Farrago Magazine 2026 — Volume 102, Edition Six by Farrago Magazine

We share these stories from the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded. The team at Farrago pay our respects to the Traditional Owners and Elders past and present, who have and continue to be the first storytellers on this land. It is the responsibility of all writers, readers We share these stories from the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Sovereignty and students to consider the colonial ideologies that remain upheld and unquestioned in so-called Australia, and to was never ceded. The team at Farrago pay our respects to the Traditional Owners and Elders past and present, who have resist these structures through education. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land, and we encourage all and continue to be the first storytellers on this land. It is the responsibility of all writers, readers and students to consider readers of Farrago to nurture an understanding of the Indigenous histories from the places you call home.

the colonial ideologies that remain upheld and unquestioned in so-called Australia, and to resist these structures through education. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land, and we encourage all readers of Farrago to nurture an understanding of the Indigenous histories from the places you call home.

Above Water is a joint literary anthology and arts project by Farrago Magazine, UMSU Creative Arts & Southbank. Through its multimodal workshop program and exhibition, it seeks to encourage student engagement in the arts and provide a space for emerging artists and writers to develop their craft. This year, its theme is crisis.

MAXWELL’S ROADSHOW visual art photography scripts

open for pitches & submissions

diaries/logs ekphrasis prose creative essays fiction music lyrics performances installations

Instagram: @abovewateranthology Email: abovewater@farragomagazine.com

FARRAGO ARCHIVES Cartoon sourced from Vol. 27, no. 2, 1951. Cartoon sourced from Vol. 28, no. 20, October 22, 1952

Farrago is the publication of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) and published by the General Secretary. The

Farrago is the publication Universitythose of Melbourne views expressed herein are of notthe necessarily of UMSU. To Student Union andplease published by the raise an issue with (UMSU) the Union, contact theGeneral President and

“the ladies sure love a man who can cook. if he kept his trap shut he’d be perfect” Winning caption submitted by Cat Davis, Bachelor of Arts (History)

“Evidently he is not on the Looksmaxxing grindset, old chum” Winning caption submitted by Jade Cotsanis, PhD in Arts

Secretary. The viewsatexpressed herein are not necessarily General Secretary president@union.unimelb.edu.au and those of UMSU. To raise an issue with the Union, secretary@union.unimelb.edu.au respectively. please contact the President and General Secretary at secretary@union. Thispresident@union.unimelb.edu.au magazine is printed on recycled and paper by Kosdown Printing. respectively. Please keep,unimelb.edu.au share, repurpose or recycle after reading. This magazine is printed on recycled paper by Kosdown Printing. Please keep, share, repurpose or recycle after reading.

2 4 6

Editorials

Jade Seabrook

Office Bearer Reports

3x3 Amber Weng

2026 UMSU Elections: Together Sweeps as Community Crumbles

Pryce Starkey

Understanding UMSU

Taylah Xuereb, Amelie Martin & Paridhi Chhajed

Perspectives on the NTEU Strike

Australia Wants Fewer Migrants But Still Needs Them

Elliot McCarthy

Syakira Setiananda

Melbourne Students Report Skipping Meals as Grocery Prices Rise Paridhi Chhajed

The Cost-of-Living Crunch Behind Melbourne’s Public Transport Fare Evasion Sophie Sewell

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Photography

Wil Simmonds

Trinity College’s Ladies Lounge Alexander Mingay

On the Renaissance of Media Piracy

Fergus Sinnott

Life Drawing: The Body Undressed or Unaddressed

Alex Homoc

Resume of an Unnamed Graduating Student

The Age of Maxxing Sonnet Mamgain

DOUBLE SERVE

Rosie Giuliano & Victoria Marietta

Feeling Bored by the State of Music Streaming?

Ivy Kaye

34 36

I Saw God at Rod Laver Arena Stella Hannagan

I Finished My Duolingo Couse, But at What Cost?

Sasha Neilson

38 45

Photography

Featured Photographers

Community Through Fashion at Fresh Flames

Maria Quartel

47 48

Australian Adolescent Ashley Syers

BORN ROMANTIC

Sunday O’Sullivan

Bougie on a (Student) Budget: Melbourne’s Best Drink Deals

Mile End Kicks: My 13-year-old Self’s New Favourite Movie

Ella Moore

Sabine Pentecost

NEW26 at ACCA: Waiting to be Seen

Cherie Gavara-Nanu Strong

Spellbound by Ruby Gill at the Curtin

Bianca Lockwood

Melbourne’s Grrrls of the ‘90s Freya Bothroyd

Farrascopes: An Archival Forecast

What the Hell is Professor’s Walk’s Deal

Harper Hopkins

James Muller

MORE BEER! The True Drama of the 2003 Student Union Elections Janice Hui & James Muller

66 68 70

All Roads Lead to the Clyde Sophia Chu

Young Love (No) Money Manēka de Silver

The Money’s in the Casket Ella Brown

The Low-Brow and Aestheticised Working Class

The Hustle and Bustle of Back Alley Tarot Card Readings

Jessmarie Long

Marcie Di Bartolomeo

76 78 79 80 81

Sweet Treat Eli Xiang

Still Life

Jacaranda Liu

Beth and the Bear Lilian Anjeli

Bailleu Bathrooms Dutch McKenzie

Comics

Jessica Chaaban

CONTENTS

Puzzles

Anjali Selvarajah & Felicity Bayne

Editorials

Sabine Pentecost

Take a walk in my shoes. You’re graduating. You’re standing on the precipice of working, non-stop, for the rest of your life. You barely survived one day a week at a not-very-taxing office internship last semester and you’re scared. The stench of the future and its corporate slop trough wake you up in the middle of the night. LinkedIn is a permanent fixture on your Chrome Taskbar. Your fingers waggle over your resume, ready in its holster. Everything moves quickly. My friend told me a few months ago that “things were getting a liiiiiiittle too serious for me lately”. And I agree. My brain has been far too preoccupied with the future and all its potential woes. What am I doing talking about the rest of my life when I’m twenty years old? Don’t get me wrong, I’m highly vigilant against self-infantilisation. Particularly in a time where adult women spend far too much time babying themselves and saying gag-inducing phrases such as “I’m just a girl”, I’m glad for my independence and my capability to make difficult important decisions. On the other hand, I am definitely allowed to take the scenic route to adulthood. I need to remember that one of the major goals of one’s life should be to enjoy it, to live in a way that makes you happy. Just because I’m graduating from my undergraduate degree, doesn’t mean I suddenly age 20 years, don a pantsuit and start thinking about my retirement fund. I’m young. You’re young. Life still has plenty of time to catch up to us. I’m going to take my time.

Maria Quartel

I’ve been thinking a lot about our generation’s inability to acquire assets such as a home before 30. The mass precarity we face when it comes to economic stability, and the shift to luxury goods as an escape. There was a recent protest in Brighton against high rise apartments in the area where a local woman told ABC news that she worked hard for five years on a single income to afford her bayside mansion, and that she hopes to keep the area pristine so that young people have “something to aspire to”. Me personally, I am aspiring to not be renting forever. On the salary of an unpaid internship, this is looking grim. But until then, I will attach myself to my second hand bedazzled Dolce and Gabbana jeans as a twisted form of security to the current state of my bank account. This is not a unique coping mechanism. In Denma’s first Gucci show earlier this year, the designer brand was brought back to its Tom Ford roots, with modern ‘himbo’ looks now inspired by ‘eshay’ fashion trends. Denma’s reference to the fashion house’s young and financially unstable customer is seen everywhere in the show. Bliss Foster points out the runway site itself was decorated with wallpaper that resembles marble, rather than placing the runway in an actual marble site, which in the context of Italy, it could certainly afford to do. Denma questions the financial authenticity of Gucci’s new found audience, while placing the emerging fashion trends arising out of this clientele front of stage. The cover story of our final edition as your editors is inspired by this show, and the concept ‘Young (no) Money’ guides its contents. Through clothing from vintage resellers, young designers, and Melbourne loved established brands, the photoshoot explores the ways in which young people are experimenting with fashion at times of instability. The outfits we see in Parkville are experimentative, sexy, tacky, self-centred, confident, and fun. It’s our last hurrah before pantsuits must be bought from Myer so we can make good impressions in interviews to have a chance of tackling the before mentioned issue of financial prospects. Though our editorials have been consistently bleak in their message, in this edition, I invite the Farrago audience to reflect on the creative efforts of the student body, and the ways in which through chaos and disasters, we have created a space at university that encourages creation for creation’s sake. As you move through the pages, the images will begin to decompose, exposing the calculated political motives of the shoot. We are young, and we have no money, and for a brief period of time, we are free. 2

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Felicity Bayne

It’s weird, growing up through two global recessions. Weird might not quite be the right word for it. Tragic? Scary? A failure towards today’s youth? Living in what I could say are ‘turbulent’ times is certainly something to reckon with. Almost everyone I know is trying to tune out to a certain extent—getting off social media, avoiding the incessantly tragic news cycle, staying home when once they would’ve shown up. It feels like suddenly we might have run out of steam. But as much as we spend our time, energy, and bandwidth, paying attention to the world around us, we must remember not everything comes at a draining cost. I have been thinking a lot about a protest in support of Palestine I attended earlier this year, before my thesis and general life started turning against me (an experience which I hear is very in vogue around the Farragoffice). It was both sunny and warm, busy but not too crowded and buzzed with all sorts of people. Attendees clambered in the trees outside the State Library to listen to speakers convince others to care—to hear about tragedy and resistance alike. I was too far away to actually understand anything that was said. But being slightly further out from the thronging crowd showed me another side of what protesting could be. Dogs tucked up amongst the legs of their owners enamored passers by; children darted about or were hoisted onto their parents shoulders, giggling. I can still picture the bubbles someone brought rising over the crowd, shimmering in the sun. It was a good day. And all it cost me, really, was the time used for walking through the streets and finding out my favourite hat. If you have to give up some things to keep yourself whole, if you must remove yourself from the echoing void of everyday sorrows all around us, I recognise that. Not everyone can take on changing the world. But, the biggest asset of youth is time. As we go into the end of the year, winning back the sun from winter, I want to better spend mine. I implore all the readers of our last edition of Farrago to not let yourself withdraw entirely from the world. Use what you have. Spend time in the sun with a friend—it’s free.

Ruby Weir-Alarcon

It’s that time once again where I have to write my editorial. Weirdly, this time will be the last. Farrago has reached its sixth edition, and with it, my term as an Editor is coming to a close. I think it’s interesting, and well, important to reflect on the time I’ve been within this cohort and within this community we as a collective have formed. It’s crazy to think that this year I’ve been able to work with 450 of you—directly or indirectly—and I supposed, working with all of you reading these works. Next year, I will be moving to a new country. A new home, where I will have to make new friends, and with it, new memories. It’s a weird thing moving on. Next year, my desk will still be there, sitting in the corner of the Farrago office in Building 168, same as always—across from Maria, next to Felicity and diagonal to Sabine. Except, next year, it won’t be my desk, nor Maria’s, Sabine’s or Felicity’s. It will be someone else’s. When things come to a close, it’s important to let them close naturally, and remember not of what you have lost, but of the time you have had. I wish nothing but the best for next year’s editors—Taylah, Saria, Tom and Lachie—and I thank my fellow co-editors, Maria, Sabine, Felicity and Chiaki for this time together. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

OP-ED

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FARRAGO MAGAZINE

OP-ED

COVER LETTER OF AN UNNAMED GRADUATING STUDENT

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Design by Sabine Pentecost VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE STUDENT UNION

UMSU Office Bearer Reports Updates from the purple names on campus...

President

Lushomo (Lushy) Chingaya

Wow, last one. I want to thank everyone for trusting me to be your UMSU president this year. Thank you for allowing me into your stories, lives and experiences. To everyone who popped by the office, said hello at events or engaged with my socials. Everything I did, I did for you. Thank you. Now let me tell you what I’ve been up to in the dying months of my term. Do you even C.A.R.E? UMSU People of Colour Dept launched their constructing an anti-racist environment (C.A.R.E) campaign alongside the 5th edition of the racism report. Anti-racism work still has a LONG way to go at UniMelb. But UMSU is dedicated to advocating for better outcomes. Safe@Uni, Safe@Home’s Safer Communities Project had Southbank students engaging with a creative competition and 100s of students submitting safety postcards. You deserve to feel safe@uni and safe@ home. See you again sooner than you think;)

thousands, our student union is in a better position because of you all! And to our incredible staff, Fiona, Melanie, Kay, Lauren and Kat, thanks for all of the hard work you do to support student clubs, and for putting up with all of our shenanigans over the past year!

Welfare

Tsun Ying (Cynthia) Wong & Alexander Hams

More UMSU... As we approach the end of Semester 2, we would like to thank everyone for the support you have shown us throughout the year. UMSU Welfare has seen an incredible 2026, with expanded Union Mart and Welfare Brunch operation, and new partnerships being brought in to support the department. On the advocacy side, we have seen increased student representation at advisory groups with the University. We also collaborated with the Creative Arts department to run a series of Arts Therapy workshops. We hope you enjoyed them and we will see you at Stress Less Week!

Council Meetings

https://umsu.unimelb.edu.au/about/ studentscouncil

Council Minutes

https://umsu.unimelb.edu.au/about/ studentscouncil/council-minutes

Farrago Live Reportage @farragomagazine on Twitter

Ida Bar!

Level 1, Building 168

Clubs & Societies

Alex Gwynn & Seamus Donellan

For our last OB report for the final Farrago issue of 2026, we’d like to thank every single club executive, committee member, volunteer, and club member who helped keep the cogs of every club turning! With thousands of club events this year and attendees in the tens of 6

FARRAGO MAGAZINE

General Secretary, Activities, Creative Arts, Education, International, Southbank, Burnley, Environment, People of Colour, Queer, Women’s & Disabilities Departments were all invited to submit statements, but failed to do so before the due date.

3x3

A single bed, a borrowed chair, and a scattering of things that were surely 'essential'.

@amberw.art

Render by Amber Weng VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

NEWS

Pre-Election

2026 UMSU Elections: Together Sweeps as Community Crumbles Words by Pryce Starkey

he 2026 UMSU elections have concluded. In one of the most consequential student union elections in Australia since 2003, 3,785 UniMelb students headed to the polls between Monday 7 September and Friday 11 September, electing next year’s UMSU administration. Wrought by scandals, controversies, bans, political defections and regulatory breaches, the elections saw voters oust Community for UMSU—a StuPol machine aligned with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) sub-faction of Labor Right. Despite four years of total control over the executive, and six continuous election wins in Student Council, Community lost the election in a historic upset, with opposition ticket Together for UMSU winning in a landslide over the incumbent administration. A newly formed ticket, Together was founded as a merger of progressive ticket Activate and independent ticket Growth, which formed Community’s independent caucus until late 2025. The ticket is comprised of the Greens, Labor Left, Labor Right’s Transport Workers’ Union sub-faction, and the Growth caucus.

FARRAGO MAGAZINE

Results

Together swept the executive and Office Bearer (OB) positions, only losing Environment OB, won by a lone dual-ticket Community-Socialist Action candidate, and Indigenous OB, won by Community in a small race comprising only 33 voters. Together also secured a majority in a majority of the departmental committees, winning a 4–3 majority in Activities, Welfare, Disabilities, People of Colour and Women’s. The ticket also won a 5–2 supermajority in the Queer department, and tied Community in Creative Arts, Education, and Environment, with minor political tickets holding the balance of power. Despite a landslide result elsewhere, and a two-ticket preferred result of more than 54 per cent against Community, Together was unable to secure a majority in the 22-seat Student Council, resulting in UMSU’s first hung council in years. Winning nine seats, Together won the largest share of seats in Council, while Community won eight, Socialist Action won three, and Independent Media and Independents for Southbank won one seat each. While Community and Socialist Action formed a coalition agreement prior to the election, it is unclear whether this coalition will persist into the next Council.

A key issue of the election was the conduct of Community’s presidential candidate and incumbent General Secretary Daniel Motika. A week before the election, the Returning Officer had given Motika an ultimatum to resign as Community’s Registering Officer, following a ruling against the ticket over its members’ alleged involvement in spreading false and defamatory rumours against the Clubs & Societies department, currently held by Activate. While there was insufficient evidence to suggest that Motika was personally involved in spreading these rumours, the ultimatum was given as Mr Motika had persistently provided “egregiously false” evidence to the Returning Officer, despite repeated warnings. A bulk of Motika’s controversies also stemmed from his working relationship with incumbent UMSU President Lushy Chinganya, whose defection from Community to Together was prompted by allegations of improper conduct by Motika in his role as General Secretary. In a June session of Student Council, Chinganya raised concerns over Motika’s association with the UniMelb branch of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), and whether this constituted a conflict of interest, given the Council’s focus on the club’s disaffiliation from the Clubs & Societies department. According to the ABC, the CSSA— which the UniMelb branch is an affiliate of—reports to and is directly funded by the Chinese embassy, which raised domestic safety concerns for Chinese dissidents and critics of Beijing. The most severe of Chinganya’s allegations came a week before the election, when Together published a video of Chinganya recounting her fallout with Community and Motika. Describing concerns about “good governance, transparency and a healthy workplace”, Chinganya referenced her worries over institutional records, conflicts of interest, compliance with regulations, tokenisation and apparent financial risk to UMSU.

NEWS

Election Week

While Community initially seemed poised to win re-election during the first day of the election due to its overwhelming number of political campaigners, it became apparent by the second day that the Community campaign was rapidly deteriorating, with its number of campaigners slumping, and a wave of successive ticket-wide campaigner bans against Community sending its campaign into freefall. The ticket-wide bans were issued by the Returning Officer amid multiple reported cases of serious electoral regulation violations by campaigners, including repeated and unauthorised entry into polling venues, surveillance of voters at polling booths, allegations of voter bribery and complaints concerning the treatment of polling clerks by campaigners. Motika himself received a total campaign ban during the election following revelations that over a period of seven weeks, he had ordered Community members to intentionally defy UMSU electoral regulations by tearing down “authorised or provable” campaign materials critical of Community. The most concerning report came when an elected member of the Women’s Committee issued a statement accusing Motika of inaction against registered sex offender Bao Phuc Cao, and a “grave departure from the reasonable standards of performance” for a student union general secretary. In March, Cao pleaded guilty to filming over 100 women in bathrooms and showers, including at his student accommodation, and is currently believed to be a UniMelb student. Cao’s case has garnered international attention. The Committee Member referenced the Committee’s repeated attempts to expel Cao from the Union and permanently ban him from UMSU spaces and events, and how the Committee’s letter of notice remained unactioned by Motika since July, raising concerns over the safety of women at the University.

Aftermath

Cartwheel Competition

However, despite the serious overtones of the election, it remained relatively upbeat and energetic at times, with ticket mascots like dancing Teletubbies and frolicking Spider-Men brightening the mood, and a universitywide cartwheel competition taking UniMelb by storm following a cartwheel challenge by President Lushy Chinganya on Day 2. While Chinganya achieved an impressive record of five cartwheels, Community’s Samuel Licciardino rocked Parkville with 50 cartwheels. However, on Day 4, Southbank Campus Coordinator-elect Elizabeth Pardallis escalated the competition by announcing a snap cartwheel convention at Southbank in a challenge against Parkville. Despite a valiant effort by Parkville, Independents for Southbank swept the cartwheel competition, with coCampus Coordinator-elect Leyla Boz dwarfing Parkville with 101 cartwheels, easily winning second place. Fellow cartwheeler Lara Malachowski sent it home for the ticket, putting Southbank on the map and winning first place with a historic 149 cartwheels, completely shattering all records.

Motika’s myriad scandals appeared to be consequential to Together’s landslide victory with the ticket’s presidential candidate Lottie Jenkins defeating Motika with a majority of first preference votes—52 per cent to 41 per cent—completely bypassing a twocandidate preferred count. Motika also appeared to have underperformed other Community candidates on the ballot, with the ticket’s General Secretary candidate Corbin Afanasyev outperforming Motika by 3 per cent on the primary vote and netting almost 100 more raw votes than Motika. In total, five downballot candidates running under the Community ticket achieved a higher share of raw votes than Motika, despite significantly lower voter turnout for such races. Following the conclusion of the election, Community filed an appeal to overturn the 2026 elections, alleging unsubstantiated claims of “misconduct” by the Returning Officer. Community’s appeal was dismissed, with the Tribunal dropping a thumping repudiation of Community. Both Motika and Afanasyev were disqualified from the election, and were banned from all participation in UMSU politics, with Afanasyev receiving a one-year ban, and Motika receiving a two-year ban. With the disqualification of Motika and Afanasyev, Jenkins won a headto-head contest against Progress’s Harrison Kemp, 85 per cent to 15 per cent. For the General Secretary race, Together candidate Khush Shah won against Progress’s Percival Taylor, 83 per cent to 17 per cent. With the decapitation of Community’s leadership and the future of the ticket unclear, the incoming Together administration will take office in December with a strong mandate from voters, and a pressing urge to restore students’ faith in their political leaders. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Who is UMSU?

Words by Taylah Xuereb

MSU (University of Melbourne Student Union) is meant to be a representation of the student body, yet most students don’t know anything about it. Unless you’re trapped inside the UMSU echo chamber, it’s likely you have no idea who your representatives on student council are, what they’re doing with your money, and how they’re directly impacting your university experience. The recent student election was to decide who would be selected as the student representatives of 2027, specifically who will fill the positions on council and become the office bearers. Specifically, there are 22 councillors: 15 general council representatives and 7 that are elected as restricted constituency representatives (Queer, Students of Colour, Students with Disabilities, International, Graduate, Indigenous, Southbank). Similar to traditional governments, the council consists of major parties, minor ones and independents. Community for UMSU currently holds an 11-seat majority in council, with this party having affiliations with Labor Right, Independents, and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA). Five seats are held by Activate- Left Action, which is affiliated with Labor Left, UniMelb for Palestine, Socialist

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Alternative, and the Labor Right Transport Workers’ Union of Australia. Finally, Growth is associated with Independent Labor, and holds three seats. However, in 2027 these parties will change, with Activate and Growth combining during the election to create Together for UMSU. Socialist ActionFree Palestine will also be a party in next year’s council. During the 2026 election for 2027, Socialist Action and Community for UMSU had a coalition agreement to run candidates on one another’s tickets. UMSU also consists of many independents including Independent Media, and Independent Southbank Students for Democracy. In 2027, the major parties will have to work with the independents to have their motions passed, since no party won a majority. Beyond councillors, UMSU is also made up of 32 paid office bearers of 17 representative departments. These departments include Media, Education (Academic Affairs), Education (Public Affairs), Activities, Creative Arts, Clubs and Societies, Welfare, Environment, Indigenous, Disabilities, Queer, Women’s, People of Colour, Southbank Activities, Southbank Education, and the Burnley Campus and Southbank Campus Coordinators. The President and General Secretary of UMSU are also paid positions, and councillors get paid based on their attendance at council meetings which typically take place a few times every semester.

Who funds UMSU? (hint: it’s you) Words by Amelie Martin

ith $10.4 million a year, UMSU has the capacity to oversee 230 clubs at the University of Melbourne. 89.7 per cent of this funding comes from the Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF), which every student pays. The remainder of funding comes from the sale of goods, equipment/ theatre hire, grants and interest, and other income. SSAF is a compulsory fee that you may have noticed on your University fees. In 2026, full-time students pay $373 and part-time students pay $279, providing about $25 million to the University of Melbourne. The University’s use of these funds is strictly regulated under the Government’s allowable expenditure provisions. These include supplies of food and drink, accommodation, health, welfare and employment. These funds are redirected to Melbourne University Sport, Student and Scholarly Services, the Graduate Student Association, and in particular, UMSU, who receive 38.2 per cent of SSAF funding. UMSU uses SSAF to fund each of its departments, events and clubs. These include Union Mart, Ida Bar and Farrago. Ida Bar reopened in 2025, with 2018 UMSU President Desiree Cai stating that the goal was to break even. Currently it offers food and drink “without emptying your bank account”, according to UMSU’s website. While some may rather keep their

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Understanding UMSU $373 of SSAF, historical alternatives did not prove more effective in assisting students. On 11 October 2022, the Higher Education Support Act 2003 was reformed to allow higher education providers to charge compulsory SSAF. Before this reform, these fees operated through Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU). This made the payment of student service fees, and membership in student unions optional. This saw drastic cuts to union funding, and limited their ability to assist students and organise events. Many services provided by UMSU such as legal advocacy and childcare collapsed. However, since universities remained obligated to fund their unions, this also caused cuts to some courses’ funding and increases in other student fees which could not be deferred like SSAF. At UniMelb, this meant funding decreased by 30 per cent. The introduction of SSAF both set limits to the fees that Universities were able to charge for student services and guaranteed that these services would receive funding. Similar to other tax-like systems, payment for services that do not directly benefit every student remains controversial. A 2023 review of SSAF at Monash University revealed that many Monash students considered SSAF too high and inconsistent. However, Union Mart does provide free food, drink and household amenities to students, and UMSU Legal provides free legal advice to students on a variety of issues.

