Thank you for picking up this new edition of Woroni. I hope it stands up to our previous 75 years of work. It has been an honour, privilege and pain in the ass to work as your art editor over the course of this year, and despite displeasure from my friends and family at my increased fatigue, I wouldn't have it any other way. There is a certain feeling that I get as I work to publish each magazine that I never thought I would have the joy to experience, and that is the feeling that my creativity has not been entirely wasted. As a child, I knew that being an artist would likely never be a lucrative career for me, and I decided to look into STEMinstead. Over my tertiary studies, my art journals, pens, paints, sewing machine and collages gathered dust as I satiated another type of creativity in research. As delightful as that work has been, having the opportunity to work as an artist and see that work published with Woroni fills a hole in my heart that I have always assumed would never quite be filled. That layer of dust is now well and truly gone.
Aala and I, your beloved Content and Art editors, found the theme Syncope through a search into the medieval and forgotten. Each work in this edition, be it text or artwork, has been lovingly and artistically chosen to represent the forgotten, pushed aside, whacky and whimsical. For those unaware, 'syncope' is a medical term describing the act of fainting, a feeling I am not unaccustomed to. I hope this edition finds the soft spot where you, the reader, have felt faint, weak or ostracised due to medical events and leaves you with the knowledge that, at some point, we will all feel that very thing. For me, the theme and these pieces heal my own experiences with medical weakness and marginalisation as a result of disability and chronic disease.
Peace and love, baddies,
Mir Niejalke Art Editor
Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Art by Frankie
Over the night of 23 – 24 July, a crowd of ANU student musicians and their supporters gathered outside the ANU’s School of Music for a protest concert. Interspersed with calls to action from members of the School of Music (SoM) Collective, their performance intended to signal intense disapproval with the upcoming cuts to the SoM.
Organiser Connor Moloney said he was inspired by a previous Music Marathon protest in 2012, held in defiance of proposed restructuring which would have cut staff positions from 32 to 20. Moloney hoped to turn this year’s concert into “more of an event”, and was “blown away” to see “so many people that care about the [SoM] community” show up in support.
As free coffee was distributed to attendees and the audience laughed and danced together, Moloney emphasised the celebratory nature of the overnight concert, contrasting with the Kambri rally earlier that day.
ANU Music Students’ Pleas Fall on Deaf Ears
By Dash Bennett, Jack Davis and Paris Chia
“We have staff here at the SoM who we need support from, and we don’t know what’s happening.”
“We aren’t trying to antagonise them, we are just asking them to help us through this.”
Mert Boyali, an organiser in the ANU SoM collective, emphasised how little information SoM students had received, accusing the university of “hid[ing] the changes in an 81 page document.”
The administration “did not contact [students]” and found out about the potential disestablishment of the SoM through “word of mouth.”
Formed in response to the recently announced restructuring, the SoM Collective is one of the many organisations working to unite students in opposition to Renew ANU – many of them previously social clubs that have pivoted to become protest organisations by necessity.
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For some, the students’ campaign runs deeper than ANU. Oliver Djurkovic, who played saxophone for two hours, warned that disestablishing the School of Music “sets a precedent for other Australian universities that [they] can get rid of art, and no one will react.”
“It’s important to be here because we are reacting, we are fighting back.”
The night’s joy, hope, and dismay persisted as students, both enrolled with the SoM and simply supporting it, told Woroni the importance of being there that night. For those outside of the SoM, the concert offered not only hours of tunes, but an opportunity to show solidarity as yet another institution appears poised to fall to Renew ANU.
“They’re coming to attack all of us, they start with music, but they’re coming for CASS, then STEM, and even medical students,” said an attendee, who wished to remain anonymous.
On the significance of the SoM to “the Canberra music pipeline,” Pippa Newman explained how SoM students “are the same ones teaching kids in Canberra’s schools.”
The Renew ANU proposal threatens not only SoM students and staff, but also “the next generation of musicians.”
