Glass 2022 Annual Edition

Glass Media is the QUT student newspaper and magazine, funded by the QUT Student Guild. Glass is a space to showcase the work of QUT students, graduates, and staff – including creative work, news, and reporting.

You can get involved with Glass by checking out qutglass.com, and following our Instagram or Facebook @qutglass. You can also subscribe to our mailing list by following the prompts on our website. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Fun DM Puzzle 3 Wordsearch 3 Crossword........................................................................ 4

Glass Wrapped ............................................................... 8 Coffee Map............................................................. 64-65 Where to Find Glass ........................................... 66-67 Horoscope ......................................................................71

Memoir

Paloma (Stir, Stirring, Stirred) .......................... 18-19

News

QUT Ranks 19th Nationally for Prevalence of Sexual Assault, 5th for Harassment 20-21

The Crumbling Legitimacy of QLD's Consent Laws 9-11

QUT Staff Vote to Strike .................................... 22-23

Feature

When life gives you bananas 26-29

Review

Sincerely, Me Lacks Sincerity 24-25 Drive My Car 29-30

Poetry

I'm Having A Love Affair With The Moon ........... 36 Summers on the Floor ............................................... 37

Non-Fiction

Lawfully Unpaid 12-13

Acknowledgement of Country

Glass Media and the QUT Student Guild acknowledge the Turrbal and Jagera peoples as the First Nations owners of the lands where QUT now stands. We pay respect to their Elders, past, present, and emerging, their lores, customs, and creation spirits. We recognise that these lands have always been places of teaching, research, learning, and storytelling.

Glass Media and the QUT Guild acknowledge the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples play within the Meanjin community.

Cultural Warning

Aborigina and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following magazine may contain references to deceased persons.

Disclaimer

Glass Media informs readers that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this issue of Glass belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily express the views of Glass Medi a or the QUT Guild.

A Glassie's Guide to Tactical Halloween Costumes 14-17

Sex But Offline 31-32 Cheats of Wall Street 33-35 Roma, Not Gypsy 38-39

A Straight Man's Guide to the Perfect Tinder Profile ........................................................ 40-42

A Glassies Guide to Heartbreak 46-47

Opinion

In Defence of Sun Yang .......................................43-45

Dear Women ......................................................... 48-49

Where Are All the Moonwomen? .................... 50-51

Your Favourite Movies Are Made by Bad People 52-53

The Internet v Amber Heard 54-57

Fiction

Millie and the Artichoke Hearts 58-60

Hot Pink Blues 61-62

Art/Photography

Izzy Heaton 63 Sam Hope 68-69

DM Puzzle

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Crossword Puzzle

Across

2. One year after being interviewed by Glass, this person won the seat of Brisbane.

Across

4. 5% of people will endure this chronic illness, which causes severe abdominal pain.

5. This cocktail is prepared by mixing tequila, lime juice, and a grapefruit-flavored soda

2. One year after being interviewed by Glass, this person won the seat of Brisbane.

7. He apparently isn't retiring, but we wish he would.

11. This Australian politician was accused of Transphobia in Issue 14.

4. 5% of people will endure this chronic illness, which c auses severe abdominal pain.

12. Watch out! This fungus could cause a global banana collapse!

Down

1. This union's QUT members recently voted in favour of industrial action.

1. T his union's QUT members recently voted in favour of industrial action.

2. As described by the Glass Gazette in Issue 13, the highest value type of male.

Editors’ Letter

As the year draws to a close, the twin ideas of endings and new beginnings inevitably occupy more and more real estate in our minds.

This is particularly true at Glass, as we reflect on the magazine’s fourth year in print. Goodbyes are upon us: to our wonderful outgoing Editor, Ella Brumm and firstever Editor in Chief, Tom Loudon. Introductions are also in order: we’ve welcomed three new peppy, intelligent Editors to the team – Celeste Muller, Ben Steele, and Konstanz Muller Hering.

TOMLOUDON

ELLABRUMM CIARANGREIG CELESTEMULLER

KONSTANZMULLERHERING BENSTEELE

our online offerings so that you can experience the joy of holding Glass in your own hands and flip through its pages while waiting for a coffee before class, or while browsing our website from home.

Without Glass, a core element of QUT student and alumni culture would be missing.

14. Their comedian President got more than he bargained for.

5. T his cocktail is prepared by mixing tequila, lime j uice and a grapefruit-flavoured soda.

7. He apparently isn't retiring, but we wish he would.

15. This international Rugby Player was too slow to kick the ball in his comeback game in September.

16. A person who doesn't experience sexual attraction or desire.

11. T his Australian politician was accused of T ransphobia in Issue 14.

17. Their debut art exhibit was promoted in Issue 14.

12. Watch out! This fungus could cause a global banana collapse!

14. T heir comedian President got more than he bargained for.

15. T his international Rugby Player was too slow to kick the ball in his comeback game in September.

16. A person who doesn't experience sexualattraction or desire.

17. T heir debut art exhibit was promoted in Issue 14.

2. A s described by the Glass Gazette in Issue 13, t he highest value type of male.

3. QUT student's favourite cafe at Kelvin Grove.

6. This friendly neighbourhood columnist wrote a financial explainer in Issue 13.

3. QU T student's favourite cafe at Kelvin Grove.

8. This country has been accused of neo-colonialism in West Papua.

6. T his friendly neighbourhood columnist wrote a financial explainer in Issue 13.

9. An unbloomed flower, a type of thistle, helpful for ndigestion.

10. The editors' favourite cafe at Kelvin Grove.

8. T his country has been accused of neo-colonialismin West Papua.

13. The preferred stroke of Sun Yang, Emma McKeon, and Ian Thorpe.

9. A n unbloomed flower, a type of thistle, helpful for indigestion

10. T he editors' favourite cafe at Kelvin Grove. 13. T he preferred stroke of Sun Yang, EmmaMcKeon, a nd Ian Thor pe.

We are so proud of Glass and how it has grown over the past four years, and we are proud of you – the students and alumni of the QUT community – for sharing with generosity and vulnerability the stories that have shaped your lives while you have been studying.

We know what we do at Glass is special. There’s nothing else like it on campus. Glass exists for you, the students and alums of QUT. Glass is a publication where you can read about the zeitgeist through the lenses of your peers, have your own voice heard, and have access to objective analysis of campus news.

Glass is a special initiative of the QUT Student Guild and we do not operate to turn a profit. The measure of our success is you, our readers – whether you feel informed and entertained, with access to content tailored for the uni experience. This year, the Glass website had 52,000 visitors (for reference, in 2021, QUT had about 53,000 enrolled students). We published work from over 67 contributors and expanded our print issues as well as

Glass is part of a long, esteemed tradition of student journalism and newspapers across Australia, stretching back almost a hundred years. Partly due to the fact that QUT was only established in its current form in 1989, and partly due to past use of various previous iterations of QUT student newspapers as effective advertising for the QUT Student Guild, QUT students have long gone without the student newspaper tradition that other university students around the country have enjoyed.

Students and alums of QUT, Glass is your magazine, and your piece of this long tradition of campus culture newspapers. We are grateful for the support of the QUT Student Guild who fund and publish Glass so that QUT students, too, have their own campus newspaper.

We encourage you to keep reading Glass with fervour and continue submitting to the magazine with enthusiasm. This 2022 edition of the Annual reflects the range of voices and multitude of stories experienced by QUT students and alums over the year. We hope you savour it, and perhaps even see yourself reflected in its pages.

With love,

The Glass Editors

Created using the Crossword Maker on TheTeachersCorner.net

Editors’ Farewell Letters

Tom

When I started at Glass in 2021, I had just graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Creative Writing) and had the job prospects to match the degree. I'd quit my warehousing job without a backup plan, because spending nights moving clothes had eroded my soul, and because the cement floors were destroying my back.

When I applied for the vacancy at Glass, I thought I could at least do something related to journalism while I was studying it. I didn’t understand what student journalism was, didn’t have much to do with QUT, and certainly didn’t care about student politics.

Two years on, student journalism has become my bread and butter and QUT my beat. Everything I’ve had the opportunity to learn in a classroom or a textbook, I have had the privilege to put into practice at Glass.

2022 has been a turbulent year for student journalism. From the Semper Art of Shoplifting furor, to the On Dit editor dismissal by the Adelaide University Union Board, we have been reminded that what we do and what we write matters. Though we have “student” in our job titles, we don’t get to wear training wheels.

From QUT’s ongoing conflicts with students and staff, to the National Student Safety Survey findings, QUT has been a busy place, and as ever, we students have been busy. Glass has in the past year published more work, by more people, at a higher standard than ever before, and I am so grateful to be a part of this upward trend. To the staff and executives of the QUT Student Guild, to my fellow editors with whom I have shared an office and years of my life, and to every submitter who trusted me with their work, thank you.

In saying farewell to Glass, I’m excited to think that the publication lives on – for as long as there are students at QUT, and for as long as they are reading. Good luck to the incoming team, Ciaran, Konstanz, Ben, and Celeste. I challenge you to leave it in a better place than you found it. And to you, the Glass readers, thank you for giving me an opportunity to work with passion, and to care so deeply about a project in your community.

After nearly two years at Glass I now treasure student journalism, and consider the culture at QUT to be vibrant and evolving, even if I still don’t care about student politics and my back is still sore.

I hope this Annual will serve as a time capsule of the brilliant work of QUT students in 2022, and from all of us at Glass I hope you enjoy it.

With love, Tom Loudon Editor in Chief

Ella

I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. I started working as an editor at Glass in my second year of university, which allowed me to turn a hobby into a job – a rare thing in this capitalist society. I remember being excited to be a part of such a cornerstone of campus culture and have a platform for my mind that was brimming with ideas.

Over the years, Glass and I have grown together, and I’ve found my voice as the magazine has, in turn, done the same. I’m proud to see how Glass has grown into a polished, intelligent, publication for the QUT community. It’s a real gift to all of us: students, alumni, and staff. I feel honoured to have been a part of that over my two years at Glass

One of the immense privileges of being an editor at Glass has been the permission to tell the stories of my peers

through my writing and by curating the submissions to be featured in the magazine. As an editor, I have written articles I would want to read myself. I don’t believe in shying away from challenging topics. I think it’s essential to confront them head-on, to look the taboo straight in the eye. It’s been heartening to hear from so many Glassies about the comfort and feeling of solidarity these stories have brought to them. I have put some deeply personal things into words over these past two years, including an open letter to all men and an open letter to women. I am beyond grateful for the trust I have in the Glass community that I not only felt safe to share these experiences but also comforted by each person who read them.

This won’t be my final foray into journalism – my time at Glass has inspired me to study journalism alongside my law degree. I’ll always be a Glassie at heart, and I know it will shape my writing for years to come.

I want to thank everyone who was part of Glass and supported Glass during my time as an editor – I feel so grateful to have worked with you to make such a special publication for QUT students.

As I prepare to say goodbye to Glass, it feels like I’m saying goodbye to a beloved friend (as well as the actual friends I’m farewelling). Glass has been an integral part of my university experience and life thus far, and it’s been my privilege to make it part of yours too.

As always, with love, Ella

If you’re a fan of Glass, or would like to see your work in these pages, get involved with the Glass community today!

Join the groups “Glassies” and “QUT Writers” on Facebook to be the first to see publication opportunities.

ELLABRUMM

In June, Queensland’s Attorney General Shannon Fentiman announced that Queensland is likely to adopt an affirmative consent model, but until then, Queensland remains one of the worst states in Australia for achieving justice for victims.

In Australia, to secure a conviction of rape, the prosecution must prove that the defendant engaged in sexual intercourse without the complainant’s consent. However, in Queensland, it isn’t that easy, and a century-old loophole allows perpetrators to use rape myths to walk free.

In Queensland, the definition of rape centres around consent, which must be ‘freely and voluntarily given with the cognitive capacity to do so’. Consent cannot be obtained falsely, including by threat, force, intimidation, or fraud.

Mistake of Fact is a defence used in sexual assault and rape cases that suggests the defendant had an honest and reasonable – but mistaken – belief that the complainant was consenting. This is easier for a defendant than disproving the incident occurred. To prove Mistake of Fact, a defendant will lean into popular rape myths, like what a victim was wearing, drinking, or where they were, to suggest that intercourse was, in fact, consensual.

Mistake of Fact emphasises how the law is constructed, interpreted, and applied by men to favour men and leads to survivors facing more scrutiny than perpetrators of assault. While a person of any gender can commit sexual assault and rape, this article focuses on the maleperpetrator, female-victim paradigm, reflecting the gender disproportionality in these cases.

Trigger warning: Sexual Assault

The Freeze Response

During an attack, a victim of sexual assault may respond in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. Each response is entirely valid and depends on the individual circumstances of the victim, but the freeze response is often misunderstood in terms of sexual assault.

Some victims fear the threat of implicit or explicit physical violence and determine their safest option is to freeze, assessing that fighting or fleeing would increase the risk of pain and suffering. In cases like these, the defence can establish Mistake of Fact despite freezing not being an indicator of consent under the law.

In R v Sax the complainant was extremely drunk but not entirely unconscious, rendering her incapable of physically or verbally resisting the assault. The defence used her lack of resistance to raise Mistake of Fact as it meant the defendant could have mistakenly believed she was consenting as she did not fight back.

In R v Dunrobin the complainant initially resisted, then passively complied, allowing the defendant to benefit from Mistake of Fact. She repeatedly told her attacker to stop and attempted to push him off. The defendant then removed her clothes and had intercourse with her. The complainant testified that her body froze because she was scared that her resistance would be to no avail or lead to greater harm. The defendant was able to prove Mistake of Fact on the ground of her freezing.

This has established a dangerous precedent in Queensland – a victim’s initial refusal is not enough to refute consent. Any subsequent freezing retroactively validates the defendant’s belief that consent had been given.

Intoxication Lowers the Bar for Proving Mistake of Fact

Intoxication, either by the defendant, the complainant, or both, allows the defendant to blame their lack of caution when gauging whether the complainant was consenting on intoxication.

To prove Mistake of Fact, the defendant must demonstrate that their belief was not only honest but also reasonable. Intoxication cannot be used to prove that the defendant’s mistake was reasonable. However, it can be used to prove that it was honest. Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research at Bond University, Jonathon Crowe, summarises this as determining if a mistake is a genuine mistake and not just something being made up.

‘The courts have said that if the defendant is intoxicated, then that might mean they would make a mistake that they might not otherwise make [sober], and so in that respect, it can support the honesty of the mistake.’

While intoxication cannot be used to determine reasonableness, Crowe doubts whether a jury would be able to distinguish this legal technicality.

‘The problem I think is that because intoxication is relevant to honesty, the defence could [say] the defendant was so drunk that they made a mistake.’

Crowe highlights that this is not an issue in other states, as intoxication is deemed irrelevant and cannot be used to prove honesty for Mistake of Fact. However, the ability to rely on intoxication to prove the defendant’s mistake was honest remains an issue in Queensland, where this defence has succeeded in cases where the complainant ‘blacked out’, legally meaning she was incapable of consenting. During one trial it was noted that the defendant was intoxicated making them ‘too drunk’ to have removed the complainant’s clothes. The defence insinuated that the complainant was mistaken in her account of being raped, as she herself was drunk.

Intoxication is only legally permissible for determining a victim’s capacity to consent, but in this case, it was used to undermine and critique the complainant’s account, thereby placing the victim on trial rather than the defendant.

The Recent Amendment Has Not Gone Far Enough

The availability of the Mistake of Fact defence in Queensland screams to sexual assault survivors that their best efforts to achieve justice will only be in vain. In June 2020, the Queensland Law Reform Commission delivered a profoundly flawed review of the operation and application of consent and Mistake of Fact. For the gravity of such an issue and the immense overhaul needed to amend these injustices for sexual assault victims, the QLRC delivered only five recommendations, none of which were substantial.

The review states that recent research does not strongly support the concern that jurors commonly harbour false prejudices or rape myths, or that any such preconceptions affect jury deliberation or verdicts. This indicates a willing ignorance on the part of the QLRC concerning the mountain of studies that have been conducted in Australia regarding the influence rape myths have on jurors’ ability to remain impartial, and instead relied upon a heavily criticised study from the UK.

‘There are two important things to note [about this study]. Firstly, you can’t use a study from the UK as evidence of what happens in QLD trials; there’s just no way you can draw that connection,’ Professor Crowe said.

