownership of the publication to allow it to continue publishing independently, or with sponsorship from another institution.
Author Alan Fyfe has penned an open letter of protest, addressed to University Vice-Chancellor Emma Johnston, which emphasises the growing need for the protection of publications supporting upcoming and veteran writers. This letter suggests the Vice Chancellor voluntarily commit 10 per cent of her annual salary to keep Meanjin publishing.
The Creative Writing, Literature and Theatre Studies, and Publishing and Editing programs of the University of Melbourne have all expressed their disapproval toward the MUP’s decision.
“[Meanjin] has uplifted many of our students through publication, internships, partnerships and employment,” states the Publishing and Communications program.
The impact Meanjin had on aspiring writers cannot be overlooked. The journal
famously catapulted the careers of Australian writers, platforming local work onto the international stage.
“Meanjin has supported, elevated and launched the careers of a staggering number of writers, including many of our own staff and students; it’s also an important resource for all teachers and students of Australian literature,” says the University of Melbourne’s Creative Writing program.
Meanjin was first established in 1940 by Clem Christesen in Brisbane, before relocating to the University of Melbourne in 1945. Oversight of the publication was transferred to Melbourne University Publishing in 2008. The literary journal has supported and published Australian writers for 85 years.
Christesen named the journal after Magandjin (Brisbane), where it was originally founded. “Meanjin” is the Traditional Yuggera language name for the city’s centre.
According to Christesen, this name was chosen to recognise Indigenous Australian cultures by highlighting “the spirit of place”.
Meanjin has made a long commitment to up-and-coming First Nations writers in its time. The “Meanjin Paper” was the first lead essay of each Meanjin edition. As of Winter 2023, this essay permanently became one written by a First Nations Elder who welcomed readers with a story of place.
Moreover, Meanjin partnered with many First Nations organisations, including black&write. This national partnership has supported First Nations writers and editors by offering career guidance and publishing opportunities.
“Without the support of such a significant literary and cultural journal, many [Blak writers and artists] would not have been able to publish as emerging writers and may not have gone on to have a publishing life at all,” says Professor Tony Birch, the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature.
Throughout its lifetime, Meanjin has become a staple of Australian literary culture. The legacy journal leaves behind writers and editors who now no longer have a rich source of creative indulgence and industry expertise.
The final edition of Meanjin will be
Mathilda Stewart
The University of Melbourne has ranked lowest in Australia for overall undergraduate student satisfaction in
2024, a report by Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) found. The University placed 35th nationally in undergraduate student satisfaction in 2023, falling to 42nd in 2024. Postgraduate
coursework student satisfaction also fell during the same period.
QILT’s annual Student Experience Survey collects data across all 42 Australian universities regarding the
quality of the overall educational experience, including teaching quality, peer engagement, learning resources and support services.
Over the last five years, the majority of the Group of Eight universities have consistently ranked below the national average in quality of overall educational experience of undergraduate students.
overall student experience, the University has consistently placed at the bottom of QILT’s undergraduate results, and was ranked worst nationally again in 2021.
In a statement to Farrago, UMSU President Joshua Stagg argued that the recent QILT results “highlight the University of Melbourne’s continual prioritisation of metrics that factor into
“we lead the country in academic rankings, but fall behind in essentially all other aspects of the university experience”
In an email to staff following the release of QILT results, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) Gregor Kennedy noted that the University’s internal End of Subject Survey saw improved student satisfaction with learning experiences, reflecting the quality of teaching and support staff. While Kennedy reiterated the University’s commitment to improving
global rankings as opposed to student experience. We are an anomaly in that we lead the country in academic rankings, but fall behind in essentially all other aspects of the university experience.”
“The University Accord stated that tertiary education institutions must implement urgent action that requires a “‘whole of student’ focus–on learning
and teaching, affordable student housing, assistance with finding employment, and income support where relevant–as opposed to simply enrolling disadvantaged students into a course and hoping they succeed’. The recent QILT results demonstrate UniMelb’s failure to heed the University Accord.”
“The University must recognise that it is their student-led organisations that stand as the only viable means of improving the QILT metrics that go beyond academic ranking. Following the QILT results, during a presentation to the University Executive, I stated that a time of fiscal scarcity is a time to improve support networks for marginalised students and disadvantaged students, not a time to cut their funding. If the ability of students to meaningfully engage in University governance is limited due to reductions in student union spending, then the next set of UniMelb QILT results will make the most recent ones look excellent in comparison.”
Content Warning: discussions of racism
The University of Melbourne has published Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 2: Voice, a follow-up to 2024’s Volume 1: Truth. The two open access books constitute an institutionally authorised truth-telling that first documents colonial harm and then explores how Indigenous leadership, scholarship and partnerships have transformed the University.
Edited by Distinguished Professor Marcia Langton AO, Dr Ross L Jones and Dr James Waghorne, Voice argues that Indigenous presence at the University was long “ignored and quietened” yet
persisted and “broke through.” The volume highlights three areas where this shift is evident–“Museums and Collections”, “Staff and Students” and “Working Together”— and frames inclusion as “imperfect, overdue and often painfully slow” but cumulatively transformative.
Volume 1: Truth assembled a forensic account of the University’s complicity in racial science: eugenics in medicine and the social sciences, the collection and concealment of Aboriginal remains, and the celebration of scholars implicated in frontier violence. That reckoning was presented not as a matter of reputational management but as a necessary precondition for justice, and the University formally submitted the volume to the Yoorrook Justice Commission as part of Victoria’s truth-telling process.
Volume 2: Voice shifts the analytical
focus from exposure to agency.
In “Museums and Collections”, contributors demonstrate how holdings— ranging from stone tools in the Leonhard Adam holdings and the Henry Forman Atkinson Dental Museum to the Donald Thomson Collection—are being reframed from objects of Western study into living expressions of identity and sovereignty, with parallel obligations around access and repatriation. The section’s method is explicit: community-led curation is the remedy to extractive collecting.
The “Staff and Students” section traces the gradual emergence of Indigenous cohorts and scholarship from the mid20th century to today. It highlights the journey from early activism and support schemes like Abschol to developing research centres and academic programs. It includes reflections by Deputy Vice-
Chancellor (Indigenous) Professor Barry Judd on the effort to create space for Indigenous leadership in systems “not built for us”.
In “Working Together”, the book follows partnerships beyond Parkville— including Gurindji collaborations, Yolŋu ranger initiatives and the Melbourne Poche Centre for Indigenous Health. The key message is both a warning and a celebration: engagement that fails to share budget, authorship and authority risks recreating old asymmetries under new branding. Genuine co-production, the editors emphasise, must be adequately funded and community-led.
The release of Voice sits within Murmuk Djerring, the University’s Indigenous strategy, where truth-telling and justice are key focuses, helmed by an Indigenous-led steering committee chaired by Professor Judd. The University has also announced an Indigenous-led Centre for Truth-telling and Dialogue, with executive leadership appointed, and the centre is scheduled to open in early
2026—marking an effort to embed the work structurally rather than leaving it as a one-off.
In public remarks marking the launch, Professor Langton placed Voice within a fifty-year timeline of Indigenous staff and students “turning the University of Melbourne towards respect for Indigenous knowledge”.
Professor Judd described the new volume as “a timely and necessary continuation” of the process, focusing on who has the right to speak and be heard.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Emma Johnston positioned the series as affirming “the central place of Indigenous knowledge and leadership” in creating a fairer institution.
Despite record Indigenous enrolments in 2023, Indigenous students made up about 1.27 per cent of the student body (well below population parity), and staffing targets remained unmet. The repatriation of remains collected by University affiliates has advanced but remains incomplete.
Both volumes are open access through Melbourne University Publishing, accessible online through free PDF and EPUB downloads.
Read together, the volumes insist on a sequence: Truth before Voice. Truth supplies the evidentiary foundation— naming practices, people and policies— on which Voice evaluates reforms across collections, curricula, hiring and governance.
The second volume’s introduction recognises that ideals have sometimes outpaced institutional support. However, it documents a half-century of cumulative change driven by Indigenous communities within and alongside the university.
The University has submitted the books to Yoorrook and is establishing permanent infrastructure for truth-telling; students and staff can now assess whether resourcing, authorship and authority align with the rhetoric. Ultimately, that is the test Voice sets for the institution—and the measure by which this truth-telling will be remembered.
Farrago Editors
Content Warning: student politics
Community has once again dominated the polls, consolidating their control of the Student Union in a campaign week with “the worst behaviour since 2005,” according to Returning Officer Stephen Luntz.
This election saw 4806 total ballots received, a disappointing slump in voter turnout and an approximately 34 per cent reduction from last year’s historic 7320, a record since UMSU’s establishment. Who’s Who?
Community is the dominant ticket at UMSU, having been in control of the executive since 2023. Although Community continue to run non-factional candidates on their ticket, they’re decidedly controlled by students from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA)
subfaction of Labor Right.
Growth, a newly formed ticket, is comprised of many students previously involved with or elected under the Community ticket. Their emergence reflects internal dissatisfaction with the factional control and topdown approach exerted by the SDA over Community.
Activate - Left Action is the product of a ticket merger between Activate, a coalition of students from Labor Left and the Greens, and Left Action, the longstanding Socialist Alternative ticket. Activate - Left Action also subsumed members of the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU), another Labor Right subfaction, who last year ran under the now defunct ticket, More!.
Rebuild, the campus Liberals, once again ran a half-hearted campaign, managing to lose their last spot on Students’ Council. Their steady decline in past years has seen Rebuild instead switch tactics and attempt Building 168, Home of the Student Union
to stack clubs on campus, with middling success.
2025 also featured an electoral debut from Students Against War (SAW), a proPalestine activist group on campus. SAW attempted to run under the banner of “Fight 4 Palestine: Cut the Ties”, though were unsuccessful in correctly registering their ticket and did not pick up any positions.
Community, Activate - Left Action, and Growth were the only tickets to run candidates in almost every position, and represented the overwhelming majority of campaigners on campus during the election week. Had the contest been between only Community and one other, the election may have weakened Community’s dominance. Nevertheless, UMSU’s optional preferential voting style, a three way contest between tickets and the strength of incumbency once again delivered Community near full control of the Student Union for 2026.
Office Bearers
Community has maintained what will be its fourth consecutive year in control of the executive, again successfully winning the President and General Secretary positions.
While elections past saw many tickets engage in non-compete deals, no such arrangements were in place this year, although Community did not contest the Clubs & Societies office. Community therefore succeeded in winning every department they contested, having won the Queer office back from Activate Independent Media, Independents for Southbank and independent 2024
Indigenous Office Bearer Noah Kellett were all uncontested in the Media, Southbank and Indigenous departments, respectively. No nominations were received for the Indigenous committee, nor for any Burnley positions.
Students’ Council
Students’ Council is the chief decisionmaking body of the Student Union, with 22 total positions. This year’s election saw Community maintain its dominance, electing 11 Councillors. Left Action and Activate both lost a Councillor each. Independent Media and Independents for Southbank both retained their one Council position each. Having this year lost their singular seat on Students’ Council, Rebuild will no longer have any elected representatives within UMSU. However with the Indigenous Councillor position uncontested, the 2026 Council will begin with only 21 members. Community’s 11 positions will therefore become a majority, should all Councillors be in attendance.
While last year Community won a controlling majority on seven of nine committees, this election saw its control overturned. Activate - Left Action and Growth will collectively hold a majority on six of nine committees. Independents for Southbank and Community were both uncontested in winning the Southbank and Disabilities committees, respectively.
UMSU’s annual elections also elect seven delegates to the National Union of Student’s National Conference in December (NatCon). While candidates for NUS run on tickets, it’s the faction that
delegates caucus with that truly matters.
As tickets, Community is affiliated with the SDA subfaction of Student Unity (Labor Right), Activate - Left Action is a composite of students aligned with Socialist Alternative and National Labor Students (Labor Left), and while Growth is non-factional, many of their members split contentiously with Labor Right earlier this year.
This year, Community retained three delegates, Growth won two, and Socialist Alternative and National Labor Students both lost one each. Whether Growth’s delegates will attend NatCon as independents, or alternatively either proxy to or caucus with another faction, is unclear.
Returning Officer Stephen Luntz is responsible for overseeing the electoral process each year. Luntz described this year’s election as the worst for campaigner conduct 2005. “The conduct this year was terrible, both in the sheer volume of medium-severity breaches, as well as the number of more serious breaches. Nothing like this has occurred since UMSU was founded.”
“Some people on every team behaved well, but the nature of the system as it currently exists rewards bad behaviour and makes policing difficult such that we were simply overwhelmed.”
Farrago is aware of multiple appeals lodged with the Election Tribunal regarding campaigner conduct and procedural fairness during the election. The Election Tribunal is expected to meet in October.
Mathilda Stewart
The University of Melbourne has announced a five-year suspension on the $2 billion Fishermans Bend campus, citing ongoing project delays and financial pressure.
The University originally purchased the 7.2 hectare property from the Victorian Government in 2018 for $49.8 million, with plans to develop the campus as an engineering and technology hub in
collaboration with the defence industry. The University has invested heavily in the development of national defence capabilities under the second pillar of the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the US and the UK.
The campus’ development forms part of a broader urban renewal project for the Fishermans Bend precinct directly southwest of Melbourne’s CBD. The project, spearheaded by the Victorian
Government, was set to house 80,000 residents by 2050, with an additional 80,000 commuters employed in the precinct.
The announcement to suspend the campus follows a damning report from the Victorian Auditor-General in June 2025 which found the Fishermans Bend urban renewal project to be significantly behind schedule and lacking key public infrastructure required to attract
employers and residents to the area.
University of Melbourne Chief Operating Officer Katerina Kapobassis stated the University “remains committed to the precinct” but that the decision to pause development facilitates better timing with governments and industry investments.
At the time of the announcement in September, the University’s plans for the campus were already significantly behind schedule. The University had initially hoped to open the campus to 4000 staff and students by 2024, with the number projected to grow to 10,000 by 2032. As of September, only site clearing and some foundation work have been completed.
Farrago understands that student support services, including those housed in the Stop 1 centre in Building 757 on the Parkville campus, were also slated for relocation to Fisherman’s Bend. This move would further disconnect students from
critical support resources at a time when undergraduate student experience at the University of Melbourne ranks the lowest in Australia.
Taylah Stojanovski
Content Warning: discussions of sex crimes and child sexual abuse
While the prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) use amongst young adults and students is undoubtedly controversial, most discourse glosses over the sinister role AI has played in facilitating imagebased abuse, particularly as it targets young adults and children.
Ongoing debates regarding the impact of AI on climate change, intellectual property and cognitive bias, to say the least, are already omnipresent online. However, more dialogue is needed on how certain AI programmes have made abusive and non-consensual forms of pornography more accessible. ESafety reports have revealed the use of generative AI to create synthetic, yet hyper-realistic and sexually explicit content (deepfakes) has doubled in the past 18 months, and an estimated 99 per cent of deepfake victims are women and girls.
Existing cultures of sexual violence are already a concern amongst Australian youth and adults–disproportionately impacting women–with non-consensual sexting, sharing of nude images and sexual assault being disturbingly prevalent.
With deepfakes becoming increasingly convincing and difficult to detect online, the nature of sexual abuse online is shifting, enabling new kinds of sexual bullying, extortion and violence.
Uploading innocent images of people to deepfake applications can instantaneously “nudify” or undress them, and is used maliciously to create non-consensual pornographic content. Frighteningly, these tools are lucrative for tech companies and highly accessible, putting women and girls at a serious risk. There are already significant cases of deepfake image-based abuse targeting female students in Melbourne, so it is more critical than ever to remain aware of the “real and irreparable” damage they cause, according to Minister for Communications Anika Wells.
Albanese Government’s Ban on “Nudify” Apps
Whilst sharing or threatening to share non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake content is illegal, the development and promotion of ‘nudify’ tools is currently not a criminal offence. A 2 September media release from the Albanese government entails action taken to counter this concern. Working alongside the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, Wells has announced
a proactive initiative to “stop it at the source.” The ban on ‘nudify’ tools will place the onus on tech companies to restrict access to tools used to create sexually explicit imagery, in a similar manner to the upcoming amendments to the Online Safety Act which restrict social media use for children under 16 and prevent them from having harmful conversations with AI chatbots.
Although this restriction is a step forward towards better online safety, there are considerable limitations of the ban, with Wells acknowledging that the move “won’t eliminate the problem of abusive technology in one fell swoop.” This initiative effectively facilitates restrictions for large-scale tech companies with “inhouse” AI applications (such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT), as they can detect and deny inappropriate requests. However, opensource AI models, which can be developed and trained by anyone, pose a greater risk
abuse drastically alters how young people navigate explicit material online.
as it will be more difficult to regulate their production of sexually-explicit content. Due to the potential limitations of the ban, and the AI industry constantly changing and adapting to technological developments and pressures, educators and authorities must advocate for increased digital literacy and education surrounding the use of AI from an ethical and consent-focused standpoint.
Deepfake image-based abuse drastically alters how young people navigate sexually-explicit material online. What is sometimes known as “revenge porn” is already a serious concern amongst teenagers and young adults. According to a 2019 RMIT study, one in three Australians
have experienced sexual or nude images taken and shared without their consent. Unfortunately, deepfake applications only facilitate the manufacture and sharing of non-consensual sexual imagery.
Whilst the material produced by these applications may not be real, image based abuse has serious real-life implications for victims. It disproportionately impacts women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the LGBTQIA+ community and those with a disability. Moreover, those who experience imagebased abuse are almost twice as likely to experience symptoms of anxiety, depression and psychological distress. Ultimately, this can lead to social withdrawal, and can disrupt relationships with friends and family, negatively impacting one’s own self-perception and body image.
Consequently, it’s absolutely critical to recognise the harms of deepfake imagebased abuse now. Increased regulations and banning of these applications is a step in the right direction, but combatting the psychological consequences of imagebased abuse begins with advocacy and
support for those dealing with it. Safety Resources for Sexual Harm
It can be scary to speak up if you’ve been impacted by deepfake image-based abuse. Yet, the more awareness raised for the abuse of these applications, the more resources exist for those struggling with social stigmas, and mental and physical distress.
According to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, the best way to deal with image-based abuse is to immediately collect evidence and report it to their online harm portal–which can investigate reports, and assist with the removal of images, legal and regulatory action. The portal also offers further information and resources for anyone who is concerned about the impact of image-based abuse.
The University of Melbourne additionally offers support for sexual harm through the Safer Community Program, with the Speak Safely Portal and Counselling & Psychological Services. Telephone support for sexual harm can be accessed through 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14, or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.
Zeinab Jishi
“If this helps even one person it will have been worth it.” – Mitch Brown an interview with The Daily Aus (TDA).
Mitch Brown—who played 94 games for the West Coast Eagles—has become the only player in men’s V/AFL history to come out as gay or bisexual after coming out as bisexual in an interview with TDA on 27 August.
The CEO of the AFL, Andrew Dillon, said Brown’s coming out was an “important moment for him, and for our game.”
The AFL Players Association (AFLPA) president, Darcy Moore, posted, “I applaud Mitch’s courage and candour in sharing his identity … To any young people in the LGBTQIA+ community out there who dream of playing in the AFL or AFLW, you deserve a safer and more respectful industry. As the AFLPA, we are committed to working towards that.”
“Representation matters, and Mitch’s bravery will help create a more inclusive and supportive environment, not only in AFL and AFLW, but across all levels of sport,” Chloe Molloy, AFLPA Board Member, continued in the same post.
“But Mitch’s experience also reiterates that more work must be done to make our
the midst of discussions within the media about homophobia in the AFL, which was
pressure to combat homophobia, the AFL and must complete Pride in Sport training.
The AFL, in their statement regarding the incident, said, “We know people in the LGBTQI+ community and allies hurt when an incident like this happens. One incident of this nature is too many, and the fact there have been multiple this year shows we still have more work to do and we are committed to that.”
“The AFL will continue to partner with our clubs, our Pride and Allies groups and the LGBTQI+ community to celebrate inclusion across both our AFL and AFLW competitions.”
In the past year, there have been five other instances of players using homophobic language against another player. Yet, Rankine’s incident, which resulted in Brown coming out, marks a large turning point in how we continue to talk about not only homophobia, but also toxic masculinity in the AFL.
While Brown has received a lot of positive responses, he has also spoken out about hateful comments from footy fans claiming he is “attention seeking” and “narcissistic,” and exposes the lack of support from four football clubs on his Instagram story.
After Brown posted the story post, Geelong and Collingwood issued
statements of support. Meanwhile, Brisbane and Adelaide, Rankine’s team, have remained silent.
Brown’s interview with TDA highlighted many of the issues discussed by the media on homophobia and toxic masculinity in the AFL.
Brown connected what he calls “Australian man’s problem” to the “primitive” environment on the field in games, suggesting that the AFL’s environmental issue stems from Australian male culture as a whole.
He explained that the pressure to display masculinity and strength results in opponents often physically and verbally belittling each other on field, “and you hear that on the field every single week, every single game.”
He also exposed how homophobia pervaded off field in locker rooms, where queerness was made taboo. He acknowledged how this created an internalised hatred which prevented him from speaking out.
He attributed his silence to the AFL’s “high performance environment.” “It’s so clear, your task, and that is to train hard, get better, win games, win a premiership; so it is really easy to not bring your
personal life into things, to stay quiet, to not share too much of yourself.”
It was not until after his career as a footballer that he was able to start deconstructing his identity. He acknowledged why current players may have argued that it was not worth speaking out while working for the AFL.
When asked about Rankine’s four game suspension, Brown expressed he was more concerned about creating a “sense of change” and “movement” in the AFL rather than focusing on punishment and match bans.
He advocated for the AFL to celebrate players that were “positive male role models” who “may not be the most successful [career wise] but the most important players in our community.”
While the competitive nature of the AFL is intrinsic to any sport, toxicity can be avoided. By coming out, Mitch Brown has created a space for others like him to be able to express themselves while creating an avenue to discuss the issues of homophobia and toxic masculinity that not only pervade the AFL but Australia as well.
Since the beginning of US President Donald Trump’s administration, the media has been flooded with updates about his tariff policies. We understand that the saturation of updates besides news of impending fascism in the country can be overwhelming, and economics is boring. So, here is Farrago’s breakdown of Trump’s tariffs on Australia.
So Firstly, What Are Tariffs?
Tariffs are a tax placed by the government on imported goods into the country. This means the revenue of the tax goes to the domestic government—in this case, the US. Thus, importers pay the increased tariffs to the government, but
often also raise prices whose costs are passed to the consumer. By making foreign goods more expensive, tariffs can fulfill multiple purposes, including: making domestically produced goods more competitive, increasing government revenue and reducing unfair trade by sparking trade negotiations.
For example,
if a country A were to place 10 per cent tariffs on country B’s steel. An importer would have to pay the price of the original cost plus the tariffs and then often sell it at an increased price to place the burden on the consumer instead. This means if local steel were $11 per unit and foreign steel were $10, the 10 per cent tariffs would raise it to $11 as well, encouraging consumers to buy domestic instead.