A town hall, organised by music students on the 24th of July, illustrated both students’ fears and Music executives’ phobia of
transparency. Intended to provide staff involved in the cuts an opportunity to hear and respond to students’ grievances, the town hall’s outcome fell far short of its intended purpose.
A range of students expressed their worries about how the proposed changes would affect them. Some expressed anger that years of dedication would become wasted.
Others expressed dismay that the School of Music, which is not a major cause of the university’s deficit, is slated as the first institution to be laid upon the altar in a futile offering to the financial gods.
Depression turned to outrage as it became evident that no member of the SoM executive was in attendance. Upon this realisation, a number of students marched through the corridors of Llewelyn Hall in search of a staff member they could hold accountable.
Questions such as “do you know what [SoM executive]’s car looks like?” were made more than once.
Despite the concert and town hall – both of which received significant attendance and support – there is no indication that the SoM has escaped the guillotine.
As one student remarked this past weekend near the SoM, “it seems like no matter what we do, they aren’t changing anything.”
Without Pressure, Nothing Moves: Women’s Department Protest Calls for Greater Action Against SASH on Campus
By Grace Barnes and Madeleine Blayney
August 1, 2025, marks the eighth year of annual protests calling for the elimination of sexual assault and sexual harassment (SASH) on campus, coordinated by the ANU Women’s Department. The date is significant because on the 1st of August 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Change the Course report revealed that ANU had the highest rate of sexual harassment (1 in 5 students) and the second highest rate of sexual assault among Australian universities.
This year’s protest featured a range of speakers from the Women’s Department and ANUSA, highlighting various issues in relation to SASH on campus. In particular, speakers spoke of the impact of funding cuts on students’ ability to report incidents of SASH, as well as on the wellbeing of staff who handle these reports.
The campaign saw students braving the rain for a rally on Kambri Lawns before marching to the Chancelry. ANUSA Women’s Officer Jade Poulton said she was “really happy with everyone who turned up… It was a fantastic turnout.”
Even after eight years of protesting, the Women’s Department maintains SASH at ANU has not been effectively reduced.
The recently released Nixon Review was a key focus of discussion, as it highlighted the pervasive nature of harassment and sexual abuse within the now-disestablished School of Medicine. Speakers also raised concerns about ongoing problems in residential colleges, pointing to inconsistent standards between private and university-run halls, as well as a lack of communication between them.
In 2019, following the AHRC’s report, ANU launched its Sexual Violence Prevention Strategy (2019-2026) to address the prevalence of SASH on campus. Despite this, the Women’s Department argues this is not enough to “meaningfully” solve the problem. In fact, three years into the Sexual Violence Prevention Strategy, the National Student Safety Report (20212022) confirmed that ANU still had the second highest rates of sexual assault in the country.
Dissatisfied with the university’s complacency, the Women’s Department created the Follow Through ANU report in 2022, with six demands for the university to ensure student safety on campus. These included clarifying reporting and support systems, increasing transparency and accountability, and improving staff conditions – with the addition in 2025 of an independent oversight body.
The university claims to have made improvements on campus, with the 2024 Sexual Misconduct Annual Report finding that the university had received 70 disclosures of SASH under the ANU Disclosure form, a reduction from 157 disclosures in 2023.
However, Poulton argues that the reduction in disclosures does not reflect a genuine reduction in instances of SASH on campus, stating “students don’t feel compelled to report anymore” as ANU’s methods of disclosure are “hard and convoluted”.
When asked how it had followed through on its commitment to “trial new, innovative approaches” to reduce SASH, as outlined in the Sexual Violence Prevention Strategy, ANU claimed it was prioritising “bespoke,
evidence-informed initiatives over offthe-shelf programs”. However, the Rights, Relationship and Respect consent education program was the only initiative identified.
There is currently a live form for feedback on sexual misconduct reporting at ANU.
ANUSA Treasurer Hayden O’Brien criticised the ANU’s “lacklustre response” to the report and the Women’s Department’s calls for action, affirming that ANSUA stands with the department in its campaigns against these issues.