Clubs & Societies Funding Has Been Cut – What This Means for Your Club Words by Paridhi Chhajed

lubs and Societies (C&S) funding has dropped for the third year running, even as the number of affiliated clubs hits a record high – a combination that’s left many clubs stretched thin. What happened, and what does it mean going forward? C&S received $270,000 of UMSU funding this year, down from $290,000 in 2025 and $310,200 in 2023. At the same time, the number of affiliated clubs has climbed to 251 (an all-time peak), driven by a wave of new affiliations and fewer clubs disaffiliating than in previous years. Less money spread across more clubs has meant a sharply reduced per-club grant cap: down to $2,000, from as high as $3,500 in past years. Many clubs are running out of their annual grant well before the year ends, leaving them to seek alternative options to cover costs. “[Clubs are] having to source more funding elsewhere, often from their members by increasing ticket prices or charging for memberships which were previously free or cheaper,” the Clubs

& Societies Office Bearer, Alex Gwynn told Farrago. The cuts have also scaled back C&S’s own programming: the amount of executive mixers and awards nights organised has shrunk, and some planned initiatives have been shelved entirely. The exact reasoning sits with student council and broader UMSU budget decisions. Gwynn said the cuts had frustrated many club executives, particularly since the grant cap was announced earlier this year. There’s been vocal pushback from clubs, and the Office Bearer said they’re hopeful “next year’s leadership will take the need for clubs to be properly funded and supported seriously, and give a budget that reflects the needs of clubs”. One proposal under discussion is a tiered funding model, where grant caps would scale with a club’s membership size – a change Gwynn said could distribute funding “more equitably” though it remains a work in progress. “Clubs are essential to student wellbeing, social connection, and development, so properly supporting them is incredibly important” Gwynn said. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Perspectives on NTEU Strike Words by Elliot McCarthy

iting intense workloads and uncooperative bargaining, members of the University of Melbourne branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) began the first of their industrial actions with a half day strike on 27 August. Farrago spoke to several interesred parties on the day.

Experiences with Workload

The NTEU and the University have been deliberating over a new enterprise agreement since November 2025. Going into negotiations, incoming NTEU University of Melbourne Branch President, Dr Elizabeth “Liz” Strakosch, told Farrago “the number one issue” was to lessen workloads for staff. She spoke of “the overwork and the stress” that university workers face because of the ill-informed allocation of work. “We want the University to focus its money on staff and students, not on capital works and real estate portfolios”, said Dr Strakosch. University staff across Australia have been voicing similar grievances. 12

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Private, for-profit university, Torrens University Australia, has been taken to court over issues of workload recognition and incorrect payment. Torrens was found to be unlawfully counting assignment correction as ʻassociated working time’, which pays at a lower rate and is reserved for other academic duties such as certain student consultations and tutorial or lecture preparation. The NTEU branch for the University of Sydney also went on strike, on 2 September, calling out workload intensity and a disconnect between management and teaching staff. University of Sydney Professor John Buchanan said that these disputes indicate that, broadly, across the country, “the neoliberal experiment has failed catastrophically”, and Buchanan proposes that the NTEU is providing an alternate pathway forward through their democratic collective action. Rory, University of Melbourne librarian and NTEU member, told Farrago about a fellow University staff member who “was feeling really embarrassed and ashamed to ask her colleague, who was on leave, about a work-related question. […] because the team was just so small, they needed to get help from someone who was on leave”. “[My coworker was] almost brought to the point of tears”. Rory outlined that scenarios like these are a consequence of the University’s “cost-saving measures”, where they “keep roles unfilled [… which] results in chronic understaffing”.

Negotiations

According to NTEU members, enterprise agreement negotiations with the University have been challenging. Jim Murphy, incoming Secretary of the University of Melbourne NTEU branch, spoke to Farrago about University management dismissing bargaining proposals “before even seeing the details”, claiming that “on a couple of [proposals] they’ve said no just from hearing the title”. An enterprise agreement (EA) is a contract between the employer

and two or more employees which outlines workloads, wages, leave, and other working conditions. EAs are the culmination of discussion and negotiation between the employer and the group of employees. In a statement, the University of Melbourne has outlined that they want an enterprise agreement that is “fair, recognises the value and contribution that all staff members make to our institution, and one that positions the University for long-term sustainability and success”. According to the Fair Work Act 2009, both parties must bargain with one another ʻin good faith’, meaning they must respond to proposals in a timely manner, give genuine consideration, and provide reasons for their responses to proposals. “We have a real problem with the University’s approach to bargaining”, said Dr Carla Winston, Lecturer and NTEU University of Melbourne branch committee member, “we’ve had months and months to talk about detailed, and careful, and logical claims, we’ve had lots of time to offer solutions, [...] and we’ve just heard basically nothing [from the University] on most of our major issues”. The University of Melbourne stated that they “remain focused on good faith negotiations” and are working to reach an agreement “as soon as possible”. The University “regret[s] any inconvenience that this industrial action may have caused”. The previous enterprise agreement was finalised in 2023 after two week-long strikes from the NTEU’s University of Melbourne branch, the longest series of industrial action in the union’s history. The issues raised by the NTEU in 2023 primarily centred around job security for casual university employees and lessening intense workloads, issues that the NTEU continue to push for again in current negotiations. Months after the University of Melbourne’s 2023 agreement, the RMIT University branch for the NTEU followed suit and went on strike for a week in March 2024, finally leading to an enterprise agreement with RMIT University staff after more than 1,000 days without one.

Inconvenience to Students

When asked if the NTEU was concerned about the strike’s impact on students, Dr Strakosch responded, “we never take industrial action lightly […] but we are really really heartened that the student union and so many students have actually been supportive”. Lushy Chinganya, UMSU President, spoke to ralliers and strikers, saying “we are standing for a university where ʻfairness’ and ʻrespect’ aren’t just words of a strategic plan”. UMSU has announced on their social media and website that the student union “stands in solidarity with NTEU members”. When asking students in the crowd to “give a quick yell” to make their presence known, Chinganya was met with many cheers. “I am here to show my support for my tutors and lecturers who make my University experience and education possible”, University of Melbourne student Charlize Chammat told Farrago. “As someone who pays lots of money to this university, [and] as a human being, I think that workers of all kinds should have adequate working conditions”.

Strike Outcome

The half day strike that took place on 27th August has been described by NTEU members as more of a warning rather than the pièce de résistance of industrial action. Incoming Secretary, Murphy hopes that the events of the 27th “puts management on notice”, yet, he explained, that the rally and subsequent barbecue served additional purposes for “union members to come together, to see one another, to know that we are in it together”. “I see a lot of comradeship that comes from doing these rallies, […] we build a bond that is more serious and more human, and I think, through that, a lot of people become prepared to sacrifice more for each other”, said Murphy. NTEU’s University of Melbourne branch is planning for further industrial action.

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Australia Wants Fewer Migrants But Still Needs Them Words by Syakira Setiananda

ustralia’s migration system is undergoing one of its most substantial restructures since the reopening of the country’s borders after COVID-19. The changes go beyond reducing numbers. They are an attempt to change who enters, who can stay, which workers Australia prioritises, and how much control the government has over a system that has increasingly shaped housing, universities and the labour market. On 17 September, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced a package of changes targeting temporary migration, including international students, working holiday makers, visitor visa holders and people who overstay their visas. The government says the measures are intended to restore control over a migration system that has become too demand-driven, while reducing net overseas migration (NOM) to 245,000 in 2026–27 and 225,000 in 2027–28. The announcement came as the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that NOM had reached 292,100 in the year to March 2026, down 5.6 per cent from the previous year. Australia’s population nonetheless increased by 392,700 over the same period, with NOM accounting for 292,100 of that increase. The distinction shows the government is not proposing to end large-scale migration, nor has it imposed a general cap on international students. Instead, it is attempting to alter the composition and pathways through which people enter and remain in Australia. 14

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A Shift From DemandDriven Migration

For decades, Australia’s migration system has relied substantially on demand. Burke has argued that successive governments allowed employers to recruit workers, universities to enrol international students and businesses to benefit from population growth on the assumption that housing and infrastructure would adjust around them. That model is now considered insufficient, particularly when housing supply cannot respond quickly enough to population growth. The government is increasingly asking which migrants it needs, where they should work, what skills they should have, and whether the economic benefits of their arrival justify the additional demand placed on housing and infrastructure. The reforms therefore draw sharper distinctions between categories of temporary migrants. Skilled visa applications connected to construction, healthcare, teaching, agriculture, aquaculture, fishing, resources, law enforcement and defence are now being prioritised. From 19 September, new ministerial directions replaced the previous processing priorities and put these sectors at the top of the queue for specified temporary, provisional and permanent skilled visas. The points system is also being redesigned so that certain housing construction trades can receive the same points recognition as a

university qualification in the skilled migration system. A nurse, construction worker or teacher is being treated differently from a temporary migrant whose pathway into Australia is primarily connected to study or short-term work. In this sense, the reforms are less about migration itself than the economic roles migrants are expected to perform.

International Students and Their Dependants

Some of the most consequential changes are those affecting international students. Under the new rules, most new international students will no longer be able to bring family members as secondary applicants, and similar restrictions will apply to graduate visa holders. Existing families already in Australia are protected by grandfathering rules, provided they remain in Australia. There are important exemptions, including arrangements for students from ASEAN and Pacific countries and for some courses such as PhDs. The government is therefore not reducing the number of international students it plans to admit. Instead, it is attempting to reduce the number of people who arrive alongside them. In 2024–25, international education generated $53.6 billion in export income for Australia, including $29.9 billion in spending on goods and services and $23.5 billion in tuition fees. During the 2025 calendar year, the figure reached almost $55 billion. International students

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consequently occupy an unusual position in Australian economic policy. They are simultaneously migrants, consumers, students and a major export industry. Universities and businesses benefit from international tuition and spending. Governments benefit from economic activity and, eventually, from graduates who enter the Australian workforce. At the same time, students require accommodation, transport and other services, meaning population growth has immediate consequences for local infrastructure. The new restriction is therefore an attempt to preserve the first part of this equation while reducing some of the second. That approach also reflects a longer-running attempt to separate education from migration pathways. Students who transfer between courses will increasingly need to apply for a new visa, while students progressing to another qualification will generally be required to move upwards in qualification level. Repeatedly moving between courses or into lower-level qualifications is being targeted as potential “visa hopping”. A new instrument made on 21 September also prevents holders of several temporary visas, including Temporary Graduate and Visitor visas, from lodging a student visa application while in Australia.

Housing and Labour as The Political Centre of Reforms

The strongest political justification for the changes is housing. The government now treats its NOM forecasts as targets partly because it wants population growth to slow enough for housing supply to catch up. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council reported in 2025 that Australia completed approximately 177,000 dwellings in 2024, compared with underlying housing demand of about 223,000. It forecast that Australia would fall short of the National Housing Accord’s target of 1.2 million homes over five years. But migration is only one part of

that equation. The housing council has identified labour shortages, construction costs, financing conditions, planning constraints and the responsiveness of the housing system as factors affecting supply. A significant number of migrants in Australia contribute to the systems that supply housing. Migrants work in construction, transport, healthcare, hospitality, aged care and other services required by a growing population. Working holiday makers are an important source of short-term labour in construction, agriculture and hospitality. The Working Holiday Maker program is not abolished, but it is substantially restricting longer stays. Applicants seeking a second working holiday year will have to enter a ballot after completing the existing regional work requirement. The number of second-year places will be capped at 45,000, compared with 57,000 people who qualified last year. Third-year places will fall to 5,000 compared to 31,000 last year. The first year of the working holiday program remains available, and the existing regional work requirements for qualifying for subsequent years remain. The economic question is therefore not simply whether fewer working holiday makers will stay, it is whether the labour previously supplied by those workers can be replaced. Therefore, the same principle applies to skilled migration. The government has retained family migration pathways for skilled workers because, as Burke has argued, many doctors, nurses and construction workers arrive with partners or children. Cutting family migration indiscriminately could therefore make Australia less attractive to the very workers the government says it needs. The emerging system is consequently selective rather than uniformly restrictive: fewer pathways for some temporary migrants, stronger incentives for certain skilled occupations and continued reliance on migration in sectors where domestic labour supply is insufficient.

Domestic Politics and Overseas Diplomacy

The reforms also need to be understood within a rapidly changing political debate at home and Australia’s broader regional priorities. Labor’s target of reducing NOM comes amid competing proposals for a substantially smaller migration program: One Nation has proposed cutting more than 750,000 temporary visas over three years and eventually limiting NOM to 130,000, while the Coalition has argued for lower migration linked more closely to housing construction, with figures publicly discussed around 150,000– 170,000 a year. Labor’s position therefore sits within a wider political contest over how population growth should be managed. At the same time, the government’s exemptions for students from ASEAN and Pacific countries show that visa policy is not solely a domestic economic instrument. Australia has been seeking stronger relationships across the Indo-Pacific, and education forms part of those diplomatic ties. In 2025, Australia welcomed approximately 145,000 students from Southeast Asia, representing 17 per cent of international students, while the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade identifies education, migration and tourism as important components of Australia’s people-to-people connections with Southeast Asia.

What The Reforms Are Really Changing

The significance of these reforms lies less in the reduction of migration itself than in the changing logic behind it. Australia is moving towards a system where migration is increasingly treated as a policy instrument to be calibrated against labour shortages, housing capacity, economic returns and strategic interests, rather than as an inherently beneficial source of population growth. That shift gives the state greater influence over who is considered economically or strategically valuable, while raising difficult questions about the trade-offs involved and who bears their costs. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Melbourne Students Report Skipping Meals as Grocery Prices Climb, Despite New Supermarket Law Words by Paridhi Chhajed

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he queue for Union Mart, UMSU Welfare’s free grocery service, wound around the corner this week as students waited to collect essentials they say they can no longer reliably afford. A few steps away, the Campus Canteen, which sells $5 meals to students, has also been drawing steady crowds. Food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose 3.2 per cent in the year to July 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and while that’s down from the peak of the 2022 crisis, it still outpaces wage growth for most students. UMSU’s Welfare report, A Campus in Crisis, surveyed more than 1,600 students. Eighty-eight per cent of respondents earn less than the poverty line, more than a quarter have less than $100 saved, and nearly half said they had gone hungry in class because they couldn’t afford lunch. “I have been forced to reduce the amount of food I consume,” one student wrote in the survey, describing a diet of one meal a day. A separate study of University of Tasmania students found food insecurity rising from 42 per cent in 2022 to 53 per cent in 2024, using the US food security metric, a trend since recorded at other Australian universities too. International and first-year students were hit hardest.

grocery competitors through the 1960s and ’70s. Those 1978 amendments loosened the rules further, and acquisitions by both companies took off through the ’80s. Coles snapped up companies including Bi-Lo and merged with Myer to form Coles Myer in 1985, while Woolworths absorbed rivals such as Safeway. In 2009, the ACCC reached an agreement with Coles and Woolworths to phase out restrictive shopping-centre leases that blocked competitors from opening nearby. Fifteen years later, the same complaint resurfaced. Metcash, which owns IGA, told the ACCC’s 2024–25 supermarkets inquiry that Coles and Woolworths could “afford longer development timelines than independent grocers and snap up land they may not develop for some time.” The ACCC’s final report found Coles holds 59 undeveloped sites earmarked for future supermarkets, and Woolworths 105 — against just 17 for Aldi. It stopped short of assessing whether any of those sites amount to land banking, calling the question too complex to resolve. In regional Victoria, Coles has denied owning a site near Shepparton that has sat vacant for around 16 years, directly across the road from one of its own stores.

How Did Groceries Get This Expensive?

A New Law to Stop Excessive Pricing

Experts point to market concentration and price gouging as the main drivers of Australia’s rising grocery prices. The sector wasn’t always this concentrated. Coles and Woolworths both began as general merchandise retailers, and their combined market share was less than 20 per cent as recently as 1964. Before the Trade Practices Act’s merger laws were amended in 1978, regulators already had limited power to block acquisitions — which is how the two chains grew by buying up smaller

The mandatory Food and Grocery Code, which sets standards for how supermarkets treat suppliers, only came about after a 2024 review by Craig Emerson. Emerson found the code’s earlier voluntary version had done nothing to fix the unequal bargaining power between supermarkets and suppliers. A merger notification process became mandatory for large retailers from 1 January 2026, and from 1 July, setting excessive prices relative to supply costs became a criminal offence for “very large” retailers.

Penalties for breaches are steep: the greater of $10 million, three times the benefit gained, or 10 per cent of annual turnover. Coles and Woolworths have pushed back, arguing the law could actually push costs up rather than down. The Law Council of Australia’s business law arm made a similar case in a submission to Treasury, warning that without a clear definition of “excessive,” retailers could face higher compliance and legal costs just trying to justify their pricing — costs that would likely be passed on to shoppers. The offence only kicks in once a price is judged significantly excessive, leaving an untested middle ground between “expensive” and “illegal.”

The Alternatives Students Are Using Instead

Students haven’t waited around for a fix. The ACCC named Aldi as one of the few remaining sources of price competition, though only for the narrower range of products it stocks. “I used to exclusively go to Woolies because that’s what I was introduced to first,” one student said. “But then I saw Aldi prices and realised I was kinda being robbed blind. Now I go to different stores for different stuff […]. It’s genuinely what you have to do to not get a $100 grocery bill every week,” they said. Another student has switched to buying in bulk and reading labels more closely than before. “I try to look for things that will last me for a long time, like big bottles of pasta or ketchup,” they said. Others rely on Union Mart, foodsharing apps such as Olio, or the free breakfast and brunch programs run by UMSU International and UMSU Collectives. For now, though, the most visible response on campus isn’t coming from Canberra, the ACCC, or the supermarkets. It’s students, queuing around the corner for what they can get for free.

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The Cost-of-Living Crunch Behind Melbourne’s Public Transport Fare Evasion Words by Sophie Sewell

John M (@thatboy_john_). 2026. “LETS START A PETITION TO ABOLISH MYKI INSPECTORS”. Instagram, 25 August. https://www.instagram.com/reels/ DNxurNYZoiS/ 18

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he rising cost of living is driving many young Melburnians to skip public transport fares, with many saying that the cost is becoming another expense they simply cannot afford. Fare evading on Melbourne’s public transport (PTV) is hardly a new phenomenon. When it was last reported in July 2024, it was estimated that fare evaders were costing the Victorian government $12 million in lost revenue every six months. A Department of Transport survey in October 2025 found that fare compliance had decreased from 95.5 per cent to 93.5 per cent in May that same year. For some, the decision is less about rebellion and more about financial strategy. When rent, groceries, bills and the increasingly offensive price of a pint are all competing for the same limited pool of money, an $11.40 tram ride can suddenly feel less like a public service and more like a financial negotiation. With the cost of living biting harder than the average Myki inspector, those loud green scanners have become a high-stakes checkpoint for young people. “It’s just too expensive”, said Caitlin, a University of Melbourne master’s student, who says the cost of public transport is becoming harder to justify alongside other everyday expenses. The sentiment is shared by fellow student, Vienna, who described Melbourne’s public transport fares as “daylight robbery”.

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A Temporary Relief

In April this year, the Victorian government announced that public transport was to be free across the state in a bid to incentivise people to use public transport amid the increased fuel prices caused by the war in the Middle East. Former Premier Jacinta Allan extended the free public transport initiative into May, before announcing that fares would be half price from the 1st of June for the remainder of the year. The cost of full-fare daily travel went from $11.40 to $5.70, while concession fares dropped from $5.70 to $2.85. The state government said the measure would save a full-time commuter up to $400 over the two free months, while half-price fares until the end of the year would save more than $850 for individual users. For young people who rely on PTV every day, this announcement came as a welcome relief. For many, the reduced fare meant that they were more willing to tap on. “Before, it was like I’m going to decide whether to tap on or buy lunch that day,” said Rosie, a UniMelb student. “Now it’s reasonable, I’ll pay it, but before it was extortionate.” The price cut meant that Melbourne’s public transport fares went from the most expensive for short distances to one of the cheaper cities in Australia. In 2024, the Queensland government applied a one-way flat fare of $0.50 to all public transport services statewide. Initially introduced as a sixmonth trial, the 50 cent fare was made permanent from February 2025. This initiative significantly reduced the level of fare evasion, with the number of infringement notices falling by around 40 per cent between August 2024 and February 2025 compared to the same period a year earlier. In Victoria, with the reduced fares set to end at the beginning of next year, a sense of impending doom is looming on young people who have appreciated the luxury of an affordable fare.

PTV’s Hidden Fare Increases

In January this year, prior to the global fuel crisis, the state government quietly rolled out a fare increase of $0.40 per day. The full-fare daily Myki cap rose from $11 to $11.40, with concession fares increasing to $5.70. This translates to an annual increase of up to $104 for those using PTV five days a week. This continues the trend of gradual increases over recent years. In 2023, the daily fare cap reached $10 following an 80 per cent rise, with further increases since pushing costs higher for commuters already battling cost-of-living pressures. This comes in conjunction with a secret 1 per cent tax on all public transport fares that came into force in January 2025, its existence not revealed to the public until an Auditor-General report was tabled in parliament on the 26th of August this year. The levy, approved in 2021 when now-Premier Ben Carroll was Minister for Public Transport, was intended to help pay for Victoria’s Suburban Rail Loop, a new train line that commenced construction this year, but has since been scrapped. Opposition leader Jess Wilson described the levy as a “secret public transport tax” and a “scandal of the highest order”. As ticket prices are getting steeper, so is the penalty for being caught without one. Melbourne’s Myki fines are some of the world’s harshest. Failing to produce a valid ticket results in the commuter copping a hefty $305 chunk out of their bank balance, more than three times the $100 penalty imposed in Western Australia. If making public transport more affordable makes young people more willing to comply with the fares, it raises the question of why deterrence through substantial financial penalties remains the preferred approach. When full fares make their unwelcome return next year, young people will be forced to contend with that question the hard way.