‘Secondly, other studies in Australia from different states have shown that rape myths play a role in rape trials, and the QLRC just ignored that in favour of this UK study’.

‘The reason the QLRC had its inquiry in the first place was because of substantive problems that have been pointed out by [advocates] ... and so the QLRC’s reforms didn’t do anything to address those problems because they didn’t change the law, they just codified it.’

So how do we rectify this institutionalised nature of gaslighting survivors and ensure that the justice system upholds the rights of the complainant? According to Professor Crowe, the answer is simple.

‘I think that limiting the application of the excuse would be a big step forward, and that is what Queensland is likely to do at some point because that’s the model that has been adopted in other states … the other option of removing the Mistake of Fact excuse from rape and sexual assault entirely should also be on the table.’

Essentially, this would mean that the defendant cannot rely upon intoxication to prove their mistake was honest or retort archaic rape myths. Additionally, the defendant must demonstrate that he took positive steps in ascertaining the complainant’s consent. In practice, this would mean that the Mistake of Fact defence would not be available for the defendant to use.

This would alleviate the injustice experienced by victims without infringing upon the defendant’s right to a fair trial or presumption of innocence. The initiating party will be expected to take active steps to ensure their partner consents to each new sexual act, as they cannot rely on this defence to excuse reckless behaviour.

Conservative opponents argue this will reverse the onus of proof. This is a flawed argument as the onus of proof remains with the prosecution to prove the defendant had carnal knowledge with the complainant without their consent, remaining consistent with the rule of law and due process.

‘It’s just false,’ Professor Crowe says. ‘That is wrong to say in law. Regardless of whether the Mistake of Fact excuse applies to rape or not, the prosecution would still have to prove the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.’

‘This is not just an issue about changing the law, it’s also about changing social attitudes, and that’s probably the most important objective. We... need to accompany legislative changes with public education. This is something that should be sustained and should be part of sex education in schools. I think that is the only way to, over time... address and rectify rape myths.’

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

HARRYGEORGEWALLACE

If you were to Google “teacher crisis” at the time of writing, here’s what you’d find:

Covid and schools: we're heading into a teacher shortage crisis – The University of Sydney

Queensland teacher shortage reaching 'crisis point’ – The ABC

Australia's teacher shortage crisis must be an election priority – The Educator Australia

These headlines have become a familiar part of our news cycle. University studies, think pieces, and newspaper headlines all agree on one thing: there aren’t enough teachers, and the problem is worsening rapidly. In the face of this, one might wonder why there aren’t enough teachers. There appears to be a lack of supply and mounting

demand, and this supply problem is multifaceted. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves, and there simply aren’t enough graduate teachers to fill the gaps.

Why are teachers leaving? And why aren’t there enough graduates? These are both formidable, looming questions – but if you asked your average Queensland education student what their biggest obstacle to graduating was last month, they might have replied with Well, for starters I’m struggling to pay my rent because I’m halfway through a month of unpaid placement. I know I would have.

My peers and I are what universities optimistically refer to as “pre-service” teachers – in other words, education students. The optimism here springs from the assumption that those studying teaching will naturally become teachers. According to evidence, this assumption is wrong.

A recent study by Associate Professor Rachel Wilson of The University of Sydney found that of undergraduates who had entered a teaching qualification in 2012, only 51% managed to complete the program by 2018. In other words, half of the potential teachers dropped out or postponed their studies – and this is pre-pandemic. The report also found that although the number of students entering undergraduate programs per year has grown considerably, the number completing these programs has actually fallen. The report lists several possible reasons for these worrying trends but misses one glaring problem that education students deal with every year: vocational placement, the months of unpaid labour mandated by teaching organisations across Australia.

Student teachers in Queensland must undertake between 60 and 80 days of placement to finish their qualification. This experience is described by the Fair Work Act 2009 as ‘lawfully unpaid’, an impressively innocuous term that obscures a big problem: unpaid placements mean fewer graduate teachers.

My cohort and I have completed two placements, and each time have re-assembled afterwards to fewer faces. This can be partially attributed to the realities of the profession being experienced by students for the first time. However, all you have to do is listen to the classroom conversations to realise that this is far from the only problem. Students trade stories of financial hardship and stress, and many question whether the sacrifice is worth it – particularly for a profession with such a high burnout rate.

Before our cohort’s first placement, we had an information lecture offered to potential teachers, informing them of the realities we were to expect from the experience. Long hours, emotional exhaustion, the reality of giving up months’ worth of wages, financial security, and even job security. After all, casual jobs are under no obligation to keep a staff member who needs to take a month or more of leave. With Centrelink payments for students still below the poverty line, daily living becomes a struggle. Memorably, one of the speakers described her time on placement as ‘a breakdown every day.’

Many industries that feed into private employment have options to work around unpaid placements. William Leach, a professional engineer, commented that his alma mater "has a requirement of three months of work experience, and it's paid. There are more hoops to jump through to get an unpaid position funnily enough." Alani Tenaglia faced a similar situation in her law degree: "To practice law, you need to undertake 75 days of placement, or 15 days and an additional course. You’re not inherently paid to complete placement, but if you are working in a particular type of

legal role, you can claim your work as your placement." These options are not open to Education students.

Teaching is a public service – often described as not just a job, but a calling. Somewhere along the line, Australia decided it would not only charge tens of thousands of dollars to perform this act of public service, but also force them to give up wages and job security to complete lengthy, challenging placements. This indicates an utterly stunning disrespect for a critical industry that’s become typical of neo-liberal trending governance in Australia.

These placements are just one of the many barriers keeping potential teachers out of education. There are overstocked classrooms, a lack of support for new teachers, meagre salary progression, and staggering workload expectations. But rarely is a problem so obvious and solvable as the problem of unpaid placements.

Any English teacher worth their salt will tell you that an effective way to end a persuasive essay is with a call to action or concluding statement. The obvious fit for this article would be 'we need to pay pre-service teachers for vocational placements.' However, this is one facet of a broader problem. There is a much more important statement to be made here: we need to start treating our critical industries like they are valued by Australian society.

Teachers in this country feel disrespected and burnt out. Education students feel like martyrs struggling against the odds. The cost of living is rising daily, and there is less incentive than ever before to become a professional working in education. There is no one simple fix to these problems, but a good start might be allowing our potential teachers a living wage while learning how to shape our society’s future.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

A Glassie's Guide to Tactical Halloween Costumes

KONSTANZMULLERHERING

Welcome Glassies, to your guide to life. This series takes a deep dive into all your pressing need-to-knows (how to contact your local MP, how to make the perfect cocktail, and how to get over your ex, goddamnit) and offers comprehensive guides so that you can live your Best Glassie Life™.

This edition is A Glassie’s Guide to Tactical Halloween Costumes.

Glassies, it’s that time of year again. Dust off the pirate hats and get ready to rumble. This year, we’re dressing with intent.

In this Guide, I’ve organised (and rated) quick and easy Halloween costumes for students on the go and under the pump, based on your intentions for the night.

T here are some Halloween classics, some new costumes, and some trends in need of dying out. Rest assured, something in this Guide is bound to help you out.

First up, you’ve got to pick your poison.

1. The Nostalgic Costume

Dive deep into the early ‘00s and grab anything you can get. (If you find childlike joy pass it around, would ya? Asking for a friend).

If you choose the nostalgic costume: automatic 10/10. You seem like a good time.

I want to see Shego, I want to see Lizzy McGuire, I want to see Danny Phantom.

Easiest nostalgic outfits on short notice include:

K im Possible

Jeremy Johnson (Phineas and Ferb)

A bbey Wilson (The Replacements)

T immy Turner

Kuki Sanban (Codename: Kids Next Door)

Jake Long (American Dragon)

L aCienega Boulevardez (The Proud Family)

L ewis McCartney ( H2O: Just Add Water)

Billy or Mandy (The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy)

2. The Couples Costume

7/10 if you’re recognisable. 9/10 if you choose foes. Give me Perry the Platypus & Dr Doofenshmirtz, give me bin chicken and water spray bottle, but for God’s sake don’t give me clowns and mimes. No-one, and I mean NO-ONE, wants to see sweaty half-ruined clown makeup with a red nose in a bathroom in the Valley while drunk past midnight on a Sundy.

4 The Accidental Solo Costume

You weren’t planning on flying solo, but you are.

There’s no reason why you can’t still try out that couples or friend‘s’ costume you had planned. Just be audacious and hit the town in search of your people.

Go ahead and dress up as the sk8ter boi to someone’s Avril Lavigne. Be the boombox to some group’s disco workout outfits.

Easy outfits include, but are not limited to:

1 Wearing human-sized Cards Against Humanity card pairings.

2. Peter Pan and Wendy, trying to change the ending.

3. B aker and a sweet treat.

4 . S carecrow and flowers.

5. Most Disney couples.

6. Dr Who and companion (there are no wrong combinations, but there is a right one).

7. Most anything that comes in pairs.

8. L iterally any couple from a notable TV show.

3 The Friends’ Costume

5/10 if you pushed for a group costume to happen.

7/10 if you were the friend that just got forced into it because someone else already had a hot outfit. I know you tried. Or maybe you didn’t. Either way, you deserve the recognition. I hear you, I see your pain. Stay strong out there.

Nothing screams easy quite like taking costume inspo from The Power Puff Girls, Winx, Men in Black, Scooby Doo, Teletubbies, Pac-Man, Stranger Things, any hospital show, the general cowboy aesthetic, the general pirate aesthetic, and, for some reason, the general American red-cup frat boy aesthetic.

Grab yourselves enough hats/wings/scrubs/ and you’ve got yourself a crew/finagle/medical team.

Based on the sheer confidence you need to have for this one, I’m giving you a 10/10.

*Be weary that your choice may signal certain sexual proclivities. Thing One or Thing Two? Talk about top/ bottom dynamic. The freedom of choice is not one to be taken lightly. Good luck.

5. The Sexy Something Costume

The name is self-explanatory.

5/10 for the basics: sexy cat, sexy nurse, sexy vampire, sexy sports person…

9/10 for the unexpected: sexy bed sheet ghost, sexy stethoscope, sexy overdue tax return.

6. The Hook-Up Costume

You have one thing on your mind, and it’s not cuddles.

I’d argue that any costume can be a hook-up costume as long as you flirt hard enough, but here are five of the hottest things you can try if you want to go above and beyond:

Don’t mention any existential dread during your attempt to snag a hook-up. It’s a buzzkill this close to Christmas.

Carry a sign that says “I’ll do your dishes/laundry/help you with your APA referencing after I do you.” (Listen, I’m not condoning objectifying yourself in the name of a hook-up. But I am recommending you invest in what you want.)

Smile. But not too much.

Make sure you smell nice. A little perfume or body spray can go a long way.

Carry mints.

7. The Characteristic–Over–Character Costume

Personally, I’m choosing characteristics this year. It’s a little similar to the ‘sexy something costume’, except I’m dropping the pretext.

This Halloween, you’ll find me in a short little red number, not trying to be anything other than hot. Because that’s what I think confidence looks like. (And the crystals aren’t working on their own so I’m upping my manifestation techniques. All evidence points to, If I fake it, I’ll make it.)

Some final thoughts, Glassies:

As general housekeeping, if you’re questioning whether your chosen costume is appropriate, the answer is probably no.

Maybe don’t dress up as Jeffrey D. Maybe let’s not capitalise on trauma.

Save your money, babe. You still need to pay rent.

If you’ve got the outfit but no party, The QUT Literary Salon and ScratchThat both have a Halloween-themed launch coming up.

Be comfy, have fun, and stay safe, Glassies!

Paloma (Stir, Stirring, Stirred)

EMREADMAN

1. I never know if my tarot card pulls are accurate, or if I make them accurate. It’s easy enough to manipulate the meaning. Each morning I lay them all out face down, I flip the same card over, week after week. The Hierophant. It’s a card about tradition, paths, and past wisdom, about looking back to go forward. Chalking it up to coincidence is easier than giving weight to it. Each time I pull it from the deck I stare at it longer than I need to, already knowing what it’s trying to say.

2. My stepfather is making paella in the kitchen, I am sitting at the bench top. We are in their new house, boxes strewn across the rooms. He, my mother, and my sister moved in not long before I arrived. I’ve gotten to know him better since the hard border between their state and mine came down – a chance to make up for the lost time. We get onto talking about his youth, and he tells me about him holding the record for the fastest drive between two towns, about motorbikes, about his family farm. He tells me about how he’s always been pulled between duty and wanting. I ask how he brought himself to choose what he wanted, and he told me the choice is easy when you’re willing to make it.

3. I am walking through the Fremantle city grid in the early afternoon. The limestone buildings shade one sidewalk and illuminate another, and I cross the street each time to walk in the sun. A true Queenslander. I am alone this afternoon, making my own way through the streets. I slip into a bar, order a Paloma, and sit at the high tops by the window. I feel like I breathe easier here, whether that’s because it’s colder or because I am wholly alone I don’t know. I couldn’t have had a drink alone a year ago, but my own company does not make me feel lonely anymore. I know what it means to be alone. Salt and grapefruit hum together as I sit, I have a fortnight left here.

4. I’ve spent more time with her over west than when I’ve been in Brisbane. I’m sitting in the backyard of a friend of a friend, making a mental note to bring a jacket next time. Someone is sound-checking their guitar on the verandah-turned-stage. A small crowd is sprawled across the backyard, and I sit next to her, we catch up over a few beers. She looks happy in the way I want to be sometime soon. She gives me a few musician recommendations and they are what I needed to hear, whether she knew that or not. A cautionary strum tells us that the music is about to start, and we settle in.

5. My sister asks me if I am alright. I say that I will be. I am on the other side of the country when my landlords call to say they are selling, and the sooner we’re out, the better (for them). I feel my sense of security in Brisbane collapsing, my tether to this place eroding in real-time. This breakaway gives space to a pull I have felt for a long time, a pull that my cards have been telling me about for longer. There are things that keep me in this city, but I know there is not enough to make me stay.

6. Half-empty houses echo in a unique way. Sound travels further than you mean it to when it doesn’t hit couches, curtains, blankets, or tables along the way. The echo makes me think there are more people in the house than just me, waiting for the end of a lease, the start of something else. The start of, hopefully, something better. I am packing my art pieces into tube mailers late at night, and the empty walls make for a stark reminder of how I made this place home. I cry, and the echo carries. I remind myself that it is alright to be sad after making the right decision.

7. I do the grocery shopping while two wines in after a literary salon. The supermarket is dead as I wander through, picking up things that I’ll be able to get through before we move. Sparkling water, a block of cheese, soup, bread rolls, oyster mushrooms. I put the coffee beans back when I remember my housemate has already taken their machine to their new house. In a few weeks, everything will be different. I am excited and scared at the same time, mourning and reviving over and over in the self-checkout line.

8. A friend invites me over for dinner by her fire pit. The months of rain had long ended the fire ban, and I bring over nice wine. We sit out on the grass. I’ve known this home since I was little, it is a home in and of itself. I lived here once, when I was between houses. It is a soft place to land. I’m here, again, on the precipice, the bushland of outer Brisbane brings me a clarity I don’t know if I will be able to replicate in a new city. I leave in a few weeks and I know it is what I am stretching out for. A new path, following what is now a tradition in my family, to move over west in a time of great change. My friend talks for a long time about bravery, about choosing what you deserve, about how feeling half-doomed comes with a freedom that you cannot get ahold of any other way. I feel my chin wobble, feel myself come apart at the seams, preparing to put myself back together. I feel myself starting to stir.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

QUT Ranks 19th Nationally for Prevalence of Sexual Assault, 5th for Harassment

CW:

TOMLOUDON

In March, the results of a survey of 40 major Australian universities revealed one in six students had been sexually harassed since starting university.

43,819 students participated in the National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) between August 2019 and January 2022, and its findings were released to universities prior to being made public last Wednesday.

One in six (16.1%) students responding reported having been sexually harassed since beginning university, with one in 12 (8.1%) reporting having been sexually harassed in the last twelve months.

The report noted, ‘female students (62.9%), transgender students (62.8%) and students who were non-binary or identified as another gender (76.8%) were more likely to have experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime than male students (26.0%)'.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) National President Dr Alison Barnes said the results of the survey were shocking.

‘I feel heartbroken for the students who have been failed by universities and our Federal Government,’ Dr Barnes said. ‘It is sadly unsurprising that student safety and knowledge of formal complaint processes has become collateral damage in the war the Federal Government has waged against universities.’