Moving forward, the Women’s Department will publish a zine focusing on intersectionality which was a key demand of the report. It will take part in student forums relating to SASH issues like the Student Discipline Framework Review to better advocate for students within these spaces.
The Women’s Department pledges to continue protesting each year on August 1st until ANU implements their demands.
Light Rail Construction a “Nuisance” of One’s Own Making
Construction is inconvenient. I’ll give you that. Some may even call it a nuisance, as a group of local businesses considering a class action lawsuit against the territory government told the Canberra Times on August 4.
These operators complain of declining trade due to construction works on London Circuit to build stage 2 of light rail and related works on the surrounding streetscape by the City Renewal Authority.
Putting to one side the legal arguments on the tort of nuisance for a moment, it seems that many of the operators who have come forward want public funds to compensate for their poor business decisions and lack of diligence. I’m sorry: I can’t accept that.
Take the owner of East Row Cafe in the Sydney Building who told the Times that he bought the cafe in January. That is, January 2025; some six (6!) years after Stage 1 finished construction and people started talking about what Stage 2 could look like.
He told the Times: “My sales were going up, up, up. And once they started putting the fences down, all of a sudden it’s declined massively.”
By Joseph Mann
I have to ask, and I mean the following with as much kindness as I can muster, but: what was the business plan?
What due diligence did this purchaser do before taking over a cafe next to an imminent construction site?
Was this decline really “all of a sudden”, given that the government had been telling people they were going to do work on London Circuit for several years?
A decline in foot traffic is, I would assume, a predictable result of construction of public infrastructure that should certainly have been foreseeable by the months leading up to January 2025, if not years earlier.
One would think, I hope, that this risk should have certainly come to this operator’s mind after the October 2024 election in which building light rail on London Circuit was a hotlydebated issue: right?
Looking at a higher level than the law — law which is currently being reviewed by the High Court in a similar lawsuit from Sydney — it feels like these shop owners and their solicitors, class action firm Adero Law, are arguing that public funds should be redirected from schools, hospitals, roads and rubbish disposal towards a bail out for private parties’ ill-thought out investments.
Do we really believe that, if ordered by the courts, this would be an effective use of public funds?
The alternative, suggested to the Times by another affected business owner, of “targeted financial relief, matched to the size of lost trade,” is just the same thing but in settlement form. It is no less a scandalous use of the treasury.
While acknowledging that it is much easier to say this with the benefit of hindsight; over the past six years, business operators have had plenty of chances to prepare for the seemingly inevitable construction of Stage 2 and the disruption it would bring.
There was (and remains) no shortage of alternative commercial vacancies in parts of the city that are largely unaffected by light rail works, yet it seems these operators chose not to take advantage of these opportunities.
That’s not a nuisance, that’s a decision; and, regardless of the state of the common law at this time, it should not be the taxpayers’ job to fund those decisions.
Joseph Mann is a member of the ACT Branch of the Australian Labor Party
ANUSA Wrapped: A Review of Change’s Campaign Promises
CBy Paris Chia
hange Your ANUSA swept the ANUSA executive in the 2024 elections. They campaigned on a variety of policies. With a couple months left of their term, what does Change have left to do?
Covering mental health, increased access to food, deferral and extension accessibility, increased awareness of ANUSA services, work rights, and residential occupancy agreement changes, Change highlighted many areas that they planned to improve once elected.
Healthcare Accessibility
Change promised to increase access to ANU’s mental health services, including expanding services offered during exam periods. As of this article’s publication, this expansion is still unfulfilled.
Over the semester break, Change successfully implemented an ANUSA PrEP subsidy, open to all enrolled ANU students who have purchased PrEP medication within a fortnight prior to submitting an application. They have also increased medical grants from $300 to $500, which can be used to access mental health treatment. ANUSA continues to support the Less Bandaids, More Solutions campaign against staff cuts to the ANU Medical Centre.
Cost of Living
Cost of living is a major concern among young people, as evidenced by the 2025 election. Change will release a cost of living report at the next SRC, on the 27 August, fulfilling one of their campaign promises. Almost one year out from Change’s campaign goal of convenient and
affordable snacks in campus-wide vending machines, no new machines have been installed. Free lunches are available from the Brian Kenyon Student Space (BKSS) from Monday to Thursday, with limited offerings dependent on the number of meals available from residential halls.