On 12 March, Donald Trump officially placed 25 per cent tariffs on all steel and aluminium exports, Australia was not afforded an exemption. This decision was made despite Trump’s previous claims that he would exempt Australia from his tariff spree.
“Government will continue to put forward a very strong case for an exemption noting that the last time this occurred it took months for that exemption to be granted,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese noted in a press conference held on the same day.
Unlike other recipients of these tariffs, Albanese decided not to retaliate economically, calling tariffs to be a form of “economic self harm and a recipe for slower growth and higher inflation.” He instead advised Australians to buy local.
This first round of tariffs disrupted a mostly stable relationship between Australia and the US. “This is against the spirit of our two nations’ enduring friendship, and fundamentally at odds with the benefits that our economic partnership has delivered over more than 70 years,’ said Albanese.
Two days later, the federal government offered the US access to critical minerals in an attempt to achieve exemption from these tariffs.
“We would very much like to have a partnership with the US, but if they don’t want to do that, then that’s up to them and we’ll continue to work with other nations as well,” said Resource Minister Madeleine King, justifying their offer of critical minerals to the US. “The truth is these minerals and rare earths are in high demand,” she told the ABC to make this offer more appealing.
On 2 April, the US announced that
it would be imposing a 10 per cent baseline tariff on all countries. Unlike the previous steel and aluminium levies, this tariff would impact all exporters in Australia. Perceiving the US to have been economically shortchanged by its trading partners, Trump purported this broad package of tariffs to be “reciprocal.” He dubbed 5 April, the day of their implementation, “Liberation Day.”
“President Trump referred to reciprocal tariffs. A reciprocal tariff would be zero, not 10 per cent,” Albanese responded.
Despite similar outrage from international trading partners, the tariffs came into effect on 5 April. This outrage would persist following the tariffs’ enactment.
The President of Australia’s National Farmers’ Federation (NFF), David Jochinke, expressed his disappointment. “The NFF has long championed free and fair trade, not just for agriculture but all industries, recognising its role in global economic growth and stability. Australian agriculture is unwavering in its commitment to this.”
“It is insulting to the Australians, undermines our national security and frankly makes us not a good partner, ” said Senator Mark Warner during a US Senate finance committee hearing on 9 April.
At the end of July, Trump unveiled further “reciprocal” tariffs on multiple countries. Despite threats that he would raise Australia’s baseline tariffs to 15-25 per cent, the country was spared—its exports continuing to be taxed at 10 per cent.
Where previously all low-value imports to the US were exempt from these tariffs, Trump unexempted the items on 29 August, placing country-specific tariff rates on all goods valued at $US800 USD or less.
A US federal appeals court ruled that many of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal, finding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which he used to legally justify the broad tariffs, did not apply.
This rift between Australia and the US in economic policy is not unique to Trump’s second administration. Trump previously placed tariffs on Australia in
2018, however Australia managed to reach a deal after months of talks.
The US and Australia previously diverted on foreign policy during Trump’s first administration. This revolved around the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP), a trade partnership with Europe, where Trump withdrew after eight years of negotiations. Meanwhile, Australia remained interested in pursuing trade agreements with Europe, later agreeing to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in 2025.
Australian public opinion on the US has also plummeted under the first and second Trump administrations. In 2016, a poll found that 45 per cent of Australian adults thought Australia should distance itself from the US if Trump were to be elected. Now, shown in a poll published in March 2025, 44 per cent of Australians preferred an independent foreign policy over a closer alliance with the US.
This change in public opinion has strong implications on AUKUS—a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the same 2025 poll, 48 per cent of Australians expressed that they believed the US would not defend Australian interests.
Lack of confidence in his ability to handle AUKUS was exacerbated when, in response to an inquiry about the partnership, Trump responded, “What does that mean?”
Albanese, however, is unconcerned, he told reporters the next day, “a lot of acronyms in this business and we all get thrown at them from time to time.”
With Trump seeming disinterested in placing additional tariffs on Australia, and Albanese’s tame reactions, an extreme rift between the US and Australia seems unlikely.
Imagine a world inspired by the dystopian cyberpunk novels of the 1980s: in-person communication is becoming less frequent, and people get most of their information through a big network of inter-connected computers which spans the globe. Misinformation is rife, the people are divided and students are forced to turn their cameras on even when they’re really comfy in bed. This was almost our reality. According to an edition of Farrago I found while looking for Star Wars reviews, the ‘InterNet’ was 1994’s hottest media fad; it took nerds by storm and left regular people quite confused.
The Australian Science and Technology Council thought, “in the visible future InterNet-type services will to some degree replace such university infrastructure as travel, additional buildings and on-site tutoring, as well as conventional library collections”. What outlandish claims. After all, according to a survey done by the IT department that year, 31 per cent of students didn’t own a computer while 10 per cent didn’t even use one in their academic work. Luckily for us, Farrago put together a few guides to aids its readers in learning how this weird media fad of the mid-90s worked.
Susan Luckman put together a list of common terms surrounding computers and the internet, which included outrageous ideas. She wrote, “VR–‘Virtual Reality’–a term coined by science fiction writers and adopted by scientists to refer to a computer technology that has the potential to perceptually mimic real life”. There was no way this “VR” technology would have taken off before subsequently becoming its own media fad in the late 2010s. Susan also tells us how to properly express ourselves by using the smileys :-), :-(, and <:]. How whimsy. Additionally, ellipses were … really… helpful in indicating “sarcasm, irony, emphasis, subtlety”, when bolding or italicising were … too... mainstream. I think we should bring this back.
One benefit of this weird computer network was the ability to email. Imagine: instead of writing letters by hand, looking through your address book and sending them off physically, you would simply type a message into an email program before using a button to send it to your recipient’s email address. Watch out though, at the time, it cost at least $20 a month to even … access … sending and receiving emails; $45 in today’s money >:[. There was no way this would have ever grown popular.
We also get a small glimpse into what people were like on this InterNet. Brian of MountainNet said, “Dorks tend to be interested in tits, bums, and titillation. Real discussions of relationships make them feel uncomfortable and they go away soon.” When asked if the InterNet could breed feelings of isolation due to a lack of physical contact, Brian said, “I don’t see the net medium as a standalone. I think it should be balanced by a real extension into meetings in the flesh.” Maybe if this whole … InterNet… thing had ever taken off, Brian’s point would have been an important one to consider. If we stopped talking to our communities in the flesh, I personally speculate that it would result in a rise of politically extremist echo chambers which would produce negative ramifications within our society :-(.
Sabine Pentecost
Over Albion Street (what a hike!) there is my personal crown jewel of Sydney Rd thrifting. The employees sport pierced septums and micro-d bangs, Blur and the Cranberries play over the loudspeakers. Plus, the prices are rarely ludicrous, even in the vintage section.
Good for: Furniture, amazing vintage section, bags and accessories
Note: this map is extremely approximate
This is a weird shop. I have never been able to predict its opening hours, nor what I will find inside. You may equally discover a true vintage dead-stock mini dress that would sell for $85 on Depop, or a soiled pair of neon leggings. I find that to be part of the fun!
Good for: Dead-stock Y2K, real wool knits, 70s jeans, chats with nice old ladies
I have been to an awful lot of op-shops in my time and I feel that it’s only fair I share my knowledge with the people.
I’ve lived in the inner-north for my whole life, so long that I remember when op-shops used to be cheap. In a fight to survive mass op-shop gentrification, I have honed my hunting skills to still find that $6 pair of vintage Doc Martens or that $8 Laura Ashley dress.
Today, we answer the age-old question: “Sabine, where did you get that [dress, leather jacket, couch, bag, pair of boots]?”
With its perfectly curated window displays and cosy interior, Scavengers feels like the op-shops of my childhood that sported an adjoining Tarot Room behind a beaded curtain and a cloud of incense. The aggressive security measures (tags on everything and a buzzer that sets the hounds on you if you approach the exit) are a bit of a vibe killer, though.
Good for: True vintage dresses, CDs, leather jackets
Ah, old faithful. Need I say more about this inner-north institution? There’s always something to be found if you look in unconventional racks (people get creative with their put-backs).
My tip: Always run to the unsorted racks at top speed!
Good for: Furniture/homewares, running into everyone you’ve ever met, pre-pub perusing on a Friday night (open until 9pm!)
Don Bosco op-shop (Sydney Rd) – super cheap!
Uniting Op Shop (Victoria Street) – great vintage and open 7 days!
BSL (Lygon Street) – good for jewellery, 70s-80s vintage and coffee table books!
Coburg Vinnie’s – I once found a Realisation Par dress for $8!
If you like being silently judged by employees and gawking at price tags, I’ve got the place for you. Goodbyes is the perfect place for fitting room photos to look back on in regret, or for finding that vintage dress of your dreams. Despite their sometimes eye-watering asking prices, coloured tags are always on a sale cycle.
Good for: Vintage Australian designers, work-appropriate fits, maxi dresses
Are you killing time before your coffee date at Green Refectory? Look no further! Everybody at this Vinnie’s is on their way to somewhere else, so if you spend some time perusing, you can find the gems that others have absentmindedly flicked past.
Good for: Unexpectedly wellpriced vintage clothes, jewellery, winter jackets
A personal memoir traversing a girl’s resilient journey from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Melbourne. She shelters hope in education, the future and writing herself home.
Gurdaafarid Poladwand
Content Warnings: the experiences described may be distressing to some readers
IamAhura, a girl from the land of rubies and emeralds, from a place where the mountains reach the sky and the winds whisper silent epics through the valleys. Northern Afghanistan, my birthplace, has always been a cradle of legends, history and memories. But for me, that land was more than just home; it was a battlefield where I had to defend dreams considered dangerous for girls by my society.
I was raised in a traditional Muslim family. A family where kindness lived in my mother’s heart and strictness lingered in my father’s gaze. In a society that reduced a woman’s role to silence, veiling and homemaking, I was a girl with a grand dream: to one day study at a university beyond the borders of my homeland. These dreams may have seemed like fantasy to others, but to me, they were like oxygen—I couldn’t survive without them.
My mother, a simple yet deep woman, was my only refuge and supporter. With her calloused hands, she worked tirelessly to keep our home afloat. At night, I would sit beside her, seeking shelter in books by
the dim light of a lamp. Those pages were my window into a world that didn’t yet belong to me. I visited educational centres (small private tutoring classes outside the public school system) many times, but I had no money. So I worked, even at jobs deemed “unfit” for girls. With the little I saved, I enrolled in a training centre.
But society wasn’t kind. Disdainful looks, harsh remarks and judgment—all simply because I was a girl—often crushed my spirit. But I had made a promise to myself, to my mother and to the thousands of girls whose voices had already been silenced. So I pushed forward. I studied alongside boys, participated in academic competitions and eventually earned a place at our local university.
My mother had cried and laughed, my father looked at me with pride and my heart was overflowing with hope. I wasn’t studying just for myself, but for every girl who had been denied education.
But then, one night, darkness fell. With the return of the Taliban, women were barred from working, thousands of girls were forced into marriage and universities slammed their gates shut to girls. I was no longer allowed to study. Everything I had worked so hard to build was destroyed in a
matter of days. My hope turned into exile. I had to leave my country. Not to run away, but to save my future. So that maybe, one day, I could return and fight for justice. Leaving my home and land was not easy, but staying silent would have been a slow death.
My brother, a father of two kids, risked his life taking me to the border of Iran. I wore a veil as black as the night above. My heart pounded as if it wanted to leap from my chest. A heavy silence filled the car. We both knew this might be the last time we’d ever see each other.
We approached the checkpoint. Every step felt like it could be my last. The air was dry, filled with dust and fear. A middle-aged woman in a white chador approached. She took my hand and said, “Come, my daughter.” Her hands were warm, her eyes calm. With her and two other women, we passed through a narrow path.
Midway, my veil shifted slightly, and a few strands of hair slipped out. A shout rang out from one of the Taliban fighters stationed at the border. He called out to my brother, raised his weapon, and yelled, “Shameless woman!” In that moment, I wanted to turn back and scream. But the
I want to return to Afghanistan one day, not necessarily with my feet, but with my voice and my pen.
woman shouted, “No! Go! Now it’s your turn to save your life.”
My legs were heavy, but my mother’s spirit whispered behind me. “Don’t run, fight.” I crossed. In the darkness, with tearful eyes and a burning heart. That moment was more than a physical crossing: it was when fear loosened its grip and defiance took its place. The image of my brother encircled by the looming shadows of the Taliban is etched into my memory forever. A bitter and eternal farewell. Though the guilt and anxiety stay with me, that decision changed my life.
In Iran, I boarded a bus to Mashhad. The terminal was crowded and merciless. I had no money, no ticket, no familiar faces. I spent long hours there crying, praying and making unanswered calls. My brother arranged for me to stay the night with an Afghan couple who, despite not knowing me or my family, offered kindness that was a shelter in a storm.
The next day, I went to Tehran to visit distant relatives and begin my paperwork. Every day I waited, checking my phone with anxiety. Then, one cold morning, the email arrived. My visa had been approved. I screamed, I cried, I ran through the room. My mother sobbed and laughed
over the phone. My father said, “Go, my daughter. I’m proud of you.”
It was my first flight. The sky at the airport was cloudy, but it was bright inside me. No one knew me, but everyone looked at me with kindness. That was one of the most human moments of my life. I realised that home isn’t just where you’re born—it’s where you’re accepted, unconditionally.
Melbourne was the beginning of a new world. One where I could walk without fear, speak out and shout my dreams louder than ever. Still, entering a completely different culture wasn’t easy. Homesickness, cultural and language differences made me feel lost and alone. But every time I entered a classroom at the University of Melbourne, I reminded myself that I was representing a generation of girls whose right to education had been stolen.
Australia was a land of opportunities, but my role wasn’t just to benefit from them. I had to build a bridge between the pain I left behind and the world I now stood in. I decided to be the voice of Afghan women still breathing in the dark behind closed doors. Through writing, speaking, and volunteering in academic
spaces, I try to present the real image of an Afghan woman as resilient, thoughtful and worthy.
My goal is more than education—it’s rebuilding. I want to return to Afghanistan one day, not necessarily with my feet, but with my voice and my pen. I want to revive the place where my dreams were buried for the next generation. For the girls who are silent today, but may one day rise and shout.
Currently, I am studying at the University of Melbourne. The classes, the books, the projects—all are joyful, even if they’re hard. But I never forget where I came from. Every step I take, every word I write, is a tribute to all the girls who remain alone with their dreams forbidden behind walls.
Migration is more than a physical movement—it’s a rebirth. I have suffered, feared and cried, but I never gave up. Now, I am here with a louder voice and a brighter hope. I came to fight, to learn, to build.
I am Ahura—a girl from high mountains and deep sorrows, a girl who learned that even in the darkest of times, one can still light a lamp.
Changing one’s name and revisiting old writing with a critical editor’s eye: is reinvention a violence done toward one’s past self, or a spoke in the wheel of constant recreation?
Blue Jordan
Content Warnings: metaphors involving violence and death imagery
Doyou think that a name change is a violent act? I don’t, personally; but sometimes people disagree. I don’t see it as something that one must feel guilty over, something that one must roll up in a rug or kick under the couch. There’s no homicide involved, not in my experience. I would never kill a little girl, even if people look at me like I have; but the concept of a ‘dead’name is implication enough. It seems to beg for confession, for incarceration. You did what to your name? the term asks with a flashlight to my face. I avert my eyes in response, and use my toe to kick the body further from view.
something very intense and very primal rise within me. I curse and sigh at the words on the page, typed in Comic Sans and spelt through a first-person drawl, then create a new document with the justify alignment, whose font is something a little cleaner (Times? Georgia?). I make the first slice through the chest of the little girl.
I was fifteen when I decided upon my new name, nineteen when I chose to tell the government about it. I want to change it legally, I said to them, but I don’t want to be violent about it. I just want it to be simple and easy (and cheap would be nice, too). Unfortunately, the government did not oblige any of these demands. When I asked it for a new legal name, it nodded its head—with a condition. It, a force without
I wouldn’t call this process violent-though when the old work’s grammar is ignorant and its language is impossibly simple, I do feel something very intense and very primal rise within me.
In reality (in the present), I know that a name change is not violent, or bloody or any other harsh term that may describe how it looks on paper. I know this now, but it was a hard revelation to come to; self-editing is an ugly, messy process. It slices you up in two, leaves you disjointed, leaves you feeling like two people rather than one. Half dead little girl and half homicidal adult. And I think that’s a mischaracterisation; but my obsession with self-editing could be used as proof in a court case for the little girl’s murder. Sometimes I find myself rereading the messy prose I wrote when I was thirteen; to open a new document right after to rewrite the horror I just read. I wouldn’t call this process violent—though when the old work’s grammar is ignorant and its language is impossibly simple, I do feel
a name, asked for my birth certificate back, and suddenly it did feel violent, it did feel like I had killed a little girl. The old certificate, twenty years old now, was folded in all the wrong places and held a dozen unidentifiable stains on the back. It had my mother’s maiden name in the postal information printed on the other side. It had the first address my parents ever owned together. It had the old name, the dead little girl’s name.
I see her in my editing process, in the document untouched for six years which today is altered. Her work lies on a table before me and I stare at it with a critical eye, not a friendly one. I ponder which mark I will make in it first, which of its insecurities I will foremost fix during this twenty-hour surgery. The lore-dumping? Or the running sentences? The dead little
girl watches me slice up her work; I assure her that this won’t hurt a bit.
It was almost a month before I plucked up the courage to send my old birth certificate to the government. I sent it via registered post after long ruminations and conversations with my mum surrounding the ethics of killing a little girl. I mailed her interstate to Services NSW. But it’s like she’s disappearing, was the crux of most of our talks when I told her what the application was asking from me. I’ve had this document for twenty years. She asked me why we couldn’t just have both: both the little girl that used to exist, and the adult that now exists. And I could have explained to her the government’s fears of identity fraud, or I could have read her verbatim the statement on the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages website, or even simply stated that there was no way around this rule. But all I said was I really want to do this. I remember feeling like I had done something violent then. But this process was never meant to be.
Whenever I make a clean cut through the belly of an old and dusty draft, I find an immaculate number of cancers and cavities, and turn my nose away in judgement. I pick at them, interchanging them with healthier substitutes, rejecting them altogether, deciding that no liver at all is better than one which is spotted and yellowing. I turn my scalpel inward, poking and prodding between the intricacies of its innards, tossing pieces I decide it does not need into the biohazard basket beside me. My document looks like Frankenstein’s monster in Times New Roman.
It seems violent. It seems like replacement, like maceration. Something vital is always lost in a rewrite, they say, just like translation. It is impossible to replicate in English the half-dozen versions of the pronoun ‘I’ that are found
in Japanese. But Haruki Murakami writes that “I have always felt that translation is fundamentally an act of kindness”. Why? Rewriting is gruesome, it’s separation, it’s replacement. It has always felt that way; but does it have to? When Murakami translates, he does so carefully, thoughtfully. He understands that rewriting kills some aspects of the original, but uplifts other parts. It becomes his own expression of love to the literature. When I rewrite, I spend days on one document, hours on one sentence. I spent time and care on a dusty document that would not think twice if I left and never came back. I cut it open because I love the work enough to care how it presents itself. Because, honestly, what is self-editing if not self-love?
When I found my new birth certificate in the mail, ripped it open, held its fresh green paper, I stared at the new name for ten minutes, thinking of the little girl who, no, had not been killed but instead had been changed by kind and careful hands. Violence is the antonym of self-editing, in reality; you have to care an awful lot about something to spend gruelling hours slaving over it. You have to really care about someone to choose a name for them.
Using stories, humanity deciphers its relationship with the natural world. Revisiting the Iberian orca attacks, Jesse untangles our long-standing fixation on whales.
Jesse Allen
I’m joining the war on orcas ... on the side of the orcas!
Two years ago, social media was awash with mock incitements to revolution. A pod of orcas, or killer whales, living in the Strait of Gibraltar had carried out a number of “attacks” on sailing boats: ramming into hulls, snapping off rudders, and even–in a few isolated incidents–sinking the craft altogether. Many online observers were quick to herald “White Gladis” and her pod (orca society being organised along matriarchal lines) as the vanguard of a coming “orca uprising” and
hastened to position themselves on the right side of history. In other words: it was time to orca-nise.
Soon enough, however, the propaganda machine ran out of steam: overtures to our cetacean comrades dried up, and collective attention moved elsewhere. Writing for The Guardian in 2023, Emma Beddington turned a critical eye to the general air of silliness which had accompanied the brief “orca wars”. Casting the killer whales as plucky, anti-capitalist freedom fighters–rather than creatures forced to adapt to anthropogenic environmental change–was a way of crafting a comforting and cathartic story, she argued. Yet rather than being a novelty of the internet age, this was instead only the latest manifestation of our “perennial misunderstanding” of marine life. For centuries, we have almost always sought to understand orcas,
For centuries, we have almost always sought to understand orcas, and other inhabitants of the ocean, strictly on our own terms, rather than on theirs.
From the biblical Leviathan to Melville’s Moby Dick, and even Spielberg’s Jaws, the image of the fearsome and ineffable menace of the deep is a familiar one–perhaps testament to an enduring anxiety of straying too far from the shore, where we quickly find ourselves out of our element and out of our depth. However, as Beddington observes, the inverse image of “mystical barnacled angels” which gained cultural capital thanks to conservation efforts in the 1970s is no less of an oversimplification. Whales are neither embodiments of unbridled malevolence, nor helpless, harmless push-overs. Unlike the distinctive markings used by scientists to identify and track specific orcas, questions pertaining to the ocean’s inhabitants–and how we relate to them–are seldom black and white.
One prime example of the ambiguities arising from maritime encounters can be seen in the peculiar art of scrimshaw, a strange byproduct of whaling which enjoyed its so-called “Golden Age” in the mid-nineteenth century. The practice involved carving often elaborate figures into whale teeth, baleen or bone. According to Sarah Holland-Batt, this was not only a way of occupying the interminable idle hours of a sea voyage, but also of channelling “intense superstitions”. Several of these highly evocative carvings have wound up in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, where they speak to the “contours of human loneliness” as well as “man’s brutality towards the natural world”; they are the trophies of a violent and bloody encounter, but equally the sole trace of “two unknowns”–the whaler and the whale–“colliding somewhere in the ocean’s vastness”.