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Photography by Wil Simmonds 20

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T R I N I T Y C O L L E G E ’ S L A D I E S L O U N G E A nineteen-year-old has co-created the first space dedicated exclusively to women in Trinity College’s 150-year history. Words by Alexander Mingay

month ago, Mimi Koczkar tells me, she was sitting on the curb outside Glamorama Nightclub in Fitzroy, waiting for her friends to come out. It was past two, and the street was almost empty. A woman she had never seen before, older with long grey hair, a trolley beside her and a small dog following at her feet, paused on the footpath and asked her if she was alright. Mimi said she was fine; her friends would be out soon. The woman stayed where she was. “No woman should ever be alone by herself at night,” she said. “I’ll stay until I know you’re safe.” Mimi is a 19-year-old student at the VCA. She is also the co-founder of Trinity Residential College’s first women-only space, along with fellow student Holly Hancock. The two girls are the first appointed female representatives in the institution’s 150-year history. I am sitting with Mimi inside one of the institution’s older wooden buildings in a room that, in a few hours, I will no longer be welcome in. Like every Tuesday at 7�30 pm, this room will become the Trinity College Ladies Lounge. In its first months, the lounge has facilitated bracelet making, an hour-long discussion of the Madonna-Whore complex, and last night, a basket-weaving workshop run by a Wadawurrung artist—none of which had a precedent at the college. While the activities are diverse, the 22

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mission is simple. Mimi says: “For one moment we can escape the social and structural hierarchies and all be together with the common interest that we’re all women.” The idea was born last year over “Formal Hall,” a college communal dining tradition (which includes the compulsory wearing of academic gowns, Mimi explains). The elected senior student was endorsing the Men’s Shed, an existing space dedicated for men to discuss male mental health and feel welcome and safe (as he put it). Admiring the idea, Mimi approached him, asking about a women’s equivalent. Mimi remembers his face dropping to a deadpan. “Oh,” he said, “there isn’t one.” This was compounded by other cultural observations, like how the men’s rugby grand final was scheduled during a time that drew a crowd, while the women played early in the morning leading to little support. It was these “little moments of bias” that frustrated Mimi. “Men have these spaces to exist, and women kind of have to mould themselves around [them]”. The Ladies Lounge, the name a deliberate homage to MONA’s famously controversial exhibition, was Mimi’s response. Kirsha Kaechele’s Ladies Lounge installation took the national spotlight in 2024 when a male visitor sued, citing anti-discrimination laws, after

being denied entry. A Tasmanian tribunal initially ruled in his favour. However, upon appeal (and after the lounge was forced to operate out of the women’s bathroom), the decision was overturned in the Tasmanian supreme court. It is the principle of the saga that stayed with Mimi. “The man who made the complaint couldn’t reckon with the fact that there was a space that he was not allowed to be in,” she says. “That kind of entitlement is something we like to talk about quite a bit.” However, her lounge is not Kirsha’s. There is no admission ticket, nor men serving fruit and champagne (to my disappointment). It is open weekly, student-led, and confidential. What Mimi hopes is that the lounge facilitates and nurtures an inclusive community that is, perhaps counterintuitively, only possible through exclusivity. Unlike Kirsha’s, there has been no formal challenge to Trinity’s Lounge, Mimi explains before pausing: “just the budget”. While the Men’s Shed has been formally allocated funding by the college, the Ladies Lounge has not. Although the Ladies Lounge may request reimbursements for certain expenses, this is not the same as being trusted with a formalised budget, she explains. This is despite the proven success of Mimi and Holly’s adjacent projects this year, including the first

Ladies Lounge outing at a cafe

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organised celebrations of International Women’s Week in the college’s social calendar and the coordination of an intercollegiate Women’s Day walk raising over $800 for Womankind Worldwide. Last night, the lounge was full. Close to midnight, after the Lounge had closed for the night, I spoke to Wadawurrung woman Scarlett Mercer, who explains that she has been searching for a way to bring a form of Indigenous cultural support to the college that was practical and relational rather than merely measured in funding and resources. Mimi and Holly’s Ladies Lounge offered the perfect space. In a special collaboration between the Female and Indigenous student representatives, Mercer invited her sister, an established Indigenous artist, to run a basket-weaving workshop. Weaving, she explains, is a healing and intuitive

form of knowledge traditionally held and carried forth by women. While some knowledge (of certain techniques or materials) is exclusively reserved for Mob, Mercer explains that she couldn’t think of a single person from Mob who doesn’t want to share their culture. The weaving circle facilitated a safe space to ʻyarn’ and share stories, which last night had a special focus on the intersection of the female and Indigenous experience. “As a vulnerable [Indigenous] student here, I appreciate the level of security of the Ladies Lounge,” Mercer says. “It was this beautiful moment of the communal college life that felt good because it was based in something bigger.” On an institutional level, Mercer is a little blunter. “Trinity is a business first and foremost… they support us when it looks good,” she said. But this night was different. “It felt real,” she explained, “it was student-

led, it was mob-led, and it was based in community.” Already, there are big plans for the Ladies Lounge. While the lounge is undeniably popular and effective, it is, as Mimi admits, currently unprofessional. “Ideally, we would have a budget. We would be a recognised society. We would have speakers come in—inspiring women and experts in our issues. I just want it to be bigger!” she says. Five years from now, Mimi hopes that that a first year can walk into the lounge and feel like she can say whatever she wants and feel supported, “because everyone deserves a space where their voice matters, and where someone is willing to stay on the curb in the early hours of the night, just a little longer, to make sure they’re okay”.

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On the Renaissance of Media Piracy Words by Fergus Sinnott

Media piracy has had a resurgence as an alternative media consumption channel in recent years—but even in an age of technofeudalism, can we forgo its ethical and legal implications?

can fondly recall the day in 2019 when Disney+ launched in Australia. It was a big deal to a teenager who’d made a point of watching every film in the Walt Disney Animation Studios catalogue. It was understandable that Disney would capitulate to what was, at the time, still a developing landscape of streaming services made by film and television studios, promising complete access to their back catalogue and the vague promise of new, original programming. But in the years since, streaming services seem to have created just as many issues as they have purportedly solved when it comes to entertainment consumption. And it’s an experience that’s becoming all the more common: you sign up to a streaming service solely for the purpose of watching a particular TV show you’re interested in. If you’re lucky, you’ll remember to cancel your free trial before the end of the following month rolls around. In other cases, you’ll have a sudden urge to occupy your evening with a film you’ve been meaning to watch for months, only to find that it’s not available on any of the streaming services you’re already paying for. And if you’re brave enough to venture onto the Apple or Google Play stores to rent or buy a program, it’s likely that the latter option will afford you just as little permanent ownership as the former. In amongst all of this, streaming services continue to raise their monthly and annual subscription costs, each time prompting users to assess the value of continuing to pay this new price. There’s no denying that the streaming

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model has fundamentally reconfigured the economic structures of the film and television industries. So too has it restructured the terms of employment for actors, filmmakers and crew members in the entertainment industry, including rates of pay, residuals and unauthorised digital representations of likenesses. These concerns were at the heart of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, which indicated a widespread dissatisfaction with the implications of this reconfiguration brought to a fever pitch. Despite the fact that an agreement ultimately reached among members of the union, its resolutions are neither watertight nor all-encompassing. Much has been written about the 2026 Paramount-Warner Bros merger, which has implications for the streaming libraries of both companies, not to mention for the influx of foreign investors into the fold and continued concerns about Paramount’s ties to the current Trump administration. This has reignited conversations about the structures of the entertainment ecosystem both in Hollywood and on a global scale. What the merger could mean for, if nothing else, the availability of content on existing streaming services is a problem in and of itself. It’s not uncommon even now to go onto a streaming platform and see a “Leaving Soon” marker above a poster for what is purportedly an original program exclusive to the service itself. Various platforms, including HBO Max and Netflix, have also become notorious for completely eliminating any access whatsoever to programs they had previously financed and/or distributed,

much to the chagrin of the cast and crew who appeared in them. In the face of such corporate restructuring, it’s difficult not to assume that these issues will only become more pronounced. The issues of ownership and access that characterise modern streaming systems have contributed in part to the resurgence of the media piracy ecosystem as an alternative channel for media access and consumption. Media piracy as a practice first emerged in 19999 via Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing service that allowed users access to people’s hard drives to share MP3 files. Napster sent shockwaves through the music industry at the turn of the century. This led to the filing of a lawsuit against the platform by A&M Records, Inc in 2001, which ultimately held that Napster could be held liable for contributory infringement (when a third party like a peer-to-peer platform facilitates an individual’s infringement of intellectual property rights) and vicarious infringement (when a platform benefits financially or otherwise from an individual’s infringement) of copyright. The Pirate Bay—the most popular online index for the peer-to-peer sharing of video, audio and other media—was launched a few years later in 2003. By 2008, BitTorrent—the communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing— had become the most popular file sharing network on the Internet. Naturally, the Pirate Bay has also been involved in several lawsuits, as both a plaintiff and defendant, regarding copyright infringement and commercial exploitation. After 2008, peer-to-peer

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traffic began to decrease, due to the emergence of other video sharing platforms like YouTube and the dawn of legitimate streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this decline in popularity, statistics demonstrate a renaissance in BitTorrent and media piracy. In 2024, piracy sites were visited over 216 billion times, while the U. S. Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly reported multibillion-dollar losses to the US economy as a result of piracy-related issues. Piracy is also particularly prevalent in countries such as Russia, China and Indonesia, where streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and/or Spotify are unavailable or have been prohibited. The Pirate Bay remains one of the ten most popular torrent indexes as of 2025. The issues surrounding the use and organisation of streaming platforms are part and parcel of a growing concern regarding the notion of technofeudalism. The term has an indeterminate origin but is best codified by French philosopher Cédric Durand in his 2020 text Technoféodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (published in English as How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy in 2024). The book charts the evolution of modern digitisation on a global scale, leveraging the system of feudalism to explore the economic, political and social implications of tech companies and their reliance on control over data, content and the manner in which we, as users, engage with any and all forms of digital media. While Napster emerged as a more modest rebuttal to the limitations placed on digital file sharing at the time, the media piracy renaissance today seems to speak more to a growing dissatisfaction among consumers with these technofeudalist models. Today’s media pirate does so with the notion that if purchasing doesn’t constitute owning, piracy doesn’t constitute stealing. It’s a valid argument in theory, but not necessarily in practice. Piracy is, of course, illegal. Many of us will recall the Motion Picture Association’s piracy public service announcement that was encoded onto commercially distributed DVDs. Today, it remains an iconic signifier of 2000s pop culture and physical media, a relic of a former medium that has now been

veiled in a nostalgic sheen, but the weight of its messaging hasn’t diminished. Piracy also poses threats to individual digital devices and digital networks if corrupt or otherwise malicious files are accessed via BitTorrent. But on the other hand, piracy does appear to be the logical conclusion when the issues posed by the current streaming market and accessibility to entertainment media continue to abound. Many game developers, for example, have encouraged audiences to pirate their games, arguing that they themselves wouldn’t have been able to access media objects formative to them if it weren’t for piracy platforms. Here, piracy makes access to art and culture an equal playing field in socioeconomic terms, a virtual Library of Alexandria from which no-one is barred entry. Media piracy also circumvents the issues raised by licensing agreements for digital content that users have in fact purchased, such as eBooks, and the companies that leverage these agreements for their own benefit. It’s not difficult to visualise this kind of sharing of digital resources as a form of digital community formation in and of itself, pirate ships in the night passing one another and exchanging resources without any attendant issues of scarcity and/or depletion. But media piracy, particularly with film and television programs, is situated in a difficult position where theatrical releases and experiential value are concerned. In a post-COVID era, reliable box office returns for any theatrically released film have become all the more precarious and unpredictable. For every Obsession or Backrooms that sparks conversation about the staying power of the theatrical experience, hundreds of other recent releases fail to turn a profit. For every new box office record set by IP films or legacy sequels, there’s conversations about superhero fatigue and creative bankruptcy. Even when alternative media channels like BitTorrent are readily available, it also contributes to this broader economic instability for cinemas as entertainment continues its migration to the digital. In amongst conversations about the access and ownership afforded by digital media, piracy ultimately takes up the same mantle as streaming services do—a mode of engagement that fails to properly remunerate artists for the work

they have done and one that prioritises, above all else, expediency. So, where can we as media consumers go from here? Well, for one, there have been recent developments in media industries for the better with regards to some of these overarching issues. A 2026 class action lawsuit against Sony found the entertainment company liable for the monopolization of their digital game market, resulting in a $7.85 million settlement that will be paid out to PlayStation Store users who have been impacted by Sony’s manipulation of purchasing terms. Furthermore, Netflix has announced that, following a contentious relationship with US cinemas regarding theatrical release windows, they have agreed to distribute and report on revenue for films of theirs that are being positioned as 2027 awards season contenders. On the one hand, the media piracy renaissance represents the conflation of multiple issues with access to and engagement with media today, not to mention the various systems— economic, political and social—that shape and are shaped by entertainment industries. While media piracy serves as a quick, convenient fix for the problems this poses for consumers, it doesn’t address the broader implications of streaming services—and practically every other digitally-focused business the world over—and their technofeudalist tendencies. It also doesn’t address the viability nor the importance of cinemas, which continue to face largely diminished box office returns across the world. In any case, the medium is the message here: the statistical resurgence of BitTorrent articulates a growing dissatisfaction with these digital platforms, whose emphasis on financial returns and capital growth takes priority over the values and interests of the users. Thus, when engaging with media— whether it be film, television, music, gaming or otherwise—it’s important to consider not only what, but where and how we choose to consume: Who benefits? Who suffers? Which do I value the most between ease of access, experiential value, ownership and cost in this particular circumstance? It’s a difficult line—or plank, if you will—to walk, but it’s one of many we must all traverse in our digitally mediated lives nonetheless. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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hese days, my maxxing has reached maximum capacity. Initially, it started with whimsy-maxxing my outfits before I decided to max out other domains of my life. In some domains I have had great triumphs. These are the mundane domains: friendshipmaxxing, fiber-maxxing, bedtime maxxing, chore-maxxing, budget-maxxing, and comfortmaxxing among others. You get the idea. In other domains, my maxxing hasn’t been doing quite as well. My current love life is a sad little example of delusion-maxxing, one-sided crush-maxxing and draftmaxxing ten different replies to a single ʻlol’ or ʻlmao’ text that feels too casual to everyone except the person waiting for it. My romantic tribulations aside, ʻmaxxing’ is becoming socially endemic even in places where you least expect it. A few weeks ago, outside Arts West, I even encountered an activist who told me they were ʻsocialistmaxxing’. ʻMaxxing’ has become so ubiquitous as a verb that we hardly ever hear the term ʻmaximum’ thrown around as an adjective or a noun. The genesis of ʻmaxxing’ in the existing cultural wave is both humorous and concerning as it evokes images of bonesmashing and thumb-pulling looksmaxxers (think Braden Peters, Clavicular and Kareem Shami—the self-proclaimed ʻgodfather of looksmaxxing’). While we may laugh at the absurdity of looksmaxxing, there is something ontologically alarming about this shift from ʻmaximum’ to ʻmaxxing’. In itself, ʻmaximum’ is a banal term. It is a static limit or state of being. ʻMaxxing’, on the other hand, is an ongoing and active process of optimization. It is not a state of being — it is a state of continuous action which completely flips how we view human potential and daily life.

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As a child, I loved visiting the Hundred Acre Wood with Winnie the Pooh and my first crush Christopher Robin. I remember Winnie frequently stopping to look at things and appreciating the small details of the woodland. Quite famously, Christopher Robin and Pooh loved doing ʻnothing’. In The House at Pooh Corner, Corner , Christopher Robin even gives us a definition of ʻnothing’, remarking that ʻ[I]t means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering’. Maxxing is precisely the opposite of Pooh and Christopher Robin’s delightful nothingness. Instead of sitting on branches and eating honey, we are estranged in the wheel of productivity culture. Instead of maxxing our lives, we are effectively minimizing them. This obsession with maximalist productivity isn’t new. ʻIdleness is the enemy of the soul’, said Saint Benedict of Nursia in the early sixth century. Even Hegel condemned idleness, emphasizing the interests of society and diminishing the interests of the individual. Other historical figures distinguished idleness from other more valuable forms of leisure. Consider Aristotle’s characterization of scholé scholé,, which positions leisure as the condition for learning, or the Romantic defense of poetry as a spiritual and politically necessary form of art. Indeed, in this environment where idleness and productive leisure often crop up, we might ask ourselves: what is new about maxxing? Unlike previous didactic, poetic and philosophical characterizations, maxxing is very trendy. While we do not openly prescribe maxxing as a lifestyle (except for looksmaxxers) there is something very powerful in how it discursively contaminates our lives. Our initial obsession with

maxxing started as seemingly harmless satire, from analoguemaxxing to joy- maxxing. Very soon, the ethos of the term began to be thrown around commercially. Without knowing it, many of us have started taking maxxing seriously. Platforms like Blinkist now offer us 15-minute summaries of books ranging from Dickens’ David Copperfield to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot so we can max out our Goodreads goals. Even if we don’t use platforms like Blinkist or AIgenerated summaries, there is something telling about the rise of maxxing and practices like shallow reading (I discussed this in an earlier Farrago essay titled What Book club taught me about the Reading Crisis and Anti-Intellectualism for those interested!) Last year, I was surprised by how many LinkedIn-maxxers had finished anywhere between 70 to 100 books, many of which were notoriously complex narratives such as Anna Karenina and Swann’s Way. As a dedicated reader myself, I was astonished by how these people who had full-time jobs managed to fly through complex narratives that demand time and patience. I was concerned about whether they actually felt the impact of these layered narratives, or whether Anna Karenina had become yet another example of intellectmaxxing for performative display. In other places, the maxxing ethos is prevalent in more subtle ways. The “academic weapon” trend on Instagram is a good example, bombarding users with Pinterest-curated study images that aestheticize spending hours in the library and promise romanticized hyper-productivity. Of course, in other terrains “maxxing” is shoved straight to our face. Consider the emergence of apps such as Maxxing: Face

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Beauty Analysis, Analysis , which promises users “No compliments, no hate— just a clear breakdown of how your appearance actually comes across to others.” (Yay! I can finally figure out how attractive I am!). Arguably the most concerning aspect of maxxing is that it makes our lives quantifiable. Instead of living our lives, we can measure them numerically, much like T. S Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock who has “measured out my life with coffee spoons” (he’s coffee-spoon maxxing!) Of course, Prufrock is a sad little character, and Eliot is careful enough to not epitomize this over-thinking, overintellectualizing being. Yet, in a way, we ourselves are becoming increasingly Prufrockian with this maxxing imperative. I can measure my beauty with AI-scanners, my popularity through my number of Instagram followers, my intellect by my Goodreads data, and my desirability based on my number of Tinder likes or dates. Maxxing is packaged up with anxiety because it always suggests a lack or a deficit: maybe I am not pretty enough, or sexy enough, or clever enough, or funny enough. Perhaps I lack aura. Maybe I need to ʻlock in’ (another term soaked in hyper- productivity) and start ʻaura farming’ (I may or may not have felt these things before, as all of us probably have). In this way, maxxing doesn’t just quantify our actions, quantifies our sense of self, and this isn’t presented as discriminatory. According to these maxxers anyone could and should max. Regardless of the conditions that shape my life I can still maxx because maxxing is presented as an accessible fantasy to all. Oftentimes, people around me assume that I would be the last person on earth who falls victim to the maxxing imperative. Perhaps there’s something quintessentially anti-maxxing about wicker-baskets (I carry one around on a daily basis) and an English and Philosophy degree. Funnily enough, I have been an intense

victim of the maxxing imperative. As a bookish woman whose reputation in high school was tokenistically “clever” (I personally don’t resonate with the term) there is something very disturbing about watching that identity becoming measurable as it is reduced to reading statistics, productivity metrics, and intellectual performance data. Indeed, the very qualities that once felt organic to me now risk becoming another domain to optimize. It kills curiosity and the consistent desire to slow down

because there is something profoundly anti-maxxing about simply saying “I can’t understand something” or “I’d like

to enjoy the process rather than the product”.

Maybe there is another angle to the maxxing imperative. It not only suggests a sense of lack and deficit, but it also makes “not being enough” uncomfortable and a source of deep shame. I have felt this in my personal life where, after Instagram reel-maxxing, I start feeling uncomfortable about my own selfhood and wishing I was more attractive, more aura-ful, more main-character energy, had more rizz, or anything else Instagram content is prescribing. Just recently, I was having a conversation with a friend about

“Helicopter” and “Tiger” parents. “How much can you demand from a single person?” she said bitterly, condemning the relentless demand for success. In a landscape, where maxxing is maximized in our vocabulary (even humorously), we run the risk of treating ordinary human limitations as a debilitating form of personal failure. Rest, confusion, slowness, and imperfections have become defects rather than the necessary conditions of being alive and part of the process of evolving as human beings. Failure to maxx becomes a source of individual inadequacy in a world where everything has become a statistical data point. Perhaps that’s the reason why I am more comfortable draft-maxxing ten different replies to a “LOL” and “LMAO” text without stepping into the vulnerability of explicitly initiating a date or giving a bold sign instead of subtle signals. And maybe that’s the unspoken tragedy of the maxxing imperative – it promises us a bigger life despite making us smaller and weaker on the inside. Indeed, when I sat down to write this piece, I made the promise of attempting to delegitimize maxxing as a way of life. However, I’m aware of the irony inherent to using the -maxxing suffix to describe my own experiences in this article, which others have also adopted to critique the whole trend in a tongue-in-cheek way online. Perhaps in this way, maxxing was always meant to be ironic, because even resisting it becomes another form of participation. I guess the only real counter-maxxing is not to argue against maxxing, but to live in ways that refuse to be measured — to take great leaps and suffer painful falls without the worry that we are falling behind on some nonexistent scoreboard. We need to spend more time being Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, lingering in pleasant nothingness and allowing ourselves to notice the people who remind us of what an un-maxxed life can feel like.