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was among the universities above the national average, with one in five (20.4%) of respondents reporting sexual harassment since beginning their studies, and one in ten (11.8%) being sexually harassed in the past 12 months.

This was the fifth highest prevalence of sexual harassment in universities nationally.

The NSSS survey also collected data on the prevalence of sexual assault in Australian higher education, with data suggesting one in 20 (4.5%) students have been sexually assaulted since starting university.

At QUT the results are just as grim, with the university’s 4.3% rate of sexual assault placing it 19th in the country.

In an email to students, QUT Registrar Leanne Harvey said that everyone who attends university, ‘has the right to feel safe, and to believe they will be treated with respect, dignity and fairness.

‘Any incidence of sexual harassment or sexual assault is unacceptable.’

The report also highlighted that student accommodation and university facilities and events were the most common places for assault and harassment to occur.

Gender and sexually diverse students are in some instances nearly three times as likely to be harassed and assaulted than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts, and nearly one in three (29.1%) students with a disability have been sexually harassed in a university context.

The survey found incredibly low rates of reporting within the university, with some case studies suggesting that university mechanisms are completely ill-equipped to handle the task of dealing with campus assault.

‘Our results show that QUT must do further work to increase knowledge of where students can go to make a complaint or seek assistance following an incidence of sexual harassment or sexual assault,’ Harvey said.

‘58% of QUT students had little or no knowledge of where to go to make a complaint about sexual harassment, about 55% had little or no knowledge of where to go to seek support.’

The QUT Student Guild said in a statement that the results of the survey were confronting.

‘To the many students who have been victims of sexual harassment and assault, [the results] are not surprising,’ the statement read.

‘It is clear that all universities have a long way to go in combatting harassment and assaults on campus.’

‘If you have been harassed or assaulted and are unsure where to go, there are a range of services available such as counselling and medical support at QUT.

‘The Harassment and Discrimination Advisers are a support network to discuss options around sexual assault, sexual harassment, or discrimination.’

Bond University and Australian National University were the worst offenders nation-wide, making up the top two highest instances of harassment and assault.

QUT Resources

HARASSMENTANDDISCRIMINATIONADVISERS: qut.to/had 07 3138 2019 discriminationadvis er@qut.edu.au

STUDENTCOUNSELLORS

MENTALHEALTHNURSES

Download the Safe Zone app to your smartphone or at iTunes or Google Play or via the links on this page

QUT.TO/SAFEZONE

Call Security on 3138 5585 and for an emergency on 3138 8888.

For further resources, visit:

A round up of Glass reporting on the 2022 NSSS survey findings.

This article discusses sexual harassment and sexual assault.

QUT Staff Vote To Strike

TOMLOUDON

The QUT branch of the National Tertiary Education Union voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking industrial action against the Queensland University of Technology.

The September poll followed six months of enterprise bargaining between the NTEU and QUT, and paves the way for the first industrial action at the University since 2019.

Enterprise bargaining is the process of negotiation between an employer and employees (or their representatives) with the goal of reaching an enterprise agreement established under the Fair Work Act.

Secretary of the NTEU Queensland Division, Michael McNally, said the results achieved were ‘outstanding.’

‘95% of those who voted support strike action,’ McNally said.

‘But we aren’t able to take industrial action whenever we want to, we are required to provide management with three days’ notice – so we won’t be moving to a full-day strike in the immediate future.’

‘The legal provisions to taking industrial action in Australia are a fucking disgrace.’

Voters were asked by the Fair Work Commission:

‘In support of reaching an Enterprise Agreement with Queensland University of Technology, do you authorise industrial action against your employer, separately, concurrently and/or consecutively, in the form of:

• A ban on the transmission of assessment results to the employer?

• Making statements explaining why NTEU members are taking industrial action in communications with any person whilst working?

• A ban on working overtime?

• A ban on working outside the span of hours?

• Ban on attending workplace meetings with supervisors/manager/Dean?

• A ban on participation in Queensland University of Technology events?

• A ban on the submission of invoices?

• S toppages of the performance of work of between 5 minutes and 24 hours in duration?

• I ndefinite stoppages of work?

Members voted overwhelmingly in favour of authorising all the above actions.

The student to staff ratio at QUT has risen to 11.5:1, which staff representatives say requires a significant productivity increase for academics that has not been reflected in their remuneration.

QUT NTEU Branch president, Associate Professor David Nielsen, says concessions around staff workload, work intensification, and job security are central to the union’s claims.

‘There’s a lot of dissatisfaction around these very important issues,’ Nielsen said.

‘There’s a lot of energy to take industrial action from our members – for an action to get up you need an absolute majority of members, so the result is overwhelming.’

‘Staff are not doing this out of greed, there is a very strong recognition amongst staff that the taking of industrial action will benefit of the entire QUT community.’

According to QUT’s 2021 Annual Report, employerrelated expenses decreased from $625.3 million to $605.5 million last year, about 59% of their total expenditure.

The University currently has $72 million in unallocated funds, in addition to a surplus of over $138 million, which Nielsen calls ‘rainy day’ funds.

‘An ideal opportunity for that surplus to be deployed was during COVID because that was a significantly rainy day,’ he said.

‘I believe QUT is a very healthy financial entity and that it can afford to provide good outcomes for staff and students.’

In 2022, QUT’s Vice-Chancellor’s salary was down from $1.2 million in 2021 to $1.08 million, which is the 10th highest in the country and higher than the salary of the Oxford University Vice-Chancellor.

Altogether, QUT executives are paid about $5 million annually.

A spokesperson for the University said negotiations are still ongoing.

‘So far there have been ten bargaining meetings with the University, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and individual bargaining representatives,’ they said.

‘We are still in negotiations and cannot comment on various claims, however, student concerns are at the forefront of our planning to ensure we can address their needs while still providing appropriate outcomes for our staff.’

Student complaints have become louder over the past few years, and recurring issues include: little to no one-on-one time with teaching staff, marking delays, poor facilities maintenance, reductions of classes due to staffing issues, and recycled online materials.

In a statement, the QUT Student Guild president Oscar Davison said he supported the move to industrial action.

‘The QUT Student Guild stands with our comrades at the NTEU,’ he said.

‘While it is a shame that industrial action is now necessary, I support QUT Staff in any action they take, and call upon QUT students to support the staff who facilitate their education, and stand with the NTEU.’

What are staff bargaining for?

The NTEU have logged the following claims with QUT:

• S alary rates and allowances for all NTEU members employed by QUT to be increased by 12% by 31 December 2024.

• O rdinary hours for professional staff to be no more than 36.25 hours per week between 8am-6pm Monday to Friday.

• C aps on academic workloads – the University must actually measure academic work in a real way so staff aren’t required to mark a 1,500-word essay in 15 minutes (currently, the union says doing the job properly means working unpaid hours).

• P rotections against excessive or uncompensated overtime.

• P rotection against work intensification as a result of organisational change.

• Work from home rights for all staff, and appropriate protections and allowances for professional WFH staff.

• 17% employer superannuation contributions.

• L awful conditions and requirements on the outsourcing of work / use of contractors that a staff member or future staff member is capable of performing.

• N o individual to be subject to organisational change process for the duration of the enterprise agreement – the University can’t restructure staff out of jobs.

• R etrenchment, including voluntary retrenchment, only to occur where the position is no longer required.

• T he right to conversion to permanent employment after three years of continuous service or two successive contracts.

• G ender affirmation leave.

The QUT Student Guild has launched a petition for QUT students to show their support for teaching staff.

JACKBELL

Sincerely, Me lacks Sincerity: Review by Jack Bell

I’ve always had an opinion that it’s no more fun watching someone be drunk in a movie than to watch someone be drunk in real life. Some people find cheerful drunkenness endearing – I find it obnoxious. This is why I’ve never really enjoyed movies like Arthur or Animal House as much as others seem to; but now, after reading Sincerely, Me by Julietta Henderson, I can add another thought on the matter as well: it’s not much fun reading about someone being drunk, either.

With a protagonist that helpfully exposits on the very first page that he is ‘Danny Mulbury, Mr Could-DoBetter, permanent address your best mate’s garden shed’, we’re all but guaranteed a book that will be as suffused with cheerful drunkenness as Les Misérables is with digressions about the Parisian sewer system. And yes, we do get pages and pages of our protagonist phonetically slurring dialogues of tiresome drunken wisdom, most of which I skimmed while thumbing the page corners to check how long the rest of the chapter was.

But for all its alcoholic consumption, let’s be clear that this is no shattering, emotionally-charged story of bottoming out on the level of a Million Little Pieces or a Dry. No, it would require too much backbone for that, or at least an expectation that it should make its audience feel just as uncomfortable as optimistic.

Anyway, the plot: Mulberry (who is possibly the most chipper and bushy-tailed chronic alcoholic in fiction since the supporting characters on Cheers ) lives a content life as a jobless, couch-hopping, hanger-on who drinks, raises hell, exploits his few remaining friendships in the process, rinses, and repeats. That is, until, the inciting incident: during an arrest, his photo and a drunken faux-philosophical quote are printed in the newspaper. All of a sudden, like Howard Beale but without the insanity, he strikes a chord with the common man – letters flock to him from average people across the country, seeking answers to their varied personal problems from their new humdrum guru.

Drama is introduced: Danny’s headstrong teenage niece tracks him down and meets him for the first time, since his sister wants nothing to do with him. He and his best friend were in love with the same woman, who is now dead from cancer. He must come to terms with the effects of his mistakes on his friends and family, as well as on the traumas of his past, ect. The central dramatic thrust takes the form of a series of mundane cliffhangers: will Danny Mulberry finally mature, learn to take responsibility, and mend the troubled relationships in his life?

Sincerely, Me – the exceedingly positive tone of which reads curiously like a YA novel but with adult characters – is obviously written with the best of intentions and with its heart firmly on its sleeve, but ends up with the depth of a sitcom’s Very Special Episode. It’s the kind of book that would want to sit down and talk through your emotional problems, but by telling you first that it’s an empath, which is why it understands you very deeply. The kind that would take a Myers-Briggs test and be way too attached to its result. If it had no plot it would be in the self help section of the bookstore, which is where it feels like it wants to be anyway.

It’s not awful, but is a novel that feels as if it’s afraid of ever becoming too realistic, or too adult, for fear that a truly canny exploration of human redemption in all its genuine messiness would be too disagreeable. Instead it plays it safe, choosing to stay quirky, frothy, and kind of forgettable. It’s a simple, cheery book which tells its story with a smirk and requires no great patience from the reader (example: one not very long scene is divided into five whole chapters; many are in the form of letters from Danny’s answer-seekers), or emotional labour, either.

To its credit, Sincerely, Me is not totally inauthentic. As the story goes on and deepens, its plot turns feature –amongst other dramas – a suicide attempt, a runaway teenager, and desperate attempts at reconciliation to heal the lingering wounds of past trauma. The less stony-hearted of its readers will surely shed a tear or two, and will end with a smile.

But for all its impersonations of serious emotional depth, the book’s overall tone of sanitised idealism leaves it feeling more melodramatically calculated than genuinely affecting. The same way that The Sims series euphemises sex as "woohooing" for the purposes of parental discretion, I half-expected Sincerely, Me to do the same with any of its own uncouth elements.

But still, there’s nothing wrong with reading for diversion, after all. A lighthearted and morally optimistic lark can be just as worthwhile as something of more substance; depending, of course, on what you get out of it. Because this isn’t a novel that’s going for the Booker or the Pulitzer Prize, obviously – the nightstand of your cheerful aunt or that friend of yours who’s seen Bojack Horseman too many times will do just fine, thank you.

Sincerely, Me is available now from Penguin.

Glass Media pairs emerging QUT writers, readers, and critics up with new release titles to review and publish on our website. To find more information or to register your interest, head to our website.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

When Life Gives You Bananas

TOMLOUDON

At the Gardens Point campus of the Queensland University of Technology, there is a room hidden atop an old brick building where scientists meet and conduct research unlike anywhere in the world. Their goal: to sure up the fate of one of the world’s largest crops – bananas.

Professor James Dale AC is an agricultural scientist and distinguished professor in the Faculty of Science School of Biology & Environmental Science at QUT. He doesn’t teach, but for the past 10 years he has led a team of world-leading scientific researchers. Their field of research – genetically modified banana crops – is gaining global importance in the wake of a potentially devastating banana pandemic threatening crops worldwide.

Dale cuts a slight frame against his imposing, almost primeval office in one of the University’s oldest buildings. His desktop, however, is lined with keyboards and computer screens, facing the desk of Joanne Simpkins, the QUT Bananas project manager with whom Dale shares his office.

'This building is really flash,' Dale says, perhaps recognising the irony of a cutting-edge research facility in an old brick building.

But Dale’s research is anything but gimmicky.

'Bananas are one of the world’s top ten food crops,' Dale says. “Wheat, maze, rice, potato, Kasava, then bananas, soy beans, sweet potato, sorghum. Depends how you count sugar cane I suppose.'

Originating in South East Asia and New Guinea, the banana crop is a staple food across Asia and Africa. The crop’s high starch content and ease of tropical cultivation makes it a key foodstuff for some of the world’s most impoverished regions, providing accessible, reliable, and healthy food.

'In Uganda they cook raw bananas while they’re hard,' Dale says. 'The bananas are steamed for three-to-four hours, then mashed. The dish, "Matooke," is a staple of Uganda, and across East Africa, bananas are a massive crop in the region.'

When it comes to bananas, Dale knows what he’s talking about, and after 30 years working on the crop, the professor has become concerned.

Dale and his team have for the past decade focused their research on the emergence of a fungus called Tropical Race 4, and the development of genetically modified bananas able to resist the fungus. In a post-pandemic world, we think of deadly diseases as spreading rapidly through regions and communities, so the slow-moving fungus has at least left time on Dale’s side. But in agriculture, a little fungus is a big deal.

'Once it gets in the soil, it’s impossible to remove,' Dale says.

However, the severity of scale for a banana-plague isn’t comparable to COVID. Instead, Dale invokes the Potato Blight, a fungus that gripped the northern hemisphere in the mid-1800s. Due to the regressive British Government export and land-use policies of the time, the Blight became concentrated on Ireland, where over a million people starved to death in a single year. According to Dale, this could be microcosm of a world in a banana-plague.

'There is a very narrow genetic base of food crops that we eat,” Dale explains. “Industrial agriculture is based around monocultures, wherein a single cultivar is closely replicated or cloned to maximise output. That’s why the Irish Blight eliminated a single potato crop across Ireland. No diversity is bad for immunity.'

And when it comes to farming, bananas are a problematically un-diverse crop.

'There are about a thousand varieties,” Dale says of banana species. “But globally, the Cavendish banana makes up about 50% of all variety.'

Cavendish bananas and their variants are the bananas you get from the store. Unlike their wild counterparts, these bananas don’t go to seed, which is great for consumers –less seed, more banana. But this means that when a new

banana tree grows from the base of an old one – a process known as budding – the new tree is an exact genetic replica of the old one.

All Cavendish bananas are clones.

These clones didn’t always make up such a large portion of the world’s bananas. Until the 1950s, the Gros Michel banana was favored by agriculturalists because its thicker peel made the crop resistant to bruising in transit. That was before Tropical Race 1, often referred to as Panama disease made its production unviable.

'They were clones, and they weren’t resistant to the fungus,' Dale says. 'Cavendish has taken over precisely because it is resistant to Tropical Race 1.'

Tropical Race 4, now present in South America, Asia, Australia, Sri Lanka, and Europe, is a blight for almost every species of banana, including the Cavendish. But in the wild, uncultivated, seeded banana plants of the world, some diversity remains.

Dale and his team identified a south-east Asian banana variant resistant to Tropical Race 4. After identifying the gene resistant to Tropical Race 4, they extracted the gene and inserted it into a Cavendish plant. The gene in question is already present in the Cavendish – the difference is, it isn’t activated.

Professor James Dale hopes to develop fungus resistant bananas. Photograph: Joanne Simpkins.

Cross-section of a healthy banana tree (right), vs a tree infected with TR4 (left).

'In Australia, gene editing methods that do not introduce any new genetic material are de-regulated by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.'

'In many ways gene editing is the same as conventional breeding methods that create random changes to the DNA of a crop species by chemical mutagenesis, but they are more precise and targeted.'