Orcas themselves occupy a somewhat unique position in this shared terrestrialoceanic story. Despite their unparalleled hunting prowess–neither blue whales nor great white sharks are safe when an orca pod is in the neighbourhood–they don’t generally seem to have an interest in going after humans (perhaps another reason the yacht “attacks” generated so much attention). Indeed, the few incidents on record have generally involved orcas held in captivity at aquatic parks – the 2013 documentary, Blackfish, delves into the reasons behind this (and is almost certain to retroactively sour any childhood memories of Sea World). On the other hand, there are some extraordinary stories of intimate, symbiotic bonds between people and killer whales. For both the Tlingit and Haida Tribes of North America, this connection goes back to the legendary woodcarver, Natsilane. Left for dead by his treacherous brothers-in-law, Natsilane is said to have carved the first killer whale (Blackfish) from a yellow cedar tree. With the help of the orca, he proceeds to exact his revenge before commanding it never to harm humans again. Closer to home, the Thaua people of southern New South Wales developed an inter-generational modus vivendi with a local orca pod. The latter would herd baleen whales closer to the shore for hunting, and were subsequently rewarded for their efforts with a prize delicacy: the tongue. Steven Holmes, a Thaua Traditional Owner, has described how, when a member of the community passed away, “they were believed to be reincarnated as killer whales,” so that “the Thaua always remained one mob – whether whale or man”.
That particular pod of orcas seems to have gone extinct, or at least to have moved elsewhere–indeed, the number of whales frequenting Australian waters overall has yet to recover from the devastation wrought by commercial whaling, which was only formally banned in 1979. Yet, on the other side of the country, a killer whale megapod in Bremer Bay is now at the forefront of global research into the dynamic social structures and complex behavioural patterns of these highly intelligent and
mysterious cetaceans.
Researchers have found that orcas possess their own “language”–a “complex soundscape of clicks, rasps and squeaks,” in Beddington’s words–which varies from region to region. In other words: the orcas of Bremer Bay have an Aussie accent. It’s also possible to observe forms of cultural transmission, as hunting knowledge is passed down from old to young. Orcas off the coast of Washington State have even been observed wearing dead salmon as “hats” (for no apparent reason), a behaviour which researchers refer to as a “fad”. This was first documented in the 1980s, before seemingly falling out of fashion; it seems we aren’t the only species with a penchant for vintage styles.
As nebulous as terms like culture, society and language might be, they undeniably bring us into what feels like very human territory. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer note that the European intellectual tradition has always defined the “idea of the human being” in sharp “contradistinction to the animal”, arguing that the latter’s apparent “lack of reason” has served as the basis for “human dignity”. Our collective history of interaction and coexistence with killer whales and other creatures of the deep has more often been shaped by ignorance and antagonism, rather than respect and understanding. If we combine modern scientific advances with insights long recognised by Indigenous communities across the globe, we can see that there is a very real basis for inter-species solidarity–one which runs deeper than a shared hostility towards luxury yachts. In some ways, orcas are more human-like than even the most facetious of memes would have us believe–or rather, perhaps we’re simply more orca-like.
At any rate, in lieu of a formal peace treaty–which means the “orca wars” are technically still going–it might be in our best interest to keep them onside.
An introduction to the writer’s Central Asian home and trying to build community in Melbourne as an international student from a lesser known country.
Maftuna Khasanova
On the other side of the world (11,700 kilometres away, to be precise), you can find my homeland, Uzbekistan. Located right in the heart of Central Asia, it is a sun-soaked country with a rich history, culture and the most hospitable people. Yet, here in Melbourne (and in most parts of the world), when I say that I am from Uzbekistan, I see confusion or surprise on people’s faces. I often hear: “This is my first time meeting someone from Uzbekistan,” “We never learned about this country in geography lessons,” or my favourite, “Pakistan? Afghanistan?” Being the only Uzbek (that I know of!) at the University, I realise how invisible my country is and how important it is to share and raise awareness about it.
When I first came to UniMelb, I was a bit surprised to learn that among so many international communities, there was no Uzbek student society nor Central Asian one. Not seeing your country’s flag and familiar faces can be isolating at times. But at the same time, it can also be encouraging and empowering. As a representative and ambassador of my country, I feel proud and responsible to share the beauty, history, traditions and warmth of my nation with my peers. And this article is my way of introducing Uzbekistan’s incredible culture, potential and the experience of a student who carries their country’s story on their shoulders.
Uzbekistan is a place where the past, present and future intertwine. As
you travel through its ancient cities, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, you can immerse yourself in centuries of history, experience the elegance of Eastern culture and walk in the footsteps of traders, scholars and conquerors along the Silk Road. Turquoise-domed mosques and madrasas, spice-scented bazaars and shimmering adras (traditional silk fabric with vibrant patterns) give the ambiance of magical fairy tales. You will definitely feel the Central Asian spirit by wandering Tashkent’s bustling Chorsu Bazaar, haggling for spices or sipping tea in a traditional chaykhana (a teahouse where people gather to socialise).
But Uzbekistan is not just a museum of the past. It is a fast-developing, dynamic country in Central Asia with modern energy. With a population of 38 million,
Not seeing your country’s flag and familiar faces can be isolating at times ... it can also be encouraging and empowering.
60 per cent of whom are young people, Uzbekistan is a new oasis of opportunity and transformation. Reforms in education, tourism and innovation are opening the country to the world, and the world is starting to notice. Tashkent, the capital, is emerging as a regional tech and cultural hub, hosting international summits, innovation boot camps and creative festivals that spotlight Central Asian talent. Young Uzbeks are confidently stepping onto the global stage, succeeding across diverse fields and shaping their own globally connected narrative. Whether you are into history, modern life or breathtaking nature, Uzbekistan has something to offer every student explorer and curious traveller.
One of the most delicious ways I have introduced Uzbekistan to my peers here in Melbourne has been through food. In our culture, food is not just about feeding your body, it is about connection and ritual. There is a special kind of hospitality where guests are treated like family members, and leaving the table hungry
is almost impossible. If you want to taste the most delicious food and experience gastronomic tourism, Uzbekistan is the best location for it. Fragrant plov (our national rice dish), shashlik (skewered meat), manti (steamed dumplings), and non (freshly baked bread) straight from a tandyr (a traditional clay oven) will steal your heart and show you exactly why food is sacred in our culture. Honestly, I often miss those tastes, especially during latenight study sessions in the Baillieu Library with nothing but a sandwich.
Uzbek culture is also about community and unity. We celebrate everything together, whether it is a wedding, holiday or simply good days and moments. As a
student here, I have tried to recreate that sense of connection. I participated in a Nowruz festival organized by the GSA, celebrating the national spring holiday of the Uzbek people. I was eager to showcase our culture, so I set up a stand featuring our national dress, delicious foods and performed a famous Uzbek song on stage. My goal was to demonstrate that Uzbekistan’s heart is as open as its borders.
Of course, there are some challenges in being an international student from a lesser known country. Constant homesickness, loneliness and struggles to explain where you are from can be tough. But I also believe that being surrounded
by such an internationally diverse community and experiencing different cultures is a huge privilege. As a proud Uzbek, I dream of seeing more people visit my country and become interested in my country’s story. Whenever I share something about Uzbekistan, I want to plant a seed of curiosity in people’s minds. I hope this article does the same. So, next time when you plan a trip and choose your next destination, consider Uzbekistan. I am sure you will be mesmerized by its history, culture and warm hospitality. And if you see me around campus, say hi because I would love to tell you more about my home over kuk choy (traditional Uzbek green tea).
How standardised schooling forces students trying to manage their time into a constant economic calculus, and how social media drains our intentionality—from the perspective of someone relatively new to it all.
Howmany hours a day do you spend on your phone? What about your laptop or tablet? If you haven’t thought to check that number for a while, I encourage you to stop and check your screen time on your device of choice. Are you disappointed? Surprised? Horrified? For many of us, I suspect that number is sitting far higher than what we would like. And, sure, a portion of that could be attributed to time spent studying or working on some internship or the other, but what about the rest? I have a feeling I’m not alone when I say that hours of my day are spent scrolling through the bottomless rabbit hole of my feed. There’s an economic concept I learnt at school that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently called “opportunity cost”. Investopedia defines opportunity cost as “the forgone benefit that would have been derived from an option other than the one that was chosen”. This essentially means that the true cost of any action or choice is the next best alternative you sacrifice in order to have it. For example, if you decide to hit the town for a night out
with your friends, the opportunity cost of that action would not be the money spent on drinks and tickets and Ubers, but the time you could have spent studying for your assessment the next week. It’s a way of considering and evaluating the choices you make. What are you really giving up, when you pick one thing over another?
It feels like I’ve been forced to make a lot of choices recently. Would it be better to do that pub crawl I’ve been excited about all week, or should I stay home to get ahead on my readings? Should I go to the gym, or let myself take a day off to recover from all the academic work I’ve been stressing over? Sometimes I even find myself wondering whether I should skip my current lecture to catch up on lectures from the week before. It feels impossible balancing my academic life with the endless list of everything else I want to do.
I will admit that making these choices might be a little bit different for me, considering I switched to homeschooling for high school. It wasn’t until I got to university last year that I realised I’d become accustomed to slightly unconventional ways of managing my
work-life balance. Deadlines and a set schedule and tutorials to attend inperson were and still are a bit of a foreign concept to me. The fact that I often have a million different things going on at once, completely outside my control, tends to take me by surprise. Homeschooling meant that my academics revolved around my life. If I had a party to go to or a movie I really wanted to watch, deadlines could move forward and back to make things happen. Here, if it just so happens that a friend’s birthday falls on the same weekend as a big assessment, tough luck. Something’s got to give.
But there’s another aspect of my life that has changed since coming to university: I rejoined social media. There was little need for me to be on Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok as a homeschooler; I had a tight-knit circle of friends from my childhood and school days. Social media had very little part to play in that. More than a couple of years ago, realising that social media had little to offer besides consuming large parts of my day, I decided to delete every social media app off my phone. I had little intention of going back until the first day of O-Week, when a
new acquaintance expressed hesitance at exchanging phone numbers. Why didn’t I have Instagram, the less personal, more relaxed way of keeping in touch? The awkwardness of the whole encounter made me open a new account as soon as I got home. The number of followers and following grew, alongside the number of hours I spent consuming content daily, with Instagram and TikTok adding themselves to the lengthy list of online media that draw my attention every day. And yet, I still find myself wondering why I have no time to do all the things I would like to—study, attend all my classes, go to the gym, spend time with my friends, finish a book. Speaking to
my friends helped me realise I wasn’t alone in the struggle. Although everybody I spoke to felt that a good work-life balance was achievable, nobody appeared to have achieved it. We all found ourselves pointing to the same issue: procrastination.
Research shows that internet usage and addiction is strongly linked to academic procrastination and can have detrimental effects on our mental wellbeing by disrupting our ability to maintain a satisfactory work-life balance. Learning to balance my academic work with all the other parts of my life is a skill I’m still working on. But it’s important to realise that every time I procrastinate
and scroll through social media or binge TV, the price I pay is not my Netflix subscription or the overpriced phone data I’m using. The true opportunity cost is the time with my friends I’ll have to sacrifice a few days from now or the marks lost on an assignment that will bother me for days. So, I propose that next time you find yourself idle, scrolling through your social media or watching YouTube on autoplay, pause to think about what you’re sacrificing with your time. There is an opportunity cost to everything, so what are you giving up?
Readers of this edition may notice an unplanned preponderance of aquatic motifs and pieces. In this keenly prescient article, Isaac contemplates why we [i.e. Farrago] love to write about water.
Isaac Thatcher
Look at the girl in the water. She imagines herself drowning, likes to test just how long she can hold her head underwater. Aloe vera gel over tan lines; sun-bleached hair with a terrible, sea salt texture; blue, yellow and a white-hot light; a growing distaste for her own body. But that’s just summer, isn’t it—a beginning and an ending, both.
Seagulls whoosh overhead, wings battering wind against her ears. She thinks it would be nice to fly but will settle atop the waves for now. Birds came from the ocean, same as us: water to sand to sky. There’s something addictive in drifting, in the bone-deep knowledge, in letting the ocean toss you to-and-fro. She lets the waves carry her, no way of knowing that she’ll avoid the water for a near-decade in years to come.
To float is to give yourself over to forces far bigger than yourself. I think of the water and I think of everything from the microscopic to the mammoth, of myself as a speck of sunlit dust moving through
the air. The sun shifts its focus and the dust flake is snuffed, crushed under the pressure of gravity and a thick, kilometreshigh blanket of salt water. The ocean goes down so deep the pressure will crush you. There’s more to the water than drowning and sharks dwelling in the shallows. Isn’t it enticing to not know what else there is to find? Anything could be down there.
My first painting: summers when I was young were coastal. My grandparents lived by the ocean and we’d stay with them for a few weeks each year. The beaches of my youth were quiet places of a washed-out blue. I never wanted to leave. One year, my father lost
The ocean isn’t a subject that lends itself to a still life— deeply unchanging, but never in stasis.
The ocean isn’t a subject that lends itself to a still life—deeply unchanging, but never in stasis. Impossible to depict in its entirety, whether that’s in words or oil paint: paintings of the Romanticists, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, art all around the world for millennia. We want answers we can’t fully have. Here is the unknown; there’s something magical in how it will always escape you. Write around it and around it and around it again, and each time you will have painted an entirely different image.
his snorkel at Wilson’s Prom. One minute it was there in the sand; the next, the waves had snatched it away. For reasons unexplained, I remained convinced we’d find them washed up one day, that the tide would return what it had taken. But water doesn’t like to do that. Evening waves wash away both flotsam and footfall. I think this is what makes sitting there feel more meaningful than it is, knowing the sand won’t remember you come tomorrow. At sunrise and sunset, the sand and water forget they’re opposing
forces and come closer together; they brush against one another in a way that’s transitory, that carries you from the end of one moment to the beginning of the next. Watching the water feels like I’m letting something out to sea.
Still Life #2: In February, some friends and I embarked on a tumultuous, friendship-fracturing trip to Wollongong. One morning, a collection of us went to watch the sun rise over the waves. It might have been that it (momentarily) seemed that the world was ending, but I’ve vivid memories of perching by the rocks and watching the ocean swell with molten gold; the water was so heavy it made each minute sag, bringing about a pause in which to catch our breath.
Let me write you another picture: I’m at Half Moon Bay in the summer of 2024, and it’s the first time I’ve allowed myself in the water in a decade. I let myself sink below
the surface, to see how long I can hold my breath now that I run on the regular. I also want to cry. How do you articulate this to the people that you’ve come here with? How do you tell them that they’re unwittingly watching brick after brick in the wall around your body dissolve into the salt water? I’d spent so long afraid of the beach and my own body, I stopped remembering my love for water. Blue has come back into being my favourite colour. I’d forgotten summer didn’t have to be a punishment.
One more: 12 months later, I’m adrift on my back at Brighton Beach and watching a storm crawl in. Waterlogged clouds turn a rageful violet. I’m all by my lonesome. I decide then and there I’d be okay if things just ended, with a sky struck with electric capillaries, lungs pumping in and out, cloud canopy alight. My ears sit below the waves, and all I hear is the blood running through them, the seashell rush of the sea. A beginning and an ending.
Becoming comfortable with inconvenience to
Alex Saveski
6390 74663*10 9460 347*3
Whatyou just read is the sequence I punch into my dumbphone keypad if I want to write “New phone, who dis?” It started with TikTok users bedazzling cheap flip phones with gems, paint and charms in the name of 2000s nostalgia and “dopamine detoxes”. Fine arts students on campus began pulling little plastic bricks out of their pockets and poking at them, like a child at a toy cash register. HMD—licensees to the Nokia brand, and now Mattel—released the Barbie (flip) Phone last year. The odd disembodied arm emerges from deep within mosh pits across Melbourne, flailing that unmistakable tiny screen and backlit keyboard. News channels from New York to New Zealand deem teenagers disposing of their iPhones for $50 replacements a worthy story, and it feels plausible to say that dumbphones are back, baby.
Someone stared at this water 10, 1,000, 10,000 years ago. People have traversed it forever. The waves suggest you’re not so different. We live in an era so conducive to isolating yourself it’s easy to forget there’s more than what’s directly in front of you. Take the water, for one. Take what lies beneath.
When will we stop writing about the beach? Maybe when there’s nothing left to say; maybe when fishing trawlers have turned over the last patch of sand; maybe when the sea has risen so high only the mountains can part it; maybe when the surface carries so much oil it swallows the sunrise.
But for now, I’ll keep thinking about how I don’t see the coastline nearly enough; I’ll think about how the waves work their way into my writing whether I want them there or not. And I’ll wait for the water to swallow us up again.
Gen Z Know We Have a Problem
In 1992, one year before the World Wide Web became freely accessible to the public, dot-com millionaire Josh Harris ironically hypothesised that “At first, everybody’s going to like [the internet], but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition.” And he was right. Gen Z was the first generation to encounter smartphones as a necessity from birth. With many of us growing up to accept this dominant lifestyle as truth, it’s easy to break the ice with other touchtyping tech gurus of similar age over a collective nostalgia: Club Penguin, early YouTube and churning out Video Star edits faster than Pop Mart acquires property in Melbourne. But it’s not without the inevitable counterbalance of a collective trauma too: blue waffles screencaps on Instagram, a Reddit 50/50 beheading sent by a school friend, porn popups on dodgy streaming sites or a “1 lunatic, 1 ice pick” upload–which still makes me nauseous when cutting meat with a knife
and fork. But the far more sinister facet to the internet, which increasingly troubles young people beyond the effortless accessibility of shock content, is the widespread inability to mitigate overuse–which is largely owed to modern design. A design that deliberately renders users complicit in their own mental fatigue and anguish, for profit.
A “dumbphone” is a mobile device that offers basic communication with little internet access; also known as a brick, flip or feature phone.
My biggest problem with carrying a smartphone at all times was this feeling that my head was too cluttered. Too full with the tonnes of useless media from platforms turning my hormones into projected metrics (dopamine targets aren’t a made up concept within the Black Mirror vacuum—Meta has been sued by 33 states in the USA), I was never focused with the potential of apps I could use in my pocket whenever I wanted. I always felt on edge knowing a notification could drop in
at any second, from any platform, any person. A study has shown that merely having your phone in sight decreases brain activity. I could hardly remember anything, ever.
My second main problem was the convenience of the smartphone. It is so easy to become complacent–you don’t even realise it’s happening, because the motions are so smooth and effortless. All you need is one hand with a thumb with endless scrolling capacity. Immediately upon waking, I would scroll. When I came home, I would scroll. Before bed, I would scroll–doing something as useless as perusing my camera roll for the 100th time, without knowing why and then feeling momentarily empty if I had few notifications in the morning. Technology creates self-obsession. I felt like I could never do the things I wanted to do because there weren’t enough hours in the day; when really, my hours were misspent on things that benefitted no one long term. Like throwing hundred-dollar bills off a yacht and into the wind.
Thirdly, I wanted to authentically re-engage with the people and world around me. Compared to 2003, young Americans in 2024 were throwing 70 per cent fewer parties. Instead of texting people a funny anecdote and calling it a day, I wanted to consciously spend more time in physical spaces and with physical media; i.e. galleries, cinemas, record stores, parks, brick-and-mortar establishments–places that are becoming displaced by online shopping. If the physical world disappears, so do the communities and social relations we need for psychological wellbeing.
the Barbie Phone–a pink flip with only the basic features for call, text radio, notes and “Malibu Snake”, of course; with the addition of some extra mindful “Barbie meditation” and “Digital balance tips”. It coaxed prospective buyers with its classic California summer iconography and nostalgia-drenched taglines, promoting “less browsing and more fun” with “the joy of simpler, sweeter days.” On a macroscale, top health authorities in the U.S. are advocating for warning labels on social media platforms, like those on tobacco and alcohol products. After 2025, the minimum age for social media users in Australia will be 16. Even a mayor of a town in France attempted to ban smartphone use in all public places–backed by a 54 per cent vote looking towards stronger communities, better recreational facilities and, funnily enough, social connectedness. This awareness of technology’s risks is not new, but young people seem to be increasingly aware of their agency over relationships with technology. And where discipline fails to be exerted over one’s addictive tendencies, or disillusionment with convenience culture is turning one depressed, flip phones are a growing instrument for salvation.
interwoven technology is today with daily functioning. A friend said she would get a flip phone simply “as an act of resistance, to show others that it’s possible to look up in a train carriage where [everyone’s in their own echo chamber].”
Social media and technology overuse is so detrimental to public health that, worldwide, measures are being implemented on individual and government levels. On a microscale, phrases like “digital detox” and “dopamine diet” are commonplace amongst internet users who assess their own tech habits as problematic to the point where they deny themselves access to social media and/or a smartphone. Flip phone sales doubled in Europe and Australia in 2023. HMD recognised this trend and tapped into the conscious consumer market last year with
The young people who are choosing dumbphones
I spoke to several of my peers, from dumbphone purists to smartphone addicts, to get an idea of how diverse this spectrum of tech dependency is. Some feel they can use technology a healthy amount and that it enhances their social/ emotional wellbeing. Some find their compulsive technology use distressing and don’t know what to do about it yet. Many opt to only access certain apps and social media through their smartphone’s browser, which minimises distraction while retaining all of a smartphone’s useful features. Some don’t engage with social media much at all but appreciate other smartphone features. Most say they cannot live without Google Maps, and this is a dealbreaker for them. One person enforces a “do not disturb” limit, which is password protected by a friend so they cannot disable it themselves. And the few, whose numbers are increasing, switched to dumbphones in rejection of how
I became fascinated with dumbphones after hearing about a friend of a friend, who made the flip earlier this year, and who I now found uber charismatic for making such a controversial, self-assured decision to reject modernity (no, this is not a cheap persuasive technique and I can’t promise more people will ask you out if you get a flip phone, but it’s been working alright for me). We shared identical attitudes about smartphones being mutually exclusive to presence: he said, “Information on the web is always linked to more information that is so effortless to switch between, because you know you could be looking at something better, newer, more interesting or valuable and it’s not far. Everything feels inadequate in a way that doesn’t happen when you read a book or put in a CD … those don’t offer you this unimaginably huge access to information, so you focus deeply on what’s right in front of you. Using social media feels like being a dumpster at a recycling facility where you only accept a certain shape of rubbish, and you don’t consider any of the other ideas running over you until the one you were waiting for sifts through. Compulsive use of technology comes from fear and escapism.”
A couple of my friends who switched to dumbphones did so by accident, in losing their smartphone and quickly replacing it with a cheaper alternative, like the Nokia 235; they ended up using them for much longer than they intended. I recall not hearing from my friend for a little while and then meeting up with him to the sentiment of “I’ve had no phone for the last week, and it’s been the best week of my life.” However, the majority of dumbphone users I spoke to said it was to curb the too-much-time they spend on social media.
But years before these conversations, the dumbphone movement is reported to have originated in New York, 2022, with the Luddite Club. A group of high school students, the Luddite Club rejected
social media and smartphones in favour of quality time–simply talking, reading, exploring, creating for themselves and the community, engaging with physical media, presently. In an interview with CBS NY, group member Ava De La Cruz explained, “Now I’m suddenly in high school and I’m about to be in college, and my life basically … escaped me, completely.” That was the sentiment that committed me to luddite-dom after much pondering of my own day-to-day malaise. It is quite depressing to reflect on a childhood spent predominantly in a fake realm, which is proliferating with more fantasy offshoots which do not help vulnerable parties avoiding real life (see: “Come Shopping with Me + My Besties | A Day in the Life” and other such videos.) Two thirds of young people in Australia report feeling lonely or isolated from others, despite being more connected than ever. In this century people are watching hyperreal depictions of others having fun with friends instead of having fun with their own friends. ChatGPT is being probed for therapeutic advice in place of real qualified psychologists, with dangerous consequences. Opting for dating apps as an avenue for meeting new people means that third spaces like night clubs, bars and community centres are progressively shutting down.