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Life Drawing: The Body Undressed or Unaddressed. Words and art by Alex Homoc

he day the body became an object of sexual desire, there was the absence of a loud bang, no foaming at the mouth, no dilated pupils. Instead, it happened subtly and subversively. It became inappropriate to shower with your childhood best friend or run around the house naked. Before the brain was developed enough to even conjure the slightest sexual thought, it was decided that sexuality would be autocratically imposed. Even if I hadn’t considered my prepubescent body as overtly sexual, society had handed down its verdict. I became conscious of the body as something that needed to be hidden, even if I could not conceptualise why. I learnt to avert my gaze—exposed legs soon turned into a symbol of shame. As the body became a sexual entity, I slowly found myself more and more disembodied. I could barely reckon with my own flesh, stretching, growing, changing, let alone with the thought of others’. Nakedness became somewhat a morbid fascination heightened by a childish curiosity. I would imagine the men on the street without their suits, holding only their briefcases. Would they have been just as respected if people in the office could see their nude, uncensored bodies, or would their identity implode? If a woman walked topless through the city in the smouldering heat, would she experience a social death? Or worse, would she now be a criminal? By nature, when something is heavily restricted, it becomes the epicentre of interest. As I eventually grew into sexual desire, the body became something so unknown, so stigmatised and distressingly enigmatic. It was the elephant in the room. You have a body—how on earth could I reckon this disturbing information? The nakedness I was told to hide and avoid was now only inches away from me at all times,

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veiled by nothing but thin pieces of clothing. A cold war erupted between my eyes and bodies on the street, which seemed to be everywhere that I turned my head. How can we deconstruct our current image of the body? How can we move from desire to appreciation? It was a cold evening in July, and I had just arrived at Parliament station. As I exited the station, a man approached me and told me he wanted me to feature in his erotic film. I entertained the conversation, mainly due to the previously mentioned morbid fascination, and because a part of me was flattered. The exchange eventually came to a close, and I was relieved. I could hear the words of my mother—stranger danger. I continued my walk up Collins Street to the Coates Community Arts building, where I was met by a woman. She was voluptuous, in her late sixties, with glasses and red hair. Someone I probably wouldn’t look twice at on the street. Normal enough. She asked me if I was here for life drawing. I told her I was, and she pointed me to the elevator. I went up to level four and walked through the hallway of what appeared to be a standard office building. When I approached the door at the end of the hall, I was greeted by the organiser, Lou. She handed me a board with some butcher’s paper and directed me to the art supplies. I peered down at the table and picked up a piece of charcoal, then walked over to the nearest chair and

sat. I looked across at the thirty or so other people in the room and felt a sense of unease. In sheer moments we would all collectively stare at a naked body and pick it apart. I grimaced a little at the thought. It seemed voyeuristic, blatantly sexual, antisocial. Then the soft jazz started, and the redheaded woman, who had guided me to the elevator, appeared from behind me in a towel barely covering her breasts. She walked to the centre of the room, looked around to acknowledge everyone and, without hesitation, dropped the towel. And at that moment something miraculous occurred—a sense of peace, because nothing had happened. She propped herself on the highchair, pulled her hair back, and for the next two hours we were ordered to draw, starting with thirty-second poses, eventually building our way up to twenty-minute poses. I stared at her body, which stood there, not asking for anything, only to be witnessed, and I came to the realisation that I had not observed a naked body outside of a sexual context for years. I felt, for the first time since childhood, that I had been both vindicated and liberated. The body had returned to its natural state of something that was worthy of attention purely on artistic and academic merit. I could, in fact, sit in front of a naked body without a plethora of sexual thoughts racing through my head. A fascination consumed me after my first life drawing session. After a

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few months of attending, I approached Lou—who has been the organiser of this particular life drawing class for over 18 years—and asked if I could interview her and one of the models to gain some perspective on the process. She messaged me a few days later and said she would be more than happy to do an interview and that Chanelle, a model for that week, would join us. When I did this interview, I was astounded by the insight Lou and Chanelle possessed. There was a depth and understanding of how the body intersects with art that only veterans in the industry, such as themselves, could express. When I asked Chanelle, “How does life drawing empower you?”, she explained that the process is liberating, as she gets to use her body as a tool that inspires people creatively, rather than simply being an object that is sexualised without consent. This led us down quite the rabbit hole, as we began discussing the idea of vulnerability pertaining to the nude body. I proposed that there is an imbalance in the room as one person is completely naked and everyone

else is fully clothed. Both Chanelle and Lou countered this by explaining that there is a shared vulnerability when you step foot in life drawing. The model displays vulnerability through physical nakedness; however, those who come to life drawing convey their vulnerability through artistic expression. Lou explained that people have to show up honestly to life drawing—leaving no room for an ulterior motive. I resonated with this notion, feeling a shared sense of vulnerability in the room. I’m no Picasso, so to draw, to express, to not feel shame about what I create, is an act of vulnerability. This has created the fabric of a strong social bond between the people in the class. I’ve started to make friends with the regulars, people of all different artistic abilities, and there is never an ounce of judgement. Chanelle mentions this idea of an “undoing”—that to draw the body you must accept it without judgement or prejudice. You must surrender. What makes the space so special—I have come to realise—is that vulnerability is met with vulnerability. Honesty is met with honesty. Everyone stands naked together, in different ways, but still equitably. Betty Grumble—a multimedia performance artist specialising in physical theatre and cabaret—questions quite plainly: “Who made the body a dirty thing?” When Chanelle quoted this to me, I resonated with it deeply. Who did make the body a dirty thing? When I mentioned how sexuality is imposed on us from an early age, both Lou and Chanelle agreed. Life drawing allows

us to reconnect with our bodies in their raw form. A catharsis, as Lou puts it, a call to arms to reclaim—and the ultimate call home. Popular media, my parents, the law, had told me that the body was rigidly private and that it orbited around a sexual gravitational pull that was unwavering. But as I sat there, drawing the models’ thighs, their ears, their breasts, I knew that pull had loosened its grip. When I leave life drawing now, there is a calmness that exists in the place that confusion and uncertainty once stirred. I feel that I have broken free of some convention, that my horizon has now forever broadened. I find myself thinking about my interview with Lou and Chanelle quite a bit. The overarching themes of vulnerability, agency, and reclamation continue to stick with me. It can be disorienting to navigate a society which has vilified nudity and painted the body as a onedimensional sexual entity. In a world where we are forced to ingest ideas about our bodies, it is nice to sit down in a place free of judgement. Now, every Monday at 7 pm, you’ll find me drawing nude models in a little building off Collins Street. An activity—and a form of expression—that would have been inconceivable six months ago. And through this artistic endeavour that celebrates nakedness, we can pivot from an overtly sexual way of thinking and come to a more grounded appreciation—an appreciation of all bodies, regardless of age, shape, or colour. It’s time to drop the robes, sit down, and look at the bodies we have been told to shy away from. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

EVRESELBUOD *

*Serving C mp on Campus*

Creative Directors: Rosie Giuliano Victoria Marietta Photographers: David Wu Charlene Hui Concept: Genevieve J. Harris Model: Holly Pearl

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DOUBLESERVE VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Words by Ivy Kaye

he state of the music industry looks pretty bleak at the moment. According to the UK Musicians’ Union, music streaming, which makes up close to 85% of music consumption, only accounts for about 5% of a musician’s total earnings. Platforms like Spotify pay artists a truly pitiful amount, a maximum of $0.003USD per stream. Better yet, Spotify has done next to nothing to address the rampant issue of AI-generated music, offering little more than an optional “AI Persona” tag for these “artists” to disclose their status as, well, not artists at all. Human art seems like it’s slowly becoming less and less of a focus for the platform—shortly after King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard removed their music from Spotify late last year in protest, they were briefly replaced by an AI impersonator in the form of “King Lizard Wizard”, a nonexistent band that uploaded

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hastily-generated versions of the Naarm-based band’s extensive “Gizzverse” discography. It’s no surprise that an increasing number of bands and artists have been pulling their music from the platform: King Gizzard were quickly joined by bands like Hotline TNT and Xiu Xiu, with major acts like Massive Attack asking to be pulled in future as well. It was at this point, sometime around the end of last year, that I, as someone who endlessly consumes and engages with music, started to stress about my own relationship with streaming. I’ve always been a fan of physical media, of making myself listen to a vinyl album all the way through, but it was just so easy to put on a Spotify playlist that I only half-knew the contents of and just let myself check out. It had gotten to the point where, unless I had chosen an album beforehand to listen to in its

entirety (which, admittedly, accounted for about half of my listening anyway), it didn’t feel like I was actually listening to the music, the platform’s musical recommendations filling in for my own taste and removing any real need for conscious choice. It was convenient, sure, and made for good background noise, but I noticed before long that most of the features that the platform offered were ones that were actively hindering my enjoyment of the music— especially with how increasingly difficult it was becoming to ignore the incorporation of AI—and absolutely didn’t justify all of the ethical issues I had with it. The main problem I hear people worrying about when they think about leaving Spotify is a fear of inconvenience. The sheer amount of music all in one place is staggering, and it’s a difficult thing to let go of. Especially as a

music student, finding recorded versions of pieces I’m learning and performing is difficult—it’s tough out here for fans of weird contemporary saxophone compositions—making the evil monolith that is Spotify pretty unavoidable much of the time. That being said, I knew that there was a world of music to be found in other places, and I decided that even if I couldn’t fully part with the convenience of mass music streaming, it was becoming more and more necessary to let myself go through some much-needed inconvenience, letting me engage with music much more consciously AND supporting the artists I love at the same time. First, though, I had to get past the question of where to start. Much like a 2024 Mic the Snare video (a YouTube channel I highly recommend checking out, he’s hilarious) in which creator Nick Canovas only allows himself to listen to CDs for a month, I wanted to do something drastic, only allowing myself to listen to music that I had bought somewhere. I’d been a bit of a record collector for a while, so listening at home was all well and good, but vinyl isn’t exactly portable, and I wanted a way to build up a library of music that I could listen to while I was out and about. I was considering looking for a tiny portable CD or cassette player at an op shop somewhere, but it didn’t seem like a particularly great idea to start spending money on another physical music medium (don’t worry, we’ll get to CDs later!), and I quickly found myself losing hope. All was not lost, however! It dawned on me quickly that a few albums I owned had come with little codes thrown into the album sleeve, which allowed me to download an MP3 copy of the music. I had initially ignored them—why would owning an MP3 copy of an album mean anything, I must have assumed, in a world of streaming?—and it seemed like the people selling the albums had too, with many of the codes no longer being supported (including, in a heartbreaking twist of events, my code for Big Thief’s UFOF). Regardless, between the codes that still worked, I was equipped with a respectable little handful of some of my favourite

albums: Alvvays’s Antisocialites and Blue Rev, Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher and Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There. Once I eventually figured out how to import the files into my phone’s Apple Music app (downloading iTunes onto my laptop, manually writing out the music’s metadata, and transferring them onto my phone through a USB cord), I had at least some idea of how my streamingfree experiment was going to go. The main problem was that this pool of music was just a little too limited, and, as I approached the start of the uni semester, and began writing reviews for Farrago, there was a lot of music I quite desperately needed to get my hands on. It initially seemed like the solution was buying digital albums through Bandcamp, a fantastic online platform for music that, refreshingly, is really quite good about paying artists and ensuring that they’re not platforming AI “creators”. On Bandcamp, I managed to find Way Dynamic’s Massive Shoe in time to write about it, but it quickly became clear that the platform is reasonably limited in terms of the music that actually makes its way onto the website, which is also quite difficult to navigate. It also had its fair share of little errors: I was forced to go to the iTunes Store to purchase Grace Ives’ Girlfriend in order to write about it due to an error in which the album was priced at USD$10,000 rather than $10 on Bandcamp. Additionally, I was having no luck whatsoever finding any of the music I would be playing for the imminent uni semester. In some cases, I had to simply look for YouTube recordings and accept defeat. In others, though, I found a much more fun solution: combing through op-shop CD sections, which are frequently full to the brim with classical and chamber music, then using a positively ancient family Mac to rip the music and transfer it onto my phone. Preparing for the conservatorium saxophone ensemble’s performance of Rhapsody in Blue was made much easier by the presence of a $4 George Gershwin compilation album I found, and, after a brief period of being obsessed with composer Astor Piazzolla last year, I was able to delve much deeper into

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the world of classical tango music through thrifted CDs. Figuring out this fun secondary, slightly strange use for CDs opened a world of doors: they’re the perfect thing to buy at merch stands at gigs (I ended up grabbing Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess at Laneway, and Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place at their Night Cat gig), and perhaps most excitingly, I had the absolute delight of combing through my parents’ long-unused CD collection, finding some absolute gems that I never would have thought to listen to otherwise. Who knew just how good the selections on So Fresh: The Hits of Summer 2014 + The Best of 2013 were? Listening to the feel-good cheesiness of Haim’s “The Wire”, Pitbull and Christina Aguilera’s “Feel This Moment” or One Direction’s “Kiss You” for the first time since I was a kid was an absolute blast, one that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t decided to torture myself by committing to my experiment for a couple of months. Is this form of consumption sustainable in the long term? For me, probably not: I can’t really afford to buy every new album that comes out, and as long as I’m studying music it would be great to be able to find actual recordings of things. The use of Spotify is, in my opinion, always going to be marked by ethical issues and a general feeling of guilt, but I understand that for most people, it’s unrealistic, whether because of price or accessibility, to exclusively deal with alternatives. What I’d advocate for, then, is stepping out of that little bubble of convenience temporarily and trying to engage more deeply in whatever little way you can— practically any other form of monetary support does more for artists than streaming revenue. Buy an album on Bandcamp, pick up a CD, go to a friend’s gig, support local talent, put together your own little library of music. There’s a world of engagement with human art that big platforms like Spotify tend to stifle, and you can do so much more for yourself and the future of music than simply throwing on an AI-generated playlist and calling it a day. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Photography by Felicity Bayne 34

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Words by Stella Hannagan

hen I was eight years old, I put on a white dress covered in iridescent sequins the size of Cadbury buttons, and Mum threaded a sickly-sweet gardenia into my hair. With a swipe of Father Jim’s thumb, I was ordained Stella Rose Cecilia Hannagan, and it was decreed that I would one day ascend into heaven. I chose Cecilia because she is the Patron Saint of Music, an innocent enough decision that still rings true for my 21-year-old self. Only now, I know that worship doesn’t just occur in the presence of a preacher. In fact, the closest I’ve ever come to complete and utter absolution is outside of the church altogether. A month ago, I whispered a prayer under my breath in a stadium full of

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15,000 people, bathed in sweat and multicoloured strobe lights. Émile Durkheim coined the phrase “collective effervescence” in his 1912 book Elementary Forms of Religious Life, referencing a kind of heightened euphoria, release and connection experienced by members of a group engaged in a collective ritual or activity. This ecstasy is multiplied and burgeoned by its group expression, and fed back into the individual members of said group. In a hyper-digitised secular world where citizens are growing increasingly connection-starved, live music events facilitate a neo-religious collective effervescence which allows people to pray, worship, attend a ceremony and achieve momentary salvation. In other words, the spaces that people congregate to and where they partake in a live music experience provide attendees (or “adherents”) a devotional outlet in which the stage becomes the church—free from the many limitations and costs of institutionalised religion. Historically, it is evident that Gods have indeed walked amongst men, taking the form of the most influential and genre-defying music makers of our time: The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, to name a few. Inspiring extreme devotion, mythmaking and fervent support from millions of fans, music has been a longstanding arena for the deification and subsequent worship of quasireligious figureheads beyond mere “icon status”. However, cracks steadfastly emerge. John Lennon admitted to being abusive towards his first wife. Elvis had a long-term prescription drug addiction that eventually stopped his heart. Michael’s legacy was forever tainted by horrific accusations of paedophilia (which are still contested by supporters today). Such idols are inevitably, chronically, deeply flawed. What then, still elicits this undying, collective reverence? Is it simply a need to be a part of a collective, in and of itself? Why do we linger at the altar? The unquantifiable synchronicity of a live music event provides attendees with a shared language for

an experience that only the people in the room, witnessing the event, can intimately understand—simultaneously unifying and individuating. In a 2024 article for the National Catholic Reporter called “What Live Concerts Can Teach Us About Spirituality”, Daniel Horan writes about the transcendence of “participating” in a live music performance “unfolding in real time”. Emboldening the attendee through their self-reflexive, active participation in this performance, this emphasises the importance of one’s self-directed surrender to a musical experience in facilitating collective effervescence. Moreover, Horan states the importance of recognising that “everyone has a unique relationship to the same God”. Contextually, he is addressing the many iterations of “God” as dictated by organised religions. However, I think there’s some merit to interpreting this sentiment a little more fluidly; perhaps, we all find God in our own way, whether that’s through the church or a pair of wired headphones. Interestingly, fame and stardom can sometimes lead to religious awakenings. Many famous mainstream musicians have altered their set career path to pursue their faith—born again in the eyes of their chosen God. Bob Dylan became an Evangelical Christian in the late 1970s following a personal crisis. Godfather of shock rock Alice Cooper became a Christian in the 80s. M.I.A. converted to Christianity in 2017 following a “vision of Jesus”. Justin Bieber was first baptised in 2014, and again in 2020. The convergence of music with institutionalised religion is a particularly interesting fusion here. Perhaps the overwhelm of being in the public eye is the driver. Perhaps it’s about finding community. Perhaps musicianship itself is so deeply spiritual that after a while, musicmaking and religious devotion appear to be more congruent than not. I’ve been lucky enough to attend and perform at countless live music events throughout my life. Arena concerts, folk music nights in dingy wine bars, mildly sketchy drum and bass warehouse raves. Whether

the night is a complete disaster or completely spellbinding, everyone in that room walks out forever changed in some unexplainable, totally unquantifiable way. Music connects us to something greater than ourselves— something we can tap into even in the foreign embrace of a stranger at a mediocre, white guy indie band headliner in Brunswick. In a 2026 article called “Collective effervescence: how the positive effects of a performance linger on”, Kate Hogan Berger talks to the sentiments of Dr. Shira Gabriel, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Buffalo: “It’s a combination of feeling a connection to the other people who are there, and a feeling that something sacred is happening… [giving] us a joint focus… and [uniting] us with people who may be complete strangers”. Gabriel goes on to detail that trying to “achieve” effervescence is not the goal here. Rather, it is something that comes over you when you abandon your inhibitions and devote your tunnelvision focus to what’s happening on stage. Music, in this vein, becomes a kind of north star, a Prophet—the intangible magic of live music events able to facilitate even a secondhand collective effervescence with the person holding the phone and watching the performance via a digital conduit. The truth is, we all need our Gods. Deities. Idols. Something, or someone, to look towards, to tell us where to go next. I see God in crowds poised in anticipation, waiting with bated breath for the singer’s next move. I see God in phone flashlights rippling across my field of vision like stars in the night sky. I see God in the thousands of people lined up outside Rod Laver Arena in the bitter cold. I see God in the deafening first chord that prompts me to rummage in my handbag for my Loops. I see God in the sea of too-high, half-full plastic cups. I see God in my hands, flexed atop the keyboard. Heaven, connection, prayer, salvation and redemption so often reside in the most unexpected places. We just have to look for it. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Art made without AI

I Finished My Duolingo Course, But at What Cost? Words by Sasha Neilson

fter years of getting by without the need to expand my vocabulary beyond the latest internet slang, my linguistic guilt as a native English speaker took over. And so, several months ago, I decided to start my mission to join the multilingual 60 per cent of the world’s population. My goal was straightforward: to become proficient in another language, in the shortest time possible, with the least financial investment. I wanted access to expand my cultural horizons and to see what I was really missing out on in my monolingual existence. Despite being aware of the ridiculousness of my aim to magic my way to fluency, I turned to perhaps the most popular digital option: Duolingo. Promising low financial commitment and a clear path to fluency, all contained within a single app, the choice seemed to be an obvious one. Famed for its aggressive owl mascot and entertaining social media presence, Duolingo was founded in 2011 with the mission to make high-quality education universally accessible. Today, it boasts over 50 million active daily users, and it’s not uncommon to come across users with 36

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many thousands of days logged on the app. This was not my first introduction to Duolingo, however. During the lockdown years, I had a brief, yet obsessive, language-learning phase, which I have little to show for today despite my hours spent yelling Mandarin phrases into my phone. The difference this time around was that I hoped the app could be a legitimate learning tool, rather than a fun way to pass the time. What I remember the most from my first time on the app was the community focus of the platform. It allowed you to see explanations when you got a question wrong, ask questions in specialised discussion forums, and progress through courses that were developed by volunteers, which allowed language offerings to expand and be improved by real native speakers. This time, when I downloaded the app and fired up my sparkling new Swedish course, there were immediately recognisable features. Colour-coded lessons were laid out like a physical path to mastery, as celebratory pings and colourful

characters filled the screen—although these aspects of the app certainly seem to have been amplified over time. And, as always, there is its famously addictive streak feature, tallying the number of consecutive days a user has completed a lesson. There were also some things I was surprised to notice were missing. Most notable of these was the “heart” system that once functioned like lifelines but has since been replaced with an energy bar that, indifferent to a user’s mistakes (or skill), frustratingly prevented extended periods of learning. The solution to this problem? Purchasing one of their heavily advertised paid plans which, for upwards of $100, provides a year of limitless ad-free learning. In my typical fashion, I signed up for a free trial and promptly forgot to cancel it. And so, with a sizeable hole in my pocket and a chip on my shoulder, I had no choice but to put my doubts aside and wholeheartedly embrace all that Duolingo promised. Propelled by my determination to make the most of my unwitting investment, I began to dutifully complete my lessons each day. The

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lessons seemed reasonable enough for a beginner, aside from the odd laughable phrase—my personal favourite of these being the lesson that required me to translate the sentence, “There is a Norwegian architect in my bed”. With each passing day logged on the app, I became increasingly hooked. Until eventually, I realised that my desire to learn the language itself was no longer my primary motivation to continue. Keeping my streak alive was what kept me returning to the app, and Duolingo’s in-game currency and daily quests were what encouraged me to sink more hours into my lessons. It should have been no surprise that I had fallen completely into the trap that Duolingo had laid for me—a gamified model that directs focus to superficial measures of progress. Metrics that I legitimately became obsessed with. The effect was instant. The echoing ping of correct answers and the disheartening clunk of wrong ones had become the soundscape of my home, much to the annoyance of everyone around me. To my delight, my enthusiastic learning was garnering me enough XP to quickly advance through the game’s weekly leaderboards, each increasingly competitive level named after an increasingly valuable precious stone. I longed for the day when I would achieve my final goal—not my desire to be able to engage in Swedish conversation, but my desire to make it to the most challenging competition of all: The Diamond League. Then, just over three months after my very first lesson, the day finally arrived. I had made it to the big leagues. My competitive streak came out in full force, and I found myself in a bloody (and most likely one-sided) battle for first place with a stranger named Marg who had a 5-year Frenchlearning streak. It was David against Goliath, IKEA against The Palace of Versailles. The competition was fierce. When 9 pm on Sunday came around, marking the end of the weekly leaderboard, I saw that I had emerged victorious and I felt what I can only describe as pure ecstasy. It didn’t last long.

After a brief celebration, crowing about my victory to anyone who would listen, my achievement of Duolingo’s Diamond League Holy Grail had ultimately left me feeling empty and directionless. I was suddenly horrified that the thing bringing me the most pleasure in life was a glorified video game that sent me threatening notifications if I was late to complete a lesson. I no longer had the same desire to keep playing. Then, to make matters worse, not long after my motivation began to dwindle with my completion of the Diamond League, I reached the end of the Swedish course. Now there was no new content, no leagues to be conquered, and there was no clear way for me to progress beyond the awkward advanced beginner realm Duolingo had left me to idle in. Somewhere along the way, my passion for learning had turned into a passion for winning, so what was the point now? It’s no secret that Duolingo has come under fire in recent years for increasing AI components and letting go of a large number of its contract workers, including translators and language specialists. Duolingo is not the only app to fall into this trap. Companies like Spotify have been part of the growing trend in which online platforms change their content delivery, often by reducing staff, pushing paid features, and building their business around statistics that promote superficial engagement. Like Duolingo, Spotify’s prioritisation of AI-generated mixes and recycled algorithm recommendations has come at the cost of editorial playlists and arguably the possibility of genuine music discovery. While Duolingo’s current AIpowered approach allows for vast amounts of content in certain courses, it ultimately seems to lack the heart of the app I remember from years ago. Duolingo was never a perfect app, and many of its flaws are inherent to its central gamified system, but it is saddening to see the user experience cheapened by a loss of community while cost barriers continually increase.