The Union Pantry initiative, launched on the 25th of July, allows students to claim five grocery items each. This is notably similar to one of opposing 2024 ticket Serve’s campaign goals. ANUSA Student Bites provides one paper bag’s worth of food per student per week. Further improvements to food accessibility come from an increase in grocery voucher limits, from one $50 voucher per semester per student, to two.
Student Support
Change also proposed a What’s on Offer document, intended to guide students to ANUSA support services and initiatives As a tool to complement the “cultural changes” that Change had planned, this guide was intended to break down barriers and increase access to support through its convenient collation of ANUSA services. The guide is nowhere to be found. If you are looking for support, refer to the Student Assistance page on the ANUSA website.
Other promised student support includes a Rights at Work campaign. The Women’s Department hosts a Rights at Work workshop alongside the ACT Working Women’s Centre on August 13th.
Assessment and Exam Considerations
Unfavourable assessment deadlines and exam conditions are potential pitfalls no matter what college we study under. Change promised to campaign for limiting exam scheduling to during class time for mid-semester exams, and end-of-semester exams during the equivalent of class hours. They further promised to ease the process for extensions, and are now pushing for implementation of these improvements after discussions with the Associate Deans of Education and the Education Development Committee throughout Semester One.
Change Your ANUSA has met many of their campaign goals and reported progress towards other incomplete goals. Outstanding goals include the What’s on Offer document, residential occupancy agreement improvements, an increase in Designated Outdoor Smoking Areas—and perhaps most importantly, where are our vending machines? No further comment has been given by ANUSA at the time of reporting.
While Change’s campaign goals were targeted at implementing reforms across a range of areas of student and campus life, much of their work this year focuses on social issues, including the Tear Down the Poster Policy campaign, No Cuts at ANU, and Bring Back Our Doctors.
With the beginning of the election season, the 2025 campaign tickets are starting to form. Woroni will continue to report as each ticket is announced.
Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Art by Anjani
Lots of Love, A (German) Language Student
By Scout Higgins
On my first Saturday night in Freiburg, we head across the city to a club at the end of the tram line. The bouncer ignores my ID, instead gently feeling my bag and checking that beneath my coat I am wearing almost nothing. In the queue for the cloakroom, I feel conservative in my sheer lace top and long pants. I’m wearing more than most in the dark corridors of this warehouse. In every trip to Germany, I am confronted by an unashamed nakedness that reveals both skin and truth. The Germans have a natural instinct towards unearthing what lies beneath, and yet simultaneously pretending that it does not exist.
I am too sober for the tectonic techno and the black plastic-wrapped walls that snake away from the main stage, leading towards private, intimate corners. Masking tape spells out: FRAUEN, MÄNNER, ALLES…
It feels strange to return to a dance floor that I’ve been searching for since I was 18, and I feel out of place. When I was younger, I burst into spaces like these with curiosity and enthusiasm and a desire to unearth every stone, to understand what weird and wriggling creatures existed in the darkness. I didn’t care what it was as long as I saw it and understood it; I needed to be a witness so that I could shed the coat of naivety I felt was weighing me down. The stickiness of not knowing anything at all versus the stickiness of knowing too much.
Whilst dancing with my eyes closed, attempting to tap back into that sacred space, a temple forged out of the swing of my arms and the bend in my knees, I feel the warmth of smooth palms on my bare shoulders. A man, I cannot see his face, swings in time with me, arms outstretched to touch me, trying to bridge the gap between our bodies. I try to shake his touch off, shimmy one way and then
another with no success, so I turn instead and shake my head. He smiles, apologises and moves on. He’s polite, apologetic, and even in this brief interaction, I can see in him something that is kind. In the touch of his palms on my shoulders, something gentle was transferred and lingered for a moment. Later, through the artificial smoke, I see another man leaning back on him. Both of them — eyes closed, smiling, dancing. That searching hand finding a willing shoulder.