I came to understand that this indecipherable ever-lurking ennui, which I had felt for a very long time, was a symptom of lack of purpose and effort. When almost every action in our lives is coordinated around technology and its immediacy, with human skills that take years of learning and practice to perfect being appropriated by AI, the world without the internet, in comparison, can seem flat and impotent. Franco Berardi conceptualises technology’s deadening quality as a “colonization of the temporal dimension”, referring to the dimension “of mind … perception … life”: the new medium for societal advancement now that physical and interplanetary space has been conquered by humans. This phenomenon of having the entire world at your fingertips, and still feeling empty, is interpreted by Byung-Chul Han as a product of “excess positivity”. That
is, the drive and freedom to unlimited creation and consumption, plateauing into overstimulation, then exhaustion, becoming passivity (more colloquially known as “brain rot”, however this term didn’t exist in 2010). If no time is made for “profound idleness” (a.k.a. boredom, or downtime) of contemplation and gratitude, new ideas cannot emerge or be digested, and mental health effectively plummets from the weight of endless passing stimuli.
To be present these days can feel like a form of resistance and countercultural optimism. The most popular responses to my flip phone typically fall into categories of: reflexive shock: “What the fuck is that!?”, straight up offence: “For fuck’s sake how am I gonna send you reels now? You’re never online anymore”, or the more optimistic, repressed desire: “Wow, I would love to get a flip phone but just don’t know if I could”. It’s painfully true that not everybody can get by with just a dumbphone in a hyperconnected society— limited features may compromise one’s professional, social or personal life when we rely on so many apps and platforms to keep the world turning. But it was exactly this demand, to be reachable at every single second of the day, that was driving me crazy and afflicting me with phantom buzzes.
A Forever Love!? Or a Trendy Fad?
I would say that in the few months that I’ve been shutting my phone with an audible SNAP, all my aforementioned goals have been realised in my life but not without swapping back and forth between my phones a couple times—I felt the positive differences immediately, and then the drawbacks a while later, like most.
I use the Opel Touchflip because it has WhatsApp, which my workplace uses, and allows for proper inbox/ outbox group chats on a single screen–a feature many dumbphones typically don’t have. You will find in your journey that most dumbphones are thwarted by one fateful hamartia for which you will have to compromise. I have WhatsApp and crystal clear audio/reception quality, but very very short battery life. My first $50 Ruio brick phone had immortal battery life and a super charming shape,
but very bad reception–leaving my calls with more “Huh!? You’ve dropped out, I can’t hear you”, than actual conversation. My friend’s brick phone is the cheapest functioning one on the market, but has no mute function, which they had to remedy themselves via a permanent DIY headphone jack plug. Getting a new dumbphone can challenge your creativity and puts you in some amusing situations; like when I sat with my current phone— made for seniors—in my back pocket for the first time, accidentally triggering the panic button which blared an alarm, ‘EMERGENCY, NOW DIALLING TRIPLE 0’. I then read the manual to discern how to disable the panic button’s function.
Regardless of the hiccups, the experience has overall made my headspace exponentially clearer and more relaxed. The most valuable skill the dumbphone life has given me is the power to be idle—to just sit and think. Alain de Botton writes that, “Journeys are the midwives of thought,” and I find truth in that commutes without tech are surprisingly the most fruitful part of my day. It’s something about being a passenger in a moving vessel that your mind excitedly mimics. Making time for thought as its own activity too, rather than a complement to routine, has aided my creativity, introspection, gratitude and sleep. With much of my thinking done during the day, bedtime is no longer burdened by whirling thoughts as the only time I was previously unoccupied. Everyone is time poor to an extent, but less so when you use your time intentionally. Once I omitted social media from my life, I completely forgot that it existed. Beyond the initial withdrawals and social alienation, I felt almost no desire to interact with it again–in the same way that the clunky operation of my dumbphone and its lack of customisation make me pretty indifferent to using it. Most flips will come with a surprising amount of features, such as an alarm, voice recorder, FM radio, notes, even Facebook, (very slow) YouTube and a web browser–but I deleted the latter four of these. The jingle when my phone switches on, the limited choice between two tacky coloured circle backgrounds and the fried ringtones
The healthiest way for me to have a relationship with the internet is for it to be a separate entity to, rather than an extention of, myself.
still charm me, but don’t compel me to check my phone throughout the day. Big limitations make the existing features so much sweeter.
I take greater time doing everything I do now, as opposed to rapidly ticking my day off a to-do list. I find myself with spare hours I can now utilise for reading, writing, seeing friends and any other activity I previously “couldn’t fit in”, which is what I tell people when they ask, “So, like, what do you do in the morning if you don’t use your phone?”
I’ve realised that I know how to get most places without Google Maps if I just remember hard enough, by planning ahead or reading signs–which is infinitely more satisfying to the senses than acutely following a map. Asking strangers questions or for directions, instead of a computer, opens up beautiful possibilities.
That said, it can also be isolating given the reality of how integral smartphones are to the vast majority of people’s lives. I never understand the references to memes my friends make anymore, which can feel defeating. I’m distanced from the Instagram group chats my various communities share and connect in. I have gotten lost on a few occasions after making a wrong turn in suburbia and have had to call friends for directions, or asked them to come get me on their bikes, in the rain, in the dark. I have often missed important emails or deadlines because I forget to check my inbox and social media DMs for a few days to weeks, but I’m responsible for my own laziness. I still have access to all these platforms “for web”. The healthiest way for me to have a relationship with the internet is for it to be a separate entity to, rather than an extension of, myself. Something like a home PC setup in the 90s, which designates a specific time, intention and place for use. This can’t work for everybody’s lifestyle, and definitely doesn’t work perfectly for mine, but it’s what feels best for me. Technology won’t feel “right” unless greed and consumer exploitation at a corporate level are radically replaced with empathy. The Light Phone is a
hopeful example of human-centric design, created to rebut these monopolies by “serv[ing] you, not the other way around”.
Existing regulatory features like “Screen Time” don’t work well enough. The hyperaddictive nature of social media platforms like autoplay or public metrics could be removed so that people don’t need to regulate their use quite as much. Greater restrictions on data mining could be imposed to protect people from emotional and financial manipulation. Parents and children could receive better education on the internet’s risks to manage personal use early on, so that we don’t have to ban apps altogether. Workplaces could be more organised and respectful of employees’ personal leisure time, so they don’t have to stay alert outside of work hours. Greater emphasis could be placed on the creation and nurturing of community spaces that provide security.
If the dumbphone lifestyle continues to gain traction, hopefully manufacturers will upgrade certain features to make dumbphones more accessible, like having more sophisticated group chat capability, higher quality cameras, greater processing power and better mic/connectivity standards.
Of course, social media and technology aren’t evil when used in moderation. There are many features that can enhance one’s quality of life.
Keeping up a social life is, granted, so much swifter with a smartphone. You can achieve more by doing less; know what people are up to without caring enough to ask. Having a dumbphone can be hard work in the social domain, and leave one feeling more isolated unless they pursue with intention.
The internet also offers an efficient platform for the circulation of educational resources and entertainment. It gives exposure to artists and creators, opens up avenues to new ideas and dimensions of experience. Some features could even be critical to one’s safety and survival, like knowing the fastest way to get home via Maps if you are stranded.
While many of these can be achieved without a smartphone mediating connection, as per the rest of history, it’s just … faster. I’ve used my flip phone unwaveringly for around four months now, only recently rebooting my smartphone to keep up with my new workplace’s app requirements whilst I’m new, and to socialise more easily with various groups. I can do so in a much more mindful way now without being seduced by the smartphone’s design; my lockscreen is plain black, and I have all notifications except for SMS disabled. It works advantageously for me at the moment, but like last time, my presence slips away more often.
Nowadays, the internet can often seem like it’s engineered against the audience it once tried to serve. When platforms endeavour to exploit users’ weaknesses for capital so ferociously that Facebook will target you with beauty ads after you delete a selfie from your profile, the costs can seem to outweigh the benefits. As such, the need for a more humane, benevolent and authentically connected way of life is illuminated to many. Whether the current flip phone trend is just a fad of nostalgia fetishism or a temporary detox strategy, the pendulum is slowly swinging back towards compassionate analogue means of consumption and life, where many struggle to trust technology anymore. Xiu Xiu are one of the most recent artists to pull their phenomenal discography from Spotify—or “Garbage Hole Violent Armageddon Portal” as they prefer to call it—over its CEO’s investment in AI war drones. At risk of sounding idealistic, maybe a collective effort to revive noncentralised community noticeboards, newsletters, rip-off tab posters, third spaces, physical media and basic word of mouth, could be the lifeline to this era’s missing sense of purpose. If technology can no longer be trusted to nurture humanity’s best interest, maybe your local community will, instead. And it all starts with a will to be present—maybe even, with a dumbphone.
On the things we throw away (or launch into space).
Jesse Allen
Onthe inside of a door, in one of the campus libraries, there is a peculiar collage of flotsam and jetsam. Invitations, loyalty cards, grocery lists, drawings— having once marked a page in a borrowed book, now comprise a gradually accrued gallery of miscellany. Did anybody ever notice these objects were missing? If so, was it with any measure of regret?
how big a sample space is needed to paint a truly representative picture of life on Earth in all its staggering multiplicity. How many makeshift bookmarks would you need before you could claim to speak for an entire planet?
This was more or less the question posed to a NASA committee chaired by Carl Sagan in the lead up to the launch of the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977. Each vessel was entrusted with a copy
a force to the most human of traits, a force which has played no less a role in our history than ambition or perseverance: carelessness.
In the words of Hilary Mantel, “once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.” While she was referring to individual lives, there’s no reason that the idea couldn’t be scaled up to encompass all of humanity. We might want to think about the artefacts we will leave behind, and which will one day speak in our place. Taken individually, each item in the library collection offers a fragmentary glimpse into one person’s life at a specific moment in time. In concert, the objects form a reliquary of humanity in microcosm—a proud testament to the most human of traits, a force which has played no less a role in our history than ambition or perseverance: carelessness. Many families possess precious heirlooms, handed down from generation to generation. Yet, alongside these few venerated articles is a shadow catalogue of all the other items a person has interacted in their life: broken, discarded, or misplaced. Perhaps these objects would provide a fuller portrait of the departed. We could explain humanity more effectively, not with skyscrapers or sculptures but with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s not hard to see why we might prefer a carefully curated “Best of” to the bluntness of a random crosssection. Yet, the question remains as to
of a 12-inch copper disc known as the Golden Record. A time capsule of sorts, condensing a version of the story of life on Earth, and insuring it against an uncertain future. Dr. Sagan and his colleagues curated a selection of 115 images, an array of natural sounds and musical pieces, and spoken greetings in 55 different languages. From among the latter, some personal favourites are: “Greetings to you, whoever you are. We come in friendship to those who are friends” (Greek); “Greetings to the residents of far skies” (Persian); “Dear Turkish-speaking friends, may the honours of the morning be upon your heads” (Turkish); and, “Friends from space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time” (Amoy).
For a collective best-foot-forward aimed at any extraterrestrial interlocutors, there are some surprising inclusions; supermarkets and traffic jams were apparently both deemed integral to the human experience and made the cut. Having said that, the track listing for Music from Earth holds up unexpectedly well: not only Bach and Mozart, but also Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong and several compositions by Indigenous and First Nations peoples get a feature. Clearly, an effort was made to create something universal, timeless–because, as distant as
the 70s may feel to most people reading this, Voyagers 1 and 2 are operating on an altogether different time horizon. As of 2012 and 2018, respectively, both spacecraft have officially left the safety of our Solar System and have entered the expanse of interstellar space. By the time they approach the nearest planetary system, a cool 40,000 years will have elapsed.
Of course, we won’t be hearing back anytime soon—that’s if there’s even anyone out there to pick up the proverbial phone. This brings us to one of the most mystifying paradoxes of the universe, famously articulated by Enrico Fermi in the 1950s: the exceedingly high probability of encountering intelligent life on the one hand, and the inscrutable cosmic radio silence which confronts us on the other. But supposing one of the Voyagers did indeed arrive somewhere, inhabited by someone, what then? For a far-flung feudal civilisation, could the well-intentioned record be interpreted as a heavenly envoy, or an omen of divine wrath? Would bloody crusades be fought beneath the banner of the Golden Disc? Conversely, would a culture several millennia ahead of us even take notice of our paltry offering? Perhaps it might just be one more piece of fan mail to add to the pile—or another scrap to stick on the back of a library door. This is all assuming a civilisational trajectory vaguely resembling our own; across all of space and time, there might instead be stranger things than what’s been dreamt of in science fiction.
It’s also worth inverting the question: if an indecipherable interstellar codex were to wash up here on Earth, would we know where to begin? Perhaps the stillness of the stars would be a mark of beneficence, in line with David Bowie’s Starman (“He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds”). Yet again, the more obvious explanation might be the more humbling one: simple disdain. The eponymous conceit of Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky’s Soviet-era sci-fi novel,
Roadside Picnic, is that our world would be merely a rest stop for celestial commuters with better places to be. The “scraps” they leave behind are (for us mere mortals) objects of immense power far beyond our understanding—yet they are discarded by these higher beings with as little thought as we might mislay an errant bookmark. The more cynically minded might be tempted to see the Golden Record as little more than a multi-million dollar, precision-engineered cry for help. Yet, for Dr. Sagan, there was no doubt in his mind that launching this “bottle into the cosmic ocean,” said something profoundly “hopeful about life on this planet”. It’s not so much the specific contents of the disc; rather, it’s the crafts themselves which embody an article of faith. No matter how slim the odds, the Golden Record reflects an openness to the idea that there might be someone else out there. This is hope, but it’s also humility. It puts into practice an idea which we all know in theory, but which is far too easy to forget: we are not the centre of the universe. The austere beauty of the cosmos does little to disguise its unrelenting indifference. But maybe, just maybe, there are some fellow travellers out there capable of understanding us, and who share the same need to be understood.
Lest we finish on an overly optimistic note: the best-case scenario of an 80,000-
year round-trip might prove too much. It isn’t being unduly fatalistic to consider a scenario in which the Golden Record will preserve some faint and incomplete memory of our species long after our highways, orchestras and languages have all fallen silent. Not everyone will find it comforting, but there’s something strangely reassuring in knowing that those two copper discs are a safeguard against complete oblivion.
Perhaps we can leave aside the question of “accuracy”, accepting that no single sample or story could capture life in all its richness and nuance. To paraphrase Hillary Mantel: a birth certificate is not a birth, nor a script a performance, nor a map a journey. But maybe it’s the best we can do. And though we may no longer be here, at least one small corner of the cosmos could bear witness to that fact that we were. One day, our eclectic message in a bottle might even wash up on some distant shore beneath far skies, to the wonderment and gratitude of our Turkishspeaking friends.
The romanticised appropriation of working-class cultures contrasted against the economic precarity experienced by young people amid the cost-of-living crisis.
Astara Ball
You’ll never live like common people, never fail like common people.
Pulp’s 1995 Brit-pop classic, “Common People” embodies the workingclass woes in its witty attack on the ignorant upper classes who “want to live like common people”. A song that only “common people” can truly comprehend, lead singer Jarvis Cocker drawls, “never
fail like common people” and echoes a desperation as he advocates for societal recognition of poverty’s realities. The song questions the continued romanticisation of class tourism, a phenomenon that is easily identified in contemporary Melbourne . Whether this impulse is manifested through dressing in thrifted clothes and labourer-inspired styles, inhabiting sharehouses located in historically working-class/immigrant
suburbs that are nonetheless cool and artsy (often gentrified) or robbing Woolies because prices are up, the perpetual boredom of the upper class seems to emerge from a longing for something to complain about. Despite egalitarianism’s centrality to its national identity, ripples of the oppressive British socio-economic class system remain present within Australia today. Cocker’s words are seared
into the skin and lived experiences of “common people”. For us, failure could come knocking on our doors any day now, eviction notice in hand.
Jarvis Cocker’s words have been spinning in my mind for weeks and not just because of Brit-pop’s revival following the commencement of Oasis’ reunion tour. My dad’s side of my family mostly resides in the UK, having grown up post-WW2 in Thatcher’s England. I’m acutely aware of how this class system has affected how I’ve grown up, as well as the ways in which it continues to be violently weaponised as a colonial tool. Both my parents have university educations and have travelled. Emigrating to Australia was a choice for them. In many ways, I grew up quite privileged because of this. For instance, I went on exchange to the UK and travelled throughout Europe, where I learned so much about the privilege of lacking responsibility. Yet on the other hand, I live out of home for university and grew up in a rural area. I’m from the Northern Rivers in New South Wales, which has the highest ranked housing costs in Australia. I’m stained by the feelings of potential and imminent failure.
As a student receiving Youth Allowance and rental assistance, my ability to pursue university in Melbourne depends on these external payments. My parents are unable to support me financially for many reasons but plainly because they cannot afford to pay their own rent alongside mine. Recently, this feeling of failure faced me in its more gruesome form. For the first time in my young adulthood, I was unable to pay my rent. I was in the process of applying for jobs and my rental assistance had ceased due to a complex issue with my lease. A sense of sinking felt enormous, because not being able to live in Melbourne meant not being able to graduate university meant having no path when my life was just starting. I felt like a failure to my parents, to my mum who immediately began helping with bills while I tried to sort things out. I felt awful, depending on her once more; after I had watched her struggle financially when I was a teenager. Even after coming back from this (it is a rare privilege to revive oneself), it clung to my clothes like a foul
Even after coming back from this ... it clung to my clothes like a foul stench.
stench. I never want to feel that way again: irrevocable defeat. But it’s a constant reality for so many, one into which I merely dipped my toes. This really got me thinking about class tourism and how many students like myself are struggling to keep themselves above water.
Class tourism is exercised through fashion and aesthetics. In Australia, it’s evident in the elitist private-schoolto-prestigious-university pipeline. Students coming from outrageously lavish backgrounds and completely exclusive social circles, most prominently in Melbourne and Sydney, dress poor. For the youth, there has always been a cyclical popularisation of workwear. The resurgence of Doc Martins (starting in the 2010s) along with distressed clothing trends such as Grunge, a pop-culture emerging from 1990s Lumber-jack working class Seattle, are prime examples. Music too drives these aesthetics. In Melbourne, the electronic self-produced music subgenres, such as house and UK garage actually have their roots in post-industrial working class cities such as Chicago.
Here, the most obvious aesthetic people follow is Naarmcore. Often described as “the rich dressing poor”, it draws upon gritty street-wear fashion and intentional “unpretentiousness”. Primarily donned by these wealthy private school kids, it is their way of living like “common people” before returning to reality and taking over their dad’s oil business or something to that effect. Local Aboriginal social enterprise, Clothing the Gaps, condemns the aesthetic as a reduction of Indigenous culture in its appropriation and satirisation of ‘Naarm’, the Traditional language name for the Melbourne area. As a form of class tourism, Naarmcore boils Aboriginal cultures down into a reproducible internet trend while harmfully misrepresents those experiencing poverty.For, class tourism via cultural objects such as fashion and music serves to decontextualise subcultures of oppressed peoples and the original meanings rooted in minority groups.
This means of expression is a far cry from a desire to express non-conformity and boredom for the “easy” upper-class lifestyle, an ennui in which ignorance and stagnancy fosters and diseases all privileged people.
Youth from working/middle-class backgrounds are more hyperaware and concerned for their futures than ever before. We are no strangers to the fact that many of us won’t ever own a house and could experience extreme poverty and homelessness. Students and young people are among many who suffer the most from this crisis. As rent prices, the cost of education and essential food items continue to rise and living wages stay low, many people are struggling to make ends meet. In 2025, cost of living, followed by the cost of food was recorded as of the most pressing concern for Australians. The Salvation Army claims that in 2024, only 2.7 per cent of Australian rental properties were affordable to a family unit consisting of two parents earning minimum wage, raising two children and receiving parental payment. In the rental market, vacancies are at a diabolical 1.9 per cent, with prices rising significantly (by 6.4 per cent in the December quarter). 58 per cent of renters have reported rent increases. A devastating 56 per cent of Australians are more stressed about their finances this year compared to 2024, with 15 per cent of Australian households having gone without essentials like food or heating due to lack of income. A further 56 per cent of Australians are concerned they won’t be able to afford essential food. A very real concern for irreconcilable poverty, failure and living life “with no meaning or control” is on the horizon for many people in this country.
Many are already living in this perilous state, and suffering the brunt of our cost of living crisis. According to the 2021 Australian census, over 3.3 million people live below the poverty line and over 122,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Australia. 23 per cent of this growing figure is young people
between the ages 12 and 24. One-parent families and those dependent on welfare payments such as students receiving Youth Allowance are in the most precarious of positions. Along with this Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at The Australia Institute, urges that “support for students is inadequate”, the HECS-HELP debt system is doing more damage as it continues to swell and become in fact, a “financial burden”. A teeth shattering finding by
ACOSS (the Australian Council of Social service) on Poverty in Australia shows that students contribute more HECS payments than foreign-owned gas companies contribute to the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT). Introduced in 1988, PRRT was intended to ensure that Australians could at least earn money from the deprivation of supposedly collectively owned gas and oil in our country. Cost of living is an issue that faces all people but it seems that students, especially those that are both living out of home and faced with the piling debt are becoming the most at risk than ever. Especially when the future seems so uncertain in the lack of hindsight from our governments which would rather we be distracted.
With the cost of living crisis being of universal concern in Australia, governmental solutions have never really gotten to the root of the problem. Australia’s recent anti-immigration “protest”, March for Australia which occurred on 31 August claims to want to preserve Australia’s culture and views halting immigration as a means of dealing with the housing crisis. It highlights similar xenophobic demonstrations internationally which blame an influx of immigration for lack of housing, in primarily western nations such as the US
and the UK.
Additionally, concern for cost of living has directly resulted in proposed caps for international students attending universities in Australia. A paradoxical position, seeing as the economy greatly benefits from international students and youth migration who come here to join Australia’s labour force or pursue highly specialised degrees. Immigration and the struggle for social status, wealth and making a home in Australia are deeply intertwined. Nearly half of Australia’s population have at least one parent born overseas. There is a refusal to criticise the real causes of the cost of living crisis, being the enduring neoliberal top-down system that allows for the financialisation of housing, turning already limited social housing into a business for profit. It is clear that hateful racist attitudes towards already struggling individuals is an easily orchestrated distraction. We must question the implications of class and how our own hatred and suffering is used as control. Maybe we all are living like common people, not necessarily ignorant and misguided with our anger, but rather all victims of the one per cent, climbing up and down the ladder in cargos and Salomons.