This is essentially the technique developed by Dale to activate the resistant gene in the Cavendish, which has since been successfully tested at exposed sites in the Northern Territory. The eventual goal; to provide an alternative to, and potentially replace, Cavendish plantations in Uganda, across Africa, and the world.

And for Dale, this is only the beginning of the positive implications of this research.

'The Cavendish is high yielding … others are bigger, tougher, tastier, disease resistant... we could potentially identify the relevant genes across these species and improve the output and quality of bananas around the world.

'Similar opportunities exist too for other crops … citruses like oranges.'

Film Review: Drive My Car

WRITTENBYRORYHAWKINS

It is Valentine’s Day, and I am alone.

My Tinder first date was postponed to later in the week; we don’t want to set too romantic a precedent. Besides, today I want to see a movie, and we all should know by now that movies make awful first dates. It’s a stationary road-trip, side by side, the sun beginning to rise – a bright world ahead with shadows behind, with a total stranger.

The team uses CRISPR gene editing to manipulate the DNA of banana plants.

'Trees have embryos too and we can make them in the lab,'Dale says. 'From modifying the embryo, we grow a plant that is a Cavendish in every way except that it is resistant to Tropical Race 4.'

But not everyone is completely sold on the prospect of genetic modification, and so far, no gene edited crops have been approved in Australia for sale. Synthetic Biologist Dr Artem Anyshchenko warns public uptake of genetically modified organisms is tentative.

'There are plenty of socio-economic considerations that affect the acceptability of the product,' Dr Anyshchenko says.

'There are imbedded moral values too. Regardless of those considerations, GMOs are indispensable to the global food supply, not only in the future, but also today.'

University of Queensland researcher Dr. James Hereward, who studies population genetics to understand agricultural pests, says there is an ongoing review process at Food Standards Australia and New Zealand to establish how to regulate gene edited crops relative to GMO foods.

'Gene editing is a very powerful technology that can accelerate efforts to increase production and make crops more resilient to climate change,' Dr Hereward said.

Until the day Dale’s bananas hit the shelves, there is one more major hurdle to clear.

'They’re tiny,' Dale laughs. 'They get to about the size of your pinky at the moment, but they’ll be at the store sometime soon, I hope.'

Read the full article, here at qutglass.com

A movie is an awful first date, especially when it’s the threehour long journey of a Japanese stage-actor grappling with the loss of his wife. But I’m not entirely alone. I invited a friend. Lachlan had nothing to do for Valentine’s too.

And I am desperate to see director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), a film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name. It’s a real custom job, converting another of Murakami’s, Scheherazade, to expand on character, plot and themes. Both stories have been lifted from his 2017 (for English translation) short story collection, Men Without Women .

I look at Lachlan, at the vacant seats around me and him. Irony is never lost.

And neither are these stories’ narrative idiosyncrasies –we’ll dub “Murakami-isms” – in transport to the screen, even with all their additional mechanics. Still, as certifiably good as Drive My Car must be, taking home 2022’s Academy Award for International Film, how watchable is it for a general audience? While it’s a scenic journey for dedicated literary fans, is it for anyone else? So, with a nigh-empty theatre and three hours’ worth of awkward silences to explain to baffled Lachlan – and now you, in the backseat – we’ll pop the hood and see how it purrs.

Drive My Car follows Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an ageing stage actor specialising in multi-lingual performances, but you aren’t told this in any convenient way. Similar to a short story, there’s no introductory scene to formally present himself as the protagonist or deliver his backstory as a speech. Simply, he moves, and the camera follows. Like coarse Yusuke’s attitude to his new driver, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), it is a film that asks you to keep both hands on the wheel and pay immediate attention. You aren’t told a lot and are shown just enough, not a quality for everyone to enjoy. Add in subtitles for Japanese, Korean, and Japanese-Korean Sign Language, and even a quick reader like Lachlan needed the occasional 'remember, that’s a reference to when…'

But the film has a reputation for not being for everyone, which is obvious from the beginning.

Weird sex, that hallmark Murakami-ism.

Moreso, intimacy held askew with some instant feeling of imbalance or unease. Sunlight crowns the head, and darkly masks the face of Yusuke’s wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), as she props herself up in bed. This first shot holds her silhouette close as she monologues, so close that she is speaking to you, not her husband, of her dream last night, the short story ‘Scheherazade.’

Cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya may have taken inspiration from Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning (2018), another Murakami adaptation, by contrasting these super close-ups with shots of generous negative space, both lingering past comfortable welcomes. Pops of colour, like

Yusuke’s brash cherry-red Saab 900 Turbo, are few and far between. Brightness comes only as the camera catches sunbeams, lens flares, blurs in motion, the forms light takes and portrays. Drive My Car’s beginning evokes Burning’s “sunset dance” scene – its voyeurism, only knowing characters through stories they tell, left wondering who else they could be. Even without plot elements, ethereal moments like these stand out as delicately crafted for anyone to see.

Using another short story to complete Oto Kafuku’s part, and prologue the whole narrative, was an excellent choice. Though it takes half an hour before title cards even roll, it offsets Murakami’s habit of leaving female characters by the side of the road. Repurposing Scherezade gives more respect to Oto with a richer backstory, a tangible relationship, and even more weird sex. Like I said, there is a dry and ponderous plain to cross with reading Murakami, but with screenplay this switches gears to the hilariously awkward. My favourite example:

A jazz record mumbles in the background of the couple’s apartment.

Oto traces a hand on Yusuke’s desk. ‘What are you up to, honey?’

‘Nothing,’ he says.

He’s not doing nothing. He’s watching YouTube.

He’s watching YouTube videos about lamprey – a parasitic eel – because in orgasmic trance last night, straddled atop him on the sofa, on the anniversary of their daughter’s death, Oto told him the dream-story of a teenage schoolgirl recounting, mid-masturbation herself, how in another life she had been a lamprey.

‘Actually, I-’ Yusuke frowns, closes his laptop. ‘I have to get going.’

I looked to Lachlan – and he to me.

Then a few minutes later we found out that Oto was cheating.

When Yusuke’s overseas trip is cancelled, he taxis home to surprise Oto. He takes a quiet step into their apartment. He catches her in the hallway mirror, mounting a younger man on their sofa like that night not long before. And Yusuke leaves, and spends the next week in the airport hotel, Skyping Oto about how great the theatre scene in Finland is.

Sometimes you just have to laugh, and laugh we did. Just as well theatres are near-empty on Valentines. In all of three hours, I don’t remember any moment of deliberate levity in Drive My Car. Hamaguchi makes no attempt at comedy with this film. It’s a rare thing to appreciate. Jokes can fall short or muddy the tone but, in this case, they’d simply halt the viewer from paving their own sense of humour over any number of earnest but eccentric scenarios. This might be obvious already, but I believe it’s your own sense of irony that will always work best to make something funny.

Still, Drive My Car has a confident tone, never steering off its course. In the space after Oto’s sudden death, Yusuke moves through his grief and the aftermath of the complex relationship he had with his wife. No matter where he goes, time in his little red Saab ekes by: time driving in silent understanding with Misaki; time confronted by his wife’s last affair, Koji (Masaki Okada) over who really knew her; time stagnant with Oto through the tape recordings she once handmade for him. Of course, we catch only the most poignant lines of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya:

‘You understand that the world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations,’ Oto recites, ‘but by hate and malice and all these petty squabbles.’ Her voice travels across years. She remains in their home, seated at the table. Sunlight crowns her head and darkly masks her face. ‘It's your duty to make peace, and not to growl at everything.’

‘Then help me first,’ recites Yusuke. ‘To make peace with myself.’

sex but offline

you’re typing 'am i asexual quiz into the search bar but you’d rather just be playing your DS or something. something that doesn’t involve questioning the deepest parts of yourself like you feel like you’ve been doing for years. at this point you’re pretty sick of having an identity to discover at all, but if you’re not doing this you’ll just be worrying about something else anyway.

you’re thinking about how society is a time-bomb, one that’s gone off about 10 times this decade already. you wouldn’t have to even think about being asexual if the world wasn’t so obsessed with making everything about sex and intimacy. that’s an unfair statement, sex and intimacy should totally be up for exploration in the media, #sexpositivity, but why are we all expected to love it? you’d rather just register your disdain for being asked to put your penis into a person and move on, rather than thinking about all the pretty characters from Euphoria or Sex Education that love having sex and wondering if you’re just trying too hard to be different. you feel every voice inside you begging for another perspective. something about all big discoveries about your identity needing to be encouraged by Buzzfeed or Harper’s Bazaar first, like the time you thought about switching over to almond milk.

JACKSONMACHADO-NUNES

you haven’t clicked on the quiz yet, and you’re nervous to. nervous because it will give you an answer, and nervous because whether it says yes or no you’ll just acquiesce to the opposite anyway. what you want to do is pick up your phone to a notification from YouTube about a new Smosh Pit video - omg, Shayne Topp came out as asexual? I’m just like him! but no, it’s silence all around you except everywhere that it’s so freaking loud. you hit the link from ProProfs that claims: With this asexual test, you will get the answer to your question, am I asexual?

maybe you’re a robot. maybe if you bang your head hard enough into the wall a troubleshooting guide will come out and show you how to reset your brain, or at least detail the components of your model and tell you what’s going on in there - like one of those Furbies with likes and dislikes, some like apple sauce, some do intermittent fasting. maybe you’re just procrastinating. again searching for online validation, like when you were in high-school on Omegle looking for 40-year-olds to want you more than they wanted their wives. you think about all the times you’ve enjoyed sex, sexting, things like that…and it’s just never been sex that you were looking for, not really. you wanted to be a pleaser, or to feel pretty, or sexy. it’s like everything just wants to dawn on you all at once or something. you’re asking yourself if anything you’ve ever really done has been for you. something tells you that you’re not just a sensitive person that needs to acclimate into sexual liberation. maybe you’re just defective.

there’s something about sex that makes you feel not a part of it. like it’s a club and you’re not invited. like you’re always behind your own eyes, counting down the seconds until His breath catches and you’re suddenly not there for any reason at all. your first complaint about sex to your friends was that it feels like it just goes on forever. maybe that just means you’re bad at it, but you’re not sure.

the tricky thing is…you kinda like the thought of it alone. you like the idea of it when you can be this perfect being in your mind. sometimes for men that remind you of sitting alone every day watching the pretty people not bring lunch to school, you can convince yourself that it feels good to do what they say. but then again, you also kinda like that powerful feeling of not enjoying a second of a guy’s time. like you have better things to do than get some guy off after a hard day of making short films about frustration and being so incredibly intelligent.

you go through the quiz and wind up not being asexual, but, nice try. are you just trying to pick up labels like Thanos and those infinity stones, or do you really think you could go the rest of your life without sex?

well, maybe there’s a quiz for that too.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

Cheats of Wall Street

YOURFRIENDLYNEIGHBOURHOODCRYPTOMAN

When we hear the word ‘cheat’, we tend to think of infidelity, sports doping scandals, and elaborate schemes involving casino card games. But, in fact, the greatest examples of cheating in history involve the seemingly legitimate gains made on financial markets.

Take for example, Bernie Madoff, a man who at one time was chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. In 2009, Madoff was convicted for swindling clients out of approximately $64 billion USD through an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the largest convicted act of fraud on record. Fraud on this scale would not be possible in any other industry, as the complex nature and enormous scale of financial markets makes identifying such scams difficult.

The subjective and volatile returns involved with trading on financial markets leaves plenty of room for scepticism from competitors and leniency from regulatory bodies, making it the ideal playground for would-be grifters. In Madoff’s case, his fraud had been identified by many in the industry as early as 1999 – the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) was informed, but no action was taken for nearly a decade due to the high esteem in which many in the finance industry held Madoff.

So, who are the biggest cheaters in finance history, what is the point of these highly elaborate, convoluted markets, and who is it that benefits the most?

Albert H. Wiggin

From way back to 1929 comes the story of one of the OG financial fraudsters, although calling Albert H. Wiggin a fraud may be a bit unfair considering his actions were completely legal at the time.

Wiggin came from an affluent family and used his connections and knowledge to work his way up to the head of Chase National Bank. As an executive of the bank, Wiggin owned a considerable number of Chase Bank shares.

Shares are a foundational security in financial markets, representing a unit of equity (ownership) in a corporation, entitling a share owner to a portion of any leftover profits made by the company, called dividends.

Wiggin used his position to encourage Chase Bank to re-purchase its shares while simultaneously, short selling his personal shares to the bank through a Canadian shell Company he owned.

Short selling means selling a security that you do not own and re-purchasing and returning the security to its owner later, retaining any profits or losses from the change in price of the security over this period. Someone looking to make a profit will short a stock when they expect its price to decrease.

A shell company is a corporation without active business operations or considerable assets. Although not strictly illegal, they are often used illegitimately to disguise business ownership and hide transactions or avoid taxation.

Wiggin shorted over 42,000 of his own shares, giving him a vested interest in ensuring Chase Bank’s stock value plummeted.

You may ask – ‘how did he know it was going to plummet?’. Well, it wasn’t so much that he knew it was going to plummet, but more the fact that he was in a position to directly influence and manipulate the direction of the company by making sure it made poor investments and bad business decisions to ensure the company’s stocks decreased in value and his shorts increased in value. The Wall Street Crash was purely coincidental, but it just so happened that his bank was considerably exposed, possibly intentionally.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Wiggin saw his opportunity to cash out as investors closed out their positions in the market. He made over $4 million tax-free (equivalent to $65.2 million today) completely legally through these trades. In the aftermath of the crash, and Wiggin’s coverage in the media, this form of insider trading was outlawed by the SEC.

Foster Winans

Winans, like myself, was a columnist, although unlike me he worked for the Wall Street Journal (cringe). Between 1982 and 1984, Winans wrote a column called Heard on the Street, in which he profiled certain stocks. Interestingly, the price of the stocks that Winans analysed would swing noticeably up or down based on his opinion.

Knowing this, Winans leaked the contents of his column early to a group of stockbrokers, who then purchased favourable positions in the stock before the article was published.

This resulted in total gains of over $700,000. Although skilled in stock analysis, Winans clearly lacked the backbone or skill to negotiate, receiving only $31,000 for his contribution to the scheme.

During his trial, Winans argued that his actions did not necessarily constitute insider trading as the definition was broad. This argument did not appear to be effective as Winans was sentenced to 18 months in prison, serving nine before his release.

Martha ‘M. Diddy’ Stewart

You may have heard that the domestic goddess Martha Stewart served time in federal prison, where she selfreportedly received the nickname ‘M. Diddy’ by fellow inmates. But what is less commonly known is that she was convicted for insider trading. Stewart was invested in a pharmaceutical company called ImClone. ImClone had recently seen an increase in their stock price because of their announcement of a new cancer drug they had developed called Erbitux, which was awaiting FDA approval.

Owning shares in a company entitles one to a portion of residual profits, paid as dividends. The market value of a share is commonly measured by the predicted value of future dividends and is tied closely to the expected financial performance of the company. This basically translates to: good news = an increase in stock value, bad news = a decrease in stock value.

Unexpectedly however, Erbitux was denied approval by the FDA, tanking ImClone’s stock value. But in a suspicious turn of events, none of ImClone’s executives or their close connections saw any great losses. An investigation into the matter found that prior to the FDA announcement, the CEO of ImClone, Samuel Waksal, had instructed numerous people to sell their shares in the company, including Stewart’s stockbroker. It is alleged that Waksal knew ahead of time that the drug was not going to be approved (though how he knew this was unclear), and encouraged all his buddies to abandon ship and sell their shares while the price was just about at its peak. Stewart was informed and made the decision to sell 4,000 of her shares, netting herself a tidy $250,000. She was later embroiled in the scandal, serving five months in prison and required to pay a $30,000 fine.

M. Diddy eventually resigned from her position as CEO of her own company, but the ensuing clout and dope nickname saw her develop a close relationship with rapper Snoop Dogg.

These frauds emphasise the ease at which these convoluted markets can be manipulated and bring into question the purpose they serve and for whom. A person who has studied finance would say that they provide a means for investment, liquidity, diversification, risk reduction, and a plethora of other fancy words that are meaningless and inapplicable to most people. In reality, they supposedly drive our economies and financial markets. However, they also act as a playground for the uber rich fraudsters while excluding marginalised people from even getting a foot in the door. It is the ultimate indicator of how rules are unfairly applied to the poor and powerless – during booms, gains are hoarded but wages stagnate, and during recessions, losses are socialised, and jobs are lost.