I raise my own hands, reach my body up to the roof: a plea for newness, a plea for change.
Language like love, like a crowded dance floor, is a portal that has a magic ability to transform. Renew, rebirth, reassert hidden qualities within the self. In this warm spring, I have the magic ability to choose to dive headfirst into change. I am terrified.
My whole life’s attempt to learn and become fluent in German has been centred on German’s relation to English. I have spent years translating and transferring what I know of one language into the other. They are not the same. They have their own rules, their own games, minds of their own. It is an exciting, wonderful realisation. What I am learning now, which I did not know before, is that German, or any other language, does not exist in translation (the verb). It can exist as a translated version of itself; we see this on our shelves, in books and movies and ideas, all of which are valid within their own right as translated objects. But the language itself is its own object. Moreover, it is a subject that directs and informs experience. Objects can be acted upon; subjects act on.
Passivity is not tolerated within this process, within this game; direct action is the driver of understanding.
Art by Jemima
To play this new game requires an unlearning of the self and a relearning of another. I don’t know who that self is yet. I have met her once, but only briefly, and I was too young to really know her well. I see her in the mirror, a distorted inversion of the person I am. I wonder when the two will merge.
In the mornings here, I ride across the Blue Bridge and look out onto the wooded hills just beyond the city skyline. Fingers of fog comb through the pine trees. I do not think. There is a gap in my consciousness which neither German nor English can fill. It’s an incoherent blank hole, and I am looking up at the world through it. Myself is not myself but a doll through which humanness is manipulated and played out, existing as a formulated version of myself. This is speaking, thinking, learning German.
What I am learning about language is what I am also learning about love. It is a deep pool of water, and I am swimming upright in it. It’s a dance, a pax de deux, and from where I’m standing, it’s hard to distinguish where the old self and the new self, the translation and the language, the known and unknown, the object and subject, end and the other begins. Language, love, and the dance floor are portals, and I am not sure where or who I will be on the other side.
Der Ruf eines Namens aus der Ferne,
Die warme Hand auf einer Schulter.
Vogellieder
Blaue Wellen
Die schwarze Feder auf dem leeren Blatt
Die Berge
Geburtstagskerzen
Herbst
Das frisch bezogene Bett
Das Echo im Flur
Sommergärten
Tanzen
Wachsen
Kartenspielen
Auf Wiedersehen
Dich wiedersehen.
Twenty Years of Feeling the Illinoise
By Michael Reid
Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, one of my favourite albums, turned 20 this July. It’s the second in a series of concept albums Stevens apparently originally intended to encompass every state in the US. Michigan, its predecessor, is a very good album, but you can tell that it was only a first step for Stevens; a promising experiment. The lush orchestral arrangements (most parts of which are played by Stevens) that make so much of Michigan excellent are much more cohesive and complex in Illinois, deftly stepping between gentle comingof-age vignettes and epic orchestral and choral arrangements retelling the state’s history and urban mythologies. The album is meticulously researched, and rich with detail. “I wanted it to be a real survey,” Stevens told Dusted in 2005. “Kind of a historical survey, but I didn’t want it to be heavy with information; I didn’t want it to be too political, and I didn’t want it to be too didactic… I wanted it to be almost like a movie soundtrack, but without the movie.”
The first time I listened to Illinois I was on a double-decker bus that was taking me from Auckland to Tauranga. It was summer. The bus had red pleather seats and broken air conditioning. From my seat on the second storey I could watch as Auckland’s industrial outskirts thinned and gave way to endless, absurdly green farmland. Illinois was the only album downloaded on my phone, I think by accident.
The album opens looking at the sky. The syncopated piano rhythms of Concerning the UFO Sighting Over Highland, Illinois build and lull, their avoidance of a satisfying conclusion creating a sense of uncertain awe that continues throughout the album. Rural New Zealand is very different to the dense urban landscapes and mythical
road-trip Americana that Stevens goes on to describe in Illinois, but both had the same weight at that moment. Though most of the track titles in Illinois refer to specific elements of the state’s past, nothing in the album is a straightforward history lesson, and Concerning the UFO Sighting doesn’t provide any easy answers about its depiction of the 2000 St. Clair Triangle sighting.