Hiya Farragossip, I have a crush. This would be an easy thing for me to deal with, if not for the fact that it's my fifth (maybe sixth?) crush I've had in two weeks. I don't know what it is these last couple months, but I'm getting all these fluttery feelings around the girls in my life. First it was my classmates, then it was my co-workers. Hell, I think I have a crush on one of my tutors (who is absolutely out of my league)! I struggle to even recall the names of some of these people, and yet I can't stop thinking about them until the next one pops up! I have so many of these bottled up in my head that I can't decide if any of these feelings are for real or not, and it's making my social life a nightmare. Should I even try to pursue dates with any of these women? Am I confusing my own glowing admiration of these people for attraction, or do I have to face the fact that I just really really like women?
I feel like I'm a bad queer because I don’t have enough sex. Let me explain: I tried college dating, I tried online dating, I tried STEM meetups and I realised that my hypothesis led to the conclusion that I don’t find dating stimulating! Intellectually or otherwise. I’m for the most part completely comfortable with that but every time I think of how much the foremothers worked to bring forth the rights for me to be a sapphic disaster in peace, I fear I am not living up to their standards. Is this what I should feel? Or am I just buying into an allosexual standard! Help me Farrago!
Unfortunately, you have found yourself in the deep dark hole of limerence! While not inherently a bad thing, I think you need to evaluate why you are getting so attached to the ideas of these people. I, too, have struggled with this in the past. However, every time it happened, it turned out I was just distracting myself from other things going on in my life. You might like to consider if this too is your issue. That aside, it really can be difficult to separate admiration from attraction. In relationships, there definitely should be a level of admiration—after all, what is love without respect? I don’t intimately know your background, but if these infatuations feel novel and exciting, the answer here may simply be exploring your sexuality.
XOXO, farragirl
First of all, you are not bad!
While sex can be wonderful, it isn’t all being Queer is! I love that you have realised that your interests do not lie in dating. That said, it might be worth interrogating why you don’t enjoy it. Is it the kind of person you’re meeting at college, the superficial environment of dating apps or the pressure you feel when society expects your sexuality to manifest in certain ways? All feelings would be valid and it’s totally fine if you’re just not suited to the cycles of casual dating and hookups! I think a period of reflection might be good for you and that stepping back might help bring some clarity to this situation.
Esther Alex
Content Warning: explicit suicidal ideation
Two weeks after Nalini’s 36th birthday, she dreams of her mother; it has been the same dream since her death. Ma on the balcony, the light cotton of her paisleyprint house-robe fluttering in the wind, a cigarette balanced between her middle and forefinger, smoke wafting in a spiral around her face. She turns to look down at Nalini, bends so close that her raven curls caress Nalini’s cheek. Ma smiles at her, calls her beta, and tells her to die.
And that morning, Nalini decides it is time to listen.
Three years ago, Nalini decided to rent the little terrace house on Canterbury Lane purely because of the fireplace. It wasn’t anything special; the wood of the mantel and hearth were chipping, the paint peeling off. But it had, nevertheless, evoked a sort of romantic sentimentality in Nalini. She had imagined herself writing late into the night, the light from the fire reflected in the lenses of her glasses. At the time, she had still been clinging to the strained fragments of an old dream. The reality was that she rarely lit a fire, and most of her all-nighters were pulled in her matchbox-sized room, with its far more reliable, less cumbersome, portable heater.
But tonight the fireplace is lit. Nalini has allowed herself to indulge in that homey nostalgia. The flames cast orange light upon the booklet she holds in her hands. Little magic, by Nalini Chandawan—Nalini’s most recent collection of short stories, in which unexplained and impossible magic flickers briefly in and out of existence in an otherwise dreary world. Her favourite of the stories is the one which sparked the idea of the collection: one about a pair of identical twins who visit each other in their dreams. She thumbs through the booklet, landing on one of the final pages.
On the night of the Last Dream, Suju is reminded of the First: They are children, Viju and he, as they always were and perhaps always will be. They sit cross-legged in a strangely pale, kaleidoscopic space. They do nothing but stare at the other. Finally, one twin smiles and stands. He reaches out a hand to his brother and pulls him up. The boy never lets go, but his brother must leave.
In the morning, only one brother wakes up. The parents, distressed and grieving, are made more inconsolable by the fact that they cannot differentiate between the child they have lost and the one that remains. They ask him again and again for his name. But the boy does not answer. In fact, the boy will never speak again. He lost many things that day: a brother, a name, his dreams, that little hint of magic.
But determination is only a mindset, one easily overturned by instinct. Sitting in her dingy living room, throwing her stories into the fireplace, Nalini’s instincts are poised. She is consumed by the scent of smoke and burning paper, by the rigid, robotic motions of her hands and the desperate, pathetic stuttering of her heart. When it overwhelms her, she staggers to the window, unlocking the latch and taking a deep breath of fresh air. She is not her mother, smoke-scented and dark-eyed, speaking boldly and living to her truth. She cannot die without fear.
But, she reminds herself, turning to face the fireplace again, that doesn’t matter. If there was one thing Nalini is, it’s obstinate. A keeper of promises, she would drag herself screaming and crying to the end if that’s what it took to honour her mother.
Nalini returns to her efforts at the fireplace, and her stack of booklets becomes at least a third smaller than it was when she began. She picks up the next booklet, scoffing at the title and the memories it brings. Mera Jaan/My Dear Without even opening it, she recalls the booklet’s first few lines.
My mother is cruel but has a voice of silver. In a lilting tone she will condemn
the fallen women: Sylvia Plath, Rosalind Franklin, Henrietta Lacks—overwhelming talents who consistently meet the same silent end. Swallowed by a man’s greed, whittled down into brief lines in history books while their counterparts swell in success, buoyed by stolen fame.
My mother will call me endearments while offering stone-hearted advice: “Hear me now and hear me well, mera jaan. You would do better to die than to find yourself on that list.”
Written a year after Ma’s death, the story is, in reality, a poorly concealed autobiographical reflection on the tormented relationship between a mother and daughter. Plagued by images of Ma on her death bed, body small and fragile on white sheets, her once-beautiful head of raven-black curls reduced to sparse strings of grey, Nalini had written it with desperation, hoping to be freed of the memory of her mother. It hadn’t worked; still, she is steeped in memories of her mother—Ma, like the bite of bitter tea leaves lingering in water, despite the teapot having been emptied and refilled time and time again. Her ghost lurks in Nalini’s stories, her dreams, the murky recesses of the places she called home. It whispers to her and tells her about time: how it runs, unstoppable and merciless; how it steals success with passing years; how it turns women from young dreamers into old, bitter crones, hunched over balconies, killing themselves with smoke. For a while, time had driven Nalini, urging her to write with an unstoppable intensity. But now she can only register the pathetic results her efforts have amounted to—a few stray competition shortlists and prizes, a fellowship in her university years. She sees the ghost and feels nothing more than exhaustion.
That is all she feels now as she continues throwing booklets into the fireplace. The night has taken on a soft, hazy tint, not so much peaceful as it is resigned. The burning fear Nalini had felt earlier has been tamped out into cindery ashes. She wonders if the heaviness that
has settled deep into her bones is what Ma felt at the end. Her mother was 56 when she died, but Nalini knows she started dying far earlier than that. Nalini wonders if Ma lay in that hospital bed, as her own blood cells betrayed her, and pondered every element of her life that had led up to her inevitable defeat, trying to track it to its beginning. Was it the day she was forced to return home to Chennai, her parents deciding to fund her younger brother’s tertiary studies over hers? Was it on her wedding day, as she stood, swathed in red silk and floral perfume, parceled away, effectively doomed from ever achieving her dreams? Or was it on her 34th birthday, when her younger brother received her dream position as a tenured professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University? Was it when her husband was promoted, given a raise and the time to sleep with young, pretty receptionists? Had she realised what it would cost her, the first time she had stolen a pack of her husband’s cigarettes, inhaled the haze, sucked in that clogging scent she despised so much? Or was this the consequence she desired? A kind of self-punishment, after she looked at her wide-eyed child and felt nothing but a horrible, intense bitterness. Maybe it’s a curse, Nalini thinks, for the women in our family to never truly make it past their thirties.
Nalini’s hand drifts to her side to take the next booklet, only to meet the uneven floor; she has not registered the last few stories she has thrown into the fireplace. She cannot stop the sharp, sudden drop she feels in her stomach. This is it—the end. In her mind she sees her next steps. Standing up and walking to the bathroom. Undressing and sliding into the bathtub. Taking the Stanley knife in hand and slitting her left wrist. She will close her eyes, she decides, because the sight of blood has always made her feel sick. She will pretend she is falling asleep, allowing herself to be lulled into darkness.
Nalini cannot move. The world has collapsed, her vision narrowing until she can see no further than the fireplace. Still it roars, not yet sated despite consuming two decades worth of her stories. Its endless hunger seems like a promise; it
will not burn out until it has consumed her too. Nalini notices that the final booklet is not yet burnt through. She had thrown it carelessly, and its lower half sags away from the pile of wood and flame. The last few booklets hadn’t even been completed stories, instead containing mere fragments of untold tales. She reads it now, the last little part of her that hasn’t been destroyed.
My mother named me Nalini, lotus, a flower with roots entrenched metres below water and earth. She sought to remind me of my origins, that all beautiful things must begin and end in the dirt from which they grew. But my name didn’t stop me from being born sky-facing, from staring at the stars. Nalini’s heartbeat echoes, loud and slow, in her ears, resounding thumps that she feels deep in her bones. Time slows to a crawl, the urgent flames made sedate and pondering. They have snatched the last corner of the final booklet and seem to progress with the feline grace of a huntress, intent on savouring its prey.
Instead, I spent much of my life stretching upwards, seeking to uproot myself and ascend, impossibly, to the sky. To join mythical constellations and dark asterisms, to carve out a space for myself alongside those of ancient monarchs, deities, spirits.
It is just Nalini and this fragment, made smaller and smaller by the flames narrowing its edges. Except it is not just her—it is every version of her that has existed: Nalini in the present, tired and haunted by her mother’s ghost; Nalini with deep, etched eye-bags, a product of full-time post-grad studies and two parttime jobs; Nalini in high school, staring out the window into space, pen tapping at her notebook. Each version different but made the same by the silent, strained ribbon of a life-old dream.
Ma sought to teach me that mortal dreams have limits, ones that cannot transcend the earth from which we bloom. But I’m afraid she failed. Perhaps even from birth I was destined a hopeless, selfish dreamer. One that would—
Contorted suddenly by the heat, the corner of the page flips up, hiding the final sentence. Nalini sees her hand reaching into the fireplace, snatching the still-
burning piece of paper. She is startled by the stark pain, frantically attempts to tamp out the flames with the pads of her fingers, breathes short, repetitive breaths. Most of the booklet has been reduced to crumbly ash that stains her fingertips or is made unreadable by burn marks, but the last line remains. Nalini reads it aloud: “One that would rather die than lose the chance to live among the stars, to be admired by a rare sky-facing baby, to become the object of their helpless, obsessive devotion.”
Nalini’s fingers, tinged red by heat, sting with an intensity that makes her feel as if she has been shaken awake from a dream. Half-dazed, she looks around, aware that she needs to go to the sink, run her hands under cold water, clean up the mess around the fireplace and tamp out the flames. But instead she sees the strange, rarely noticed little details of her imperfect home. The irregular, misaligned stone tiles of the floor. The fourth leg of the dining table, slightly shorter than the rest, which always makes it wobble under the weight of a meal. The slight crack in the plaster ceiling, extending all the way from one corner to the centre. Her mother’s ghost lurks somewhere behind her, floating in her house-robe, for once remaining silent. For the second time that day, Nalini feels herself filled with a sudden rush of fear. She has the confusing realisation that her existence is suspended in temporality, subject to brief flickers of emotions, the slightest shifts in choices. And because in the end, she is still tired, still mourning, still unable to register the immensity of her decisions, Nalini brings the paper to her mouth, made dry by heat and breath and air, and presses tight. She lets it disintegrate against her tongue, crumbling bitterly, the only truth she has ever known.
for
Sam & Eleanor
The koi fish ripple the pond, loosening a watery laneway in the dull hunt for sustenance. Their mouths, in perfect Os, gape at reflections mistaken for food.
As it so happens, the spider has woven its web carefully across the pond, trusting two rocks to hold its home mere centimetres above the koi-kissed surface.
Just like us, and ever-precariously, the spider lives in this beautiful and dangerous world.
Art by Jess Nguyen
The fire is really going now, a cone of light edging out of the darkness. Joan Baez’s voice chimes above the peaks of flame, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, the fire’s flare an impish folk dance. Embers fall to the soils, flickering in that dark radius like cities seen from space. I say something like this, then Eleanor kneels above the raging earth, above the countless bright devourings. She puts a city out beneath her finger, her face a reddened half-moon split by laughter. It goes on this way, watching the rest burn down in time. In time, the light gasps the last of its griefs, then Sam turns, says there’s always summer, and we nod like daisies bobbing in the pale night. For now the fire trails too small a wake, a wind sweeps us ever onward, so we wind our way through the field, circling like shadow-children the bent-back willows, the lonely elms, upturning the wintered ruins of leaf-rot and bug husks, while nightbirds claw their small flights into the dark. Then the breeze pitches our breathless bodies round the bend, spits us out of its slipstream, deposits like salts our straggled selves on a road flashed white by headlights— and there is already so much distance between us and the ash-heap (and only so many miles until sleep will outpace us), but for a night, didn’t we make another world? Gone now, but how it blazed, how it blazed.
freshwater
sam sweeney
almost everywhere i went swimming on larrakia, kungarakan and miriwoong country.
there’s freshies in the water, but it’s the stray salty you’ve really gotta watch out for. look at me: two weeks in the top end and all i got was this casual adoption of cutesy croc shorthand. kidding, i got a lot; this place is magical, this place is blinkersoff and bonkers and bound up in outback beauty and my dad’s stories. up north, i swam more often than i thought i would: at first, only in the safety—relative— of chlorinated, contained water; eventually, in the 651-kilometre long ord river.
parap masked lapwings strut and swimming lessons kick off while we flick ants—so many ants—off our towels and onto the grass. we’re the only ones here lounging, something i’m perplexed by until i remember it’s both a monday and darwin’s winter, in all its 29 degrees. it makes me think of every other public pool i’ve been to. public pools, like supermarkets and laundromats, have the same formula no matter where they are: swaying plastic lane ropes, rhythmic splashing arms, a chlorine smell that seeps and sticks and stings. trees i don’t recognise stretch shade towards us. we bundle damp towels into tote bags, crunch the empty chip bag into a ball. time to go.
berry springs
we read the signs along the water’s edge that detail croc monitoring in the area. the sign tells us again: freshies might attack, only if provoked, but salties don’t need a reason. in the back of the car i’d googled berry springs croc attack and read about two people killed in 2011 and 2014. some people prefer not to know about this kind of stuff before they visit. my mind has to know, if only as a small salve for the relentless imagining of what might happen. but when we swim in the springs, it is blue and clear and warm and completely, totally, fine. in this translucent pool, enveloped by bright pandanus and birdcall, i find myself relaxed—completely, totally—floating with the current on a two-dollar hired pool noodle.
ord river / goonoonoorrang
the woman at the boat hire shop has a now familiar warning: freshies don’t want anything to do with us, but no guarantees there aren’t any salties in the river. the journey up-river is peaceful. we stop once or twice to look at a bird in the canopy, passing binoculars—knockers— between us. it takes four goes to anchor; after each failed attempt i haul the increasingly slimy, seaweed-laden anchor up by its rope and feel like a hot, strong top while i do it. in the end, we find the upper trunk of a tree poking out above the water line and tie the boat to it. we swim twice: first with clothes on and eager, giddy leaps from the rails; second without clothes but no less giddiness. both times i’m not in for long, just enough to feel a rush on my skin and, right beneath it, that euphoric glow.
nightcliff
people stand knee- and hip-deep in the sea. i try to work out what makes them different, what makes them weirder/ stupider/braver than i to stand in a natural hunting ground for estuarine
crocodiles, but i find nothing and realise they are all ordinary people who believe, as the saying goes, they’ll be right. i watch sunset after sunset on the cliffs, take long, humid walks past groups of runners, kids on scooters and one guy on his bike, speaker attached to the back, blasting reggaeton remixes of pop songs. in the final days of my trip, i decide i’ll swim. then liv gets home and tells me someone posted in the local facebook group that they’d been stung by a box jellyfish. i’d come around to the danger of crocs, absorbed the local indifference by osmosis, but i’m not gonna risk a jellyfish.
lake argyle
thirty-five kilometres off the highway on the western australia side of the border. the drive is much of the same, yet still i’m fascinated because it looks nothing like home. colours i haven’t seen outside in months. then: the ranges. the land is flat and then it isn’t, the road slows and bends between vast walls of red rock. then: blue water. the lake appears between two walls, a shock of blue tucked into this desert landscape, made all the more beautiful in its unexpectedness. the small town of lake argyle is almost all caravans and greyhaired, soft-fleshed travellers walking pool to pub in faded towels, asking how ya goin’ as they pass. on a secluded beach at the bottom of a cliff, we drink beers and swim and only afterwards, when we’re sitting on the sand, does someone point across the water at the crocodile—a freshie—gliding along the top of the water.
Charli Davies
Content Warning: mentions of suicide and drowning
Art by Jocelyn Soetanto
Every night, a woman walks along the pier barefoot. I watch her covertly from the water. I used to worry she would spot me, but by the time she sits herself on the pier’s edge and dips her feet into the lapping sea, she is far inside her own world. She has a dolphin’s energy—the calm intelligence so integral to my species.
I sometimes imagine what she is thinking about. My pod believes I have fallen in love. For a while they snickered, but for a long time they have been silent. They do not understand the joy that comes from watching another forgo the world’s judgement. Dolphins are shifters, we move between pods, and partners, and seas. We scheme as much as the humans do, our brains work so similarly, but we cannot move between worlds. It makes me understand why dolphins in captivity suicide. I keep thinking that if the woman ever steps into the ocean, I will do what my species has always done: swim beneath her and lift her head above the water. I will give her the choice of life. Unlike humans, dolphins are conscious breathers, we know what it is to choose to live.
In my mind, the woman is mourning a life lost. Bittersweet and nostalgic, the fleeting moments are gilded in rose-coloured glass. She remembers a place where the skies were like fickle gods, bathing the country in torrential downpour until every surface was clean, pure, reborn, ready for the moon’s moody night and the sun-soaked hills of dawn. I conjure images I don’t truly understand: the sounds of people bartering in the streets, the intoxicating smells of cooking food, and gloriously decadent temples filled with a quiet reverence. Perhaps, when she is looking beyond the confines of the horizon, she can forget the towering skyscrapers glistening obnoxiously behind her.
I shake myself from my reverie. Her life is not my own. It is a very human trait to want what you cannot have. Dolphins should not conform to such egotism.
The woman is staring at me.
This is the first time she has seen me. I stare back at her. I don’t know if she can see the intelligence in my eyes; humans tend to be blind to it. I start to make a series of whistles and clicks, and she stands up and steps into the ocean. For a moment, I think I should not save her. It is a moment of weakness. I quickly swim beneath her drifting form and hold her above the surface.
I feel as if I can see what she imagines. In her mind, the land is plunged into darkness, the soft light of the moon casting the ocean with a ghostly shine. Somewhere else in the world another life is starting, another day is waiting.
She quietly hoists herself onto the pier. It is silent—the curse of animal-human relationships. Sentience collides. We are one and the same, yet my clicks will never be understood by her human ears. The most I can hope for is that the memories that haunt her floated away as she left the land and entered the sea. Perhaps now she will feel a different world tug at her heart.
Richie Huang
We diverged eons ago by that stream deep in the forest, before it forked east and west into our lineal family crests.
The last time we saw each other was on that quaint river bank somewhere in the clump of semi-Pangaea.
That landmass would later melt and distort, thrust into the mould of countries and courts.
Of course, you know nothing about them. The only boundary that matters to you is the sacred border of dignity.
That time we said goodbye, with the promise of reunion, was so subtle and unremarked as to escape any mention in history.
Perhaps we forgot, or maybe the river swelled overnight, but we never returned to that common shore.
In that time, we’ve changed, become gnarled, weathered and chiseled by the Sisyphean world.
You stayed on all fours, knees bent the wrong way. I stand with hands to hold, yet I’ve lost our mane.
As promised, here we meet again, finding our way through the brambles of time finally converging in the hold of our arms.
Cradling each other, like a friend long lost.
The shared inhabitance between man and dog, a parabolic embrace across space and time.
Why else do we share a love so inexplicable if not a rekindling?
Bella Hall
yesterday i went to bed with a belly full of grief i dreamt about my best friend and my mum and someone i met at a party two and a half years ago whose name i don’t remember
i dreamt about my childhood bedroom that wasn’t mine because the bedsheets were tucked in at the sides i dreamt i was smaller i dreamt i went swimming
in my dream i was an only child and in the pool i floated my belly bobbing at the surface fingers pruned with time spent another adaptation i did not choose i closed my eyes and the sun disappeared at night, the world is quiet and no one needs anything
last night i dreamt i was pregnant and in love today i woke up hungry and tried my hardest to remember
lily woodberry
some boys are birds when they sleep all ruffle twitching soft all feathered locked in that airless room above faro we recycled musty breath the sheet wrung thin between us the sun persisting through dusk you dreamt. while heat boiled up my old habits &i kept obedient watch like i’d willed the bandaid on your sunned shoulder to untether it slung off lazily. struck i reached to touch the pinprick &my fevered spirit rode the lonely highway of your vein. boys who are pretty inside slosh fat with moving blood but you pretty bird were thick with dark mud. litter bobbed up reeking of rot i swam to the spot where i’d last crossed an X between rib ridges past the pair of ashen young lungs there it was sunk too deep to dig decaying on a low tide you’d
starved your prettiest part&buried it stiff as a carcass. back on the bed where time was exempt i knelt &dressed in the day’s wet clothes&left following the river to its end to pretend like everyone who caught gelato on their tongue i was gladly vacationing. finally the sun turned atlantic red my old habit of showing the last card i twisted a sweet bud&rushed back&floated it by your nose like scent might exhume a dead heart.
lily
bugs flung across my windscreen, baby detonated bombs smear their winged debris and green honey. sunned gum pastes my thigh to every seat, suction off; hot skin; heavy air; sticky thing. peanut butter glues down my sandpaper tongue, i move it through my dry mouth, dog mouth, without swallowing. tacky moon lollipops cling to any loose thread they can reach, weaving in ferociously the irreversible knot of a little something sweet; yes everything catches on me. stickiness my only certainty, everything i rub past lunges at me, tightens around my body; yes everything touches me. particular wounds radiate their own emerald light and mine attract men with wings and glossy eyes, my web my glistening trick glows under morning frost. i dangle hung spun moths all places with me, give all my dizzy darlings love equally; yes i am the sticky thing. baby can you take a look real quick is there something in my teeth? feel but can’t see a little repercussion wedged inside me, princess and the pea, storing bodies like poppy seeds. bite down; bruise my upper arm with the stamp of every thumb; lockjaw glued there toothpick back of the throat under the tongue baby there’s another body caught between my canine teeth. time burns past so fast but i get to grip the grazes, anyone who wants me gone has to cleave me off; i’m composed entirely of shimmering scars. everything changes is changing me touches me i touch everything relentlessly touching, nose to nose; hot skin; heavy air; stickiness is friction is our only evidence of connection and i, knitting my silver spider lace, brush skin on the subway and run up my palm along another string of cutting grass.