Whether you are an experienced trader or considering your first investment, keep in mind these markets exist almost exclusively for large corporations and the ultrawealthy. To the average person they are no more than a game of chance at a casino.

For each of these fraudsters, their influence and connection allowed them to effortlessly take advantage of the financial markets that drive our economy. From the outside, it seems they committed relatively victimless crimes, despite injuring a faceless corporation.

However, finance is a zero-sum game; there are always winners and losers. The reality for the individual people on the losing side of their trades could have resulted in the loss of someone’s life savings, prevented a small business from retaining staff, left a family with no deposit for a house or a range of other devastating outcomes. But unsurprisingly, aside from Madoff, for each of these cheaters, the whiter they were and the more money they harnessed from their respective crimes, the less amount of time they spent in jail – highlighting the unfairness and disparities in justice that wealth and power can bring.

Summers on the Floor

HANNAHJAMES

On the sizzling cement pavement, In the company’s comfort, It's always following and chasing, This shadow. And the sun sees to that, But it's not natural like that. She pried, and I couldn’t form an answer. Have you always been afraid?

Online shopping for something that’s not in store. Faceless friends forever/ kids bonding over loose ends. Google searching just to speak into the void and have it speak back to you.

Boredom fuelled summer of cruel fascination, Crying on your mother’s carpet, As though you never learned to walk.

Afterlife obsession has a nihilistic impression. Haunted by an invincible blue light, So, there's always those bloodshot eyes. They look like something broke your blood vessels. The reaper’s hands squeezing around my neck, They look like mine.

I spent all my summers on the floor.

I’m having a love affair with the moon

SHELBYLEE

it was harmless at ten as i swung my legs from the balcony at sunset, bewitched eyes on a clam dusk because a fool murmured, wish on cracked gold, but i’m not ten anymore, the decaying wood reminds me, never letting me sit comfortably without a cushion of baby fat to protect my bones i lap from a bottle and fumble a call to the one love i have shown any commitment, to mumble about pataphysics and how our wretched language mangles merdre, like my shikt habits exhibited in all the obvious places, like under my eyes and in dead rodents on my pillowcases yet my dear comes without expectations without baggage without trust for which i’m most unfamiliar, they understand how some nights my eyes can’t bare perception but with the tide’s inevitability, will return their embrace until my bleached-coral flesh is only recognisable in their apathetic glow.

Gypsy developed into the word gyp, which is a synonym for stealing, hence the phrase, ‘I’ve been Gypped.’ This is a false and harmful stereotype that has followed our community for hundreds of years and follows us to this day.

Roma, Not Gypsy

OSCARDAVISON

Hello, my name is Oscar, and I am the President of the QUT Student Guild. I am also Roma, or what some of you may know as gypsy. Today, April 8, is International Roma Day, and so I felt it important that I use this opportunity to write about our wonderful people, and hopefully educate some of you about our community, and some of the struggles we continue to face.

Roma – not gypsy.

Something I’ve always been quite outspoken about, especially in recent years, is correcting people on what to call us. The word “Roma” was adopted by our community at the First World Roma Congress in 1971. The most important thing to get out of the way is, Roma and gypsy are not interchangeable. They do not mean the same thing.

During World War Two, more than 500,000 Roma were systematically exterminated in the Holocaust. This amounted to 80% of the Roma population. We call this the Porajmos, or ‘the Devouring’. A specific “Gypsy Camp” (Zigeunerlager) was established at Auschwitz for the extermination of Roma. The Porajmos was not recognised as a genocide by Germany until 1981.

Roma were also victims of 500 years of chattel slavery in Romania, which only ended in 1860.

Many European countries including Switzerland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic enacted policies of forced sterilisation of Roma men and women. Forced sterilisation of Roma women only ended in the Czech Republic in 2011.

Message I received from a friend when she was in France.

This stereotype is harmful for a number of reasons, mainly that it is untrue – you have the same chance of being pickpocketed by anyone – and that it ignores the effect discrimination and persecution have on criminality. It minimises crime to a personal feature of the Roma, rather than a situational response to discriminatory legislation that keeps Roma in poverty.

The word gypsy has transformed into a synonym for “free-spirited”, a fetishisation of nomadic lifestyle of the Roma. This was not a lifestyle that was chosen, but one that was forced via 1000 years of murder, genocide, torture, and slavery. This is not a word to be rebranded because you had a life-changing experience while backpacking. It is a word with a millennium of pain behind it.

There are thousands of ‘gypsy’ rings, earrings, books, and more being sold online, appropriating a word which has been used to persecute, for a quick profit due to the wanderlust of an ethnic minority.

My Relationship with the Word in Australia

History of the word “gypsy”

Roughly 1000 years ago, the Roma were forced out of northern India. Thus began 1000 years of migration, nomadism, and further persecution. Roma travelled through West Asia, the Middle East, and many of us found ourselves in Europe. Coming from Northern India, most Roma had dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. Many Europeans’ only interactions with people of darker complexion came from Turkey and North East Africa. The story goes that Eastern Europeans thought that Roma were Egyptian. Egypt -> Gyp -> Gypsy.

The origins of the word itself is problematic, as we’re not Egyptian, we’re Roma. However, it is easy to dismiss this as a mistake, which warrants discussion about the past and present treatment of Roma in society.

Segregation is still common across Europe. Schools, churches, shops, and villages are segregated across Europe, including in Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

And racism against Roma people is overt in Europe. Zsolt Bayer, co-founder of the currently elected Fidesz Party in Hungary has been quoted saying:

‘ The Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their beastly skulls. At the same time, these gypsies understand how to exploit the achievements of the idiotic Western World. But one must retaliate, rather than tolerate. These animals shouldn’t be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved immediately and regardless of the method.’

Media Representation

The media tends to portray Roma people in two key ways. Either as a poor beggar and a pickpocket, or a hypersexualised temptress (the most common representation of the latter is Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

‘Her complexion was dark… she danced, whirled, turned around… her large, black eyes flashed lightning… with her smooth bodice of gold, her colourful dress that swelled with the rapidity of her motions, with her bare shoulders, her finely turned legs that her skirt now and then revealed, her black hair, her flaming eyes, she was a super natural creature… in truth,’ Thought Gringore, ‘she is a magical creature, a nymph, a goddess, a bacchanae of Mount Menelaeus!’

At that last moment one of the magical creature’s tresses came loose, and a piece of yellow brass that had been fastened to it fell to the ground. ‘But no,’ he said, ‘she is a gypsy!’ The illusion was shattered.”

– Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Due to the way Roma women have been represented in these two lights, the word gypsy is incredibly dangerous to Roma women. Either a criminal to be persecuted, or a mystical sexual creature to be conquered.

I have a complicated relationship with this word gypsy in Australia. In the UK and Europe, it’s well known that ‘Roma’ is the correct term for us, so when people use terms like gypsy, or cigani (Eastern Europe), or zigani (Germany), it’s quite evident that the word is intended as a slur. Whereas in Australia, we face very little oppression. There are very few of us here, between 5,000 and 25,000. Many people do not know we’re here, and those who do often have no idea the word gypsy is considered a slur by our community, or what the appropriate term is. Therefore, I struggle communicating my culture in Australia. The conversation usually goes something like:

Them: So, what’s your background?

Me: I’m Roma[ni].

Them: What’s that?

Me: *sigh* You would probably know us as gypsies.

After which I have to go through the motions of explaining the origin of the word, how it is rooted in 500 years of slavery and racism. It’s often easier to go ‘I’m a gypsy’, which sometimes feels like a betrayal of my community.

Roma is the Romani word for person/human. The word Roma is so liberating. After 500 years of persecution, genocide, and slavery, it was chosen that we would simply call ourselves ‘human’. 500 years of being dehumanised, and we choose to call ourselves ‘human’ rather than a word which has become synonymous with thievery, poverty, hyper-sexualisation, and barbarism.

So, I’ll finish this article the way I started it.

Hi, I’m Oscar and I’m the President of the QUT Student Guild. I am Roma, not gypsy.

Bc we were talking about France and pick pocketing

And she's like "yeah it's because of all them gypsies!"

A Straight Man’s Guide to the Perfect Tinder Profile

ELLABRUMM

Hint: you don’t reel in women by having a photo with a fish.

The tips in this guide should go without saying, however, almost every straight man on Tinder continues to ignore the unspoken criteria of what makes a decent human.

The Bio:

1. If you feel the urge to write your height followed by ‘if that matters’ – please don’t. Some girls may prefer men who are taller than them but honestly, it’s not as big an issue as you may think. Just like the size of other things, most women are not overly fussed. It’s truly just a dick-swinging contest between yourselves. Function over size always.

2. Include your pronouns. It signifies respect of other people’s identities and queer women will feel more comfortable knowing you will not assume gender or sexuality just from photos. HOWEVER, if you do this purely to enhance your chances and you’re not committed to doing the work of an ally for the LGBTQIA+ community, we’ll figure it out very quickly.

3. In the same realm, include and learn about the Indigenous land you are living on. Here is a link to the map of Australia’s Traditional Custodians.

4. Write something short and sweet, introducing yourself in a nonsexual way. Women don’t want to hear jokes about your dick, especially ones you’ve copied from the internet.

5. If you are specifically looking for a relationship, make reference to it in your bio in a casual way.

6. You’re looking for a person, not your weekly groceries, so please don’t put up a shopping list describing what kind of woman you are looking for. The following is an example from a profile I was blessed with (I wonder whether you can guess which way I swiped):

‘Looking for someone to get along with, must be into fitness, be driven, fun, confident, and actually wants to meet up. Also, must be low to medium maintenance, I’ve dealt with enough psycho women for one life *laugh emoji*’

And if you mention the phrase ‘bonus points’, I hope you know that we are the ones judging you not the other way around.

7. It’s best to include as many talking points in your profile that Tinder will allow that are still quick and easy to read such as, your age, work/study, education, and interests. So maybe you’ll be able to text something other than ‘hey’ because as most women are very aware, y’all are not a fan of that but seem to expect a response back when you do it.

8. Try to write a cute/funny line – even if it’s objectively not that funny, we’ll still appreciate the effort and the fact that you haven’t used the age-old one liners that are filled with sexual innuendos and immediately make us feel uncomfortable.

The Photos:

1. I h ate that I have to say this but under ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you include any photos of dead fish in your profile. It doesn’t show you’re adventurous, it's not cool, and there is no cute outfit to wear when fishing. Just please don’t.

2. S ame goes with photos of your car. You have a finite number of photos to upload, why are you including one that is not you? Would you like to see a photo of my worm farms or high heel collection? No? Well, that’s how I feel about seeing a photo of your car.

A ll it says is “when we’re talking in person and I hear a car engine pass, I will immediately stop listening to what you’re saying and watch that car until I can no longer hear it anymore and not think that is rude in any way”. Also, it just screams that you never outgrew the little boy phase of wondering how wheels go round and are somehow still fascinated by that magic (can you tell my ex was into cars??)

3. If all your photos are group photos, I don’t know who you are. I don’t want to do a puzzle. Your profile shouldn’t feel like I’m playing Where’s Wally?. Your first photo should be you (no sunglasses, hats, and I’m going to say it again, ABSOLUTELY NO FISH). Also have at least two group photos to break it up in between.

4. If you want a girl to instantly swipe on you, include a photo of your dog with the bonus of an instant talking point. Nothing is cuter than dogs (and guys by proximity who happen to be in the photo).

To sum up, men please stop with the fish photos. And to the girls, gays, and theys I highly recommend moving over to Bumble or Hinge. Don’t get me wrong, there’s the occasional man with a fish, but they’re fewer and further between.

In Defence of Sun Yang

TOMLOUDON

On February 28th 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport handed down a guilty verdict and eight-year ban to Chinese swimmer Sun Yang. This outcome was the result of nearly four months of hearings, deliberations, and tantrums in the Swiss town of Montreux, and formally designated Sun as a drug cheat. Two years on, the ripple-effect of this decision carves a problematic precedent when it comes to drug use in sport.

As the COVID-belated 2022 FINA World Championships begin in Budapest this weekend, the best swimmers in the world will either descend in competition or take a deserved break after last year’s Olympic Games – with one notable exception.

Australian swimmer Mack Horton faced the wrath of the Chinese media during the 2016 Summer Olympics, when he publicly labelled Sun Yang a drug cheat. Since then, the Australian media has collectively demonised the 30-yearold Chinese, freestyle swimmer out of public favour.

And on the surface, what’s wrong with that? Sun Yang is, by any definition, a drug cheat. But the case of Sun Yang resists simplicity, and it’s time the culture of drug vilification in sports is properly examined. Because not only is it unhealthy – it’s deadly.

Though not widely known, FINA (the global body governing aquatic sports including swimming, diving, and water polo) has until recently been one of the most successful sporting organisations in the field of doping prevention. In fact, the body has come under fire for the strictness of its rules, notably the 2017 twelve-month ban issued to Australian swimmer Thomas Fraser-Holmes, who missed three drug tests in a year – tests that are by their nature random and unannounced, only allowing a single hour for an athlete to provide a sample.

But from the get-go, FINA has been soft on Sun Yang.

Sun returned a positive test for the banned substance Trimetazidine in 2014, and was handed a back-dated three month ban by the Chinese Swimming Association (the Chinese FINA affiliate body) that didn’t restrict his entry to any international events. This is incredibly inconsistent when compared to Fraser-Holmes' twelve-month ban, received without a single positive test.

Pertinently however, the drug was prescribed to Sun by a doctor six years prior to treat heart palpitations. The drug had only been banned a few months before Sun’s positive test; a fact Sun maintains he was not alerted to.

To this day, Sun continues to use the drug with a medical exemption, as it is not considered by sporting authorities to be performance-enhancing when used outside of competition.

The Culture of Drug Prohibition in Sport

The prohibition of medically prescribed drugs from competition does not, in any material sense, level the playing field. Instead, it puts athletes at risk.

Australian-Hong Kong swimmer Kenneth To suffered similar symptoms to Sun Yang. In 2019, To felt unwell after a practice session in Florida. The issue – To’s heart had not slowed down to a regular rhythm after exercising. After being taken to hospital, To died of Sudden Cardiac Arrest aged 26. While one can’t speculate about To’s access to medication, his death serves as a reminder that even elite athletes can die suddenly from a heart condition.

In this context, the hostility shown towards Sun by swimmers like Horton and the Australian media looks much less like courage, and more like aggression.

In any practical sense, most sports analysts and journalists tend to agree that the goal of cleaning up sport is not attainable. Widespread, unregulated use of performance enhancing drugs has been a concern for sporting governing bodies for decades, and has not gone away.

But while the discussion over the legalisation of sports doping is ongoing and complex, performance-enhancing drugs remain prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which views doping violations as breeches of ‘the spirit of sport’.

But Australian academic and analyst Julian Savulescu wonders how legal and freely available drugs in sport would violate this ‘spirit’, which includes pillars like excellence in performance, community and solidarity, and teamwork.

‘For many athletes, sport is not safe enough without drugs,’ Savulescu argues in his 2004 paper, Why we should allow

performance enhancing drugs in sport

‘If [an athlete] suffer[s] from asthma, high blood pressure, or cardiac arrhythmia, sport places their bodies under unique stresses, which raises the likelihood of chronic or catastrophic harm.

‘For example, between 1985 and 1995, at least 121 US athletes collapsed and died directly after or during a training session or competition—most often because they had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or heart malformations.

‘The relatively high incidence of sudden cardiac death in young athletes has prompted the American Heart Association to recommend that all athletes undergo cardiac screening before being allowed to train or compete.’

In many instances, experimental or therapeutic drugs publicly available to anyone in many countries are not available to athletes. Former NRL player Sandor Earl is one example of the double standard. After accessing experimental peptide treatment to recover from a shoulder reconstruction, Earl was banned by the NRL for four years. This was despite his drug treatment not specifically influencing his performance outside recovery and ASADA dropping their probe into Earl.

In many ways, the quest for superhuman performance at any cost dehumanises athletes, and puts them in avoidable physical danger.

Why Sun?

Sun Yang has become a particularly popular villain in swimming – other positive drug tests haven’t seemed to draw the same ire as Sun’s, and Mack Horton’s silence after his Australian teammate Shayna Jack’s positive test in 2019, was not lost on fans of the Chinese star.

South African swimmer Chad le Clos sensationally accused Sun of being ‘dirty’ when the Chinese swimmer came from behind to beat him in the 2016 200m Freestyle event.