Communication is fundamental to our existence as humans, so what is the value of learning a language in a process stripped of human involvement? Real life doesn’t have reward chests filled with gems or triumphant trumpet sounds, and human conversation cannot be replaced by a cartoon character and a speech bubble. For me, completing the Swedish course was the end of my journey with Duolingo, but not the end of my bilingual dreams. After getting over my initial disillusionment with my progress, I found that what remained was a genuine motivation to learn and improve, which, perhaps to Duolingo’s credit, was driven in part by the app’s aggressive tactics to increase user hours. I have since turned to different methods, more grounded in human interaction. In-person classes (although decidedly more costly) and language-learning podcasts have become the basis for my ongoing quest to learn Swedish. While my progress is no longer presented on a silver platter with colour-coded sequences, it has felt more fulfilling than the satisfaction I felt logging more minutes than anyone else on an online application. So far, from my short languagelearning journey, I have learnt that my initial goal of finding a shortcut to fluency is just as impossible as it sounds, despite what apps like Duolingo seem to promise. No app can truly offer what the personal experience of engaging with native speakers can, particularly when the humans behind the screen are increasingly replaced by robots. While I mourn the time sunk into this strangely addictive app, I will always have the brief, yet dark phase of my life ruled by gems, leagues and French-speaking adversaries to thank for guiding (or driving) me to the point where I feel truly motivated to continue learning. Duolingo can offer fun mini-games that involve occasionally suggestive scenarios, but I worry that the features that capture our attention have come at the cost of its original mission—the bringing together of people through language. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

Irene Pinato

Anika Bartholomeusz

Yew Wey Lim

Jacquie Skouris

Milla Harris

Jacaranda Liu

Sabine Pentecost

Ishita Sharma

Rhoen Kennedy

Alexander Homoc 38

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Ella Brown

Celia Xilei Yang

Manēka de Silver

Ebony Silva

Rhoen Kennedy

Erin Ibrahim

James Alexander

Devansh Aerry

Maisie O’Loan

Marla Sukroo

Sabine Pentecost

Marla Sukroo VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

Photography by Wil Simmonds

Photography by Anjali Selvarajah 40

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VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Community Through Fashion at Fresh Flames Words by Maria Quartel

ith bags of precious designer clothes on our lap, my friend Lucas and I make the long PTV commute from Derrimut, back on the Sandringham line. He tells me how he met Chris from Fresh Flames. It was a random Saturday morning in Melbourne, so early that cafes were still closed on Flinders Lane. 15 year old Lucas was the first one to line up for the Fresh Flames pop-up shop on Little Collins, so eager that he turned up before the organisers themselves. When the Younan brothers arrived he volunteered to help set up, and he continues to help them out to this day. My friendship group has since been going to every Fresh Flames pop-up, getting our regular dose of Lucas approved clothes for very unpretentious prices. From its inception in 2017, Fresh Flames has been a growing powerhouse of vintage reselling in Melbourne. Known for their pristine selection of football t-shirts and high quality vintage Ralph Lauren, every pop-up amasses large queues reaching all the way to Elizabeth Street. The project was started by the Younan brothers, Chris, Isaac and Dom, selling pieces from their “extensive wardrobe” to friends and family. Since then, they have built a website, started hosting pop-ups in Melbourne’s CBD, and now have a permanent showroom store in Melbourne’s West, giving a “breath of life to the Westside” where the brothers were born and raised. The humble project continues to grow with Fresh Flames now dressing AFL and AFLW players off the field, bringing sports fashion culture seen in football VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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to Aussie shores. From the curation at both the popups and the show room, it is clear why Fresh Flames continue to pull large crowds of fashionable young people. The brothers have noticed trends that come and go, yet persist in selecting only what is of high quality. Chris references the USA branded pieces that were “all the rage” in 2015-2018, and the current demand for Ralph Lauren. However, the store feels fresh and exciting, and apart from the odd Coach bag that is currently high in demand, every article of clothing feels impartial to the outfits on my Instagram feed. Chris tells me they curate only what is timeless, keeping the clothes they cherish at the forefront of the project. His intentions feel successful as I browse (and buy) at Fresh Flames. Every piece I pick out to buy seems to leave the brothers in anguish that they 46

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can’t wear and keep all the clothes themselves. Even when the clothes in question are women’s Dolce and Gabbana bedazzled skinny jeans (note: this is the second time I reference these pants in this edition). There is a real love and appreciation for what is put on the rack, and the result is a clear vision for the aesthetics of the project. Reflecting on the rise of Fresh Flames, Chris also references the general pull towards vintage designer pieces in the last decade. “As designer brands continue to rapidly increase their retail prices as they have a monopoly on their own market, it is only logical for consumers, especially those of a younger demographic, to turn to the second hand market. Vintage designer, and shopping vintage as a whole, is not only significantly more affordable, but the pieces were also made to a higher standard and quality.” This shift is clear when looking at the numbers. As reported by Lilian Raji in Forbes, the revenue of luxury brands are going down, while Gen Z is one of the highest splurging generations in luxury goods. The vintage market and authentic resellers such as Fresh Flames are coming out on top. As Chris remarks, “the most ironic point also being that designer fashion houses are digging back into their own archives of now-vintage pieces to remake the same or similar pieces at an extravagantly higher amount than that of the original retail price, and of course, that of similar pieces on the second hand market.” The brand’s edge over that of the luxury industry is a genuine community that the Younan brothers have created. Fresh Flames has been able to retain high quality pieces for affordable prices due to the friends, family and the growing support around them. Chris calls this the “cornerstone” of the store and its operations, and it is through this tight knit circle of “incredible and hard working friends” that they have been able to maintain pricing at a low while also growing their stock and ventures. “Coming from different backgrounds and life experiences, this has benefited the way our store is run as we are all friends first, with

the love for each other to take the ideas on board to see the store and our community grow. We feel that this separates us from other vintage stores as everyone who is a part of our team seeks to put our customers and community first.” The core of the Fresh Flames project is the authentic connection it provides Melbournian fashion heads with. What other space is welcoming 15-year-olds so eager to see nice clothes that they get out of bed before 8am on a Saturday? Or letting a student magazine borrow their archival Issey Miyake for a photoshoot in a sweaty office? Yet, it is these exact spaces that our generation yearns for and needs, and it is here that creativity and hope for better is found.

Australian Adolescent Photography by Ashley Syers

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

REVIEWS & CULTURE

ARETHA BROWN AT THE ABBOTSFORD CONVENT

Perhaps while on your way to your dead-end or your coffeefixes in the past month you’ve seen them, the simple posters in various bright colourways plastered on the brick walls of businesses or in alleyways throughout the city. Most read provocative slogans and sweet, Insta-caption à la mode taglines in a bold sans-serif, saying something like:

‘I PUT THE TREAT IN TREATY NOW’ or ‘HOTTEST GIRL ON THE MISH’ or ‘I’M ABBA-RIGINAL (LAY ALL YOUR LUB ON ME)’ or (the brief) ‘SEND NUDES’, or (my personal favourite) ‘B4 I DESTROY MY CAREER DOES ANY1 WANT TO ADMIT THEY HAVE A CRUSH ON ME? :(’ Quite unhelpful in advertising their purpose, yes, but aren’t they fun? These cheeky neo-poems are advertising BORN ROMANTIC, Brown’s debut solo exhibition that was held in the Magdalen Laundry at the Abbotsford Convent from 26 September to 4 October this year. On the streets, this key information could only be sourced from the two editions of the print run that’s solely black and white, advertising the artist and show in question and when/where one can find it—of course the poster’s twin to the right reads simply ʻ...WHO?’. Now if you’re young, smart, and full of art—fear not! You already know Brown from her work at the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial shown at the National Gallery of Australia this year. Brown took the floor (but mainly the walls) for the exhibition After The Rain, and produced her largest mural to date, THE BIRTH OF A NATION: THE TRUE HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA. It was an unflinching epic, a recounting of the history of our country’s

First Peoples, depicting settlers first contact, colonisation, massacres, enslavement, and dispossession, as well as how these often unaddressed injustices are reverberating in the cultural/political landscape of Australia today. Brown is a dynamic young Gumbaynggirr painter, screenwriter and muralist, with a legacy of female creatives in her family behind her. Her approach to street-art is coming from an ancient context rather than the off-beat, Brown founded the **KISS MY ART collective—made up of young women and non-binary artists—to create works ʻoutside traditional gallery spaces’ and to ʻspark important conversations and invite everyone to confront Australia’s colonial legacy.’ In a Triple J Hack interview, she harkens the murals she produces with KMA as to our First Peoples artistic legacy as the originators in public art, beginning with rock-painting. Now, cut to BORN ROMANTIC, in the makeshift cinema of the exhibit: a video plays for us while we get comfy on some beanbags, it records her deinstallation of the NGA mural as a performance piece. Brown’s voice laments the task of removing murals, something she hasn’t had to take on many times—but always something she’s been forced to do. The camera follows Brown in a red dress, she picks off the corners of figures and pulls away their features strip by strip, she saves the circular stickers (that used to be stars), and they become polka dots as she presses them onto the fabric of her dress. She climbs a step ladder with a scalpel, and we listen to the vinyl peel off the matteblack walls (naturally taking chucks of paint with it), the film ends with the ball of discarded white vinyl sitting in the center of the room. Out of focus behind the wad of mural, the walls are left scarred by the torn vinyl. It’s a mixed bag: another video plays that was originally produced to promote funding for publishing by the Teach Blak History Project; in another, she’s pashing a

BORN ROMANTIC WORDS BY SUNDAY O’SULLIVAN

Many of us walk the earth and have romance thrust upon us. Meanwhile, some of the lucky ones like Aretha Brown, are born romantic.

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lover during golden-hour in Blacktown; in an animation using the toolbox of her figures in the style of her black and white hallmark, she recounts her upbringing and education. The last shown in the collection, hosted by a 3D rendered figure of Aretha Brown in a ʻscene select’ menu, a montage of KMA’s mural paintings around the world plays—cut with slut-drops in the studio and the collective running amuck with local kids in the cities they visited and painting them temporary tatts. Now, let me take you back: when I first walked into BORN ROMANTIC, it was love at first sight; I must confess, cartoon cupid’s aim was undeniable that night. A portrait of a polkadot balaclava, PINK BALLY (2026), was the door bitch, and as you weaved through the suspended grates that were the ʻgallery’ walls that night, you were treated with the best that contemporary iconography has to offer. Brown has always been drawn to symbols, at first in graffiting in the western suburbs as a kid, now she plays with recurring characters and ʻurban’ motifs: powerlines, clotheslines, scampering dogs, and flat cars fill her paintings along with figures. There’s no textural, or stylistic difference between the people and the things, they are all a part of her scenes. Some works are painted with a bit of grit mixed in the paint like the CHEEKY MISSION DOG and GIRL WITH BRAIDS (2026), while other works paints lie flat. The spotlights disappear into the black backgrounds and the rainclouds representing the seasonal cycles at the Nambucca Mission—Brown’s ancestral Country depicted in the landscape work AFTER THE RAIN (2026)—glow. The imagery is perfectly sized and shaped to fill the canvases, Brown has a playful use of space in the alternative-landscapes she’s presenting us like in NAMBUCCA MISSION. Her practice isn’t beholden to just paintings however, a large wall hosts a configuration of objects (think Bulldogs caps and lightsabers; as well as shapes cut to her own world like balaclavas, blue wattles, and molotov cocktails) bedazzled with kitschy decor like rhinestones and beads you would find on a friendship bracelet. As well as those embellishments, the Bedazzled series of works incorporate midcentury textiles of ʻA boriginalia’, a term coined by Tony Albert. In imbuing the reductive and caricatural souvenirs with the camp sparkles, Blak symbols, and the artist’s personal divas (Hi Kylie, Hi Nicole), she’s intending to subvert the ʻexpectation that Aboriginal artists must conform to a particular visual style’. For the Triple R show ʻIndigenuity’ Brown appeared on in the lead up to the show, she revealed her recognisable use of mainly black and white colours in her body of work (playing with only positive and negative space to create her scenes rather using any lines, shading, or colour) came from simply having sparse materials to work with when she attended VCA, ʻI rocked up to art school and was like “this is sick” where are all the art supplies?’ All she could afford to use at that time as she was developing her skills as a young (no money) artist, was a 20L can of black and white Bunnings paint—thus her style was born. Keep all this in mind, the week of BORN ROMANTIC’s run, Brown also took to Instagram to ʻcall-out’ Gorman for the second time (both posts have since been deleted) since accusing the brand of appropriating her work for the designs used in a line of Moroccan architecture-inspired clothing back in 2019—which founder Lisa Gorman ʻtotally den[ies]’—sadly Brown wasn’t able to afford to pursue legal action to investigate the likeness the

clothing had to her signature style of graphic art at the time. Now, while providing a comment and keeping their longer statement surrounding the accusation in an archived page on their website, Gorman has never actually been able to name the mystery artist behind the ʻoriginal work’ used for the ʻNight lights’ clothing line. And there are the posters again! Hung up on mesh panel fences by bulldog clips, and might I add, looking pretty spiff indoors compared to the iterations sacrificed to brave the spring-showers all in the name of guerilla advertising. Well all but the ones Brown signed and stuck up around Brunswick in the week leading up to the show, setting the city’s Romantics on a manhunt for an original Aretha Brown. I hope the lucky ones who ended up snagging them lock their windows...would be a real shame if…

‘The only thing harder than being born Aboriginal, gay, and a woman is being born… a Romantic.’ – Aretha Brown

Brown is leaving it all out on the table, but when you’re left with ʻno gallery, no representation, [and] no rich parents’ funding your career what else do you have it work with but spilling your guts? If you’re rocking up to art school and you can’t afford all the paint colours Bunnings has to offer, then you definitely cannot afford to cringe. If we can take anything away from the feat of BORN ROMANTIC, it’s that the truly hungry will make it happen regardless of their lack of affordances, they will make it happen on a wall, in the streets, or even at an old laundry in a convent. Perhaps limitation can be a kind of liberation—all that to say, art schools should probably supply materials, Gorman should look into coughing up and paying Brown her dues (unless they plan to reveal this ʻmystery artist’ anytime soon), and we should all (definitely) pay the rent. The philosophy of the show seems to mainly hedge on ʻa bit of fun’, and after the emotional tax that her work for After The Rain would have taken, it’s incredibly heartening to watch a young artist give in to the frivolity of subjects like: crushes. The honesty is working, the all-caps confessions and tasteful self-deprecation feel really defiant amongst a generation embattled with performance. With a grin on her face as she’s twisting the knobs on the decks during the opening night festivities (that had supporting acts CAUTION, Milika, and Nate Lust play tracks that I can only imagine shook the ghosts of the nuns around the convent’s veils off), Brown is ahead of any responses or recountings for now, and is revelling in some well earned-joy. It’s sink or cringe out here, and Brown has just completed her victory-lap past the pesky trepidation that being young and a Romantic can be rife with. Bravo and good luck to the rest of us I guess—we’re right behind you, Aretha! VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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I’ve reviewed my three favourite happy hours in and around the inner city, so you’ve got somewhere that feels chic but doesn’t come with a dent to the bank account.

Lenny’s Wine Room, Richmond Lenny’s is all about the small details, the staff are casual and fun, offering me a sip of a Portuguese wine I’d never tried before—immediately, I felt rather worldly. Since the place is walk-ins only, I’ve seen the team manage a monster queue, squeezing eager guests around the bar and into corners of the space. The courtyard is my favourite spot, the fairy lights wind through vine leaves which orange and redden in the winter months, making the $10 you’ve spent on a spritz feel far more sophisticated. Even the name of the happy hour being Aperitivo Hour adds to Lenny’s European bar fantasy. The dripping wax candles, low lighting and green accents makes a casual drink with friends feel far more expensive. What’s even better is once the happy hour is over, and you’re feeling hungry, you can order from the pizza shop next door. What could be better! Lenny’s Aperitivo Hour runs 4-6, Monday—Thursday, $10 spritzes, $12 Negronis and $11 wines.

Bar Lola, Fitzroy Bar Lola is definitely the bougiest of the three, you can sip an Aperol Spritz for $12 and munch on some oysters for $4.50. The highlight was the spritz being garnished with what they called a “Gucci” olive—it doesn’t come with designer branding, but I think it’s the biggest olive I’ve ever encountered. Naturally, I got two. Bar Lola feels like the kind of wine bar whose classiness feels effortless, as the staff were dressed in casual attire, it lets the food and drink and interior do the talking. The green tiled bar and curtains hanging on the ceiling were classy touches. I also cannot rave about the focaccia enough, while not on the happy hour, that honey glazed rosemary bread is something I’ve dreamt of since. Bar Lola’s Golden Hour runs 4-7pm every day, you can sip $20 Champagne Lallier, $10 Pinot Grigio and Cab Sauv, $12 Aperol spritzes and Snaquiris and $7 XXXX Gold—girl’s got range. 50

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Bougie on a (Student) Budget: Melbourne’s Best Drink Deals WORDS BY ELLA MOORE

Rooftop Bar, CBD Rooftop Bar is probably the cooler, more Melbourne-feeling of the three, the outdoors means you can smoke a vogue, sit on the wooden steps and watch the mix of suits, people off to gigs, and those there to be seen. There’s a sense of community that I feel seeing people sat on some wooden steps, it’s humble and almost school-like. The altitude also adds a bit of glam to your evening, not to mention that you can get Four Pillars gin and yuzu spritzes on tap for happy hour. I’d argue that it’s perhaps cooler and grungier than bougie per se, compared to the other two. It’s my go to spot to take interstate friends, the fake grass, the misters turned on in the summer, and the DJ overlooking everyone, conducting the evening against the backdrop of the Melbourne skyline makes you feel immediately cooler. Rooftop Bar’s Spring Happy hour is on 4-6pm weekdays, $10 Stone and Wood Pacific Ales, $8 House Wine (red, white and prosecco) and $12 Four Pillars Peach and yuzu spritz.

DESIGN BY RUBY WEIR-ALARCON VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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Mile End Kicks Words by Sabine Pentecost 52

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A title sequence in Helvetica Neue Bold can tell us so much. While the font is favoured by Farrago for print and online–you’re reading this in Helvetica Neue right now, meta!–it evokes a nostalgia for my tween years. Sitting in the MIFF screening of Mile End Kicks, my heart pangs in my chest to the unmistakable beat of “Robbers” by The 1975 like returning home from a long trip. Hello, Tumblr.com. Mile End Kicks follows Grace Pine, an established but under-appreciated music journalist who makes the move from soulless Toronto to the yung-ho capital of Canada: Montreal. She’s just quit her awful job under a predatory boss, she’s got a shiny new book deal to write a 33 ⅓ book on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, she’s determined to find herself in a new city. Grace is the posterchild for millennial optimism—a girl who is going to be ok. Grace is your classic annoying, naive main character. She moves into the spare room of cool and carefree Madeleine speaking no French and having little intention of adapting to her environment. She quickly takes the easy option at every turn, falling further behind in her book and her rent. The limits of Madeleine’s carefree attitude are tested. Grace’s insufferableness works superbly to critique the gentrification of metropolitan cultural centres; her lack of engagement with the language, the norms and existing residents of Montreal coming across as garish and disrespectful to the viewer. While Grace does realise how unbearable she becomes and changes for the better, Mile End Kicks cautions against the blind, navel-gazing entitlement that pushes out culture and stifles community. To procrastinate working on her Alanis Morissette book, Grace becomes a pseudo-groupie for mediocre indie band Bone Patrol, which is only taken as a serious

artistic endeavour by frontman and “worst guy in Montreal”, Chevy. Grace becomes infatuated with him and the band, hoping to fit in with the fabric of her new city. If you run in the same circles as local musicians who publicly spout disdain for making it big while secretly hoping for a BEAT Magazine feature, then you know the vibe of Bone Patrol. Chevy’s dialogue is written with such wit; it could be Shakespeare. Maybe in 30 years we will look back at his lines like an Araki film, call them camp and artfully O-T-T. To me, in 2026, I see no exaggeration.

share house couch. Levack occupied a similar space in Montreal during her youth, an insecure music critic becoming entangled in the indie scene. In an interview for Director Fits on Substack, Levack says costuming for the film involved “a lot of going through old party photos on Facebook and looking at exactly what people were wearing”. She searched for specific archival American Apparel to match the vision of the 2010s she had lived through. In fact, many items from Grace’s wardrobe are taken directly off the back of the director. The protagonist’s lime-green Sonic Youth shirt comes from Levack’s visit to their gig at the McCarren Park Pool in 2007, her SPIN Magazine tee sourced from Levack’s time interning there as a music critic. This direct link between writer-director and protagonist makes the film feel all the more real— an Almost Famous for the millennial era. The brilliance and success of Mile End Kicks speaks to the broader Canadian takeover we are seeing. In the wake of the USA’s selfown/implosion, the American cultural pull has shifted north. We saw this in the explosive popularity of Heated Rivalry, bringing global attention to Canada-based streaming platform Crave (which also chipped in for the production of Mile End Kicks). Canada is fast carving out its place as the USA’s cooler, more levelheaded older sister, a place where perhaps we can still have nice things. Younger millennials and older Gen-Z are hitting the point in their lives where nostalgia takes hold. We yearn for when rent was cheaper and social media was still silly. Depressingly, we yearn for a time when most of young people’s lives were lived in the real world. Mile End Kicks quenches that thirst for a simpler time. Grace’s journey against the backdrop of a buzzing Montreal is messy, but recognisably human.

my 13-yearold self’s new favourite movie A lot of people in Melbourne genuinely talk like this. Chevy’s blind faith in his own artistic genius puts me in mind of the tale of Icarus; with his wax wings melting on stage as he writhes and screams wearing only a trench coat with lipstick smeared across his face. All in the name of art. For too long have greasy men dominated the self-insert loser writer movie. In Mile End Kicks, director Chandler Levack demands a seat at the table—or rather, the stained

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There are few things less glamorous than a waiting room. Fluorescent lighting, office chairs, a coffee table, something to read while you wait for somebody else to decide what happens next. Diego Ramírez has put one inside the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). His installation, Bureausis (2026), centres on his own Kafkaesque novel about contemporary art under total bureaucracy. Copies of the book sit around a makeshift reception area with the stale familiarity of somewhere designed for waiting. You can flick through the book in the gallery, though reading the whole thing during a visit would require a commitment bordering on performance art. Most visitors will encounter Bureausis in fragments, with the installation giving physical form to the administrative world described in its pages. The work sits at the centre of NEW26, the revived version of ACCA’s long-running NEW series. Originally staged between 2003 and 2016, the program has returned after a decade away, commissioning seven artists to make new work across painting, moving image, ceramics and installation. ACCA describes NEW as a platform where emerging artists can experiment, take risks and produce ambitious work within a major public institution. That language sounds generous. It also made me think about everything that has to be in place before anyone gets to simply make something new. An artist needs somewhere to put the thing. They need materials. They need time and, often, another job. Ramírez’s novel moves through the risk assessments and institutional language that accumulate around contemporary artistic life. Artists wait for funding while the systems meant to support cultural work can just as easily slow it down. That tension feels especially pointed inside NEW26, where Ramírez has received the kind of institutional support his fictional world keeps postponing. A section of ACCA’s wall has also been removed. The gallery briefly stops feeling seamless and becomes something visibly built and managed. Space matters throughout NEW26. The exhibition is generously installed, with enough distance between works for each to establish its own presence. Nothing feels tucked away. Sightlines remain open and the lighting shifts carefully between paintings and larger installations. Large canvases need walls. Ceramics need floor space. A five-and-a-half-metre data rack tower needs somewhere it can loom over you properly. Amanda Bennetts’ Axis Mundi (2026) does exactly that. Data racks and cabling rise towards the ceiling in a structure resembling both a server stack and an altar. Small screens glow from behind frosted acrylic, while steel rails interrupt the vertical structure and give the tower an awkward bodily quality. Directly beside it, a bench holds headphones playing Bennetts’ AI-generated double delivering a sermon-like address. Axis Mundi takes its title from the Latin term for the “axis of the world”, later used by Romanian historian Mircea Eliade to describe a sacred centre connecting heaven and earth. Bennetts recasts the data rack tower in that image, and I found that comparison hard to shake. She gives it the scale and visual authority of something sacred, but its ugliness never disappears. Cords and metal remain exposed. The tower is imposing, almost reverential, while still looking like the industrial machinery it is. AI is increasingly discussed with a kind of faith, as something inevitable and all-knowing, capable of predicting desire and even 54

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the body itself. At the same time, data centres are multiplying across Melbourne, particularly in the west, with enormous demands for land and power. Their expansion can feel beyond the control of the people expected to live alongside them. Bennetts translates that helplessness into physical scale. The tower makes the viewer small in relation to a system whose inner workings remain largely out of sight. Its religious framing grows uncomfortable precisely because devotion requires its own submission. Axis Mundi gives that hidden infrastructure a body, then makes us stand beneath it. EJ Son’s Eggverse (2026) creates a stranger, more playful environment. Unglazed ceramic vessels and repeated egg forms gather across a circular platform. Curtains and CCTV cameras frame a large egg under a concentrated spotlight, giving it the absurd dignity of a relic. The unfinished ceramics look porous and unresolved, which suits an exhibition preoccupied with emergence. The eggs carry associations of fertility, gender, reproduction and genetic engineering, then collapse just as easily into the fact that an egg is also funny looking and ordinary. Its title returns to the classic chickenand-egg paradox. Where does any version of the self actually begin? NEW26 stretches “emerging” well beyond age. Here, the word describes visibility as much as youth. For Nicholas Currie, the new is never empty. His large-scale paintings draw on Aboriginal art history alongside the Western canon, threaded through with motifs that are distinctly his own. Inflatable crocodiles are attached directly to (P)oxymoron (2026), referencing a crocodile totem in Currie’s family. In big X (2026), an “I ♥ Melbourne” t-shirt sits against the painted surface while a linear-perspective diagram emerges underneath, drawing on a device used throughout Gordon Bennett’s work. Elsewhere, intersecting arrows adapted from his father’s doodles and a ghost-like figure appear across the series. Currie lets all of these visual languages crowd the same canvas without smoothing out where they come from. The clearest material history appears in time and patience. (2026), a five-metre-wide spiderweb painted in bitumen. Currie connects the material to roads laid across Country and to his own family history, including the forced labour of his Indigenous forefathers in far-north Queensland. The bitumen pulls that family history into the broader violence of colonial expansion. Material takes on a completely different pleasure in Caesar Florence-Howard’s six untitled paintings. Dirt and sand sit alongside glue, latex, hairspray and air-dry clay. Detritus moves from one canvas to another. These were the works I wanted to live in. I wanted to touch them, crawl into them and maybe take a nap inside one. Every section demands its own small inspection. A streak. A lump. Sand caught thickly against the surface. Their value gathers slowly through time and the choices that hold everything together. Amanda Bell’s moving-image work Feel it all. Then let it go. (2026) pushes the exhibition’s title somewhere else again. Bell works through Country and archival footage alongside the history of violent dispossession. Her question is how anything new can be made while colonial systems continue to structure what is remembered and what is valued. NEW26 ends up crowded by what came before. Bell’s images persist, as do the colonial systems that decide what gets remembered.