Alika Mogilevsky
He took the fucking furniture. Not the house—it was technically now Mel’s—nor the wine in the wine cellar, though Mel was sure he was going to send someone for it soon, so she hid one bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the walk-in wardrobe in the downstairs guest room, and another in the pool house. Mark didn’t take the art either, though Mel supposed it was because she had been the one to buy it all, curate it meticulously, match it to the colour story of the rest of the room, hire the young men with their short shorts and laser levels and funny rectangular pencils to hang it all up. Just all the fucking furniture. Mark let Mel keep their bed though, as a courtesy, were the words that he used, because strictly speaking, the prenup says it should’ve gone with him.
“Courtesy my arse! He didn’t even leave one bedside table!” Mel said to Teny on the phone, laying in that bed. It was a king, the headboard an off-white boucle fabric. Mel felt very small in the bed and couldn’t decide which side to lay on. She had brought the Sauvignon Blanc from the guest room into bed with her like a second pillow, and sipped it slowly from the bottle.
“Well, Mark’s just such a nice guy,” Teny sighed over the phone sarcastically. It felt like a warm whisper into Mel’s ear. “Taking every stick of furniture. Very generous of him.”
Mel Hayes liked Teny Hess because she didn’t understand her. Not in a mysterious, spiritual way though. In fact, Teny was carefully assembled and completely knowable, Mel just couldn’t quite map out the shape of her. Teny wore linen trousers, button-down shirts, and leather sandals—items of clothing that looked like they could be casually picked up at an op-shop, but actually cost hundreds of dollars. She called everyone darling with
an edged softness. She sometimes sent Mel poems by Frank O’Hara late at night without context. She flirted with waiters regardless of gender or age, but only really for the sport of it. She had a rescue dachshund named Bertie and a tiny gold key that she wore around her neck and never took off. Mel once asked her if it was meant to be metaphorical.
Teny said, “No, it’s just for my bike lock.”
Teny lived alone in a very large, converted factory loft in Surry Hills where one wall was all bookshelf, and another was painted Yves Klein blue. Mel had never met anyone who had chosen a paint colour like that before. She had never known anyone who chose things like Teny. Mel didn’t like people she couldn’t predict, but she liked Teny very much.
Mark Hayes didn’t like Teny Hess because he also didn’t understand her, but not in the same way Mel didn’t. He said Surry Hills was the Northern Beaches for hippies.
“I feel like I’ve been burgled,” Mel said to Teny.
Teny didn’t even pause. “Darling, you know what you have to do.”
There was a beat. One horrifying millisecond where Mel, completely consumed by Sauvignon Blanc, halfbaked woe, and a looming sense of dread, sincerely wondered if Teny had meant kill him. Or perhaps hire someone to kill him.
“What?” Mel asked, just to confirm.
“Shop,” Teny said brightly. “You have to refurnish.”
Mel simply sighed into her phone— half-relief, half-disappointment—and hoped that her sigh had also felt like a warm whisper into Teny’s ear.
“What? You think it’s too soon?” Teny asked, concerned.
Mel didn’t really know if she thought it was too soon. She didn’t really want to shop. She didn’t really want to do anything at all. The divorce was quick and, boringly, not even messy. Maybe too quick. There were no screaming matches, no furious cross-table negotiations. Mel didn’t even cry much. It was all pre-sliced
like deli meat. She signed where her lawyer told her to, and that was that. Mel did that often: as she was told. She thought that the break had been far too clean. Perhaps the kind of clean that people claimed to want, though Mel suspected that most people preferred something a bit stickier. At least then you’d have bruises to point at. Scorching proof that you had, at one point, indeed experienced something
There had been a prenup, of course. It was drawn up by Mark’s father’s lawyer. Mel signed it because she did as she was told. She was twenty-four and believed that love meant not questioning these things. Mark came from old money. So old and so solid that no one really remembered how it even started. Something techy. Maybe logistics? It was definitely international, and definitely important. Mel came from a solid enough background—her father was a Crown Prosecutor—but not that
The prenup protected Mark’s portfolio, but allowed Mel to keep the lifestyle in the event of separation, so she got to keep their home. But their daughter, Charlotte, had already left by then, so it didn’t really feel like she’d won anything. It was an enormous house in Mosman. A comfortable harbour suburb, but in truth, more of a peninsula of high fences and double garages, hemmed in by sea and staggering property values. It had been a wedding gift from Mark’s parents: a twostorey, five-bedroom sandstone facade, floor-to-ceiling glass in the living room and a sloping lawn that led to a plunge pool Mel had never once used. It was the kind of house that made real estate agents say architectural gem, and friends roll their eyes, shake their heads and draw out their vowels: God, you’re just so lucky! Even on the first day, there had been a sense that the house didn’t quite belong to her. Like she was borrowing a life. Like she was being hosted.
The furniture inside the house,
however, was a different matter. It was purchased through a family trust that was in Mark’s name. It was technically never Mel’s. It was leased to the home under some bizarre tax structure that she never fully understood. When they split, he took what was his—which, legally, was the walnut credenza, the imported rugs from Berlin and the industrial bar stools. She got the shell. He got the staging.
Mel didn’t know anyone who had been divorced. Teny had never married. Her younger sister, Ellen, was still jollily ensconced in hers. Her parents were going on fifty years. She didn’t really know what she meant to be doing. There was no map. No one had given her a copy of Divorce for Dummies. Mel felt like a woman who’d woken up halfway through a play—unsure of the role she was meant to be playing, and too embarrassed to ask. Everyone else seemed to know their lines, where to stand, when to laugh. She just had to sit in the wings, blinking slowly and unconsciously into the stage lights, watching all the other people moving through their own lives. Was she supposed to cry? Go out? See new men? See women? Mel had been walking around from empty room to empty room, carrying her laptop like a Victorian woman clutching a lantern, searching for signs of life.
Divorce, as it turned out, was mostly just a slow, treacherous, unthreading. There had been no grand rupture. No final blowout. No smoking gun. It was just a cool, slow, melting icecap. One day they simply just stopped talking. She got an email from Mark after everything was finalised; a formal wishing you the best moving forward! which he even had the gall to sign off with an exclamation mark. And then he took the fucking furniture. Mel had not even realised she was no longer married, and the furniture was already gone. Mel had to fend off the inevitable after that.
“I heard about you and Mark.” A
woman in her Pilates class said it first. Her hair was slicked into an uncomfortably tight and high ponytail. One of her hands was gripping her drink bottle, the other, Mel’s arm. Mel couldn’t look her in the eye, so was forced to stare at the throbbing vein on her forehead that was graciously revealed by the tightness of her hairstyle.
Then someone she met at a charity ball. “Black tie, Sherman Foundation, remember?” He tilted his head and murmured, “I just admire your courage.”
A few days later, it was a woman in the produce aisle at Harris Farm who gave her a look of such intense, wincing sympathy that Mel assumed she must have been at the wedding, but she didn’t recognise the woman at all. They all said it the same way, like the bad news had reached them by courier. “I’m so sorry…” And then: the look. A fatal cocktail of reverence, curiosity and relief. The visible relief of not being her. Mel always smiled. Said she was doing fine. She didn’t know if she was lying. She had begun to understand that there weren’t many middle-aged divorcees on the North Beaches. Or any divorcees for that matter.
Mark had moved out a week before the paperwork was finalised. He left nothing behind. He had always been like that: definitive in strange, annoyingly specific ways. Mark knew how to be charming at dinner parties, and he knew the exact day in March you were supposed to change the filter in the heating system. He made very good risotto and very bad apologies. His job paid for things like midweek dinners with wine pairings, first-class trips to Croatia, and boutique hotels with concrete walls, and mood lighting, and matching tonka bean and sandalwood scented shampoo and conditioner. Mel didn’t hate him. She hated how thoroughly and undetectably he’d outgrown her without her even realising. She hated that when she’d first confronted him—when she’d asked, very calmly, if there was someone else—he had only blinked, as if trying to recall whether or not there was.
“Mel, darling, I’d like you to know—I don’t think it’s too soon.” Teny said over the phone.
“Thanks.” Mel mumbled.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning
and we can go to that enormous homemaker centre in Artarmon. Home HQ.” Teny said cheerily. Teny was offering to pick her up because Mark had also taken all four of their cars. The BMW, the Porsche, the Rolls Royce and the Mercedes. She didn’t even drive most of them. They had really only been for show. For grand appearances. Now, appearances came with Uber receipts.
Mel didn’t say anything, just let her head fall back against the headboard with a small, theatrical thunk.
“They’ve got Freedom, Nick Scali, Plush,” Teny said in an intrepid attempt to fill the silence, listing the stores dutifully like ice-cream flavours. “Everything you need.”
For a moment, Mel wanted to argue. To say she was fine sleeping in an empty house, that she didn’t need Teny’s rescue mission.
“Alright,” Mel said finally. “But we’re just looking.”
“Sure,” Teny laughed. “Famous last words.”
That night, Mel couldn’t sleep. She stared at the ceiling in its beige blankness that bloomed slowly into shapeless thought. Somewhere in the house—a house she now supposed was hers, technically—something creaked. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the entire 500 square metre floor plan furnished. She couldn’t. She kept picturing the rooms as cold and hollow caverns of ghostly mid-century desolation. Everything was gone, and tomorrow, she would have to begin to think about replacing it.
Mel hated homemaker stores, and despised homemaker centres. Not the tidy, overlit IKEA ones—at least those had a sense of democracy, an order, a cafeteria. The ones she hated were the sleek, softly wincing gigantic showrooms with tackedon store names and overly attentive staff. Stores like Nick Scali, where each piece of furniture was so wildly out of proportion with a real life that it felt desperately melodramatic, and comically deranged. Faux living situations arranged like stage sets under bleached lighting, meant to make you feel as if buying a side table might somehow fix your
marriage or make you less lonely. The staff always appeared instantly, quickly gliding over like you’d rung a bell. Their lace-up leather shoes so soft and squeaky on the polished floors, their smiles so taut and annoyingly ready. Can I help you with anything today? Are you looking for anything specific today? And you’d have to say no—just browsing—which was already a lie, because you weren’t. No one ever went there to browse. You went because you needed something. A dining chair. A new beginning. A performance of adulthood, or stability, or taste, or money. Something to fill the space that had opened up in your life and was now joyfully humming like feedback; you needed so desperately to shut it up. To smother it. And the smell. Oh God, the smell. Mel hated that most. That manufactured newness—the scent of leather and glue and processed wood. Something plastic beneath all that musk, like they were trying to convince you this was real and luxurious and aspirational. It was nauseating.
Mel rolled onto her side and blinked into the dark. She felt resentful at the thought of pretending to care about ottomans. Teny would try to make it fun. She would say things like shopping is therapy. Mel didn’t want therapy. She wanted to walk into her own living room and see her life returned. She wanted to stop blinking into the dark. But she’d said yes. So tomorrow, she would go.
The next morning, Mel followed her usual routine. She made the bed, smoothing out the Egyptian cotton and carefully fluffing up the European down pillows, then stood in the corner of the very empty master bedroom to admire her work. She did her morning stretches as instructed by her physio because she had pulled her hamstring—repeatedly, and completely pathetically—by simply stretching her legs in bed. Mel thought there was something so humiliating in injuring yourself whilst lying down. She wandered into Charlotte’s old bedroom to check if the echo was still there—she said the same thing every morning: hello? It was still there. Then, she crossed the hallway into a guest bedroom and tried again: hello? The echo, of course, replied
obligingly. She brushed her teeth, got dressed and then stepped out onto the front porch, placed herself carefully down on the sandstone steps and waited for Teny to arrive.
It was far too warm for a May morning. Mel’s calves prickled with sweat under the hem of her dress, and the air was blistering with a heavy scent of sea salt. The beach was not far from Mel’s house. You could only just see it peeking up from behind rooftops. In the evenings, if you were to sit in one of the large rattan chairs on the east-facing balcony, and listened very carefully, you could
hear the waves. Their gentle waxes and wanes. The slow, monotonous breaths of the ocean. Hush, then pause, hush, then pause, then hush again. The sound arrived very faintly, softened by distance, but Mel liked that it was always there—constant and consoling. Mel enjoyed this activity— it calmed her. An activity which Mel now had to complete cross-legged on the tiled floor instead.
Teny’s car, a modest Range Rover, hummed slowly past the rolling gate, which she had a spare remote to, and pulled itself up the winding driveway. It came to a decisive halt just short of the sweetgum tree. The tree had begun to lose its leaves, and they were carpeting the edges of the lawn like soft pastel debris.
Teny rolled down the passenger-side window dramatically.
“Good morning,” she called out. She was wearing very large sunglasses that covered most of her face, and from where Mel was sitting, they made her look vaguely insectoid. Like a ginormous blowfly you wanted to swat away.
“Darling, that doesn’t look like a shopping face!” Teny squinted—at least, Mel only
thought that she was squinting, because her glasses made her face painfully unreadable. Mel could feel her facial muscles contracting, she knew she had been grimacing while waiting for Teny. Mel lifted herself up off the steps, slowly, so as to not injure her hamstring any further, and walked hesitantly toward Teny’s car.
“What does a shopping face look like?” Mel opened the door and slid in.
Teny nudged her very large glasses further down her nose, looked over at Mel and began examining her face with false seriousness. “I don’t know. But not like that.”
Mel turned up the corners of her mouth.
“That’s better.” Teny smiled, and began to drive off.
The twelve-minute drive to Artarmon was very quiet. Mel liked silence. She liked silence with Teny. It was the sound of an inaudible, ever-present companion that followed two women who had known each other long enough to survive entire decades of each other’s choices. It didn’t press, it didn’t ask anything from either of them, it just sat comfortably and sensibly buckled into the back seat. It’s not that neither of them had anything to say—in fact, they had plenty—but more so that they were the kind of people who preferred to simply sit and think beside each other instead. Outside the window, Northern Sydney moved past in hurried fragments. Mel liked that—that beautiful, constant drone that dressed in soft cotton, and doused itself in Tom Ford fragrance, and pensively overlooked the harbour. But most of all, Mel liked that Sydney endured her detachment. The trees cast green shadows on lined footpaths, construction workers drank green juice from bottles, a woman was dragging a scruffy dog towards a café. Mel watched it all with the dimly removed gaze of someone who had not quite yet returned to the world.
They passed florists, chemists and offices before the Home HQ centre came into view. It was a large, glass, converted factory complex that stood pale and rectangular against the overcast morning.
Teny pulled aptly into the
underground carpark and switched off the ignition. For a moment, neither of the women moved. The sudden absence of engine noise made the silence feel less companionable—now it was just quiet. Mel blinked at the entrance. The spell of the morning had been broken by the low ceiling, the smell of concrete, and fluorescent signs humming above them.
“Shall we?” Teny asked, but said it as more of a direction.
Mel nodded and opened the door, stepping carefully out of the car, so as to not accidentally shift the tectonic plates beneath her. They both walked slowly toward the lift, shoes clicking in unison, bags tucked under arms. Neither of them said much as the lift doors closed. Inside, Mel caught sight of their reflections in the mirrored wall—two women, perfectly composed, standing in suspended quiet. Mel thought that they looked like they had been painted there: one in very large sunglasses, one in linen, both carrying a sort of vague grace that was deepened by the mirror—not clean, though not exactly dirty either. It was more, foggy. Mel felt foggy too. She studied her and Teny’s images as the lift ascended; angled slightly apart, but still joined together in that intentional way in which women stand when they know they’re being watched. A tableau of mutual poise. It occurred to her that if someone were to take a photograph of this exact moment, they might look like they were about to walk into a gallery opening, or a funeral.
Teny was adjusting something in her bag. Mel was adjusting nothing, but pretending to. She wasn’t nervous, but she had the sense that she was about to perform something that she hadn’t rehearsed.
bounced off lacquered furniture. Every living room had been arranged like it was waiting for guests who would never come. Every available surface boasted a sign that declared names like Harlow, Banksia and Quinn. Teny marched confidently toward the dining sets. Mel wandered blindly, her hands brushing against fabric that felt either too clean or too cheap. She never roamed too far from Teny. She made sure she was firmly anchored to Teny’s gravitational pull.
Teny walked up to a dining table. It was plainly wooden and ridiculously large. Light-coloured but strong. Mel pulled up a chair on one of the ends. Her bum dropped in sorrow into the wicker seat. It was soft and worn, and Mel felt as though she had just sat on a deflating whoopee cushion. Teny picked up the acrylic sign and unfavourably squinted, like she had just read a bad tabloid about herself.
“Kennedy, this one’s called. Kennedy is made from natural Australian oak,” she giggled. “Kennedy costs nearly four grand.” She put the sign back on Kennedy.
was sitting opposite Mark and mirrored him so exactly that Mel thought, absurdly, that they looked like matching salt and pepper shakers. The woman asked Mel what she did. Not what do you do, but more like what do you doooooo. As if stretching out the word could draw some of her own interest or care into it. Mel had answered that she worked part-time as a director for a small art gallery, which wasn’t really a lie, though it wasn’t really true anymore either.
The woman smiled, “That must be so lively and fulfilling.” Mark laughed at this. Just once. Just ha! It was the same sharp and dismissive sound that he made when she suggested they get a dog, or when she’d asked if they could spend Christmas somewhere other than his parents’ house just once.
The lift dinged, and the doors opened into twostoreys of endless, light-drenched homemaker storefronts. This was the threshold, Mel thought, and she stopped there for a moment in that rare limbo.
They started at Nick Scali. The store was hushed, harshly overlit and sprawling. Light
Kennedy reminded Mel of a table that she had sat at during a dinner party at a holiday house in Byron Bay. That table, like the jog Mel had taken on the beach early that morning, was impossibly long. The dinner party had been fine, lovely even—and so had the dinner itself. Expensive wine, cream coloured charger plates, heavy glass candle holders and white fish in green sauce. Lou and Simon’s Byron home had a balcony that overlooked the bay. That night had been low and unseasonably warm. The breeze had died down in the evening, so the folding glass doors had been left open. Mel had found herself staring out into the darkening sea rather than into her plate of fish or into anyone’s eyes. She had felt the whole night slipping under her skin—a kind of persistent wrongness that disguised itself in charming affability. The candles had smelled of bergamot. Someone had complimented her earrings. Mark had made a joke at the table, Mel couldn’t remember it now, but it had elicited the kind of laugh that people give to jokes that are not exactly funny. There had been a woman at the table— blonde, shiny, very off-the-shoulder. She
The gallery had demoted her a little over a month before this trip to Byron. Laura’s email arrived on a Monday morning. It was raining that day. Not dramatically. Just enough to make everything feel soggy and pathetic. The email had an ominously vague subject line, which Mel knew was the kind of email that you had to open immediately.
Dear Melissa Hayes,
After a period of thorough review, and rigorous consultation, the board has decided to transition you into a new strategic administrative role effective immediately. We value your contributions, and this change reflects our evolving structural needs. You will no longer be listed as Director, but will remain integral to our curatorial and cultural identity moving forward.
Take care,
Laura Ingles
Mel had stared at it for a full minute before reading it again. And then again. And again. And again.
“In an email?” She’d said aloud to herself. “Not even a phone call?” Mel buried her head into her palms and considered the state of idiocy she’d found herself in. In that moment, Mel thought of that phrase that people used far too often: I’m not angry, just disappointed. She thought it was a ridiculous saying
because she now understood that one person could definitely be both of those things at once—that they were certainly not mutually exclusive. Although, she was mostly angry. She clicked reply, then closed the tab. She didn’t send anything. She went down-stairs, stood at the floorto-ceiling window and watched the rain make ripples in the pool. Later, Mark asked why she was sulking, then offered to open a bottle of white. Mel said no, but he opened it anyway. That was the kind of thing he did.
The bathroom at Lou and Martin’s home was upstairs. She had pretended she was looking for it by accident, wandered off between the caviar bumps and the dessert. Mel flicked on the light and saw her own face in the spotless mirror; foreign and glazed over. Her mouth looked like it had forgotten how to hold shape. Her eyes sunk into her face like caves that have those signs out the front; ‘TURN BACK NOW’ or ‘STOP! PREVENT YOUR DEATH! GO NO FURTHER!’ but of course, nonsensical thrill-seekers went in anyway. She stared at her reflection and thought to herself that she wanted more than this. She had made a decision. The relief had been so immediate she’d started crying. Mel didn’t make any noise. She didn’t sob or flinch. She just leaned forward over the marble sink with its matte black tap, pressed her hands firmly into the counter like she was bracing for something, and let two ridiculous, fat tears fall straight into the sink. Then she took a towel off the matching matte black towel rack, dabbed her eyes with it, and walked out of the bathroom.
When Mel returned to the table, Mark reached out and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. Then he turned back to the blonde woman and asked if she’d ever been to Toulouse. Mel drank the rest of her wine. It took her eight more months to do it.
Eight months of Mark’s practiced charm at dinner parties, his way of finishing her sentences with better words, his assumption that her gallery job was a hobby rather than real work. Eight months of him saying we should when he meant you will, and let’s not when he meant I won’t when Mel suggested anything that required him to change.
“I don’t think Kennedy is for me.” Mel said, standing up from the sagging seat.
Teny nodded once, as if that were all the truth that needed to be spoken.
“This one seats fourteen.” A sales associate appeared. “Are you looking for a dining table?” He asked evenly, grinning.
“We’re looking for something that doesn’t remind us of awful people,” Mel said pleasantly.
The man’s smile flickered. “I—perhaps I could show you some other options?”
“No, thank you,” Mel said, already walking away.
“Thanks, darling. We’ll find our own way,” Teny finished.
She thought, even then, that there was something so refreshing about this kind of emptiness—the way it became very intimate very quickly. The absence of people made her feel like she was at the art gallery. Like it was all normal. She was talking to contractors and clients, organising events and openings. And in that moment, Mel felt strangely visible. Like if someone were to pass by the window just then and look in, they would see her not as a woman shopping for furniture, but as a woman standing at the edge of something much bigger.