‘I was ahead by a long way with 50m to go in that race, but Sun Yang came past me,’ le Clos said.

‘He was the only man who did that, and that says it all really … Sun passed me like I was standing still in the last 25m, which is unheard of.’ Swimming commentators at the time, however, disputed this claim, noting le Clos wasted more energy than his competitors on his poor final turn.

Attacked from many sides, paranoia brought about Sun’s eventual second doping ban – this time, without a positive test. After giving blood and urine samples to three antidoping assistants (DCA) at his home on September 4th

2018, Sun sensationally took a hammer from his garden shed and destroyed the samples.

Unsurprisingly, the already embattled swimmer became, again, an easy villain for the Australian press. How could he not? Sun’s fans have abused several high-profile athletes who commented on his case – including basketballer Andrew Bogut and British swimmer Duncan Scott – and his abrasive personality hasn’t made him many friends in the sporting world. Sun’s shed became the butt of many jokes among pundits, as did his “fearsome Tiger mother”.

Few commentators managed, however, to observe that a doping test taking place in a shed is not protocol and that Sun did not in fact bring a hammer with him to a test, as was often purported. Few still reported that after providing samples, Sun observed a DCA taking photos of him. When confronted, the DCA could not provide any accreditation, even claiming to be a construction worker. None of the DCAs had brought any accreditation at all.

More confounding still is the allegation from Sun’s Australian coach, Dennis Cotterell, that the drug test conducted on the 4 September 2018, was his ninth in two weeks (These tests were conducted during the Asian Games, and all returned negative results).

Speaking to Glass Media in 2021, Australian Olympic Silver Medalist Jack McLoughlin had little sympathy for Sun, and stressed that other swimmers felt the same way.

‘As someone who thinks what he did is despicable and as someone who is racing him, I did find the 8-year ban to be really harsh,’ McLoughlin said.

‘I think that was a big statement against what he did.’

‘Even if he was concerned with how the test was carried out, with all of our tests we complete there’s areas in the forms where you can report what you weren’t happy about.

If the panel thinks that it’s valid, they will scrap the test, no matter what happened. So, there was no real reason for him to do what he did.’

‘We are meticulous with that stuff, when I look at a vial even if I see a speck of dirt in it, I request a new testing tube. Just flat out refusing is a no-no. We all agreed that he should be banned for something like that.’

Sun’s Fate

Sun’s farcical defence at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2019 and 2020 was easily lambastable in the international media, including his refusal to respond to questioning, to his attempted boycott of the court. But his initial hearing was also deeply marred by translation

issues, which caused frustration among judges and lawyers. The unnamed DCA who had been unable to provide accreditation at the time of Sun’s drug test, also admitted to being a construction worker via written testimony.

The eight-year ban handed down by the CAS may have seemed inevitable, but in context, the case of Sun Yang resists simplicity. Sun is a helpful villain for a sports media industry concerned by the threat to western sporting dominance posed by China. But when one considers his actual crimes, it's nearly impossible to justify an eight-year ban. In fact, last year, the Court of Arbitration for Sport halved Sun’s ban from eight years to four, clearing the way for his Olympic return in 2024.

Meanwhile, at these June World Championships, Sun won’t be in the pool. He remains the World Record holder in the 1500m Freestyle, but at 30-years-old, whether he will ever race professionally again remains to be seen. ***

Sun has always carved a lonely figure at major meets, and is by all accounts difficult for other swimmers to be around. Sun’s confrontations with his competitors has been difficult to justify, even to his fans. When Duncan Scott refused to share a podium with Sun in 2019, Sun infamously berated Scott, calling him a ‘loser’.

I also find it difficult to detach Sun’s cantankerous personality from his swimming performances. At a swimming camp in 2015, my swim team stayed at the Runaway Bay complex where Sun used to train. It was, and remains, the only time I have ever seen a swimmer, elite or otherwise, train completely alone. Sun was accompanied only by the five or six assistant coaches by the pool-side –the only time I’ve ever seen a squad in which the coaches outnumbered the swimmers.

But an abrasive personality is not enough to justify a career ending ban. It’s difficult to defend Sun Yang, and it’s important to criticise him – but that doesn’t mean we can’t try both.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

A GLASSIE'S GUIDE TO

CIARANGREIG

‘That bastard !’

This is the sound of my mother, a few champagnes in at my cousin’s wedding, learning about my friend Nadia’s recent breakup. I giggled as people around us turned to see what had happened to make my mother gasp. My mother was outraged to hear about how Nadia’s ex had treated her in the dying days of their four-year relationship.

I was outraged too. But as a writer, every heartbreak strewn across my path is an opportunity. And this was a juicy one.

THE GOSS: Nadia’s long-term boyfriend had been coy about moving in together. She was more than ready for it, he was not. Then, Nadia got one of those messages no-one wants to see ping into their inbox. Hey Nadia, I’m really sorry to tell you this…

The Bastard had been talking to someone else. The Bastard had been on a date with someone else.

It was over. Well and truly. And though Nadia knew that it was for the best, she couldn’t help but feel entirely broken and lost in the wake of the breakup.

I caught up with Nadia earlier this week to chat heartbreak, healing, and how to put yourself back together in four steps.

Understand Why Heartbreak Hurts

This first tip is my own. In the wake of my first breakup, I watched a 12-minute TedTalk called How to Fix a Broken Heart. It might sound cheesy, but it was methodical and logical and exactly what I needed to understand what I was going through.

In the talk, psychologist Guy Winch explains that to your brain, being in love is like being on drugs. It activates similar pathways and produces similar chemicals. So, a breakup is a withdrawal from a drug, and reminiscing on happier days with your ex is just your brain trying to get its fix.

Something that helped both Nadia and me after our recent breakups was making a list of all the reasons our previous partners weren’t right for us. Mine included small things like the fact that he slept with no doona cover (gross) and bigger things, like the fact that our moral compasses didn’t really align.

Nadia made her list mentally. I wrote mine down, took a picture of it, and carried it with me wherever I went.

Whenever I started to feel a bit sad and reminisce about the sweet parts of the failed relationship, I would get out the list and remind myself what it was really like to sleep with no doona cover night after night.

I even read out the list to my friends. It was cathartic on so many levels to talk candidly about the relationship and laugh about it with people who loved me.

Change Their Name on Your Phone

During my most recent breakup earlier this year, my friend Ash turned to me and said, ‘Ciaran, that man has the emotional maturity of a pair of kitchen scissors.’

I decided this would be a perfect moniker for the said man and promptly changed his name in my phone to ‘Kitchen Scissors’, complete with a scissor emoji. It worked exactly as intended – each time he texted me, or I went to text him, I would be reminded of exactly why we weren’t right for each other.

I’ve also seen people on TikTok doing this in a different way – each time you end things with someone, you ‘add them to the graveyard’ in your contacts by changing their name to a solitary headstone emoji.

This tip works best if you primarily message someone through text messages. You could also do this through messenger, but the person will be able to see that you’ve changed their name. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing. Up to you, Glassies.

Give Yourself a Little Grace

Heartbreak hurts. It really does. Let yourself fall in a heap occasionally, if that’s what you need. Give yourself grace. Maybe even share your heartbreak with someone – I can almost guarantee you the person you share your story with will understand, and will likely have experienced that same thing.

My friend Nadia is doing well. She'll be living in London by the time this issue goes to print (!), is looking hot AF, and even managed to pick up a cute new guy at Maya Mexican a few weekends ago. She’ll be more than fine. I know it. And you will too, Glassies.

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

Keep Busy, Biatch

Keeping yourself occupied is important on so many levels. This was one of Nadia’s key strategies in the wake of her breakup. She mentioned how so much of the pain of a breakup is manifested in a really sudden shift in routine – you’re no longer texting that special someone when you wake up or before you go to bed. Your weekends look different, your bed might be colder.

Nadia used all of her extra time to read. She read and read like she’d never done before. She spent time with the friends she’d neglected while in the relationship. She daydreamed about her future.

I think the key here is to add things to your life (‘fill the void’, as Nadia said). Breakups can leave a gaping hole, but holes can be filled pretty darn easily with a bit of creativity and imagination.

Dear Women

Dear Women,

Subject: It’s time for us to take up the space we deserve

In 2006, Tarana Burke used the phrase ' Me Too t o raise awareness for women who have experienced sexual violence. Eleven years later, this movement reached global recognition after American actress Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo, detailing her assault at the hands of Harvey Weinstein.

We’re in 2022 now, and we have come a long way since this movement peaked in 2017 – Harvey Weinstein has since been convicted on rape and sexual assault charges. While back in Australia, Queensland rape law now recognises that rape can be committed in private by someone known to the complainant, and consent cannot be automatically inferred based on what the complainant was wearing, whether they were intoxicated, if they followed the offender to a private area, a lack of physical resistance, or their prior sexual history. These have been harrowing battles that we, the women of the world, have fought and won in the legal sector. However, despite this being recognised by law, we still have much further to go within the social discourse around rape and sexual assault.

For too long, women have had to shoulder the burden of protecting their abuser’s reputation, not disrupting the patriarchal standards of society, and suppressing years of sexual trauma because some things just 'aren’t that big of a deal'.

We have been told – either overtly by men, or inadvertently by society – that most 'minor' experiences don’t warrant an emotional reaction. These 'minor' experiences are when men catcall us while walking outside, grab our arse or boob while dancing in a club, tell us to smile more, make inappropriate sexual comments, leer about what we’re wearing, and go beyond our boundaries in sex. Society tells us that we should not make a fuss about this because 'it’s just what happens'. These experiences are not minor. Most are deemed by law to be sexual harassment and assault, so why are they not perceived as such socially? I refuse to accept this behaviour any longer, and I refuse to suppress any of these experiences again.

I was raped in 2019. It was someone I knew before it happened. I willingly followed him into a private room. I was intoxicated. I didn’t report it afterwards. If I tried to, there would have been a five per cent chance of him being convicted. With only a few bruises on my body and my word against his, I knew deep down there was no hope. So, I stuffed this traumatic experience into a dark place deep in my brain and tried not to think about it again.

It’s taken me three years to finally confront this memory, recognise that it was, in fact, rape and slowly attempt to work through it properly in therapy. Each time I faced a 'minor' experience at the hands of men, I was told that it is just a part of being a woman in this current climate. This translated in my brain to mean that I had no right to feel upset and must simply move on. If the narrative around this issue is centred on women to just 'grin and bear it' or, even worse, to pre-empt being harassed or assaulted and protect ourselves, how are we supposed to talk openly about rape when the onus is on how we contributed to it?

The injustice survivors experience is stark when compared to almost any other traumatic event. For example, when someone’s house burns down, they are not immediately told that it’s a common occurrence and just the risk you must accept if you want to live in a house. When someone experiences a car crash, they are not invalidated by their experience if they can’t recall specific elements of the event. When someone is robbed, the blame is not placed on them for having too many valuable possessions. But when it comes to the so-called 'minor' experiences of women, we are routinely told it is standard practice, that it’s just a part of being a woman, that it didn’t happen if we can’t remember the details, and we had it coming because we dressed provocatively or lead a man on.

Just because this has happened to every woman I know does not mean 'it’s just what happens' or that it should be dismissed as just a 'part of being a woman'. It means this is a systemic issue that has been shoved under the rug for too long. The discourse surrounding how those 'minor' experiences are dealt with acts as a gateway to silencing women about rape ans sexual assault. Time is well and truly up for rape and sexual assault to be dealt with in this archaic way.

It’s time for us to take up the space we deserve in society and speak truthfully without shame about what we have endured at the hands of men for far too long. It’s time for us to allow ourselves to feel upset, angry, frustrated, distraught, and all the other emotions when we face these 'minor' experiences. It’s time for us to make the men around us confront their privilege daily. Sexual violence against women won’t end overnight, but we can vow that we will make space to feel how we want to feel, and to say what we want to say — so we don’t have to carry this burden alone anymore.

Men, if you don’t believe me, ask a woman you know today about her experiences with sexual violence and watch your worldview crumble before your eyes. Women, take time today to appreciate how much we have overcome and understand that they are not 'minor' experiences – it is sexual assault and harassment, and regardless of the circumstances, you are validated in how you feel.

Sending love to you on this International Women’s Day, Ella

Trigger warning: Sexual Assault

Where Are All The Moonwomen?

ANNAHOLMES

Note: inspired and based on the research on the 74th edition of the Griffith Review.

When man first landed on the moon, the world watched. Generations after can still recognise the first words Neil Armstrong spoke as he became a “moonwalker”.

‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ I wonder, what will it be like for the first female astronaut to step foot on the moon? I have some theories. I can imagine that the first footprint of a moonwoman will become a similarly celebrated icon as her male counterpart. I imagine the male crew will have been instructed to let her go first, a gesture to prove chivalry isn’t dead. I imagine her having to think carefully about her first words, as they will resonate for generations into the future. Neil Armstrong got to choose his ‘one small step’ spiel. I wonder if they would let our first female moonwalker choose her words or if she’ll have an advisory council behind the matter. I imagine her standing there, still for a few moments before she carefully steps onto the moon. The rest of the crew will be tasked with taking photographs of her. Social media will repeat her words and circulate her image endlessly. T here will be a camera rolling, sending a live transmission back to Earth for those of us who have waited for this moment for all too long, to watch and listen.

The Apollo 11 astronauts had an audience of 600 million people. I wonder if this moonwoman will have an audience the same size. There are nearly four billion women on Earth – will they all watch? And for each of these women, they have a father, brother, partner, son, uncle, friends … will they all watch too? Or will her audience dismiss

This piece was originally published on qutglass.com

her as a hoax, her life-changing journey a stunt – just as Valentina Tereshkova was called when she became the first woman to leave Earth in 1963, six years before a man went to the moon.

When she returns, she’ll be a hero – a heroine – right? And she’ll be a media sensation, famous enough to be invited to the Met Gala. When she returns, she’ll be the new it girl, the one Jimmy Falon and the likes of him will be interviewing. Will she be asked different questions from her male counterparts?

Were there mirrors in the spacecraft for you to do your hair in?

How do you balance work and family?

Who was looking after your children?

Why don’t you have any children?

We can imagine the responses. The feminist outrage on the socials.

I wonder in what ways she will be changed by the experience. Many cultures have believed that women have long been governed by the moon, our menstrual cycles linked to waxing and waning. If so, will she have her period the whole time she’s there, or will she turn into a werewolf?

Now, I do not profess to know the full scientific context as to why there hasn’t been a woman on the moon. However, it may have something to do with how some of humanity's greatest minds not knowing how periods work – NASA

engineers literally offered astronaut Sally Ride 100 tampons for a 7-day space mission.

It may also have something to do with the blatant ignorance of some, and the misogynistic behaviour of many. For example, another excuse for the lack of moonwomen was the belief that the speed and movement of the spacecraft compromises fertility, or that a woman’s weak body cannot withstand G-forces. When we look deeper into this myth, we find that it’s not based on science or experience, but just a myth. One that suggests high-volume exercise is harmful to the female reproductive system, and fuelled decisions such as that of the Olympic committee when they withheld women from ski jumping because jumping down from about two meters off the ground about a thousand times a year seemed not to be appropriate for ladies. From a medical point of view, of course. There has been no credited medical research to back this claim. This was when the Summer Olympics had included female wrestlers and weightlifters for decades. Yet even after research into military women continuously disproving this age-old belief, the effects of its hold on decision-making remains.

Space is not the only context in which women have been held back – where society deemed women unsuitable, our needs too complex. Our government, world leaders, sports and STEM industries reflect this. There are other truly inane examples of misogynistic myths that have held women back since the beginning of human existence. Early trains were thought to make a woman's uterus fly out. Space is just another area where we see the need for change, just as the trains did.

As our Earth crumbles around us, as glaciers melt, and our country faces bush fires and floods, maybe it’s time to start sending more people into space. As governments promise to do nothing, space is looking more and more like an alternative living solution, actualising that Planet B that all the environmental activists say we don’t have. Maybe our next generation will be the ones to colonise Mars, and maybe they will watch our now home implode like a Death -Star-esque spacecraft. But before we dream of starting our new civilisation, which I assume concerns people of all genders, we need to get a woman on the moon.

The US has proclaimed that it will send the first woman to the moon by 2024. All I have to say is…what the fuck took so long.