Waiting to be Seen

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Amanda Bell, Feel it all. Then let it go. 2026, installation view. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2026. Photographed by Andrew Curtis

That makes the exhibition’s title feel like a question. What does it take to emerge?

Money is part of the answer, even when nobody says it directly. So is time, and having a room large enough to fail in. “Emerging” makes an artistic career sound almost natural, as though somebody simply surfaces once they are ready. NEW26 exposes how much has to happen before that moment becomes possible. Work needs funding and space. It needs people willing to take it seriously. ACCA has now brought NEW back as a biennial series, with NEW26 running from 18 September to 22 November 2026. Its return matters because early artistic practice is often squeezed between making the work and finding the means to keep making it. A commission cannot fix the unequal conditions of the art world, but it can make visible what becomes possible when those pressures ease, even briefly. “Emerging” starts to feel like a strange word for a process shaped by so much waiting and unseen work. The new does not arrive by itself.

WORDS BY CHERIE GAVARA-NANU STRONG

NEW26 at ACCA VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

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If ever there was somebody who could conjure up some kind of antidote to the blues of drifting through our crashing world, it would be Ruby Gill. Compelled partly by a craving for live music but mostly by the promise of Gill herself, snagging some tickets spontaneously to surprise my partner meant I was lucky enough to witness this phenomenon firsthand. Within moments of Gill appearing onstage, the entire room fell silent, bodies stilled and swaying as if in a breeze, soothed by the sound of her voice. To say that her presence is magic is no exaggeration.

spellbound by ruby gill at the curtin Words by Bianca Lockwood Photography by Jeven Wang

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The Johannesburg-born, Melbournebased songwriter has been captivating audiences for many years, with more recent adoration in the local scene blossoming after the release of her 2025 album, Some Kind of Control. The album navigates existential dread, political frustration, queerness and personhood with melancholic sincerity and humorous wit. Coupled with minimal production, the vulnerable tenderness of Gill’s words have room to quietly unfold and slowly settle with a resonance that has decidedly won the hearts of listeners. Gill has certainly proven her knack for carving everyday moments to the bone, making it entirely impossible not to be endeared by her gentle yet unflinching honesty. This talent was particularly evident amidst the intimate atmosphere that The Curtin’s bandroom invited for her most recent set. Behind an inconspicuous, thick door in the heart of the pub, a creaking staircase curls up and out into the centre of an attic. Other than the unique L-shape of the room, which allows almost entirely unobstructed views, the space is simple and unpretentious, evidently reflecting the building’s sixteen decades of history and solid reputation of supporting live music. Rising into the room, humming with the excitement of friends and couples both young and old, felt wholeheartedly magical. We settled amongst the crowd towards the back of the room, waiting nervously, unphased by the glimpses we caught of the small stage. What mattered, and what was so distinctly palpable, was the feeling that descended into the space. All those people, all their days and lives and stories, seemed lulled and relived so easily in the anticipation of her art. As Gill stepped out onto a simple stage, there was no fanfare, no theatrics, just her and her voice, and it was enough to still the room. Gill began with an unreleased song, ʻLord Let Me Be a Pastry Chef’, unfolding the recognition she has come to afford herself in fostering the present joys of her life. The first half of the set rolled easily from there, almost like water, without spectacle

or exertion, reminding me of a lullaby. We hear beloved tracks like ʻSpace Love’, ʻSome Kind of Control’ and, my favourite, ʻHow Chimpanzees Reassure Each Other’, which earnestly details the navigation of intimacy with incredible vulnerability. ʻRoom Full of Human Male Politicians’ carries more rage, responding to the greed of political figures determined to control the bodies of women, queer people and immigrants, offering unbelievable catharsis in its specificity and wit. “What’s a girl to do when her backs against the wall”, Gill sings, “It’s my goddam body on your bottom line.” The quiet revolution of the crowd signing along emphatically was incredibly moving. Carrying us delicately along are the gentle guitar strums, gorgeous piano melodies and enchanting lilt of bandmates Lewis Coleman, Hannah Cameron and Jess Elwood. There was a charming companionship in how their bodies comfortably glide through the set together, with fleeting glances and friendly flickers of camaraderie between songs. It feels like something tangible tugs them together, a thread of truly knowing one another that removes the need for too much communication. Halfway through the show, almost from nowhere, Gill pulled an A4 exercise book into her lap and shared three poems. Red Season, Hot Mail, and The Lesbian Urge to Cut Off All My Hair are equally hilarious, absurd and emblematic of Gill’s curiosity about the emotional possibilities afforded by the tiniest of happenings. Whether revelling in the glory of a haircut, or pondering the possibility of birds with periods, there is a deep well of cleverness and curiosity needed to craft worlds from the ordinary rhythms and moments of life, a skill Gill demonstrates with ease. The second half of the show was dedicated to tracks from her upcoming record, due to be released in October. The record, she explains, was created by her band inside a tiny London studio in the dead centre of a heat wave. It feels reminiscent of an exorcism to imagine the heat of the room and the art pouring out of them all like sweat,

rinsing them dry and leaving them gasping. Despite each band member wrestling a calamity (an illness, a break-up, an existential crisis etc.), or perhaps, serendipitously, because of these things, the songs they shared with us were entirely enthralling. ʻCarol / Not Carol’ is my favourite of these tracks for how it captures the essence of the new album by trying to find meaning in the wreckage. Gill shared how her encounter with an older couple in the aftermath of a car crash inspired the song, emphasising the strangeness of tending to a humorously optimistic injured man. The tale reflects quite sweetly what is so special about Gill; this ability to lead us by the hand into the middle of a story, letting us see and feel exactly things just as they were. The set concludes with more new material, including ʻPorch Light’ and ʻJamie’, as well as a surprise appearance from Mimi Gilbert, an exceptional singer-songwriter and close friend of Gills’, for their joint track ʻWhatever Whatever’. The very creation of the song, written partially by Gill before being finished harmoniously by Gilbert, brings home the capacity of Gill to connect so deeply with others. To end the evening, Gill takes a moment to thank us for coming and expressing something that I have been slowly coming to realise myself. Nothing, she says, can replace the feeling of being here in this room, of existing in this moment at this time in this space, and she is undoubtedly right. Standing beside somebody I loved, surrounded by others beside people they loved, strung together by mutual adoration up into that creaking attic on a drizzly evening simply to catch a glimpse of the words of this person we all adored, was an apt reminder that to hold on to each other, those spaces are one of the most powerful things we have. It is a rare comfort to see somebody so openly hold onto the parts of yourself you might not be proud of, or even understand within yourself, and for that, I can only say thank you Ruby Gill.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Words By Freya Bothroyd

DESIGN BY RUBY WEIR-ALARCON 58

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

As I am sure many of you were, I was incredibly excited (and more than a little upset at the fact that I was not able to go, on account of being on the opposite side of the globe) when Olivia Rodrigo recently hosted her festival Daisy Chain Fields. The entire thing was not-for-profit, raising $20 million for various women’s charities, and Olivia wore a dress made by Palestinian owned brand Nöl collective. She furthermore had an installation at the festival called Grrrl Germs: Punk Feminism goes Viral, 1991-2026. Olivia Rodrigo therefore made it clear that the festival was a political statement, and what excited me the most about this was that she invited the classic ‘90s acts Garbage, Bikini Kill and the Breeders to perform alongside newer artists, whose careers have just begun to flourish. The all women (or women-fronted) lineup was inherently politically charged and Rodrigo, far from backing away from this, embraces it, explicitly underscoring the ‘90s feminist significance in the festival’s Grrrl Germs exhibit. With the festival still relatively fresh in my mind, I wanted to take the opportunity to see what Farrago’s own archives had to say about punk feminism and the grrrl movements of the ‘90s here in Melbourne. In a 2025 interview with The Guardian, Shirley Manson of Garbage relays exactly what ‘90s feminism was about: it offered “a different kind of woman, for the first time… liberated, mouthy, opinionated, political, also often beautiful and powerful”. Indeed, this was exactly what I found in my own exploration of Farrago’s articles. In one article in 1997, Vanessa Sowerwine declares, “I keep calling myself a feminist despite the media backlash

against it precisely because of it.” From the Women’s Action collective in 1998: “Feminists are often called angry women… and if you ask me, that’s great”. Women took what were initially disparaging insults directed at them—calling them “bitches”, “crazy”, so on, and said so be it, reclaiming these anti-feminist remarks. This defiance and unrelenting anger against the mainstream is, perhaps, one of the reasons the Riotgrrrl movements gained a hold within ‘90s girls around the world—and Melbourne was no exception. In 1995, Farrago interviewed fanzine Grot Grrrl, who directly addressed this in their name: Grot, because that’s what the conservatives thought of them, and Grrrl: “We’re … angry girls so we’re GRRRLS”. Rather than rejecting the labels given to them, Grot Grrrl and other feminist groups and people reframed them as a positive, intended to encourage girls to go against the grain. The earliest mention of grrrl I could find in the archives was in the interview with Grot Grrrl, however “Grrrl” is then on used as an identifier in a handful of Farrago’s ‘90s issues, towards the audience: “women, chicks, grrrls, mujeres, femmes, whatever you want to call yourself: read here!”, as an introduction to Spiderbait’s Janet English: “Spiderbaits guerrilla grrrl”) and as a descriptor of Ani di Franco’s music: “grrrl folk”. The term is used casually and with familiarity, pointing to the prevalence of the movement within our own campus. Grot Grrrl gives a lot of insight into the attitudes of Riotgrrrl and the reaction towards Riotgrrrl at the time. Two key components of the movement were its roots in the “girl rock scene” and fanzines. Grot Grrrl described what they

did as “two women doing what we want to do”, run out of their flat in St Kilda with no professional office or studio, demonstrating the DIY ethos at the heart of the movement. Despite all of this (or perhaps because of it), the fanzine was popular. They were interviewed by multiple large media organizations like Triple J, The Age, Time and HQ Magazine and, at the time of the interview, note that although their distribution was at 500 copies, “the demand [was] out there” for more, which goes to show the level of interest invested in the Riotgrrrl movement here in Melbourne. There were a lot of girls who identified with the messages these fanzines were disseminating—they wanted an alternative to the ways in which women were seen in the mainstream, and the riot movements based in women’s rock and largely distributed through fanzines had given them a space to do so. In another interview Farrago published in 1997 with Jane English of Spiderbait, she echoes similar sentiments of the fanzine—a want for women to be really represented, not just the “Anglo thin woman who is the lustful object”. In the Farrago archives we can see an important snippet of the alternative women’s spaces created in the ‘90s. Moreso, the prevalence of the feminist attitudes that underscored the movement and general allusions to Riotgrrrl indicate that there was a significant community here at The University of Melbourne too. And with Olivia Rodrigo—an incredibly successful, mainstream artist—highlighting the movement at her own festival, it is clear that the significance of the ‘90s movement has not faded. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Look. Are horoscopes real? No, probably not. Do I still ravenously hunt for and consume the little vague predictions stuck in the nether of a magazine? Abso-fucking-lutely. Well, dig in, because Farrago’s Zodiac section has never been taken more seriously. Taking from Farrago’s archival horoscopes, this article will illuminate everything you wished to know—and probably more stuff that you didn’t—about the day you were born. Beware: the stars don’t hide their ﬁres amongst Farrago’s pages.

Libra

Starting off strong with the Libras. According to a 1968 horoscope, a Libra’s physique “is uniformly debauched by constant masturbation.” Y’all are glowing, but let’s keep it out of the lecture hall please. In a similar vein, we “really can tell how much meth you’re on.” Libras were also warned in 2007 to “not mishandle the hamsters you sicko”, which right off the bat is fairly sound advice, though I shudder to think of the animal abuse that prompted this warning.

Scorpio

The Scorpios aren’t much better off. Thankfully, Farrago is no kink-shamer. “That’s not a daddy complex; we too like scoldings from men in tweed” says one from 2007. But, you were clocked for not voting in the UMSU elections: “chump”. You “have big feet, and use these to tread on others”, but don’t get too close because “there’s something in your teeth. Oh wait: That is your teeth. Eek.” A word of advice from 2007: “Remember kid: a chauvinist act a day keeps women away.” Do with that what you will.

FARRASCOPES

Sagittarius

Sorry Sagittarians - don’t get your hopes up. As the “chief carriers and spreaders of venereal disease” and the zodiac most likely to “wimp out”, y’all are advised to “give up your porn habit before you see how your mum got rich.” Yikes.

Capricorn

“No heaven for you” Capricorns I’m afraid. “God saw you masturbate in the shower.” Think He needs to mind His own business, particularly since you’re so “repressed sexually, with a fetish for good living.” Funnily enough, this theme comes up again in a horoscope from 20 years later—if Capricorns “could put anything (like sex) above working they may one day create their own family.” Yeah, that one doesn’t hold up as well today as it did in the ‘80s, does it. There is just one silver lining—”one person will love you.”

Aquarius

Farrago 1961 predicts that “you were probably born in January or February.” And you thought horoscopes were bollocks. “Why are you fooling yourself with this uni stuff? You were born to RAP!” Aquarians, a choice lies ahead of you—do you stick with that Arts degree or do you start a Soundcloud? Up to you, but the stars have placed their bets. That being said, let’s stick to rapping, just because “you can play a few chords on guitar; it doesn’t mean you have to.” 60

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Pisces

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Farrago really has something against Pisces. Not a single archived horoscope is comprehensible, unless you would like to be reminded of “the eleventh commandment: dolphins are human” or that Kevin Rudd “won’t tip strippers.” Sorry y’all.

A 1968 Farrago horoscope explains that all Arians are “uncertain of their sex.” That being said, the moustache is not a good look I’m afraid, it may “bring all the girls to the yard” but “they’re like, ‘Please shave it. Now.’” Maybe take skydiving off the bucket list though, one prediction foresees a “high fatality rate” for Aries people.

Aries

Taurus

In a statistic from August 2007 that surprisingly has not changed in 19 years, 1 in 8 Australians have genital herpes. A horoscope from this article advises Tauruses to “look ‘round your tute. Fuck. Sorry. IT’S YOU.” Hate to break the news this way, but STI testing is free, go book an appointment sometime. While you’re at it “it’s time to admit you have a crack problem. Ditch the lowriders.”

AN ARCHIVAL FORCAST

Words by Harper Hopkins

Gemini

In a similar way to the Tauruses, us Geminis have to understand that “camel toe is not an appropriate fashion accessory.” Actually, a horoscope from a few months later advises to “go commando all day.” Perfect for fulﬁlling the next edition’s advice, that “an anarchic act a day keeps the system away.” Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us here.

Leo

For the Leos looking for a fresh start, “change is good, but that doesn’t mean you should change your name to Tits McGee.” Maybe try Indiana Jones, because while “you don’t have to be Harrison Ford to get a girl, it would help.” It’s okay though, because the “love of your life is waiting—for your raging herpes to clear up.” If that doesn’t work out, at least there’s still some job security, for Leos “make good eunuchs” according to a 1968 horoscope section.

To any Cancer’s upset about a job rejection, worry not, “you didn’t get that job because you ARE too sexy for it.” It’s okay though, who needs money? “You can’t always get what you want, but stealing is very effective.”

Cancer

And ﬁnally, Virgos. Farrago 1961’s horoscope simply reads, “really?” and frankly, there’s not much more to say on the topic. Farrago seems to think y’all need a reminder that “you’re not Carrie Bradshaw, you’re just dumb, vain and slutty” and that “you’re not Daria, just arrogant, a recluse, mean and sarcastic.” Feels personal.

Virgo

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

FROM THE ARCHIVES

What the Hell is Professor’s Walk’s Deal? Words by James Muller

If you’re an Arts student, you’re very familiar with Professor’s Walk. It connects the crepe shop with the Baillieu, Old Arts, Arts West and the Babel Building. You’re probably even familiar with the plaques placed into the ground, that have names, birthdates and usually a few achievements of the person whom the plaque is honouring. For my first two years of university, I assumed these plaques gave Professor’s Walk its name. You’re literally walking on professors. Professor’s Walk is actually named as such because when the university first opened, the walk was lined with houses for professors. One of the old houses is still visible when walking in the little passageway towards Carte Crepes, the crepe shop. The plaques are given out to recipients of the “University of Melbourne Award for their lifetime of distinguished contributions”. It’s so vague that it means the University can put who they damn well want on the ground. Along the walkway, there are different plaques. No, I’m not joking. Get it out of your system. Now, I’m not going to lie, most of them are academics who founded some sort of institution or were vice chancellor and almost all of them have a building named after them, but some of the people the University has chosen to represent are crazy. Here are some of my favourites:

Sir Redmond Barry (1813-1880) Foundation Chancellor of the University (1853) Founder of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1848) and State Library (1854) Supreme Court judge of the Eureka rebels and Ned Kelly I can’t tell if this guy is more honoured by the building named after him, this plaque or the Barry the Bear mascot using his name. I’ve got some beef with Sir Redmond Barry. First of all, he signed the death warrant for Ned Kelly and indicted his mother. Uncool. Secondly, how are you allowed to be a judge, found a hospital and a library? #EatTheRich. Working class villain. Except for the whole acquitting all the Eureka rebels in the high treason trials, and his attempts to defend First Nations people from receiving the death penalty. And also, he made access to the library free for everyone so they can get an education. Eh, at least he probably wasn’t a eugenicist.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (1905-1990) Charismatic teacher Lover of books and libraries Founder of organisations for the humanities I’m glad to announce that Kathleen Fitzpatrick has now appeared in four Farrago editions in a row. To be honest, seeing her name here with the likes of Redmond Barry is what made me want to write this article. For a more detailed look at her, go read my article in Edition Four. For some quick highlights, she’s probably one of the first contributors of Farrago, married one of its founders, divorced him and then became more well known than him. Girlboss. She also was part of the first female majority department at the University and taught many students in British history. She deserves more than this plaque and that theatre in Arts West. We need a new mascot called Kathy Kangaroo. 62

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Ernest Cropley (1914-1997) Legendary University groundsman Expert cricket pitch curator Patron of Melbourne University sports

I am 90% sure this dude dedicated his life to cricket. The building on the University oval is named the ʻErnie Cropley Sports Pavillion’ after him. According to ads in Farrago, he helped run and organise the Melbourne University Cricket Club. Again, I don’t understand who gets these awards and why. So far, we have the first chancellor of the Uni, the biggest girlboss in Melbourne’s history, and a dude who liked cricket. I hope the next entry clears things up.

Ray Marginson (1923-2019) University Administrator Creator of the Underground Car Park Founder of the University Gallery Ray Marginson’s biggest accomplishment is laying the groundwork for the cochlear implant. Why did they put the fucking carpark on his plaque? Is Mad Max more culturally relevant than revolutionising technology for hearing impairment? I’m just flabbergasted at this understatement of his life. Was the carpark a much bigger thing like ten years ago? It’s a parking lot! A fucking parking lot! WHY IS A PARKING LOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN COCHLEAR IMPLANTS.

Philip Henry Marcham (1830-1915) University porter and bellringer (1880-1915) How legendary must a bellringer be to get an honour on the same level as Redmond Barry and Kathleen Fitzpatrick? I’m still no closer to figuring out a logical method on who gets honoured in plaque form or not, but I like this dude’s energy. There is nothing about this guy online except for his death notice. However, when going through the UMSU archives I did find a reproduced photo, although the original date is unknown. When his plaque said he was a bellringer, I imagined his bell was installed in a building somewhere where the whole University could hear. I knew he died before the Old Arts Bell Tower was even planned, but I imagined there was one somewhere. But this picture suggests that he literally just walked around with a little bell. If he was trying to indicate the hour, surely he couldn’t get around the whole University in a single minute? I know it was a lot smaller then, but that still seems ludicrous. He would have been hauling ass. There’s so much more I want to learn about this man, but information is so scarce. This award is probably the biggest honour he ever received in his life.

Sir John Monash (1865-1931) Co-founder Melbourne University Union Distinguished military commander Vice-Chancellor This is probably a low point in honours Monash has received. He is literally on the $100 note, and he has a freeway named after him, and even the university that takes all the people who couldn’t get into UniMelb is named in his honour. I guess being the only effective general on the British side of World War One will do that to you. It’s kind of crazy that he founded the union here as well. The moral of the story, I think, is that to be honoured at this University it’s not about money donated, glass ceilings broken or national heroes hanged. It’s about the drama, the flair, the aura you contain. Cochlear implants literally just make people hear again, while the underground car park has resulted in an EPIC campus legend involving one of Australia’s most legendary directors. Storytelling over societal impact. Now that’s the University I know. VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Words by Janice Hui & James Muller Imagine the worst student election you think of. Corrupt right-wing parties were wearing green clothing, students were campaigning on the basis that the same right-wing party was not properly taking council minutes and those invested in student politics saw it as the most significant election in the Union’s history. But most importantly, it saw the More Beer! party play a crucial role in student politics. 2003 was an incredible year for student politics at the University of Melbourne. So, what the fuck was going on in the early 2000s? In short, via some legal bullshittery involving the magistrate’s court, the right-wing 64

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Labor club (who would later form an alliance with the Liberal club) swept the 2001 student elections. They weren’t really elected, since no one else could even run. Then, two weeks before the end of his term in 2003, the president of the union Scott Crawford, along with his predecessor Darren Ray, signed a 44-million-dollar deal with a property management group that had existed for two weeks. For reference, the union’s annual budget was 13 million dollars. As it turns out, this was going to send the union entirely bankrupt. The University itself stepped in and liquidated the entirety of the

Melbourne University Student Union (MUSU) in 2004, and from its ashes rose the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU). The petty, and almost comically theatrical, drama of early 2000s student politics at UniMelb has already been extensively documented both in Farrago and in the media outside of the University. Most notably, it is the subject of Gary Newman’s documentary The State of the Union, whose investigation into the messy and toxic microcosm of student politics during the 2003 MUSU election now serves as a cautionary tale for aspiring student politicians today. Surprisingly (or maybe not so

FROM THE ARCHIVES

surprisingly, considering the state of alcoholism among the student body both past and present…), beer played a significant role in the 2003 election. Looking through the 2003 election guide, we see members of the More Beer! party running for every single position in the election. Their candidate statements reveal that their policies would truly, and only, revolve around the consumption of more beer. The presidential candidate, Kate Lawson, promised that “When you vote More Beer! there are no broken deals, just broken seals.” Benjamin Mactiervan, who was running for the role of Education Officer, claimed that “More Beer! [would] campaign for students to have a life and get pissed on South Lawn during lunchtime.” Even the candidate for Media Officer, who would take on the mantle of being the Farrago’s editor if they were elected, declared that “Every Edition would be full off Beer, Drugs and well Beer and drugs.” Judging by the glaringly obvious spelling mistake, we’re not so sure if he would be a great fit. In its ticket speech, More Beer! states that they were “firm believers in equating everything back to one common unit that is relevant to all students—the cost of a slab!” We can judge their questionable policies all we want, but one thing is for certain: these guys are nothing but consistent and reliable in their love for beer. More Beer! had actually been running at student elections as early as 1993, calling for the creation of Melbourne University’s own beer label, turning the Farrago office into a brewery and “replacing the water in the South Lawn moat with beer”. However, in 2003, we would see More Beer! take on an important role in the sensational election. According to various articles in Farrago, More Beer! was one of the largest clubs on campus, perfectly capable of “[pulling] a crowd” of over 700 members. More Beer!’s status as a well-loved social club would make it a valuable ally for the opposition of the Labor-Liberal alliance, who attempted to garner as many votes as possible to defeat the corrupt right-wing party. To prevent the continuation of Crawford and Ray’s reign, the ALP (not to be confused with the right-

leaning Labor club) joined forces with the International Association and More Beer! to form the ticket “Pride” under the Queer Department. Though they were now part of Pride’s progressive campaign that called for “democracy, fairness and the legitimate representation of the Student Body”, students may rest assured that More Beer! never strayed away from their single-minded focus on beer. When leftist groups called out the Liberal government’s “rampage on public education”, More Beer! determined how much beer one could buy with $44 million dollars: “It’s 1.2 million slabs at 64.8 million cans, and it’s 24.3 million litres of beer”. Other campaigners stressed the importance of safeguarding and improving student services at the University, while More Beer! calculated that “that’s six Olympic-sized swimming pools full of beer!” The right-wing Labor-Liberal alliance also capitalised on students’ love for beer during the election. In The State of the Union, it was revealed that a number of “feeder tickets” were created with catchy names to channel more votes to the right-leaning factions. This included “The Society for the Appreciation of Free Beer” (Free Beer for short), led by Hamish Jones, the MUSU Activities Officer and a member of the Liberal club. In the Farrago editorial before the elections, the writer claimed that Jones had a hand in the disaffiliation of political clubs in opposition to his party. They alerted students to “be aware” of Jones’ Free Beer club, accusing it of being a product and beneficiary of “political bias and favouritism” within the corrupt and crumbling Union. So, how does Free Beer compare with More Beer!? Ideologically, the two clubs seemed pretty aligned in their united enthusiasm for beer. However, the insidious schemes of Free Beer was uncovered in The State of the Union, when Newman exposed them of putting up homophobic posters with the words “Enjoy your heterosexuality” and “Chicks, Footy, Beer: you don’t have to be queer to have FREE BEER”, which clearly targeted the Pride ticket of which More Beer! and the ALP were affiliated with. The right-

wing alliance was also revealed to be involved in a smear campaign against Queer students as they alleged that Pride supported the protection of basement toilets in Union House as an area for queer students to have sex. MUSU Queer Officer Daniel Skelton addressed this hateful display of sexist and homophobic material in the following issue of Farrago, comparing their campaign as being “no different from the tactics of individuals such as Pauline Hanson and Adolf Hitler”. Between evil homophobic beer drinkers vs jovial alcoholics whose only crime is being a bit silly, I think I know who I would vote for in this election… After the conclusion of the 2003 elections, Newman confided to Farrago that The State of the Union was originally intended to be a lighthearted documentary focusing on More Beer! by posing them in juxtaposition with the more serious political groups. However, like yours truly who also initially thought it would be funny to write an article about beer, he was soon sucked into the insanity and intensity of the student political arena at the University. In the end, despite the controversies that surrounded the right-wing parties and the efforts of Pride and More Beer!, the LaborLiberal alliance claimed victory in the 2003 MUSU elections with Scott Crawford being reelected as president. “The prospects don’t look good,” commiserated the editors of Farrago as they anticipated the impending right-wing takeover of the publication. “If Farrago becomes a mouthpiece for the party-politics of [the Labor-Liberal alliance’s] constituent groups, you know what to do in the elections for 2005,” they continued. Luckily in the year of our lord 2026, we have avoided a similar fate to these poor souls. Which is a good thing, not only for the welfare and quality of education for future students, but because I don’t know how many more acronyms we could get out of three letters with a repeat. MUMS? SUUM? SMUU? They just don’t roll off the tongue. …I need a beer after all this.