They visited nearly every store in the homemaker centre, each equally as disorientating as the last. Bright. Glossy. Cold. None of the layout made any spatial sense, as if dozens of rooms had been lifted by crane from different houses and dropped carelessly into one giant warehouse. They wandered through office furniture, bed displays, rows of desks that stood in quiet anticipation, ottomans that recoiled under the lights, couches that were accessorised almost identically. The last store they entered was on the first floor of the centre. It was completely empty, more experimental and avant-garde than the others. There were no customers and very few furniture displays. The walls were bare apart from a couple strategically placed frames of black and white photographs of New York or Paris. The hush that followed Teny and Mel around the store was absolute. It was brighter here, but the lighting less hostile, diffused across concrete floors and high ceilings that made the furniture look smaller. There was no music playing. Just the faint, architectural whir of the ceiling vents and the quiet creak of Teny’s shoes against the floor. Mel had been here before, a couple years ago with Mark.
Teny, ahead of her now, turned back and pointed to a large couch near the back.
“Ugh,” Teny exclaimed. “Imagine this in your living room!” She said, waving her arms excitedly.
Mel nodded and walked towards it. It was the kind of couch that expected you to stay a while. Deep, wide-seated, too large for any apartment. Mel stopped in front of it, slowly lowered herself down, and let her body disappear into the cushions. Teny sat down beside her and dug up a couple of old Minties from her handbag. She popped one into her mouth, and offered the other one to Mel, who declined.
“You know Mel, sometimes I think you’re the most capable woman I’ve ever met,” she said with her mouth full, pausing just long enough. “And then I remember you let that man just take all of your furniture.”
Mel only smiled, thank you.
“You’re being very quiet,” Teny said, chewing.
“Sorry,” Mel replied. “I’m trying to picture things in the house. It’s not really working.”
Teny kept chewing. “You know, you don’t have to if you don’t think you’re ready yet.”
Mel nodded slowly.
There was a long pause, where all that was audible was Teny’s
chewing.
“I think that’s what I want,” Mel said finally.
“What?”
“Quiet,” Mel sighed, “Not silence,” she clarified, “just—calm.”
Teny tilted her head and smiled slightly, “You want peace.”
Mel considered the word. It felt too final. Peace was what people found at the end of something, not in the middle. Mel was still very much in the middle. She thought—and not for the first time—that she wanted softness. She wanted calm like an ocean. Like a sea on a windless evening when the waves didn’t wade higher than your ankles, and pulled steadily out from the shore not out of force, but out of memory. Calm like the water stirring in its sleep. Hush, pause, hush, pause. She wanted to be near that, just kept afloat.
“Mm,” Mel answered finally, not quite committing to agreeing with Teny.
“You ever think about how weird it is,” Teny said, “that furniture’s just ... always there? Like, you never think about a table. But then it’s gone, and suddenly it’s a crisis.”
Mel’s mouth twitched slightly at this.
“Sorry—not that you’re in a crisis or anything. Just that you don’t have anywhere to sit,” Teny added.
“It’s okay,” Mel said quietly. “That was accidentally profound, actually.” Mel continued, smiling.
“I didn’t mean it to be,” Teny laughed. “I know.”
The longer Mel sat on the couch, the more her body settled into it. It got comfortable. They both sat there for a while. Both out of need for rest—because they had done a lot of walking—and out of something to do. The couch wasn’t really remarkable. Taupe, maybe. Or some other shade of beige invented by marketing teams who feared specificity. It had little wooden legs that made it look like it was trying to levitate. But it was wide, and soft, and when Mel leaned back into it, her body settled in easily. Their couch at home had been different—a different colour, a
different aspirational comfort. You kind of had to fold yourself into it. Mel felt like a very expensive paper towel when she was sitting on it: soft, absorbent, disposable.
She sat there on the couch with Charlotte one afternoon, after Charlotte had already moved out, when she announced to Mel, very plainly, very casually:
“I’m moving to Melbourne.”
Mel had looked up from her phone. “What?”
“I got into that Masters course I wanted.”
Mel blinked. “You applied? You didn’t even—”
Charlotte had shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”
That day Mel stared at her daughter the way one might stare when passing by an old street they used to live on— something quietly rebuilt in one’s absence. She looked at her hair—blonder than hers had ever been—and the way her face had grown so confidently into itself, like it had always known where it was going. There was no trace of the small child who once asked to sleep in her bed during thunderstorms, or played mermaids in the pool. Charlotte had become someone with a forward-leaning life. And Mel, absurdly, felt like she ought to thank her for still telling her things at all.
closer to Mark. Of course, Mel didn’t know what Mark was thinking, but she had hoped his stomach was tightening, that he was pleading, please no, don’t say it. But Mel had said it: “I think we should separate.”
Mel had repeated the phrase ‘I think’ because she suddenly wasn’t certain of anything. She had been up without a wink the night before trying to settle this certainty, calm it down. Gently stroke its ugly, rearing head to try and put it at ease. Mel was playing out the lines in her mind as she lay there against the boucle. Should she say ‘divorce’ or ‘separate?’ She had planned to use the word ‘divorce’ because she thought it sounded more certain, but when the time came, ‘separate’ just slipped out. She hated that she used that word; like her and Mark were conjoined twins or recyclable plastics.
He didn’t say anything right away. Didn’t cry. Just blinked, once, twice. Mel thought he looked like a wounded baby animal. A fawn or a lamb. Something small and fluffy with big hopeless, sorry eyes, and twitchy, bony limbs that flinch when you got too close.
“I don’t think I love you anymore,” she added, trying desperately to put him out of his misery. Stupid certainty. “Not the way I used to.”
So yes, it was a very big deal. But Mel had swallowed that reaction, like she swallowed most reactions around her daughter: whole, unseasoned, slightly dry. She remembered looking down at the email Charlotte had opened on her phone—the word Congratulations tauntingly stared back in aggressive dark blue. The cushion Charlotte was perched on inflated very slowly as she stood up. It wasn’t something someone would notice, but Mel noticed. She noticed the soft shift in balance—the correction of weight. The silent signs of departure that always happen before someone actually leaves. Mel noticed all these things the same way she noticed that after Charlotte left, it was just her and Mark again.
It was a month or so after that that Mel had decided to say it:
“I think we should talk,” she said, shuffling herself across that same couch
Mark just blinked again. “You used to love me?” He asked, too brightly, like Mel had just hit a punchline.
Mel sighed. “Can we not—”
“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, waving around his arms like he was swatting a fly, or trying to explain a maths equation. “I’m just wondering when you did. So that way, maybe we can get a photo framed, and you can hang it up next to the Del Kathryn Barton.”
Mel left the living room. Mark stayed seated on the couch. She hadn’t waited for him to follow. She’d learned to stop waiting for Mark Hayes to catch up.
“I think I’ll buy this couch,” Mel announced to Teny now.
“Are you sure? We can keep looking,” Teny said, raising her eyebrows.
Mel ran her fingers against the armrest. “I like it.”
They stood. The sales associate
appeared the way sales associates always do—like he’d been summoned by intent rather than movement.
“May I please get your name?” He asked, with trained politeness.
“Melissa Hayes,” Mel replied, and watched him type it out—one key at a time on his little iPad thing, like each letter mattered.
His expression changed, brightened. “Ah yes,” he said. “Will that be on the same account as last time, Mrs. Hayes?”
Mel glanced over at Teny, who was already looking at her. They both waited, briefly, for the other to speak. That split-second of shared recognition, a sort of private frequency only long-term friendship can transmit. That day with Mark a couple of years ago came to her again. They bought bedside tables. The ones Mark didn’t leave her. They must have kept his card on file.
“Yes,” Mel said smoothly, smiling. “Exactly the same.”
All of the furniture arrived slowly over the next week. It came in staggered deliveries in oversized boxes that only just fit through the front door. Delivery men swore gently under their breath, and Mel offered them water, because it felt like the kind of thing a person with a
fully furnished home might do. By Friday evening, the house had begun to resemble a house. Mel scurried into the pool house for the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that had been waiting for her patiently, and carried it, along with a glass, out onto the east-facing balcony. She’d bought an enormous, overpriced armchair and placed it out there. It was linen and deep-seated. She curled herself into the cushions, tucking her feet beneath herself and dialled Teny.
“Hello. The last few things arrived today,” Mel said.
There was a rush of noise on the other end. Running water, a distant splash. A pause. Then Teny’s voice, bright and echoey: “Oh, darling, terrific!”
Mel swirled her wine. “Are you free tomorrow?” She asked.
“I am.”
“Maybe you can help me arrange everything?”
“Of course,” Teny said amongst the splashing—like she was rinsing shampoo, or exfoliating her legs, or doing something else definitively hygienic. Neither of them spoke for a minute. The sky over Sydney was turning lavender. Somewhere below, a neighbour was hosing their garden.
“Okay,” Teny said eventually, spluttering faintly. “Talk tomorrow?”
Aaron Agostini
You think I am so fucking stupid. I do not play games. I am a killer. I do not get upset. I get results. Line them up baby. Tiny tiny cans all in a row, they sew the edge of the fence to the blue sky which seems like it goes on forever but it does end. Eventually. Everything does. Walk around in blue jeans.
Sip coca cola. Red can. Bite the tab a little bit when you sip because you’re looking at me.
I do not look back. I look ahead. Line up the shot. And pull the trigger.
“Yep.”
Mel hung up. She took a sip of wine and leaned her head back against the cushions. She could hear the ocean breathing. Hush. Pause. Hush. Pause. Hush. Pause. She wasn’t listening to be calmed—she was calmed by talking with Teny—she was listening because it was hers to hear. Mel let herself be held by the furniture she had chosen, and closed her eyes.
—inspired by Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So”
Eleanor
Waters-Jones
I.
Flip on the tele’;
To Looboo, Mama tells me I can’t do nothin till I watch Van Dyke and have the pills. I don’t like having them pills; they taste funny when I trap them under my tongue. But Mama checks my mouth now. She knows I do that. I like to give her fun, she has fun with me, when she’s in the room.
Most time I do what Mama tells me to; I’m a good boy and I do what she says, even talk to Mrs Wheadon on Sundays after church. Sundays I like, I get to look up at Jesus and ask im questions. That’s what I do Sundays. Whaddayou do? I aint even thought to ask if you’re a Christian. Hope to God you are else Mama won’t let me write to you no more. It’s time when all them farmers start cropping, so my hay fever’s gone real bad. Worse this year. I stay inside most of the time now, which I don’t like one bit. But I like Mr Van Dyke, all his silly stunts and the funny clothes he wears make me feel less lonesome, somehow. Even though I can’t see the colours, I’ve started guessing them. Last week’s show was certainly yellow with pink spots. See? No one could wear that round here. Mrs Wheadon wouldn’t stop talking bout it on Sundays. Dya have a box? We only got ours last year, but that was cos of the hospital and the pay out and some other words Mama won’t repeat to me. I know we’re doing OK, but Mama says not to talk about moneys any more, wouldn’t be good. I know you won’t tell nobody. You got nobody to tell, right?
I hope you’re feeling better than last month. That was rough for everyone, mind. Not sayin it wasn’t specially hard for you, cos you’re his sister n all. But Ma took it bad, and I couldn’t even play Van Dyke for a week, cos she wouldn’t have any noise in the house. The screen door banged something terrible, and she’d get up and slam it shut, and she’d take the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t tell her I told you that; she spent an awful long time in the church the Sunday after, so I think she’s repented good and proper. Mama suggested you visit us sometime. I’d like that. I only have a vague idea of what you look like, after all, cos I was so drugged up in that hospital, most people were just figures and lines. A bit like the box, where you can’t really tell who’s who unless you’re paying attention. Maybe that’s why Ma likes me to watch it, so I can train myself. She had me reading when I first came home, but then the head aches came back. All the time, like someone had shot my head clean off with a great shotgun. You know, like the one Mr Wheadon uses if the kids come too close. Dya get head aches still? And I can’t concentrate for very long on letters, neither. I’ve had to break this one up so my head feels alright. Most times it does; a bit fuzzy still, like I’m dreamin or something, but alright. I aint even been dreaming lately, when I sleep, I mean. It all goes black and then there’s Ma in the mornin, waking me up with pills and the promise of Van Dyke. I guess I’ll finish up, now. Please come and visit us. Miss you.
II.
wrestle with JIMMY
she crawled over the salt and saliva, creeping up to him. there was red liquid on the floor—it wasn’t blood, but it wasn’t not blood, either. it congealed in great pools and dribbled into the cracks the floor didn’t even know it had. her knees were sticky, her cuffs soaked. the crush of bodies all around her was intoxicating. her ringed fingers were stood upon, until people noticed the curve of her spine and pulled around her instead of through her. she found cocaine, and condoms, and glass, and tried not to let it cut her hands. but thin red lines scored her skin like she was a Christmas ham. the room seemed to pulse, awake and alive with music and bass guitar both. she could not see the speakers, but she felt like they were everywhere, and she wanted to throw up with the vibrations. stilettos clomped and asses shook; perhaps it was just her who was nauseous.
she gained some ground, crawling like a grotesque insect to him. a man picked up the skirts of her dress and looked; she did not react and only watched omnisciently as another batted his hand away with a reprimand. their argument faded away into the huge noise that seemed to throttle all. maybe it was a fistfight. she found she did not care, for as she crawled closer, she could hear him sing. she strained her eyes to hear, but the strobe lighting was neon and buzzed in her ears. however, she did succeed in finding the edge of the mosh, closest to the stage. she would have to stand up, she feared. her hands pressed to her knees and her knees pressed the air, thick with guitar riffs forcing their way through her flesh. she did stand though, and was immediately glad she’d made the decision, for she could hear her baby better. no more was the clonking of heels and bass the only sound. No, she could hear his singing, his groaning, grunting, horrible sound that she loved so dearly. he was writhing around on the stage, thrusting his crotch into the crowd with an ease that was all too familiar to her. his devil-smile lasted only briefly, between the chorus and the verse, but she thought she could hear some hearts popping in the mosh. dark curls drive everyone crazy, but fatuous winks drive sexual beings to the brink. he was scanning the audience, moments of uncertainty filtered between the well-rehearsed performance’s pores. did she want to be seen, recognised? she was not sure and briefly considered ducking down under the mosh’s skirts. but this would only draw attention to herself, when what she really wanted was to observe the one person she had never understood. he glimpsed her; she froze. others crashed into her, crushing her skin to wine. it turned out, the only way to avoid the mosh was to be in the mosh, as hard as humanly possible. he continued singing, his eyes flickering closed in faux sincerity, mumbling something about how freedom and how i miss you and how
oh yeah. she took her chance, and backed away, directing the press of bodies to close up around her, hands on waists and shoulders. they took the hint and sewed up her spot like there had never been a wound. he opened his eyes, determined not to look at the spot where she was. but she had not his determination. from far away, he looked ordinary and gorgeous, a figure on a stage, microphone in hand, mumbling and screaming something about yeah yeah yeah. she adjusted her dress, wiped her spit-stained fingers on it, and headed downstairs to call a cab.
III.
Something is bubble-i-i-i-i-ing
The first day we were together—I mean really together, not partially, but completely and entirely together—you suggested we die. We tied nooses to the railing and talked about who would go first. It didn’t really matter anyway—all we had to do was keep our foot hold on the stone. But then your mother came out (blessed, really) and was concerned. It’s only thin rope, we said. We’re not really going to. Then, in the middle of the summer—I mean middle, when it’s so hot it’s wet all the time, and we remember that we really are 80% water— you suggested we sit on the road. I, stupid thing that I am, said no, we’ll get run over. And you told me that there were no cars around— did I see any? No, I didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. We’d walked around the places I didn’t think we should have, and even though it was the middle of the afternoon, no one was out. We gazed at the railway track, and the struggling shrubs, green against the desert-orange dirt, so dystopian it was kinda romantic. Little paths I had never trod before, that went down side-streets and alleyways, where houses would loom large and barren, apocalyptic and tremendous; we talked about the film trailer we would make that day. It was about The Misunderstood—like all our cinema—and according to you, the pivotal shot was us sitting in the road, looking wistfully at the sky or the ground (it didn’t much matter which). Art must come first, I thought, unconsciously cursing the heavens and its terrific waves of numbness. So, I was coaxed, by you, onto the road. We set up the iPad. And a car came along. I regret taking off when we visited my great-grandmother. You were much more interesting at the time, so we went for ‘a walk’. I should have known—with you, it was never just ‘a walk’. I found life in the retirement village I had thought of as so safe. Especially when we found out we could get into people’s backyards. The yellow stone paths, the huge hedge-like trees fragrant, the purple flowers and peaceful units that always seemed a shade too quiet. They must have heard us, shhhh-ing and hearts pounding loud in our throats, as we hid below windows when there was no-one there, and ran when there was nobody to chase us. Until the dog. The last unit on the property had a dog, a big black one (I thought of a Pitbull or a Doberman), that made you yell out RUN. And I obeyed you, climbing ungracefully over the smooth green fence with no footholds at all, damn it. You had to help me over, in the end, and I truly believed I was going to get pulled back down by vicious, snarling, drooling teeth. You did not have to tell me that there was no dog—we both knew.
IV. Behind My Back.
there are no people in this car
there is a brick on the accelerator and the windows are open some music is on and it is louder than the whistling of the wind created not by man this time the car has no right foot to brake with it wouldnt choose to brake anyway the paddocks and cows float past on this line called the horizon beautiful and common
this car is silver and a blue tarpaulin is floating away into the air it got unstuck from the tub there are no other cars around not that this car can see anyway alone on the road the road stretches like a birthmark snail trail mohawk stitch in wound it is beautiful
this car is leaving us it has had enough it doesnt really care anymore would you flowers and crucifixes mark accidents caused by the cars kind it ignores them with reverence this car is flying and things will break at the T intersection up ahead people will break people are very brakable breakable fuel will run out in ten minutes so it doesn’t matter
was this car born with a brick on its accelerator and its windows open and music blaring louder than any music has ever blared before this car is going very fast but not all that is written is gospel instead we will hear third-hand
those who meet with this car and see how it lives brilliant under January sun this car faces the intersection bares bare born borne with a wink and the guitar reaches its orgasmic peak
The ‘Dog Movie’ has largely become a dormant genre over the last ten years, with few films attempting to shift a space on the shelf with Turner & Hooch, Red Dog, and the certified classic: Beverly Hills Chihuahua The Friend seeks to smush itself alongside them, if only hanging on by its front paws.
After the suicide of her best friend, former teacher and former lover, Walter (Bill Murray), Iris (Naomi Watts) finds herself sharing a glorified studio apartment with Apollo, Walter’s Great Dane (Bing). Apollo is a lousy housemate, forcing Iris to a blow-up mattress on her floor and trashing her perfectly curated mid-century lounge suite whenever left alone. Spoiler alert: she learns to love the dog, and fights for her tenancy in a ‘No Pet’ building to keep custody of the noble steed.
The film occupies a timescape that my screenwriting tutor has dubbed the “timeless 2009 nothingness”, which I think is incredibly essential for viewers looking to escape the current day and its horrors. When we don’t want a period piece, but we want an uncomplicated romp through Central Park, we come to the world that The Friend offers: few iPhones, no AI, neighbours that actually talk to one another, winters that are still frosty and crisp. Ah, bliss.
New York City is bloody gorgeous. The autumn light brings to life the emotion of the film, the solidarity solidifying between (wo)man and beast. Burnt oranges and reds splash over falling leaves, knitted sweaters and the quaint lights of Iris’s apartment as the season shifts into a bright winter. Plus, Scott McGehee and David Siegel have thrown the “frazzled English woman” canon a bone with Iris’s character—despite her New Yorker status. Her propensities for coloured scarves, berets and schlepping
This frazzled
can’t write for shit!
Sabine Pentecost
Art by Erin Ibrahim
ginormous tote bags around wintry New York are modelled straight from the Meg Ryan Manual and Bridget Jones Playbook.
The most impactful scene is a complete diversion from the film’s previous structure, taking on an imagined conversation between Iris and Walter post-death. Iris lays everything out on the table, scolding Walter for his selfishness and being more honest than she would have been while he was alive. This is the best dialogue we get, the most nuanced reflections on grief, and the main points of comedy. Watts and Murray play off each other brilliantly in Walter’s unimaginably large brownstone and it felt like a glimmer of what could have been. Alas, the glint was fleeting. The Friend’s overall arc is sweet and heartfelt, yet the final third suffers from several false endings; all of which left me wondering: “How is there still more to go?” The last ten minutes of the film are narrated by Iris as she writes her novel, equally about Apollo and about Walter, and that was quite painful to slog through. I’m convinced that when people write movies about writers, they do not hire actual writers to write the faux writing published within the narrative. If they did, it would sound better than this earnest metaphor soup I was subjected to throughout The Friend. The film itself isn’t poorly written, but the excerpts of writing—supposedly written by the many “writer” characters—are akin to the over-intellectualised, indulgent ramblings of a self-help guru.
I knew, as with almost all dog movies, that Apollo was a symbol for something bigger. A vessel for Iris’s character to pour in her grief and the love left over from Walter. I did not need to have that dropped on my head like a purple-prose anvil in the last ten minutes.
One thing is for sure though, that dog would not fit in a New York City elevator.
Maxwell
Content Warning: references to sexual and domestic abuse
You see, the problem is that I’m a lightweight. One schooner of beer and I’m out of commission. I do things I’m not supposed to, like agree to write a review for the magazine.
The way it started was that I drank at the Edition 4 launch party and, come home time, made the mistake of sitting next to Farrago Reviews Manager, Ruby, and saying something along the lines of how out of it I was. She said she liked my last review—the one that had a poop joke as a title that I thought nobody got. Would I like to write another one, she asked me.
My generous nature prevailed. Sure, I have two essays due in two weeks with a combined word count that would make the Bible look like a pamphlet, the likes of which I haven’t even begun to research, but hey. Why not? Rock and roll, because you only live once. I’m a lover of the craft and I’d die for it.
The movie I’d like to talk about today is Honey Don’t, starring Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza and Charlie Day. Qualley stars in this crime caper as the lesbian private detective Honey O’Donahue, who fools around with troublesome women and gets embroiled in shenanigans. Evans is the reverend Drew Devlin, who leads a sex-culty church, and Honey has to investigate him and his organisation after the suspicious death of a potential client. Plaza showcases her talents as main love interest and cop MG Falcone, bringing her dry wit made famous from Parks and Recreation. Honey Don’t is directed by Ethan Coen of Coen brothers fame
and written by his lesbian wife Tricia Cooke (not sure how that works). It is the second of what is considered the “lesbian B-movie collection”, the first being DriveAway Dolls, also starring Qualley. I was really, really looking forward to seeing this movie. I saw the trailer and thought it looked pretty sick. A crime caper, albeit one with a plot that sounded a little cliche, but with a Coen brother attached to it, I figured all would be well. That little bit of Evans preaching with his heart and soul about higher service and was sold. That shit was what I needed in my veins ASAP. But, like any addict, I did the deed and then felt shame coarse over me, wave after wave. For days I was busy revising my review in my head, trying to decide what I would share to my two followers on LetterBoxd.