Your Favourite Movies are Made by Bad People

TOMLOUDON

Will Smith, Roman Polanski, and the moral corrosion that keeps Hollywood alive

For all its circumstance and glamour, Hollywood is one of the most insular communities in the world. Even the synecdoche “Hollywood” is derived from a singular, elite neighbourhood in one of the most expensive cities in the world. A 20-minute drive downtown and you find Skid Row, the permanent home of nearly 10,000 homeless people. It’s not surprising then that Hollywood celebrities

because I see his actions as acceptable, but because I thought the Academy would. The celebrity elite being held accountable for flagrant abuse is devastatingly new, younger than most Gen-Zs.

***

Not enough is written about the case of Roman Polanski, the Polish-French Director who survived the Holocaust and went on to win an Oscar, two Golden Globes, two BAFTAs, the Palme d’Or, and a Ceasar.

Three of his Oscar nominations (including his sole win), three Golden Globe nominations (including a win), a BAFTA Award, a Palme d’Or, and nine Cesar awards (from an incredible 12 nominations) have all come to Polanski in the years since his conviction. Far from refusing to work with a convicted sex offender, the community rallied behind Polanski and enabled him to continue working and abusing in their industry. Eight women have accused Polanski of sexual misconduct in the years after his extradition.

The Polanski Petition

At one stage, it seemed likely that Polanski would be extradited to the United States to answer for his crimes, both convicted and alleged. In 2009 Polanski, then aged 76, was placed under house arrest in a Swiss chalet to await extradition to the United States. The director had travelled to Switzerland to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival.

Again, Polanski’s community rallied around him. Filmmakers, actors, and producers worldwide signed a petition urging his immediate release, reading as follows;

‘Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by [his arrest]. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by police to apprehend him.

‘His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

‘By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

‘The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.

‘Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

‘Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians — everyone involved in international filmmaking — want him to know that he has their support and friendship.’

In true Hollywood style, the petition was signed by Polanski’s contemporaries; Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton, and Guillermo del Toro, among many more, as well as

the French Film Academy (Cesars) and the Cannes Film Festival.

American screenwriter and director (and alleged comedian) Woody Allen has also been nominated for three Oscars after it became known that he was engaged in a relationship with his underage, adopted daughter. American actor Kevin Spacey, also an Oscar winner, has faced more than fifteen accusations of sexual harassment. Unlike all these men, Will Smith has been banned from the Academy Award ceremony.

So, in the bubble of Hollywood, what makes Will Smith’s crime so much worse? The fact it was at the ceremony? Maybe the fact his actions were broadcast and impossible to look away from? Will this sacrificial lamb hold the Academy in good stead with audiences in the future? It's important to note that of all these people, Will Smith is the only Black man, and the role of racism in Hollywood's selective policing should be an entire article itself.

It’s never too late to do the right thing. Nothing is stopping the Academy from banning Roman Polanski.

The ‘Polanski Petition’ was signed by, among others: Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Monica Bellucci, Adrien Brody, Robert Cohen, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, Terry Gilliam, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Wong Kar Waï, John Landis, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and Tilda Swinton.

Polanski has been or continues to be, supported by: Johnny Depp, Whoopi Goldberg, Meryl Streep, Stellan Skarsgård, and Harvey Weinstein.

Previous supporters of Polanski who have since publicly expressed regret include: Asia Argento, Xavier Dolan, Natalie Portman, Quentin Tarantino, Emma Thompson, and Kate Winslet.

Polanski’s films remain available in Australia to rent or stream on: AMC+, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Crackle, The Criterion Channel, HBO, Hulu, Kanopy, Netflix, Paramount+, SBS, Tubi, and Stan, among others.

*A full list of people who signed the Polanski Petition* (www.altfg.com/film/petition-for-roman-polanski-signatories/ )

The Internet v Amber Heard

ELLABRUMM

Although the dust seems to have settled from the Heard v Depp case, the effects of this mishandled defamation trial will be felt by victims of domestic and sexual abuse everywhere – begging the question, why do we still not believe Amber Heard?

On June 1st, the world watched as a Virginia jury found Amber Heard liable for defaming her ex-husband, Johnny Depp. While this was a defamation case, it quickly developed into a harrowing recount of domestic violence.

The trial, despite taking everyone’s social media hostage for its duration, has not been covered with much nuance or sensitivity, a dignity it should've been afforded given the gravity of this dispute. Instead, people began taking sides and echoing their support for Johnny Depp on social media, cheering along like excited spectators.

Like many other progressives, I flatly refused to be i nvested in this trial at the beginning. It felt sadistic to take sides in a domestic abuse dispute from which allegations initially appeared to spring from both sides of the relationship. Hashtags like #AmberHeardIsALiar and #AmberHeardIsAnAbuser have littered social media for years since the first reports of abuse in the relationship surfaced.

When my Facebook and Instagram algorithms inevitably shoved them into my feed, the comments under the posts were ugly. The excess of Men's Rights Activists jumping down the throats of anyone suggesting Depp also had a role to play in the abusive relationship was enough toxicity for me to steer clear of the whole conversation.

But when the U.S. trial hit its peak on social media about two months ago, the scale and tone surrounding the case became warped. Posts that first only vaguely questioned Heard’s credibility were now misogynistic rants, laced with rape and death threats. The hashtags became #AmberHeardIsAPsycho and #AmberHeardIsASociopath.

I fell into the trap of clicking on suggested YouTube videos of the trial with titles like, Amber Heard is a Psychopath – Psychological Expert Reveals Amber Heard’s Lies on the Stand , (the video essentially claimed that Heard was caught lying because she moved one of her eyebrows in a certain way on the stand when talking about being assaulted). I began to realise that this time, the rhetoric around this case was no longer thinly veiled hate wrapped in right-wing dogma – it was blatant misogyny on display in mainstream media. It was obvious that these posts clung to minuscule discrepancies or irrelevant factors to smear Heard because they didn’t have any real evidence against her; they simply just didn’t like her.

As I too was sucked into #JusticeForJohnny TikTok, I realised the immense scale of misinformation and miscomprehension surrounding domestic violence that circled the case. Almost everyone I spoke to believed

Heard was a liar, and that she was the sole abuser in the relationship. Among progressives and feminists the thinking was only slightly different, many seeing the two as being as toxic as each other.

But the more I explored the case, and the more I parsed through the MRAs and Depp Stans, the more I realised how different the standards were for Depp and Heard. And I began to wonder, why, when we usually try so hard to believe women, have we decided not to believe Heard?

Well, by waiting for the trial to unfold and come to a conclusion before weighing in, we have allowed the media space to be filled by MRAs and Depp Stans who hijacked our social media feeds. Unfortunately, the misinformation surrounding this trial has spread so quickly across all ideological spectrums, it is now difficult to contain. Everyone seems to be aware of every misstep and supposed ‘lie’ of Heard’s, but are blind to the incredible amount of evidence against Depp. We have become so entrenched in misinformation it is difficult to change the narrative.

Many seem to forget that this is not the first trial to take place regarding Heard and Depp’s relationship. In late 2020, Depp sued The Sun over an article published in 2018 that labelled him as a ‘wife beater’. The UK is an infamously difficult jurisdiction for publications to secure a win in a defamation trial. However, The Sun was able to prove that Depp was a wife-beater and therefore were within their right to describe him as such. In the judgement, Heard alleged 14 incidents of abuse spanning over a period of years. Of those 14 incidents, one was thrown out on a legal technicality and three were considered ‘he said, she said’ meaning there was no other available evidence other than their testimonies to corroborate either of their version of events. The remaining ten incidents were substantiated by witnesses, forensic evidence, contemporaneous texts, emails, diary entries, physically visible evidence like bruises on her body, and in one case someone nearby heard Depp assaulting Heard. It is unheard of to have this amount of evidence for domestic violence cases, yet somehow, we were told that this case was murky, complicated, and reciprocal. In reality, when you strip away the skewed media coverage, all the evidence points to a very clear-cut case of a man with power and notoriety abusing his wife.

At the beginning of their relationship Depp was sober, but as the relationship evolved, he began drinking again. In her testimony, Heard said that when he started drinking again, he would ‘disappear for days... and when he came back, he was different’. Heard says Depp accused her of ‘whoring’ herself out at auditions and questioned why she was wearing revealing clothes. He would suggest to her that all she was were her clothes, and that's why she got the periphery roles she did. His mood would change drastically when she talked about work, so she actively tried to avoid the topic.

Eventually, verbal torments turned into throwing glasses across a room, flipping tables over, punching a wall inches from Heard's head, and trashing the apartment in a boozefueled rage. Each time Depp lost his temper, he would return after a few days and beg Heard for forgiveness, saying he would quit drinking. Then he returned to his sober self, as Heard described – a kind, interesting, funny, generous, and calm man.

The first time Depp hit her was over an innocuous comment. Depp was drunk, and possibly on cocaine when she asked what his tattoo said. Depp replied, 'Wino Forever'. Heard thought he was joking because to her, it didn't look like it said that, so she laughed, and then he slapped her across the face. In her testimony, Heard explained that after he slapped her, she hesitantly laughed again because she didn't understand what was going on.

‘I was thinking that he was going to start laughing too, to tell me that it was a joke, but he didn't.’ Instead, he yelled, ‘you think you're funny bitch?’ and then he slapped her again and again and again.

As Heard tried to leave, he fell to his knees crying and grabbed her arms, apologising, saying it would never happen again.

‘I believed it’ Heard said. ‘I believed there was a line that he wouldn't cross again’.

The Documented Abuse Against Heard

Before dating Depp, Heard was relatively unknown. She secured minor roles in films like Zombieland and Pineapple Express, and in 2008 she landed a role in The Rum Diary alongside Depp. She was 23, he was 46. They were both in relationships at the time, until they separated from their respective partners and began dating in 2011.

But sure enough, his drinking, possessiveness, and anger crept back into their relationship. The cycle of domestic abuse continued. Heard described walking on eggshells around him, never knowing what may set him off. Depp would accuse her of cheating because of rumours he heard or photos of her standing too close to a male co-worker. Then Depp would explode. He would throw things at her, scream at her, pull her hair when she tried to walk away, and then he would hit her. One time he sexually assaulted her, which you can hear her described online if you can stomach it.

In 2014, Depp and Heard flew from Boston to L.A. on a private plane. Heard was shooting a film with James Franco, an ongoing source of contention in their relationship considering he made a pass at her on a previous film. Heard had already made a conscious effort to shield Depp from the script by telling her assistant to make sure he didn’t see it, as she knew he would blow up at her for the sex scene that was involved.

Depp arrived to their flight at minimum drunk, and possibly on cocaine. According to his texts to Paul Bettany, he acted like ‘an angry, aggro injun in a fuckin blackout, screaming obscenities and insulting any fuck who gets near.’

According to Heard, Depp accused her of cheating, followed her when she changed seats, slapped her, then kicked her down when she got up to move again. He eventually started howling like an animal and passed out in the bathroom.

What Heard describes is consistent with well-documented patterns of domestic abuse. Depp’s behaviour was textbook abuser and Heard was a textbook abuse victim. She tried to fix him, launching desperate attempts to help him stay sober. By 2014, Heard was the only person in his life confronting him with the reality of his anger issues and drug problems. His life was deliberately structured to ensure he would never have to face the consequences of his addictions. His chequebook covered the cost of the trashed hotel rooms, he surrounded himself with yes-people who soothed his self-bruised ego, doctors readily administered medication to get him through film shoots, and his notoriety and celebrity status acted as a safeguard against him ever losing work.

Heard was, as Depp once put it the 'lesbian camp counsellor' who ruined all his fun and treated him like the addict and abuser he was. He grew increasingly resentful of Heard. As the trial revealed, his messages to her were apologetic and grateful, but to everyone else they were acerbic and spiteful.

‘I’m out. I’m done,’ he messaged his sister during a period when Heard was giving him the silent treatment.

‘Her actions have added more drama than necessary […] that's what people call falling off the wagon ... It's happened to a lot of my friends. ... Their wives don't stop calling them.’

Heard continued to try and fix him. She would take photos of Depp passed out in hotel rooms and at nightclubs to use as evidence the next morning to show him that he had a problem. Towards the end of their marriage, learned helplessness kicked in for Heard.

‘I would try to stand up for myself,’ she said. ‘I would push back, I would push him off of me … I would yell at him and scream at him, I would call him ugly names.’

Depp began disappearing for even longer periods, returning with more paranoid accusations and violent outbursts toward her. Heard became increasingly brittle and numb to Depp’s anger and reliance on drugs and alcohol. She refused to accept his empty promises of sobriety and became resentful of his denials of addiction.

When Depp disappeared for over a week, only to return drunk at Heard’s 30th birthday party, the marriage collapsed. Afterwards, he blew up, throwing his phone at her, striking her cheek. The next day, Heard filed for divorce and the following week, she took out a restraining order against him.

In 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post , in which she said, ‘I became a public figure representing domestic abuse’. Over this, Depp sued Heard for defamation.

While people could put two and two together to realise Heard was likely talking about Depp, she didn’t mention him by name and he was not a focus of the article. Heard’s restraining order against Depp was already public knowledge in 2016, and the idea that Heard defamed Depp in any real way is rejected by most legal experts.

The Trial

Despite being a defamation trial, Depp’s legal strategy from the beginning was to use the public forum to smear Heard and fuel the conspiracy theory that she had been concocting a hoax for years to destroy his career. In his legal filings for the Virginia case, Depp said that Heard’s allegations are ‘an elaborate hoax to generate positive publicity for Ms Heard and advance her career.’

At the most basic level, this doesn’t make sense. When has publicly speaking out against a powerful, older man over abuse ever helped elevate a woman’s career? In fact, the exact opposite tends to happen, and it should be noted that Heard recently filed for bankruptcy.

Depp’s legal strategy also doesn’t hold up when you consider the amount of people who testified in the case. His defence implied that Heard had planned to destroy Depp’s career by convincing multiple friends, ex-friends, family, employees, neighbours, and professional contacts to lie numerous times under oath, all while leaving no trace of this nefarious communication in the form of emails or texts.

The claim that Heard is a gold-digger and solely after Depp’s money is not only deplorable but baseless. Despite whether there was abuse or not, Heard was entitled to millions in the divorce. She didn’t have to claim any abuse to receive that because there was no pre-nuptial agreement. Instead, Heard dropped her claim for ongoing support and ended up taking significantly less than she was entitled to. Part of the settlement required her to withdraw the abuse allegations, sign an NDA and co-sign a vague, anodyne statement that the relationship had been ‘volatile’ but ‘there was never an intent of physical or emotional harm’.

It seems unfathomable – and rather idiotic – for Heard to have spent years (before #MeToo even began) fabricating texts and photographs only to get a modest divorce settlement that she was already entitled to and then stay silent for years, only making oblique references to her relationship as part of her domestic violence advocacy work.

But Depp’s team asserted that Heard lied about donating her $7 million divorce settlement to charity. Heard announced that she would donate half the sum to the ACLU, and half to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, but it was revealed during the trial that neither place had received the full donation. A small amount of digging, however, shows that while she has not yet donated the full amount, Heard entered into an agreement with the ACLU in 2016 to donate the full $3.5 million over 10 years. After the initial contribution, subsequent payments have been delayed pending her civil trials with Depp. Heard says she has so far spent $6 million on her legal defence.

It is not uncommon for large charitable donations to be spread out over longer periods, and representatives from the ACLU testified that Heard was transparent with them about her financial circumstances and remains committed to completing her payments. The ‘proven lie’ here amounts to an imprecise choice of words: she said ‘I donated’ when she should have said ‘I pledged.’

Of course, she could have been more accurate, but a minor misstatement, or at worst a slight exaggeration of her generosity, hardly amounts to evidence that she was capable of the kind of bank-heist calculation necessary to fake abuse claims for years.

The Aftermath for #MeToo

I was baffled by how this case has deviated from consistent progressive discourse regarding domestic abuse matters. We have sprung to the defence of many women in the past, so why not for Heard?

The right are desperate for a case that proves that #MeToo has gone too far. They have been clamouring to substantiate this conspiracy theory for years, and to an extent, they succeeded. The difference with this case is that centrists, centre-right, and even left-aligning people are not seeking out the evidence and are therefore believing the information they come across on social media. Amber Heard is one of America’s most hated figures, she will likely never be cast in another major Hollywood film, and she has now filed for bankruptcy. Heard is ruined, while Depp is in preproduction for his next role.

One of Heard’s attorneys, Benjamin Rottenborn, detailed in his closing statement how the jury appears to give more weight to the innocuous behaviour of the abuse victim rather than the tangible proof of abuse itself. He emphasised through a series of Catch-22s how it wouldn’t have mattered how Heard behaved on the stand.