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Words by Sophia Chu

eer and university students have always made a pretty good pair. Our love for beer is plain to see, with not one, but two beer-related submissions from the Archive Team in this Edition. On the corner of Elgin and Cardigan Street, The Clyde Hotel has welcomed generations of UniMelb students through its doors, but students were hardly its first regulars. Dating back to the 1870s, it started off as a clubhouse and changing rooms for the nascent Carlton Football Club. Since becoming a pub, it has witnessed significant changes in area, including the demolition of Carlton’s housing, while also undergoing a few transformations of its own, from renovations to the addition of a rooftop bar and beer garden. Through it all, The Clyde has remained a cornerstone of student life. Its proximity to the University made it an easy favourite, especially on Thursday and Friday nights. The Clyde and Farrago have a shared history from very early on. As early as 1952, the student magazine advertised the pub, which later supported Farrago’s annual dinners and helped get the 2008 Media Collectives sloshed in the middle of 66

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the day. There is a good chance you have found yourself at one of Farrago’s events at The Clyde, whether it be pub crawls, trivia nights, zine-making sessions or launch parties. More broadly, The Clyde has long been a popular gathering place for student clubs and societies. It is tied to some of the wilder student traditions of years past, like Prosh Week. Once the University’s major annual event, Prosh Week ran for decades before declining and becoming extinct in the seventies. It was briefly revived in the eighties with festivities including the infamous drinking-and-eatingfoul-things competition, the “Beauty” Contest, and the Trike Race. The week concluded with an expedition to find Lasseters’ Reef, which essentially was a pub crawl starting at The Clyde and crawling all the way into the CBD to finish at what was then the Reef Hotel on Little Bourke Street. Then, in the 1990s, there was the Melbourne Uni Scavenger Hunt Cup. To get a sense of the event, take a look at some items on its task list: a photograph of a pantomime horse mating with the horse statue outside the National Gallery (250pts); holding a “Joan Kirner dress sale” on the steps of Parliament (125pts); kidnapping Sophie Lee (1,000pts). The list went on, but you get the idea. The winning team took home

the coveted cup and had its name added to a plaque at The Clyde. Sadly, our recent fieldwork at The Clyde confirmed that the plaque does not seem to be on display anymore. When election season rolled around, The Clyde was like an unofficial extension of campus politics. If you headed there during student election season in September, you might see a spectacle unlike anything you would encounter elsewhere. For decades, Farrago chronicled these scenes with relish, recording rival student pollies descending on the pub en masse, still buzzing from the heady thrill of harassing defenceless student voters. In 1987, as the Student Union election drew to a close at The Clyde, Farrago likened the pub’s atmosphere to the Munich beer halls of 1933. Flush with victory and beer, some Labor Club boys turned “real nasty-pasties” and caused a scene. The group rallied around Evan Thomley, nicknamed the “Betty Ford of student politics”, whose tongue was loosened as alcohol kicked in. Holding his student card aloft, Thomley proclaimed, “I’m an ALP hack with no ideological backbone, got any problems with that, sunshine?” Another instance of alcohol-fuelled candour was in 1991, when a prominent Left Alliance member was overheard at The Clyde boasting that Students Against

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Corruption would “destroy the Labor Club by June, giving us an easy run in September.” Farrago caught the group red-handed, exposing how Students Against Corruption, then dominated by Left Alliance, was plotting to turn the Student General Meeting to its own political advantage. Thanks to past Farrago reporters camping out at the pub, we can see these candid moments as they happened, giving us an unfiltered exposé of all the drama. By Farrago’s account, the atmosphere at The Clyde could turn “dripping with palpable tension” and at times, downright bloody. In late March 1984, six members of the Melbourne University Gay Society (Gaysoc) found themselves caught in a vicious confrontation at the pub. After winning the boat race, the Newman College crew adjourned to the Clyde for celebratory drinks. On noticing the Gaysoc members, the mood quickly soured. Fuelled by beer, the 150 Newman boys began chanting in unison, changing their chant from “We hate Ormond” to “We hate faggots”. Things soon escalated as beer was poured over heads, insults became threats, and before long broken glass and spit began flying across the room. So badly outnumbered were the Gaysoc members that even their friends working at The Clyde

reportedly kept their distance. The President of Newman, W. Lange, later suggested Gaysoc move to another pub, saying it would be “best for all concerned.” The incident sparked a furious, weeks-long war of words in Farrago, with correspondents traded blows over whether Newman remained the most “animal” college, while others dredged up allegations of rape and animal cruelty as evidence of a broader culture of notoriety at the college. Gaysoc, meanwhile, was sick of making things “best for all concerned” by remaining a mute minority while the vocal majority drank, shouted and threw glass. Aggression towards Gaysoc was severe, but the fights between the Newman’s “yobbos” and Gaysoc was just one of the several episodes that Farrago has records of when a drunken evening at The Clyde had gone wrong. Over the years, Farrago has regularly featured The Clyde in its drinking guides, calling it and “simply a standard (albeit overpriced) pub caught in the centre”, “upmarket and trendy, but a nice place to have a drink”. Despite occasional criticism of its “soggy salad” and “revolting house claret”, Farrago has generally written good words about the pub. The bill, however, drew less generous reviews. Cheap counter lunches were a major

draw at a pub known for catering to students, but Farrago often questioned how much value students were getting for their money. In 1973, a $1.70 rump steak was deemed “outrageously expensive for a student pub”, for which the table service, place mats and salad bowls hardly compensate. The Miser’s lunch pot n’ crept from $2.00 in 1989 to $2.50 in 1990 and a hefty $5.00 in 2004, making the supposedly cheap lunch rather less miserly. This explains why previous Farrago guides reckoned The Clyde was best saved for the occasional dinner than a regular counter lunch. Though students from earlier decades might be surprised by how modest those prices now seem. For the record, an $8.50 Chicken Parma in 2004 would cost $27.90 today, an $8.00 Steak Sandwich $25.90 and $9.50 Fish n’ Chips $26.90. One interesting incident was when students in 1989 proved especially keen to save a dollar. They found their own way around the prices, resorting to the rather scummy practice of photocopying Farrago coupons for a free pot at The Clyde. How they managed to pull that off is however a story for another day. (This is not sponsored content; entirely motivated by the Archive Team’s appreciation for beer.) VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

CREATIVE

PICK YOUR POISON, TELL ME WHAT YOU DOING

Words by Manēka de Silver

She Speaks

He Speaks

She Speaks

There are translucent, shining hues of light reflecting onto the glass plane. It’s rather startling; the shock of colour in an otherwise bare room. They emanate from the plastic bottles Amara had cut into, shaped into leaves and flowers and hung as a mobile. Leo thinks she’s collecting junk; he thinks there’s no use hanging up bits of old plastic that no one wants. But it’s alive. Even with the lack of ventilation in the place, that still mobile emits so much life within it. It’s her, fashioned from her hands. She likes to make flowers out of newspapers too; she collects cardboard and bits of old lids, only seeing the world for what it could become. She lives through her days chasing sensations and beauty. She likes the lewdness and splendour of her youth—her only true virtue, saving her from complete and utter bereavement, allowing her to seize the confines of the day and set sail into the bohemian life she’s always wanted. She likes lovemaking when it hurts, when she’s raw and drenched in honey. She likes the idea of living and dying in the revolution for love, art, and socialism. She finds it unbelievably sexy.

Leo likes to fuck Amara to the sounds of his vinyl records, the groans of some miserable trumpet player accompanying her moans. He likes the way she feels in his arms, but then again, he’d liked the way anyone feels in his arms. To have someone gaping wide and warm beneath him. He’s an agreeable guy. He doesn’t really mind. Venturing to the top of a leering precipice of his own making, he thinks about the opinions of others more than he has time to craft his own opinions, because he likes to be a balanced, nuanced type of guy. Nice. Easy-going. Smooth, like honey. Never overtly upset someone. He likes his comfort and his money… God, he loves money. He lives for money… He sometimes gets bored while fucking Amara; it’s more a chore than anything else.

Lying in each other’s arms, Amara can’t breathe. She’s suffocated—astounded, really—by just how utterly unseeing this guy is. He’s a total dick. She knows he’s a dick, selling his soul to the corporate machine, not the simplest amount of tenderness in his heart or a proper care in the world. Weighted by the materialistic possessions he surrounds them with. She wants to wrench herself free from the grasp, become an ascetic, or a wayward traveller. She could live off scraps if it meant she could be happy, just making art out of her findings, out of her life. She despises the noises of the city outside Leo’s window, the raging clangs of machinery and the drone of traffic. She longs for greener hills.

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Young Lov

CREATIVE

— KENDRICK LAMAR

Content Warning: Sexual content

He Speaks

She Speaks

He Speaks

Leo likes living with Amara. Maybe it was too soon to move in together after only a couple of months, but it’s convenient. He enjoys the domesticity of the life they live. He leaves before light and comes back after dark. Corporate work suits him. It appeals to him, becoming a sleek businessman from one of those suave films. He’s good at it, making and breaking deals in the heartbeat of a moment, watching from his perch as the repercussions scatter below. He doesn’t particularly care what Amara has done during the day. As long as she says things are alright, they’re alright. He gets home and slumps his bag from round his shoulders, pours himself a glass of water, and scrolls on his phone.

These two worlds should not belong together. She should hate him for his smug “finance-bro” bravado, his deplorable arrogance as he takes her time for himself. When she’s convenient. On the other hand, she likes the way his hair falls about his face, and the creases in his eyes when he laughs. He’s got the good side of life, the easy side of life. She reckons she is jealous of him. It all just comes so naturally to him. Social conventions and people, so easy, but for her it’s different. She doesn’t know anyone, really. She’s been here years now and her roots are only just starting to sink in. She’s struggling. Maybe he is too. He won’t admit it. There’s a big, wide gap in the bridge of their relationship; no traffic can move through or past.

She’s good at filling the time; he likes to play the part of the gentleman; kissing her forehead on the park bench, holding her hand on the sidewalk, opening cafe doors for her. It feels good being a boyfriend, being seen being a boyfriend. She’s a bit of a leech, though, in small glimpses. They fight about the laundry; the dirty dishes piled high in the sink. She’s a mess, with all her bits and bobs strewn across their shared bedroom. He asks her to tidy them up. She never does. He doesn’t know why he stays, but he’s comfortable in the domesticity of their uncomfortable life together. He relishes the city, the tall skyscrapers and the throngs of aimless people wandering around and through the streets. He’s happy; he has his friends and his flat and his money. He’ll continue to fuck her when he comes home from work.

ve (No) Money VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

The Money’s in the Casket CREATIVE

Words by Ella Brown

rief is as funny as it isn’t funny. You spend as much time crying as you do laughing when you’re grieving. You reason your behaviour with if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry, so that you don’t admit that, for a brief moment, you felt happiness when you were supposed to be in deep sorrow. You wear black and kiss a pallid, waxy cheek in a casket. Swipe some real tears with your finger, dab some fake ones with a tissue. You sit in the front pew holding your grandmother’s shaking hand, admiring how her wedding rings have embedded themselves into her finger. Flesh and metal married and decorated with six diamonds. You sit there thinking about diamonds. They were never always so precious. It’s hard to think that only a hundred and twenty years ago they were hard lumps of rock. Wedding rings used to be interesting. They used to have sapphires and rubies and spinels whose hue was chosen for the wearer. You squint as the cut surface reflects the ceiling light into your eye. Now wedding jewels are only blinding white and as fat as the maker could afford. Later, you file out of the church among the black sea to a room with tall tables and sandwiches that taste like whiteness. Identical to the sandwiches you’ve had at every catered party your entire life. Identical to the sandwiches your grandmother used to make you. You wonder if it’s appropriate to have 70

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interesting food at a funeral. You shake your head when you try to picture these bags of bones dipping nachos into guac and flinching. It would be too spicy for their salt-satisfied tongues. You wonder what the hell they ate all their lives. The sea approaches you. “You must be his granddaughter.” Yes, since I’m the only one here under fifty years old. You nod, smiling tightly and adjust your jacket to hide

the pin your mother had pinched you with; the

corsage marking you as his direct family. “What do you do with yourself?” “I’m at university.” “How wonderful. Studying what?” “Writing.” It’s the same conversation at least ten times over, just with the timbre of another croaking voice. “You should write his memoir.” Maybe not a memoir. But maybe you should—out of some sense of filial piety. You’d never met your grandfather, but your mother had

mentioned him more than enough in your life. In your memories, you could still recall how her rouged lips would tilt upwards, and she’d twist her diamond tennis bracelet when she spoke of him. You remember trying on that bracelet as a child and how it pinched the blond hairs on your wrist. “Your grandfather was an incredible man. Everything you have you owe to him.” Something about your tiny studio apartment disagreed, especially since you were the only rent payer. Your father, a man with weathered hands who wore the broken watch his father had handed down to him, always said your family worked for what they had. You wondered which side of the family. Then you wondered why you’d never asked your parents how they met. Perhaps it was because you knew how they divorced and that they probably wouldn’t want to talk about a time when they were happy. Standing in the corner of the room, you take in the town hall around you. It’s a room you’ll probably never stand in again. You don’t really understand what the word “buttress” meant, but you decided it was a pretty good way to describe the place. Buttressed. It was also a good way to describe your mother’s family. Older, wrinkled women line the room. They’ve dressed themselves in long skirts and short heels that had old-timey buckles on the front of the shoe. You count enough shoulder pads to build a whole other outfit, and enough gaudy, expensive jewellery to fill a small shop. You imagine it would be the kind of shop you’d find in the arcades in the city, the ones with checkered black and white tiles and

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gold trims around the paned glass shop windows. You shake your head at yourself and turn away from the room. Angled to the buffet table, you take a plate and try to fill it with food you recognise. Thinking all these things didn’t make you feel better about your scuffed boots that you wore every day to work, or your one nice sweater that had pulls and was covered in pills, or the thick Lovisa jewellery you’d adorned yourself with to fit in with the extended family. Before the funeral, you had so many questions. The kinds of funerals and memorials you knew your mother’s side of the family held were not the normal kind. Though you suppose you’d never been to enough funerals to know what “normal” was. Is any funeral normal? You’d been to one when you were nine. You had a best friend in your early schooling days. You can’t remember his name anymore, but you remember holding his hand and kissing his cheek at school sports day with yellow ribbons in your pigtails. His mum died. You’d probably met her a few times but, even sitting in the church pews at her funeral, you couldn’t remember what she’d looked like. At that funeral, everyone wore colours. The lady who spoke on the podium said it was because your friend’s mum was a woman who loved colours. You wore your school uniform, and your mum wore a rainbow dress. You both cried with everyone, and then it was over. Whilst you and

many others cried at your grandfather’s ceremony, it didn’t feel sad. Natural could be a better word. Maybe your friend’s mum’s funeral was so sad because she was so young, and she left a widow and her nine-year-old son behind. Or maybe it was because someone told you they’d found her body in a lake. Or, maybe, somehow, you knew her better than a man who’d been part of your rearing, however abstractly. There is too much glittering in this room for it to feel sad; too many sagging bracelets and ringed bony fingers and heavy, choking necklaces. This was a world you were fascinated by. When your mother told you your grandfather had died, this was all you could think of. What were you walking into? Your head was filled with scenes of period dramas you’d seen, once upon a time, of women in black dresses and veils and men in fine black suits. In glorious churches, they marched the coffin across the room and adorned it with giant white lilies. You’d seen those actors lower prop caskets into deep six-foot holes and sprinkle dirt on them with one finely gloved hand. You’d observed how the young ladies wept dutifully and daintily, dabbing their makeup with a white handkerchief. You’d watched them from your couch that you’d taken from someone’s hard rubbish on some nature strip whilst stuffing your mouth with microwave popcorn that was on special at Aldi. Participating in it now felt nothing like watching it. This place is cold and unaching, the aged crowd

stiffly waddle from group to group and after grandchildren and reading clubs and latest trips in RitzCarlton hotels. Occasionally, one of them would draw rosary beads and recite something biblical. This was the reality of half-hushed voices and mumbled condolences. You pile into a car with your mother, your grandmother, and several others with the same corsage pinned to their lapels. The drive to the cemetery is quick, thank God, and you haphazardly unwedge yourself from the middle car seat and step into the summer heat. The sun is blinding and only swells through your black clothes. Somewhere, cicadas chirp and become the only ambiance. There is only “close” family here. You don’t speak, and nor do they. A priest mumbles prayers from the holy book as the coffin is lowered. Your mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, and finally you take that gloved fistful of black earth and sprinkle it on top. It covers none of the shiny surface of the coffin and instead slides to either side until it hits the grave walls. No grand rain pelted from the sky onto black umbrellas. No eyes were gently dabbed by ornate white handkerchiefs. Your mother and grandmother clutched each other and sniffled, someone blew their honking nose into a tissue, and you stood and watched before walking back to the car and driving away.

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

CREATIVE

The Low-Brow and Aestheticised Working Class

Words by Jessmarie Long

got really obsessed with this one band in Year 10. They sang with heavy Australian accents and not only looked, but also acted much like the other white boys I knew. Not long after my obsession kicked off, I learned that the band had formed in their private school, where they recorded their music and sang about being on the dole. It felt like I’d been tricked; the rug was pulled and I suddenly saw the hollowness in their image. But, in a way, I get it. Like a lot of people, I went to public school, a very small technical one where students were encouraged to move straight into VET courses so we at least did something with our lives. It was one of those places where if I told people where I went, they’d make a face and move on—but still, I get it. Personally, when I was desperate to rarefy myself in a room of Melburnians with professional parents, I told tales about the kid who rode into school on a lawnmower, or about the time when my dad briefly lived in 1970s Richmond. How Fitzroy used to be a slum and rent was 10 bucks a week. I said this last one, eager to see my peers gasp, despite the fact that plenty of them have never paid rent in the first place. Being confronted by spaces where I did not feel naturally welcomed, such as writing workshops where I’d subconsciously put on a more sophisticated voice and nod along to 72

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others’ broader vocabularies—I’d tell myself this behaviour was justified. I deserved this self-mythologising because it’s not as if I’d feel okay with being myself either. In their article “New Forms of Distinction: How Contemporary Cultural Elites Understand ‘Good’ Taste”, researchers Dave O’Brien

and Lisa Ianni observe how conspicuous wealth has become something to avoid, evaporating in the face of wishing for a more “authentic” presentation. All within a country that, perhaps inadvertently, remains steeped in romantic images of the white Aussie “battler”: an aestheticisation of the working-class; a vital brick in Melbourne’s facade. Rennie Ellis’s photography, pub rock music and 1970s revivalism seems to be inescapable within the innercity’s ambiance: a follow-up to the

once-dominating era of baggy jeans, amateur graffiti and skateboarding. Whenever I log onto Instagram, my feed is similarly filled with media archive accounts, featuring 20thcentury photos of unnamed thin, white delinquents, often staring into the lens with a vague or perhaps “distant” expression. I’m never quite sure what the sharing of these photos is supposed to evoke—concern? pity? inspiration? Rather than reaffirming highbrow/low-brow hierarchies of taste, a desire for a more diverse palette and “cultural omnivorousness” has become the new status signal. This term, coined by sociologist Richard A. Peterson, explains why it’s cool to shop at Footscray Savers now. No matter its presentation, it appears that any hint of deviance is profound, as long as its models are white and skinny, and their clothes cost more than you’d think. The stereotype of champagne-clinking snobs is therefore not lost but just updated; they’ll have some beer instead, thanks. Back “home”, Melbourne and my lifelong dream to move here was always an easy punchline. The first time I ever got published was during work experience in Year 10. After a week of writing 5-line newspaper articles about swooping season and the Mother’s Day events at a primary school, I’d concluded my stay with a

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piece on rurality as an Asian girl who didn’t play sports. It opened with the proclamation that my childhood ambition was to have an art studio (I don’t do visual art), attend museum openings (museum openings?) and thrive in the big smoke (the CBD sends me into panic). Despite my truthfulness, I’d realised mid-writing that the locals would read it, quickly conclude that I was “now” grateful for the “joys my small town humbly offered”—a phrase that would ultimately headline the whole piece. Already feeling a weird mixture of pride and insincerity, the accompanying photo was unflattering, and I recall rushing to one of the staff and begging they pick something else. My hair was badly box-dyed, and I’d only just accepted that the black second-hand coat I’d worn was not frayed in the cool way, like I hoped, but genuinely torn up. Upon seeing my face in print, I recalled the time I was called a “scruff bitch” the year before, and mocked for going to op-shops in Year 8, despite how thrifting was very “in”, never mind the supplier of my entire childhood wardrobe. It was clear that the desire I’d harboured to appear cool or creatively inclined did not actually translate in the real world. But I hoped that maybe when I moved out, it’d all fall into place. And for a time, it did. As a matter of fact, it felt quite natural. In university, I noticed humanities students wearing steel-cap boots like my dad. Flannels were paired with old bootcut jeans, like the kids I knew in Year 7 who’d drive themselves back home to the farm. I knew that things were different, but I still relished in the familiarity—hanging onto any semblance of the town I’d spent 18 years trying to leave. It was a weirdly hopeful time, though the discrepancies eventually became too great to ignore. According to sociologist João Valente Aguiar in his study “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life and the De-classicization of Western Working-Classes”, to aestheticise is an “emotive”, “hedonistic” and “rational calculating endeavor”. He argues that aestheticising requires access to broadcasting platforms, like art and media, as its efforts would

be otherwise unseen and futile. As a consequence of existing to be perceived, things quickly lose their meaning: clothing gets detached from its function and concepts of social class become obscured. As later stated by Aguiar, images convey a “powerful device in the absorption of everyday life experiences”—so what happens when they’re taken out of context? When I was new to Melbourne, I would often post scans of my white father in the 1970s (photos of my family growing up in provincial Philippines didn’t elicit the same positive response, though I tried not to dwell on that). In all of them, he had long, wavy hair, groovy graphic tees with high-rise flares and was likely carrying a long neck. Alongside these mementos, he had decades’ worth of diaries which detailed the long hours of manual labour he’d worked, though I never shared those. The pictures were the cool part, and I was eager to receive the online affirmation, some people letting me know that he was a real fashion inspiration. When reporting this back, he’d respond with flattered confusion. “All those shirts are truck rags now.” My parents visited recently, actually. They stayed in an apartment that was pretty out of budget but close enough to my house so that they’d worry less about me. I was a nervous wreck, insisting that they only go out if they needed to. I ruminated over them getting lost on the trams or in a small shopping centre. Once they arrived, they naturally bumbled around in front of formally dressed receptionists, yelling “Us country folk, aye?!” As I

near-stuffed them into the elevator, I realised the unique allure I’d felt since moving away was flimsy. Impractical. Stupid. All in all, I was embarrassed. All three of us were, or maybe it was just me. I was again confronted by the facts of an un-picturesque life. We can always do more than hope that the scope grows wider; that representation’s arms could hold more than a curated image of the marginalised, but also what they have to say. As a member of UniMelb’s bubble now residing in the inner-west, there’s no denying the privilege I’ve gained. The time I can now devote to learning, reading and watching more widely is something I once dreamt of – but there’s more to it than that. We often get lost in the theory, us university folk, and reality always stretches much further than the words we use to understand it. In the search for something raw, we may miss the facts that surround us: our luck, our egos, our leverage in relation to others. There’s only so much you can learn from a piece of art, though its real value lies in how it moves us to act. Maybe I’m just tired of discussing representation in a room of inner-north white people or hearing laughter in response to an anecdote from my childhood. But I know we have it in us to understand and see the person behind an image or text. There’s much more to all of us than that.