One thing that struck me was the sheer amount of sex. Sex scenes occur about four to five times in the movie, which is surprising given the movie only runs for 89 minutes. Chris Evans is in three of them, for anyone interested, but ol’ Captain America does not hang dong. Someone ought to tell Cooke and Coen that there is a whole genre of film dedicated to just people being nude and having sex. I’m sure that their talents could elevate the form to new heights. I was not disappointed to watch sexually tense displays between Plaza
and Qualley. But when those are the heights of excitement when watching cinema, I’d rather skip the whole eleven dollar ordeal and stay at home with my Pringles can, some sponges and a rubber glove (for the uninitiated and the stingy, instructions for self-entertainment will be included in next edition’s Farrago editorial).
One of the few scenes I can think of that was riveting and where the actors had clothes on was the scene between Evans and Qualley, when the latter is attempting to squeeze out some information about the dead girl. It’s a neat little back and forth, where both actors are very charming, but rarely does the movie ever reach new peaks or explore new avenues. It’s clear that despite the drawbacks of the film (and there are a few), the performances are not one of them. As previously stated, I enjoyed the scene of Evans, the corrupt preacher, talking about God. I wish there could’ve been more of it.
To its credit, the movie can be somewhat funny. I’m a huge fan of Fargo, both the movie and the TV show, and there are moments where the old Coen & Coen charm does shine through. I never burst my appendix laughing, but there were moments when I lightly chuckled to myself.
One of the saving graces of this
movie was Charlie Day. I like Charlie Day because in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he is king of the rats and sniffs paint. And while he is neither of those things in this movie, Day is a delightful presence, consistently asking Qualley’s Honey out on a date and being confused when the lesbian detective shuts him down. It’s a nice gag.
Aubrey Plaza always sort of confuses me, because she comes across as dryly funny but not much else. This worked very well in Parks and Recreation, but her acting always comes off as somewhat reserved. I always feel like she’s going to make some kind of dry, mildly fucked up joke and then I get surprised when it’s just a normal line. It’s a sort of whiplash that I only get when she performs. The way she says, “Love those click-clacking heels”, sounds less like a tried and tested Coen turn of phrase and more a stilted impression of someone from the past unconvincingly attempting to blend into the present day.
Disappointingly, the plot goes nowhere. It starts off pretty generically: suspicious death, private detective becomes suspicious about death, police say it’s nothing to worry about. Detective, badass and right about the situation, confronts the suspicious party. But then there’s other stuff about the French being key to the church organisation, a missing niece and MG Falcone was actually a previous member of the church and goes on about the exploitation of women and how, by not killing their abusers, women are essentially weak and
part of the problem.
I feel like there’s a perfectly valid point to be made about the methods of dealing with trauma and abuse, but in the context of this story: a romp about a private detective who loves lesbian sex encountering a corrupt preacher, the point seems very weak. Certainly, there are a few threads on abuse. Honey’s missing niece Corrine is hit by her boyfriend; the response being Honey goes and beats him back. The dead girl is the result of finding self-confidence after giving herself to the Reverend, which presumably leads the church to kill her (I think). The Reverend takes advantage of shy, insecure women from his congregation to stoke his own ego. Charlie Day’s character won’t stop harassing Honey, no matter how many times she rebuffs his affections. MG
Falcone was once a member of the Church and was sexually abused by her father. In return she killed him.
While these concepts seem sound to be explored on their own, they are frequently overshadowed by the main character, who embodies the Cyndi Lauper mentality of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. She’s just a sassy girlboss lesbian private detective. Not that Honey is a one-dimensional character, it’s that more often than not the movie seems more interested in her sexual exploits than it does other characters. Why do Evans’ and Day’s characters do what they do? Why doesn’t Honey lend a helping shoulder to Falcone when the latter opens up about her past? Does Honey have her own intimacy issues that lead her to hop from bed to bed? It leaves a lot more to be desired, meaning a lot of the conclusions feel anticlimactic. Honey goes out to do more lesbian sex shit. Falcone dies. The Reverend Drew dies because he pissed off the Frenchy. It’s a lot less like Fargo or The Big Lebowski, where things feel like they’re spiralling out of control and getting messier. The movie has the effect of feeling too messy and yet too clean, like a handful of spaghetti wrapped up in a bow. In the end, I think that Ethan Coen is coasting a bit too easily on the goodwill from his tenure of directing with his brother. As for Cooke, someone should get her out of the kitchen, because she’s making a
M E S S !
Content Warning: references to sexual assualt
Contains spoilers for Sorry, Baby (2025).
Eva Victor’s work prior to Sorry, Baby often materialises as recycled Instagram posts on my feed from the feminist satire page Reductress. With unsettlingly vengeful and dark headings like: “How To Laugh It Off Even Though You’ll Never Forget This and Someday Your Son Will Get Revenge” and “‘I’m Feeling Good These Days,’ Says Woman Who Clearly Does Not Get NYTimes Notifications,” their confrontational and unnerving satire easily taps into a timelessly vindictive part inside many of us. Their filmmaking debut does something similar, but looms in our thoughts for much longer.
The Melbourne International Film Festival headliner follows Agnes (played by Victor) through non-chronological episodes of her life shortly before and after being sexually assaulted by
With her best friend and support system, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), moving away to New York post-graduation, Agnes is left alone in the subtly suffocating container of her trauma: her New England college town. The film’s nonlinear structure mirrors Agnes’ own recovery, creating a tender reflection of how the process is often fragmented.
Labelled as a dramedy, Sorry, Baby gives generous attention to both its genres without going overboard. The opening scenes are filled with hilarious banter: Agnes and Lydie acting out male sex moves and diving into an overly philosophical dissection on the phrase, “ya like that?” (…what is that?)
keep things from being too quaint. For
The soundtrack, reminiscent of Untitled Goose Game, is lighthearted and simple— mischievous enough to keep things from being too quaint. For a while, the combination of Agnes’ wit, along with the playful music and serene setting, makes the film feel like a safe space. The apparent mutual respect between Agnes and Decker reinforces this comfort— they speak admirably of each other’s work, and she mentions to Lydie that she would maturely reject his advances if he were to initiate anything physical with her. Agnes’ confidence and Decker’s demeanour aid in creating that illusion of safety, which Victor dismantles shortly afterwards.
The assault itself is never shown; instead, we are placed outside Decker’s house as he invites Agnes in to discuss her thesis. It’s easy to wish and almost try to convince yourself that nothing
instead, we are placed outside Decker’s house as he invites Agnes in to discuss her thesis. It’s easy to wish and almost try to convince yourself that nothing happens during this visit, but that hope quickly fades as the sky darkens and the street goes still. Back home, Agnes recounts the moment to Lydie second-by-second. Afterwards, she endures a hostile ER visit and a useless response from the college disciplinary board, both of which are portrayed through outrageous, near-theatrical performances. Decker resigns before Agnes files a report, so the university doesn’t take disciplinary action—and that’s it.
Albeit the scenes gave me one of the strongest feelings of secondhand embarrassment, Agnes’ friends-withbenefits relationship with her awkward neighbour Gavin (adorably played by Lucas Hedges) disproves the assumption that all survivors of sexual assault repel against physical intimacy. Her clinical lectures on the book Lolita are also unnerving to witness considering the book’s content. Victor’s performance throughout the film expertly delivers layers of disconcerting complexity into an otherwise monotonous everyday life.
I wanted that scene to go on for longer. The juxtaposition of Agnes apologising for a life that she was violated by was heartbreaking and too universal to just walk away from. I wanted her to say something more definitive, something reassuring, as if I were the baby waiting for comfort, but knowing inside that there probably isn’t anything more that can be said. That was the first time I’ve felt that with a film.
That might be what makes Sorry, Baby so memorable: the physical and intimate response it evokes thanks to its emotionally tuned cast and balanced writing. Watching it felt like someone was gingerly tapping on my belly (consensually), and such intimacy made it hard not to feel protective of this film.
I appreciated how the overhead lights stayed off as we left the Astor Theatre; I don’t think many people wanted to be perceived right after watching that film, like it points out, “It’s a lot of time, but it’s not that much time too.”
Years later, Agnes finds herself working in Decker’s old office, teaching as a full-time professor, leading a class based on the thesis he once supervised. There’s irony everywhere: Decker is mild-mannered, a father and his ex-wife is a prosecutor. He’s the opposite of “extraordinary,” a word he often uses to describe Agnes and her work. These are just some of the factors that shield him from facing even a fraction of the consequences. Agnes’ decision not to pursue legal action isn’t just believable, but quietly devastating in its realism.
The principal focus of Sorry, Baby leans more towards the mundane snippets of recovery. the scenes gave me one of the strongest feelings of second-hand embarrassment, Agnes’ friends-with-benefits relationship with her
In the present, Lydie visits with her partner and their newborn. After Agnes offers to babysit, she softly apologises to the baby for being born into a world where bad things can happen, but is still hopeful that the baby can have a good life.
Walking home alone after watching Sorry, Baby makes it feel just a little more unsettling than usual—and somehow, a little less lonely. I feel thankful, and sorry, knowing I am not lonely in that sense.
Invitations to Melbourne’s opening night of In The Heights came with a dress code—
“Colour, Culture & Carnaval”
—and the musical absolutely delivered on all three of these themes. From beautiful lighting to complex hip-hop dance the show was a delight to watch; I was entranced by the level of detail baked into each element of the production. In The Heights is incredibly well staged, but more than that, it’s just incredibly fun.
Theshow follows an ensemble cast living in Washington Heights in New York City, exploring the neighbourhood in the lead up to the new year amidst romantic endeavours, the looming threat of gentrification, and a breadth of different Latin American migrant experiences. Written by Quiara Alegría Hudes and with music/lyrics from a pre-Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda, the sprawling story is quite ambitious for a two-and-a-half-hour musical.
The character’s stories, though individually interesting and compelling, felt quite fragmented—this was particularly noticeable through the second act as it jumped from subplot to subplot. The plot lines and musical pieces were great to watch, but I questioned why certain events happened in the specific order they did. Unrelated moments back-to-back made the narrative lose flow and though enjoyable some of the musical interludes felt disjointed to the overall story. That being said, the Australian company did an incredible job at executing the show. Though it doesn’t have quite the same polish as Miranda’s later work, the musical holds up as a story about love, culture and family. I laughed, danced in my chair, and may have possibly cried just a little.
My favourite parts of In The Heights were when I could watch the vibrant ensemble embody some of the best character work I’ve seen. A significant element of the life on stage was the incredible dancing and movement by choreographer Amy Campbell. There were flips, tricks, dips and dives, often by performers who were singing at the same time, in true demonstration of the triple-threat. Steve Costi’s (Sonny) solo was a particular standout, whilst Malena Searles in the ensemble always caught my eye. The group numbers enraptured me, and I never ran out of places to look or people to watch.
Our leading characters wove in and out of focus seamlessly, standing out for solos and blending back into the ensemble without missing a beat. They gave a perfect demonstration of what sharing a stage really looks like, creating a real sense of familiarity.
Ryan González (Usnavi) was a strong lead (though I did think for a second the real Lin-Manuel Miranda was on stage for a moment) to carry us through the story, working beautifully with Olivia Vásquez (Vanessa). The entire cast had a great chemistry, but González’s dynamic with Lena Cruz (Abuela Claudia) was particularly touching. Our salon workers Vásquez, Vanessa Menjivar (Daniela) and Tamara Foglia Castañeda (Carla) were also incredibly dynamic: teasing, loving, vulnerable and strong all at once. Meanwhile, Alexander Palacio (Kevin Rosario) and Angela Rosero (Camila Rosario) felt like a real married couple, capturing the complexities of hard work and duty versus desire in their portrayals. It’s hard to name a standout from the cast when they all deliver a nuanced performance alongside fabulous songs, but the young Maria Gonzalez (Nina Rosario), Ngali Shaw (Benny) and Costi are a bright future for the Australian musical scene.
Of course, a musical can’t be a great musical without great music, and both music director Zara Stanton and the band absolutely delivered. I was impressed with Thien Pham on the trumpet even before his outstanding solo, and his tone playing through the mute was impressive. Lara Wilson also killed it on a range of different percussion with wooden tones and timbres creating some real liveliness in the music. The score was funky, fun and sometimes absurdly difficult, and they executed it well.
I was a bit disappointed at the numerous microphone errors at opening night, and there was a flashing light
that was somewhat distracting (though this may have been on-the-night photography). There were, however, improvements in the technical mishaps even between the first and second acts, so I can only attribute this to opening night jitters. The show was otherwise technically well-executed, detailed, textured and just so beautiful to watch. I am still thinking about that firework sequence.
Lighting designer Jasmine Rizk and set designer Mason Browne created a visceral world, capturing its complex changes in time and emotion. Their designs were intricate yet never overwhelming, paying perfect complement to the music and performance on stage. Lighting fixtures were built into the set itself in ways I haven’t seen staged before. Lights were rigged into the set, or almost above the audience, or layered behind semitransparent walls to create some great depth. The layered lights in particular seemed like reflections on the wall itself, from street signs implied to be behind the audience, and there was evidently a great deal of thought put into enveloping the viewer themself into the performance space. It was all incredibly clever.
InThe Heights promised to be a celebration on stage and it wholeheartedly was. The artists captured the magic of musical theatre, of production and of live performance, and it was simply a delight in every way. Despite a few technical errors on opening night, the story rang strong, and if you’re looking for a beautiful show with a beautiful story, this is the one to watch.
In The Heights played at The Comedy Theatre in Melbourne from August 1st to September 6th. Keep your eyes peeled for when it next returns to Melbourne!
Emmy Nicholls
Content Warning: discussion of ableism
In April this year, the newly appointed US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, announced that his department would fund a widespread research effort to determine environmental causes for autism. As an autistic person with a special interest in neurodiversity, I watched Kennedy’s speech with a kind of grim resignation. I also felt a strange desire to laugh. Having read a fair amount of psychiatric autism research, I’m used to pathologising language that frames the autistic brain as “disordered”. I’m familiar, also, with the euphemisms employed by the media and the general public, who think it’s derogatory to call us autistic and instead insist that we are “on the spectrum” or “living with a condition”. Allow me to assure you, dear reader, that I write this sitting on a fun wheely-chair, not a spectrum. Also, I have looked in all my cupboards and can confirm that I’m not inadvertently house-sharing with a condition. If you really want to know where my autism is, I’ll tell ya: it’s in the very structure of my central and peripheral nervous systems. It makes up the network with which I receive and process all external stimuli. Basically, it’s me, I’m the autism (or the “autistic”, to be grammatically accurate). And in case you were wondering, I like it. To borrow the logic of esteemed philosopher and drag queen Trixie Mattel, being autistic is not
hard: social and institutional ableism makes being autistic hard.
Now normally, this autistic doesn’t have time for quackery. I like to pretend that most people know poorly conducted research when they see it, and that conflicts of interest, ill-matched control groups, the mis-representation of results and the cancellation of a researcher’s medical license would be enough to undermine the authority of a study. Alas, this idea is little more than wilful selfdeception.
After listening to RFK, I knew how exhausting it would be to address all of his claims (these actually can be placed on a spectrum, which starts at “buffoonery” and ends at “potentially fatal”). In order to conserve my energy, therefore, I have drawn a nice picture. It’s got RFK Jr in it, and also a man named David A. Geier who, along with his father, is responsible for two-thirds of the studies claiming that vaccines cause autism.
To give my work a little more context, here is an excerpt from RFK’s April address:
“This is an individual tragedy as well. Autism destroys families. But more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children … These are kids who, many of them were fully functional, and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two-years-old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”
To hear Kennedy’s misinformation yourself, see:
HHS Sec. RFK Jr. announces findings of autism survey conducted by CDC: LIVE on ABC News’ YouTube channel (17th April 2025).
For an in-depth breakdown of Kennedy’s claims, see:
‘What Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Doesn’t Understand About Autism’, the June 7 episode of the New Yorker’s podcast Radio Hour.
For an overview of David A. Geier’s vaccine scepticism and flawed research practices, see:
‘The Playbook Used to ‘Prove’ Vaccines Cause Autism’, written by Jessica Steier for the New York Times (August 16 2025).
Aaron Agostini
Thesame brain that once wrote “My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola” now appears to be deeply invested in smallengine repair. Reports surfaced late Tuesday that Lana Del Rey was seen repairing a tractor in a back-lot mechanic shop in Jamaica Plain. Ignoring the obvious (where does one even find a tractor in Boston?), the larger mystery was what was taking her so long.
She looked the part.
Blue Jeans. White Shirt. A hat that felt racist but wasn’t. Oil stains stretched across her shirt. An ice-cold Diet Mountain Dew rested precariously between her long, acrylic nails. A sold-out stadium tour loomed in Edinburgh next Friday, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she blew mango vape into the machine’s rusted gears. The scene felt almost domestic, like a Norman Rockwell
painting rewritten by someone on cough syrup.
When pressed for comment, Del Rey said nothing. The closest we got was her spelling “ANAL” backwards in paint thinner on the floor. As the fumes evaporated, she passed out cold. Thirteen and a half hours later she awoke with jet-black hair, sighed once, and returned to work on the tractor.
Her silence did not extend to her music.
We can confirm her next album will arrive next month: a 12 ¼-track conceptual doo-wop record narrated by Judge Judy, humbly titled iPhone contains magnets that may interfere with medical devices. See Important Safety Information in the iPhone User Guide. The record reportedly includes covers of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Sisqó’s “Thong Song”, along with fourteen
minutes of hidden silence. Early reports describe it as “audacious,” “unlistenable,” and “literally more important than air.”
This was not her first detour.
Before the release of Blue Banisters, her eighth studio album, Del Rey worked an unpaid shift at Waffle House, frying breakfast for the happy residents of Florence, Alabama. The tractor, then, feels less like a stunt and more like an evolution; an artistic evolution of someone totally in their own lane.
If a global pop star can chase her dream of small-engine repair, what excuse do the rest of us have? Fall in love with someone older. Throw out your microwave. Try consent. Start a band. Anything your heart aches for, you can attempt—and maybe fail at beautifully.
Amandi Fernando
“The brain is a wild and wonderful thing,” Dr Spaceman tells me in his office, which shares a high-rise building’s basement floor with a Woolies Metro. We’re meeting so I can interview Spaceman about his recent investigations into the student brain.
He gestures to a congealed lump of cooked spaghetti rawdogged on his desk.
The pasta serves as a makeshift model of the brain, which Spaceman prods with gloved hands. “The work began in Semester One, and it’s taken months, no weeks, to compile it all!”
He was initially trying to investigate student mental health during exam periods. Instead, Spaceman found something far more likely to achieve low-grade internet virality (more than
one hundred shares on TikTok, at least two hundred Instagram stories and an eventual Facebook post cobbled together by someone’s mum).
According to his research, talking about doing your assignment does amount to actually doing your assignment, neurologically speaking. Through a mixture of questionnaires, medical imaging and a technique Spaceman
calls “following students and recording their words and images with my video camera from 2005”, he’s put together an abundance of data. When asked if obtaining the students’ consent to be recorded was a challenge, Spaceman replies,” you lose 100 per cent of the shots you ask before taking, so I never asked.”
Spaceman claims his brain imaging revealed that the same areas of the brain that light up when a student hits ‘submit’ on an assignment also light up when a student says phrases such as: “I can’t come, I have to do my assignment” and “I need to work on my assignment”. Similar results were produced when they Googled the Pomodoro method. It seems that the brain recognises all these interactions as signs of productivity and sends out signals that something has been achieved.
The brain even takes in visual cues as
signs of productivity. So, when a student sets their phone on “do not disturb” or snags a spot in the ERC Library, the brain believes a large part of the task is complete and reacts accordingly.
Students have had mixed reactions to the news. While 75 per cent agreed that they felt a sense of accomplishment turning down plans under the guise of doing assignments, 80 per cent said they could not comment because they were working on an assignment. Meanwhile, 50 per cent did not believe these findings would have any impact on their life or grades.
“That actually makes so much sense,” says Kiara, an English Honours student. “Because sometimes I feel relaxed right before a deadline, but my document is still blank! All I did was tell people that I was putting my life on hold until after I
submitted my thesis.”
Louisa, a first year neuroscience student, says she spoke to Dr Spaceman for his research. When told about his findings she says, “All he did was draw dots on cartoon outlines of brains!”
“It’s not so much scientific proof as it is making wild theories come true with no conceivable end goal,” Spaceman says, nibbling at a piece of spaghetti stuck to his glove.
What does Spaceman hope to achieve through his research? “Once teaching staff learn how to grade intention, then we’ll really be cooking,” he says, knuckles-deep in spaghetti.
UniMelb students echo his sentiment.
“The hermeneutic labour of preparing for an assignment should be included in the rubric. And why don’t we have a 24/7 library yet?”
Jayden Alexander
Last week, Vice-Chancellor Emma Johnston announced a radical move for the University of Melbourne. In a University-wide email, she declared, “The University will be trialing a new recorded lecture system. After the copyright notice, the lecture will play an unskippable thirtysecond-long advert. Students are advised that Adblockers will not work on campus, if connected to UniWireless.”
The Vice-Chancellor proceeded to thank BetterHelp, the leading telehealth psychologist appointment app for sponsoring the preliminary trial.
Several students we spoke to assumed the email was a spoof or a prank and were shocked to discover it was legitimate.
“Unbelievable. First they make us sign the new WiFi rules or whatever, and now they are making us watch ads? I didn’t incur HECS debt to watch ads at uni,” one student said.
An informant from the University administration, who has requested anonymity, shared that the decision was a result of rising costs, citing tariffs impacting weapons manufacturing research and a need to increase the Vice-
Chancellor’s salary to $1.88 million from its current $1.5 million, because of “angel numbers”.
This news comes after the announcement of the closure of prestigious literary magazine, Meanjin, prompting speculation regarding the University’s finances. As one online commenter incredulously marvels, “The uni can shut down Meanjin but not divest from Ishreel? Wow.” This netizen isn’t alone in their outrage regarding the magazine’s shuttering , with an open letter circulating among the University community which requests Johnston receive a voluntary 10 per cent pay cut to continue funding the magazine.
Instead, Johnston’s pay increase, funded by these advertisements, will increase her salary by a whopping 25 per cent; enough to fund the degrees of two international students!
At the forefront of tertiary sector privatisation, UniMelb will be trailing the sponsors during SWOT Vac for profit maximisation. The data collected from this trail period, if positive, may see other Australian universities into following suit. However, Farrago’s analyst notes that with
a demographic of only 53,000 students, even if a 90 per cent click rate were achieved, it would be unlikely for the trial to prove profitable for BetterHelp. When Farrago reached out for comment, the University suggested that they were looking into getting sponsors related to national interests, such as the Australian Defence Force (ADF). They declined to respond to our other queries regarding the closure of Meanjin or the online backlash they have received following the announcement.
Fill in the blanks with words that go together with their incoming and outgoing arrows
Community Chest
You have become electorally irrelevent on and off campus! Stack the German Club.
Community Chest
You worked 8 semesters as a casual. You’re now blacklisted from employment to avoid full-time conversion!
Community Chest
You were sued for endorisng BDS at Students’ Council. Pay $60,000!
The University underpaid staff $72 million. Collect $4500 of stolen wages! Chance
You graduated from stupol. Accrue another $100,000 of HECS and start networking. Chance