‘If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen; if you did take pictures, they’re fake,’ he said.

‘If you didn’t tell your friends, you’re lying, and if you did tell your friends, they’re part of the hoax. If you didn’t seek medical treatment, you weren’t injured; if you did seek medical treatment, you’re crazy.’

He didn’t refer to some other common tactics used against abuse victims deployed by Depp’s team: if you surreptitiously record abusive behaviour, you are conniving and untrustworthy; if you don’t, it didn’t happen. If you ever try to laugh off your partner’s ghastly behaviour then it’s not abuse. If you talk back or fight back, then you are the real abuser.

This case has set the progressive movement to believe women back years. We already had so much further to go, but now other alleged abusers are already copying Depp’s legal strategy, and succeeding.

Millie and the Artichoke Hearts

Table of contents

Executive Summary…………………58

Context………………………………….. 58

Further Background………………. 59 Methodology………………………......59

Analysis………………………………..... 60 Findings……………………………........60

Executive Summary

1. To Millie, those early breakups were like losing baby teeth: quick, relatively effortless, and often met with enthusiasm by her mother.

2. To the men she left behind, they were more like the extraction of a wisdom tooth: cavernous, aching, and something that should really have been done under anaesthesia.

Context

3. O ver the past eight months, I have conducted an investigation into the heart and mind of one Ms Millie Lang (24).

4. I would go as far as to say that we have become friends. But I don’t like her one bit.

5. I really do understand her a great deal. Accordingly, I now find myself in a position where I can’t help but love her like she is my own sister.

6. Even though I don’t like her.

7. Not one little bit.

Further Background

8. I first heard Millie’s name on the lips of a man I very nearly fell in love with.

9. I realised later that through the thick lenses of Simon’s sensible glasses, he was superimposing her image onto everything I was: a) my dark hair; b) the particular wine my palate craved; c) the way my thigh felt under his hand.

10. Millie, Simon told me, had recently extracted herself from his life.

11. She had made a habit leaving her lovers, he said. He took a hand to his face and rubbed at his cheek. He told me about the boyfriend she had before him, and the boyfriend before the boyfriend before him. I imagined a trail of men strewn over a darkened field. Millie in the distance, upright and stalking away.

12. Simon’s gums were bleeding profusely. The blood rushed from somewhere deep in his mouth and wept down his neck, sliding delicately over each ridge of his Adam’s apple. As we talked, the sides of his mouth frothed softly with weakly concentrated crimson foam.

13. That night we met, that night he said her name to me for the first time, that night he held me in his arms by the side of a busy road – that was the same night he leaned in and pressed his lips firmly against mine. The blood and foam spread onto my own chin, the sides of my face. Globules of red pigment seeped deep into my pores, staining my skin. I’ve been trying to remove the damn stain ever since.

14. I looked her up later – Ms Millie Lang (24). And that was where it started. A tiny whisker of curiosity that took root and grew. A central inquiry that twisted, thorn like, around each microscopic synapse in my brain. Why, Millie? For what reason?

15. I had a picture of Millie in my mind already, painted by Simon’s words. She was callous and reckless. Confused but decisive. Naïve but cunning with the weaponisation of her rosy cheeks. I didn’t understand her. I didn’t like her. I wanted to know more.

16. Millie and I were suddenly, haphazardly, unwittingly entwined.

Methodology

17. The research methodology used in the production of this report is grounded soundly in opportunity and luck.

18. It was an accident.

19. I was not supposed to recognise her when I saw her that day, skulking through the shops with an empty basket hanging from the crook of her arm. But I did. I knew exactly who she was.

20. I knew her from the photo I had seen of her online. I knew her from the way Simon had described her –short and pretty and brunette. I knew her from the way she walked: barely lifting up her feet. Purposeful, unbothered. Millie.

21. In my car, with the engine running and the aircon lazily grazing my neck, I waited for her to emerge from the supermarket.

22. Eventually, she slunk across the carpark carrying two heavy looking plastic bags, the weight of them straining the plastic. I imagined the burden of her purchases drawing out stretch marks on the bag’s handles.

23. As I drove home, my car stopped in traffic right in front of where Millie was waiting for the bus. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and the bus shelter was hardly effective in protecting her from the heat. She sat there, squinting into the sun. I rolled down my window and asked if she wanted a lift.

24. She didn’t hear me the first time. ‘Want a lift?’ I asked again. She frowned at me then, considering my beat-up Barina, and, somehow deciding that I was benign, nodded.

25. She told me that we were driving to Birdwood Terrace, mumbled a quiet thanks, and pulled out a jar of –artichoke hearts? – from her shopping bags. As we rolled up to a traffic light, I watched as she loosened the tight lid of the jar of artichoke hearts open with one deep, round pop. She dipped her bare hand into the jar and brought an artichoke heart to her lips, swallowing it whole. As she wiped her fingers on her jeans, she caught me looking.

‘ You don’t mind, do you?’

I shook my head.

26. We drove in silence over and down the hills of Jubilee Terrace, through the roundabouts of Bardon, and past Government House. As we reached Frederick Street, with Toowong Cemetery sitting meekly across the way, I cleared my throat.

‘I know your friend Simon, actually.’

She looked up for a moment before submerging her hand back into her second jar of artichoke hearts. The first one was rolling around on the floor of my car, empty after she slurped it of its preservative oil.

‘Oh, he’s not really my friend,’ she said.

Analysis

27. M illie told me that I should come in.

28. She lived in a dilapidated Queenslander rented from a g reat aunt. She didn’t seem to mind that it smelled of rotting wood and gecko poo. We sat together on wooden chairs on her back deck, feet submerged in a kid-sized paddling pool.

‘I know this is weird, but I just don’t understand you at a ll,’ I said.

Millie smiled for the first time. She looked me in the eyes kindly. She still said nothing.

‘I want to understand,’ I said.

She held my gaze. I felt a pain blooming somewhere in the back of my throat, as if I were about to cry. What was it about being so close to this woman whom I found so incredibly strange that made me want to weep?

Millie kicked her feet in the water. Her feet were more delicate than mine: long toes with delicately shaped toenails painted red.

I waited.

Findings

29. S ometimes, Millie said, she wondered why she did it. O ver and over again.

30. S he told me that her sister was getting married at E aster. Millie said she could have been married five t imes by now. She had even asked one of her boyfriends t o marry her once, only to break off the engagement five months later. She had proposed to him on impulse, one rainy afternoon when the thought occurred to her. She had thought she wanted it. She was wrong.

31. ‘I don’t really know why I do it,’ she said, looking at me w ith her eyes the colour of shiny cockroach bodies. She d idn’t say this with any particular concern or worry. It w as just an observation. A neutral statement of fact. A s in:

a) T he sky is blue.

b) T he grass is green.

c) Homebrand milk is always priced at a dollar-a-litre.

d) M illie makes men fall in love with her and then she breaks their hearts and has no clue why.

32. ‘ You’ve thought about it though?’

Mi llie shrugged.

She said the last time she had been on a date she had t aken care to observe herself.

T he way she smiled and made jokes and pushed her hair behind her ear and asked thoughtful questions and touched the man lightly on the leg. She monitored the way he responded, at first cautious, then enthusiastic.

L eaning back, returning touches, smiling before she reached the punch line of her jokes.

M illie said she marked the date as a success the moment he tried to kiss her.

‘ So maybe that’s why,’ she said to me. ‘Because I can.’

33. I l ooked at Millie. Of course she could. She was a cis-woman, young, and on the surface, uncomplicated.

M illie was smart and kind and generous with her smiles. The men were attracted to her on a basic level, at a pheromonal, hormonal, physical level. All she h ad to do was dress herself, doll-like, and add a dash of enthusiasm.

34. M illie said that by the time she broke up with Simon, h er friends had stopped calling and texting to ask if she was ok when they heard about yet another failed relationship. ‘And to be honest,’ she said, scrunching up her nose, ‘I actually prefer it like that.’ She said there was something about her friends’ tenderness, the way t hey handled her so carefully in the wake of a relationship ending, that made her feel nauseous.

35. T he summer she broke up with Simon was the same summer she started eating artichoke hearts, she said. Jars and jars of them. ‘They taste like…nothing else.’ S he considered the open jar sitting on the ground b eside us.

36. She held out an artichoke heart for me, her hand wet f rom fishing a leaf out of the plastic pool moments before. I considered it for a second: the way it sat in her p alm like some fantastic, wretched creature pulled f rom the ocean floor.

37. I took it from her hand into my mouth. It tasted salty, tender, slippery. Complex.

Hot Pink Blues

JAIMECOLLEY

Lemon is pregnant, a soft litter of puppies, due in a few weeks. She nuzzles into my hand, forcing my love onto herself, so I give in and scratch her ears. She pants, her belly round and full. She wanders away from me and flops down in the grass. The sun filters over her eyes, so she reshuffles, and then lets out a long sigh. I smile, as I realise how alike she is to a pregnant human.

I c all Mum a few weeks later to see if she has birthed the puppies. Mum tells me Lemon forced a miscarriage. When I ask why she would do that, Mum explains that dogs can reabsorb the litter if something isn’t right. ‘Mothers always know,’ she says.

***

I wake before the world when I find out the news. At first, I don’t absorb it. I’m scrolling through Instagram the same way someone functions before coffee, but slowly, I get my fix, and my mind is working. By the time I read the news, the sky is the colour of peaches, clouds like tissue paper. Roe v. Wade is overturned in America. My brain is instantly thinking, thank God I’m in Australia. However, this does not dull the panic that’s smoking in my belly. It is an ignorant thought. Oceans do nothing to protect from sexism. If anything, America has taught it to swim. I climb out of my bed and sit by the fireplace. It provides me no warmth, so I cry hot tears instead.

***

I’m home helping Mum and Dad muster and mark lambs. Three hundred head. Mum is in the yards with the kelpies, pushing sheep up the race. I needle and drench while Dad brands and tags. It is a routine we mastered years ago when I was a kid. We move accordingly, shift when sheep need pushing up, step away so the dogs can get through. Some families rotate around kitchen benches to prepare feasts; we rotate around yards, sheep, and dogs. At some point, Mum struggles to push a mob of rams into the race. I jump back there with her, a black kelpie at my feet.

‘Push ‘em up,’ I say. The kelpie barks and sweeps across the yard. The rams shift, and they understand they must move forward. I tell the dog to sit, and she does. I look at Mum.‘I think I want to go to a protest.’

‘You can’t.’ That’s all she says. I refrain from saying that I wasn’t asking for her permission. I climb back over the fence and walk up the race. For the remainder of the afternoon, we are unbalanced, and sheep spill everywhere. ***

I pull tarot cards every morning in July. A ritual, for myself. Some of my friends think they’re a waste of time, but I find comfort in their meanings, like every vibration will become a ripple, like this world is moving through us, rather than with us. I pull the same card for a while: the Ace of Swords. It is a card of great force, and means to triumph or conquest, either in love or hatred. For a while, I can’t pair the meaning with my life. It isn’t until one frosty morning, do I consider that it is not talking of any of my triumphs.

It is after all, a card of great force.

***

I buy a pink dress to wear at a literary salon. I make peace with the colour. For years, we blued. I didn’t like its deliberate grandstanding, parading purported femininity. For so long, I thought being feminine should’ve been a secret, like secrecy equalled elegance, and that’s what being a woman came down to. I am not elegant. I’m heavy, with chocolate cake thighs, and like a blister, I hold more anger than forgiveness.

I was taught where pink was soft, I was calloused. It wasn’t until I became older did I realise I could be both. Being a woman means I am both.

***

‘Bitch!’ Some guy hollers as they drive past while I finish my afternoon walk. I didn’t even know he was trying to talk to me out of his car window. Taylor Swift was blaring through my earphones, and I turn her down for no one. He just happened to scream as a song was finishing (Champagne Problems). There is no guilt. If I had heard him, I would have ignored him, and I would still be a bitch.

In ignorance, accident, or deliberation, I am the bitch. I think of Lemon, and her reabsorbed puppies, how her body understood it’s limitations. Maybe a bitch is something to aspire to.

*

The condom breaks. Of course it does. I take my pill in a religious fashion, a habit which was hard to enforce, so the worry doesn’t come right away. Any girl would say they’ve used less and have been fine. Hell, I genuinely have used less and have been fine. Still, there’s something in my stomach curling. God, how privileged of me to be like that, to throw caution to the wind, to not think ahead, to wait and see if I care if there’s blood between my legs in a month. I feel sick. My partner sees this and offers to drive me to the chemist in the morning.

I think of the conservatives I’ve seen on social media, likening abortions with careless, stupid teenage girls who couldn’t be bothered to use protection (because it’s only her responsibility, right?). I think of my pills, and the broken condom now wrapped in tissues in the bin. You can do everything, and it can still not be enough. I cry in the shower for those teenage girls. I see my sixteen-year-old face behind their eyes, and I feel the ache in their hearts as I wash myself clean.

When I go into the chemist the next morning, I ask for the morning-after-pill in a crisp and loud tone. I hope a

teenage girl hears me and knows this is okay.

***

My brother’s wedding is soft. It’s in a garden nursery, and I can smell early blooming wattle. Sun filters through poinciana trees, and everything glows at the edges. I pick at my acrylic nails. It’s not often I get dressed up like this, the heels and hair. I feel like a girl. Dad gives me a hug and tells me, ‘You look good, mate.’

This is his way of saying beautiful. I cling to the words and feel so warm.

My three nieces play with the hem of my dress. They’re aging, which is such a sad verb to give to a child. But it’s the truth. They’re so little, and soon they won’t be. I recall being their age. I was a grotty and feral kid, with cake batter painting my face and warts on my knees. These girls are gentle, with plaited hair and a fresh spray of freckles.

I would crash my Bratz scooter, and eat mulberries from trees, and use curled hibiscus as lipstick. I genuinely had so much to look forward to. I look down at these little girls, and I sigh.

They don’t know yet what it means to be a woman. It will be the most exciting and terrifying time of their lives, but I hope they know that every female in every room stands with them.

And that I will be there too, to buy them morning-afterpills, to drive them to clinic appointments, to pick out their pink dresses. I will be there, ready to hold their hands, and show them how to move forward.

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HOROSCOPES

Try not to beat yourself up over the little things; everyone else will beat you up anyway.

They know what they did to you. They act like they don’t but, like, c’mon. They know.

21 MAR - 19 APR 23 JUL - 22 AUG 22 NOV - 21 DEC

You suspect good fortune lies ahead of you and that which you seek is getting closer. Just remember what it took you to get here, and don’t forsake your laurels now.

This is your invitation to invite some toxicity into your life. You’ve been doing your best for so long now, and where’s that got you? Here. Time to get toxic.

Look at the moon and notice the stars. Look at the ground and notice the flowers. Beauty is all around you, and you are not unique you narcissistic bitch.

20 APR - 20 MAY 23 AUG - 22 SEP 21 DEC - 20 JAN

All of your shit is still together. It feels like the world is spiraling out of control right now, but only one thing has changed. You’ve worked hard to get your life together and everything is still right where you left it.

You’re lucky this is the only glass you have in your face right now. Spend some time considering if your friends are really the best people to have around you.

You get others get away with so much, when you are so hard on yourself. Turn those rose-coloured glasses inward and watch the growth.

21 MAY - 20 JUN 23 SEP - 22 OCT 21 JAN - 18 FEB

One more word out of you and I swear you won’t make it out of 2023 unscathed.

The word ‘isolation’ comes from island. When you are feeling isolated remember to check, are you making yourself an island? Reach out when you need help.

Cancelled.

21 JUN - 22 JUL 23 OCT - 21 NOV 19 FEB - 20 MAR

You always worry that people are talking about you behind your back, and they are. You are very intuitive and annoying.

Editors

Tom Loudon

Ella Brumm

Ciaran Greig

Celeste Muller

Konstanz Muller Hering

Ben Steele

Illustrators

Ben Steele

Claudia Pilbeam

Graphic Designer

May Lyn Chew

Contributors

Anna Holmes

Ciaran Greig

Ella Brumm

Em Readman

Hannah James Harry George Wallace Izzy Heaton

Jack Bell

Jackson Machado-Nunes

Jaime Colley

Konstanz Muller Hering

Oscar Davison

Rory Hawkins Sam Hope Shelby Lee

Tom Loudon

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