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awn breaks. The winds whoosh wildly. A person clad in a withered brown cape walks along a sandy beach. They enter a cave—brightly adorned with candles. Inside is a lone figure, cloaked in purple, sitting atop a purple mat adorned with a cup of tea and a deck of tarot cards. She looks up and smiles. “Greetings. I am former apothecary and witch Selena Sparklemoon. Nowadays I just read people’s cards in this dingy cave. So, tell me, passer byer, what’s your name and what troubles you today?” “I am Henri, I’m without a penny to my name. That being said, my family needs me to provide for them, or else we will starve,” says Henri. He goes down on his knees, hands clasped as if in prayer. “Please tell me, will there be fortune in my future?” “Uh-uh, not a fortune teller. Remember that. However, I can see what the cards have to say about your predicament.” Selena grabs her cards and starts rearranging them. “Try picturing what ails you in your mind as I’m shuffling.” Henri nods and watches intently while Selena continues shuffling the cards. Eventually she stops and pulls out a Five of Pentacles, followed by an Eight of Cups and a Nine of Pentacles. “Five of Pentacles. Down on your luck, you’re struggling, searching for something to change your fortune. Eight of Cups: you’re changing course, walking out on what no longer serves you. Finally, Nine of Pentacles: prosperity, stability,

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material security. It’s everything you have been searching for and more.” “Okay, but what does that mean, exactly?” asks Henri, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. “If I had to guess, the cards are telling you that there is wealth in your future, but only if you leave your family.” “How dare you!” says Henri, now on his feet, hands balled into fists. “I would never abandon my family! How could you propose such a thing?” “Not me, the cards are doing the talking,” says Selena, hands ever so steady as she motions over the cards. “If you think about it, it’s gotta be a lot of work and wealth, taking care of—how many kids did you say you have?” “I didn’t. I have five children.” “Five?! Dear me, that’s a lot of mouths to feed. And what do you do for work?” “I’m a farmer. I tend to my fields. Been having bad harvests lately.” “I wonder, if you were to leave behind your bad lands and mouths to feed—you could do anything, you could really make something of yourself.” Henri turns his back, sighing, “I’m sorry, but there is simply no reality where I would leave my family for some hare-brained pipe dream. No matter what the cards say. Now good day!” Henri leaves in a huff and a puff. Selena looks down at her mat and sighs. “Shoot, he didn’t even pay me. Should really request payments upfront.” A second passerby soon enters the cave discreetly. It’s

a musician with their lute. They leave the lute at the corner of the cave. “Coins please,” says Selena, her hands outstretched. The musician gingerly drops them into her palms. She proceeds to drink the rest of her tea and put the coins away in the now-empty cup. The musician grimaces and sits down. “I am Selena, once an apothecary and witch, nowadays I’m a simple reader of the cards. What’s your name, and what ails you today?” “Ah! Robyn is my name. I would like some love advice, if that’s okay?” “Why, of course! Half of everyone flocking to this cave comes looking for a little clarity with love. If that’s what you seek, that’s what you’re gonna get in spades.” Selena proceeds to shuffle the cards and produces three new ones: a Three of Swords, a five of Cups, and the Lovers card. “Three of Swords: rejection, heartbreak, sorrow, hurt. Five of Cups is, as I like to call it, the depressed old man card and, of course, there’s the classic Lovers card—love, harmony, relationships, you have it all.” “Meaning?” “Meaning that you have suffered quite a bit of heartache already and are quite melancholic and sad as a result. You may be wandering aimlessly now, but you will soon reach a crossroads, one with better love and harmony, that will send your heart soaring!” “That’s great news, when’s that going to happen?”

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“I can’t say. The cards have told me their limit, and to ask for more would mean—” Selena proceeds to jingle her cup. “But that’s all I have! I couldn’t ask for any more of your wisdom even if I wanted to.” “Tough luck then. Just be glad that you will reach a crossroads soon. One of love and romantic alignment. Good things will come your way, I’m sure.” “I just thought, after the breakup, I could recover, play my old tunes again. I can’t play them like this, and if I can’t play them, then I can’t earn a living, now, can I?” “There’s still hope for you, I’m sure. Maybe try tapping into this sadness of yours, see what that can provide for you. Who knows, that might help you reach your crossroads towards a better life.” “I suppose. No harm in trying, right?” Robyn stands up, thanks Selena for the reading, and promptly leaves. Tired from doing two back-to-back readings, Selena lies down on the ground and falls fast asleep. No dreams in her sleep, save for one image of a shrouded figure closing in on her. A knock on the cave door wakes up Selena from her fitful slumber. She looks up to find a cloaked figure, their face obscured from her view. “I’m guessing you’re here for a reading as well. Well, take a seat, and focus on what ails you most.” “Actually, I’m here for your rent,” says the figure, unravelling their cloak to reveal an officer’s uniform and a bank insignia on their chest. Selena’s mouth gapes, and stays that way for a couple of moments, before she chuckles.

“I live in a cave! I highly doubt the bank’s going to worry about little old me. You tell your boss that there must be a misunderstanding and—” “Actually, Ms Sparklemoon, the City Bank has jurisdiction on all nearby dwellings, including but not limited to the ocean, and this cave. So, I’m going to ask again, your rent Ms Sparklemoon.” Selena jangles her cup of coins from today’s earnings, but the official shakes their head. “Going to require a lot more than that bit of pocket change, Ms Sparklemoon.” Selena takes a look at the official, then the cards, then back to the official and smiles. “Of course, of course, but before anything else, let me do a reading for you, free of charge— I’m sure that will cover some of the rent I owe you and your fine establishment.” “I’m not sure that’s poss—” “Wonderful! Your question, what is it?” “I wonder whether or not you will pay me the rent you owe today Ms Sparklemoon. Because if you don’t, we may have to involve the local authorities.” “...Wonderful question! Now let’s get shuffling!” Selena proceeds to shuffle the cards thoroughly, until she produces three: an Ace of Cups reversed, Death and the Tower. “Ace of Cups reversed: coldness, gloominess, emptiness—” “Like your empty account, Ms Sparklemoon,” says the official, tapping their foot. “Precisely! Now as for Death, that refers to change. Great personal change.” “Like the change I’m expecting

from you as soon as this reading ends,” they say, eye now twitching. “Exactly! Sort of. In a manner of speaking… And finally, the Tower—great upheaval, more changes, crumbling of foundations—” “Alright, I have entertained this farce for long enough! If you do not have the rent for this cave, of which you have been living in for quite some time now, we will have no choice but to—” “But you see, that’s the best part. The Tower wasn’t just referring to you. Oh no, it was talking about me as well,” says Selena, as she starts gathering up her belongings into a suitcase. “I beg your pardon?” “You see, while I used to be an apothecary and a witch, I still very much have the power to be both! I just choose not to call myself such titles these days— easier to travel without all that baggage.” “And this is relevant how?” “Well over the years, as a result of my many magical experiments, I had to get quite good at leaving in a pinch. And, on that note, buh-bye!” And with those words Selena disappears in a puff of purple smoke. The official grabs at it with their hands, sees nothing, and falls to the ground in shock.

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

Sweet Treat CREATIVE

Words by Eli Xiang

“This the “This the last last twenty twenty dollars dollars II got/ got/ But I’ma But I’ma have have a a good good time time balling” balling” -Pitbull -Pitbull Strobe lights Strobe lights bounce bounce off off the disco disco ball ball at at Yochi. Yochi. the It could could be be the the moon moon if if II squinted, squinted, It but she she is is sallow sallow and and small-poxxed, small-poxxed, but

and her her glare glare glints glints silver silver on on the the coins coins in in my my wallet. wallet. and

Design by Zaeena Dimog

should be be saving saving for for my my home home loan, loan, II should my student student debt, debt, my my super, super, my but II shake shake out out just just enough enough but for my my sweet sweet treat treat of of the the day. day. for

Candy-coloured Candy-coloured Candy-colour ed cysts, cysts, crystalised crystalised on on

plastic sheets. sheets. plastic Stick S tick the the gems gems onto onto your you yourr mask, mask, Stick your skin, skin, your the single-use single-use cup cup you you the flick into into landfill. landfill. flick Or watch watch it it teeter teeter Or on the the overflow, overflow, the the other other domed domed lids lids on tinted green green or or brown brown or or another another shade shade of of #trend #trend tinted and watch watch another another dynasty dynasty begin begin to to fall. fall. and

farrago_sweets<3

Un-garnish yourself, Un-garnish yourself, unpeel the unpeel the wrapp wrapp er from er from your your skin, skin, wrapper un-crinkle and un-crinkle and fold fold it it with with the the othe othe rs, rs, others, Brandy, Subdued, Brandy, Subdued, Shein, Shein, ropes ropes of of pink pink and and red red spilling spilling from the from the closet, closet, the carcass the carcass of of another another animal, animal, the threads, the threads, the the veins veins of of another another hand, hand, (another is (another is enough enough of of a a name, name, when the when the life life is is tagged tagged 95% polyester). 95% polyester).

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CREATIVE

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

CREATIVE

Still Life Let me tell you how I tried to find “Nirvana”: in the city lights of Osaka, twinkling like colours in a video game, and believed there were angels of salvation in the clothing stores, convenience stores of Shinsaibashi; in the crystal blue waters of Phuket where I tried to learn the enigmatic happiness that comes naturally to the clownfish circling around anemone; in synthetic henna; in the smell of marijuanna; in the snow of Canada, burying in sheets of ice; in the Hong Kong rush hour, pretty places and people— buzzing streaks of light, drunk on noise and camaraderie— a cacophony of red taxis whirling past crowded streets. Let me tell you how I poorly filled my grieving heart: with the flipping of tarot cards,; a new toy, a new place; with rosaries and prayer beads; and angels that must be, hiding within graphics of lotus flowers. In every 777, 2222, 1111— I recognise their clean lines and arches, like the sacred geometry of a cathedral. Dyed my hair pink and purple, assembled an altar of makeup to make my tear-stained skin colourful, Put together an energetic net of bought things—a numbing cocktail I would feed that ravenous emptiness within— in hopes they fused like supernova nucleosynthesis, creating a new shiny person that could replace dead darkness—

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Words and design by Jacaranda Liu

No, I shall peel away the bandages and facade, and tend that person underneath. There is no city or angel that has the power to heal. If I could not find healing in the glamour and escapism— the motions of the world— let my life be a still life painting laid over a wash of burnt umber of my settled grief. Perhaps it is enough to observe how oranges sit in a basket by the window, inconspicuous and sweet. May this be enough: basking in the nothingness, where joy and grief are quiet, and the only sound is the sizzling food on the stove, and peace is found despite the rumbling of car engines and the trickling of time. For now, against everything, let me rest and let life be still.

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chapter 6

ticky-handed Beth began her journey back to the food pass. Her insides were unsteady and excited; her every molecule vibrated. Someone grabbed her arm, she followed the tug, humming. Then she was in the back office, which was a storeroom really. One side of the small room was lined with cardboard boxes, filled with napkins, cutlery, various glassware and small cardboard cups for holding tomato sauce. On the wall opposite was a desk, upon which the printer claimed the most territory, competing only with a whirring desktop computer that displayed nine live images of nine locations in and outside The Sovereign Hotel. There wasn’t space for three people to comfortably meet, and yet they did. Adam instructed Beth to sit on the sole chair. The owner, a short and bland man with glasses and a gruesome smoker’s cough, was named Mark. She politely nodded to him as she shuffled into the room, which he ignored. He was rarely seen outside this barely-office, and Beth had often forgotten about him. Little figurines of her colleagues move busily on the screen, the dish hand hides from Chef and looks at his phone, someone rushes through the rain on the street outside, everything, all at once, presented to the grey man before her—omniscient and totally forgettable Mark. Can you explain to me what happened just now at table 40?—Adam’s voice wobbled as it struggled to decidedly take either a furious or concerned tone. Beth felt anxious about being told off but had no qualms explaining the situation to her superiors. After some confusion, Adam settled on concerned—It’s not this singular incident, I’m afraid, Beth. We’ve been getting some feedback on your service; it’s been said that you have been, well, um, unsettling the customers. We’ve been getting complaints for a while now—Hm—said Beth—I’m thinking we do some refresher training on customer service. Yes, I think we take some time off, and then we will retrain and get back out there—Mark awkwardly interjected—Eye contact!—Both Beth and

Words by Lilian Anjeli Design by Marc Lebon

Adam shuddered in fright for a moment; they had forgotten he was there. We had some customer feedback about your eye contact—Adam explained. Mark continued—When you look someone in the eye, count in your head to twenty and no more. That is a reasonable amount of time to look into someone’s eyes. It’s rude not to, but people don’t like it when you go for longer. So, twenty seconds, Beth. Mark got closer; she realised that the strange, murky smell in the room was him—can you do twenty seconds? Look at me. Look at me. Count to twenty— Beth stared at her boss. His eyes widened and narrowed, which she tried to mimic. At thirteen seconds, something cried Beth’s name. Again, at sixteen— BETH—She broke eye contact and Mark tutted—Can you hear that?—Hear what?— Beth rose and followed the cry—We’re not done here! She ignored Mark and walked back onto the floor, her pupils dilating as she went. The man at table 40 was putting on his coat. Sadie had cleared the fallen meal and had gone back to the bar to serve the group of workday businessmen. If horror and gossip had resulted from Beth’s actions, it had quickly settled. Service was normal. Apart, of course, from the deep and persistent shouting of Beth’s name, that everyone but Beth was ignoring. She scanned the space for its origin. Mark and Adam caught up to her. Adam grabbed her arm and spun her around to face them—Beth, I think you should go home now—She shook him free and went outside to check there. Immediately she was stung by the harsh diagonal slashes of rain—Hello—She cried into the night—Who’s there?— She got no response but a crack of thunder. She might have left then, and let herself be beaten by the weather, but for a sudden commotion inside. A beast tore through the Sovereign violently. It threw across the room a table under which the date-goers cowered. The man either spontaneously died or was playing so. As Beth re-entered, the creature turned to her, simultaneously standing to its full height. She was again in

the path of a huge grizzly bear. Of course, you—she thought—Hello— she said. A group of patrons were huddled at the emergency exit near the back, one on the phone, many others trying to get their words heard by the other end of the phone call. Adam had backed away and was hiding at the entrance to the kitchen. Mark looked furious and hadn’t moved at all. To Beth he said—What is this? Who is this? Do you know this thing?—When she didn’t respond, he stepped closer, angrily gesturing at her—Take it away, take it away, this is unacceptable, take it away and never come back! You no longer have a job here. Beth would have warned him, and she definitely meant to, but she had long lost her sense of urgency, so she didn’t get around to it before the bear lunged at Mark. In a dream, usually when things get too ridiculous or terrifying, there occurs, sometimes, a flash of lucidity, where either the dreamer realises they are dreaming and wakes up, or they are redirected on a less disturbing path to prevent the former. Beth had known strange dreams and panicked awakenings most nights since she was very young, so she was familiar with this flash. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed it to come. When she opened her eyes, the man who owned most of her time and body movements, down to the duration of her eye contact, lay in a crimson pool on the floor, strips of his shirt and the skin of his abdomen peeling off him. He cried in agony, which seemed to annoy the bear, who might have left him there had he been quiet. The bear couldn’t stand the noise, however, so he groped at Mark again, pulled him into his huge hairy body and bit his head off. The rest of his body crumpled to the floor and lay there silently, bar the rushing sound of his blood. No one yelled or cried. A ubiquitous pop song still played softly through the sound system. Beth and the bear stared at one another for twenty seconds and many seconds more, then the beast lumbered away, out the front door and into the rainy night.

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VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

SATIRE

Formerly Serviceable Baillieu Bathrooms Upgraded to Piece-of-Crap, Good-for-Nothing Shitboxes Report by Dutch McKenzie A sigh of relief has befallen Baillieu bathroomgoers as University of Melbourne staff proudly revealed the new bathrooms in the Baillieu library, which thankfully, do not work at all. Acting Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis said of the old bathrooms, “Though dirty and cramped, and with a sort of anti-feng shui which encourages awkward eye contact, we decided the bar was not just too low, but too clean.” The bathrooms have been completely overhauled. Grey walls were replaced with a blinding, 50s-mental-asylum-white which is sure to be tinted yellow by the end of semester. They are set to be rented out for electro-shock therapy and porn shoots in the off-season. As well, the much-beloved and always out of order urinal was protected during construction as a UNESCO heritagelisted site, since Waleed Aly used it in 2002. Faculty are apologetic for the removal of the cringe-inducing, deeply unfunny graffiti which had littered the previous men’s room, but note that even worse visual gags are already appearing, such as a running tally for ʻnumber 1s vs number 2s’ in the rightmost stall. As one student said, “when I heard that there had been changes to the bathrooms, I was worried that it might benefit us somewhat, but thankfully it was just a massive waste of money for no reason, which as a Community voter, I appreciate.” One group not happy with the change are the Engineering Students’ Club (MUESC), who have spent the last year tunneling from the Eastern Resources Centre to Arts West with plastic spoons in an attempt to escape their degree, and were accidentally showered with waste during construction. At the inauguration of the new bathrooms, it was revealed that the Baillieu will soon also house around 650 live-in students, since Little Hall is being repurposed into a homeless shelter for recent computer science graduates.

GOT A BATHROOM TIP? CONTACT US VIA CARRIER PIGEON (WE WILL LEAVE THE OFFICE WINDOWS OPEN) 80

FARRAGO MAGAZINE

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

Growth is uncomfortable, but necessary?

Comics by Jessica Chaaban

Romance in the age of artificial intelligence

COMICS

PUZZLES

Cost-word 1

4 5 6

11 12 13

Art by Celeste Li

Across 8. Migration is essential for the _____. 10. Over one _____ homes were recorded as empty in the 2021 census. 11. Discount for energy efficient appliances. 13. Australia’s biggest trading partner. 14. 10% off at the Building 168 Chemist with this ID. 16. Melbourne AFL team who recently traded for a man allegedly involved in a recent sexual assault. 18. Wealth god, Greek. Down 1. Singer of “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows.” 2. Supermarket price gouging was made illegal in _____ 2026. 3. The percentage of Australians who earn under 5-DOWN according to the 2025 Poverty in Australia Overview. 4. With library, office, park, forum. Democracy manifest. 5. Someone who makes under 50% of the median income lives below the _____ line. 6. The inescapable housemate that never pays rent. 7. Hanson’s jet setting billionaire friend. 9. Questionable fundraising tactic common in early 2000s teen movies. (3, 4) 10. Use only in case of tram emergencies. Follows 14-ACROSS. 12. They say these used to be affordable. 15. Liberté, _____, Fraternité. 17. 2007-2009 ruh roh. ABBR.

FARRAGO MAGAZINE

PUZZLES DOWN 1. GORE, 2. JULY, 3. FOURTEEN, 4. PUBLIC, 5. POVERTY, 6. MOLD, 7. RINEHART, 9.CAR WASH, 10. MYKI, 12. HOUSES, 15. EGALITE, 17. GFC cozzie livs crisis Across 8. ECONOMY, 10. MILLION, 11. REBATE, 13. CHINA, 14. STUDENT, 16. KANGAROOS, 18. PLUTUS.

Word Scramble civics sizzle soir The Economic Situation

SudokuPad Puzzle by Anjali Selvarajah

Normal Sudoku Rules Apply. Place the digits 1-9 in each row, column, and box. Anti-Knight: Cells that are a Knight’s move apart (in chess) may not contain the same digit. German Whispers: Adjacent digits on a green line have a difference of at least 5. Palindrome: Digits on a grey line must read the same in both directions. Renban: Digits on a pink line form a set of non-repeating consecutive digits in any order. XV: Digits separated by an X sum to 10. Not all Xs are necessarily given. Digits separated by a V sum to 5. All Vs are given. Created on platform sudokupad.app by Sven Neumann

VOL. 102 EDITION SIX

thank you to our team

for the best year ever!!! We have had the best year because of you <3 SUBEDITORS Ella Brown Lachie Carroll Paridhi Chhajed Amandi Fernando Finley Monaghan-Mc Grath Zoe Hibbard Ruth J Hiree Janice Hui Zeinab Jishi Andi Misa Madeline Mitchell James Muller Sabine Pentecost Saria Ratnam Alex Revyakina Syakira Setiananda Fergus Sinnott Pryce Starkey Ruby Weir-Alarcon Taylah Xuereb

NEWS MANAGERS Finley Monaghan-Mc Grath Syakira Setiananda Pryce Starkey Taylah Xuereb Zeinab Jishi

REVIEWS MANAGERS Hayley Yeow Junae Won Lachie Carroll

CREATIVE MANAGERS Helani Munidasa Khush Shah Pip Murphy-Hoyle

ARCHIVE MANAGERS James Muller Janice Hui Tom Weir-Alarcon

SUB-EDITING MANAGERS Alex Revyakina Emily Macfarlane DESIGN MANAGERS Aroma Imran Erin Ibrahim @farravisuals

PROOFREADING Sophia Chu Paridhi Chhajed Victoria Creighton

FEATURES MANAGERS Fergus Sinnott Saria Ratnam

PHOTO&VIDEO MANAGERS Ashley Syers Wil Simmonds @farratography

RADIO FODDER MANAGERS_ Elissa Kaluka Maddie Barrett Sophie Gehling Tom Weir-Alarcon @radiofodder SPECIAL THANKS The Kosdown Printing Team <3

creative direction & production Maria Quartel styling Maria Quartel Sabine Pentecost photographers Jasmine Pierides Joseﬁne Enke Wil Simmonds post production Felicity Bayne Maria Quartel Ruby Weir-Alarcon 3d artists Aroma Imran Gagan Sandhu models Amour Gabriel Anyang Wal Aroma Imran Hugo Simpson Poppy Phillips Wafa Dhirani Zain Sarant brands Ebony Northeast Fresh Flames Mujomade Nu Girl XLarge