Stevens has described Illinois and Michigan as “populist”, which I think is an apt, if dispassionate way to describe the way Illinois’ collective voice urges us to take responsibility for each other’s actions, even when we do awful things. The album’s fourth track, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. mythologises the infamous Chicago serial killer by invoking intimate details of Gacy’s fraught childhood and personal life. As the song ends, the sparse piano backing picks up, and Stevens’ breathy voice becomes frantic as he reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: ‘In my best behavior, I am really just like him,’ he confesses, ‘Look beneath the floorboards / for the secrets I have hid.’
By the time Illinois was released, Stevens was already moving away from the accessible, catchy acoustics of his earlier work on Seven Swans and Michigan. In 2006, he released The Avalanche, an Illinois outtakes album he “shamelessly compiled,” as the album’s cover put it, to avoid continuing the 50 States Project. “I feel like my whole music career has been an exercise in calling my own bluff,” Stevens said in a 2022 Vulture interview. “I go on all these excursions and I feel they’re indulgent and slightly megalomaniacal in their approach. At some point, I realize how absurd and unhealthy and unsustainable it is, so I am fine moving on.”
Since The Avalanche was released, his musical output has been impossible to pin down to a single sound or genre. The Age of Adz, his first proper album since Illinois, is a sprawling, maximalist project that abandoned any clear sense of narrative in favour of glitchy electronics, heavy autotune and improvisational guitar. “[The States project] isn’t even as much about the U.S. as it is about myself and my imagination,” he told Duster. “The states themselves are just kind of the fabric, they’re kind of the canvas, and they create very helpful arbitrary guidelines.” Once a framework has served its purpose as a mechanism through which for understanding himself, and America, Stevens was unsentimental about moving on. I occasionally wonder what an album about New York might have sounded like, or how he would have approached a sparsely populated state like Montana or Wyoming. But Illinois is such an achievement that in some ways it makes sense that he chose not to continue. Where could he have gone?
Music, like scent, can snag insistently at memory. To me, Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers feels like the walk between my house to the State Library during Year 11 SWOTVAC, because it was all I listened to at the time. Lungs by Florence and the Machine reminds me of the smell of hair gel and popcorn, because my mother would play it while she drove my siblings and I to and from dancing competitions. I have listened to Illinois too many times in too many contexts for it to retain any specific feeling. Only the opening track still carries that visceral reminder of where I was when I first heard it. I take it with me everywhere, and it has picked up a patina.
The album’s third-to-last track was playing over the speakers at my summer job last December while I cleaned the deli.
A customer in a high-vis jacket approached the till with a block of chocolate.
“Nice taste,” he said. He gestured at the speaker.
“Thank you,” I said. “My manager isn’t in, so I get to choose the music. It’s my favourite album. I really like the second half.” I don’t know why I said that. To have something to say? It’s not even true, to the extent that “I really like the second half” implies I think the first half is inferior. It’s all excellent.
He didn’t miss my confusion. “The second half?”
“Yeah, I mean, I like the first half too. I introduced it to my mother and she plays it when she’s working. She says her coworkers like it.” That was at least true, but not precisely what I wanted to say. Writing this, I’m very aware of how difficult it is to explain your feelings about art you really love. It’s even more difficult to convey those feelings, off the cuff, to someone you don’t know. I wanted to explain to him why I cared so deeply about this album, and how delighted I was that he wanted to talk to me about it.
“I got really into it,” he said, breaking the silence. ”Researching the whole area, the history of the state. I used to do a lot of long-distance driving and I didn’t change out the CD for like 4 years. I would just listen to the whole thing over and over, like it was a movie.”
We talked about Stevens’ other music for a little longer, and I recommended A Beginner’s Mind, another concept album Stevens made a few years ago in collaboration with Angelo De Augustine. I rang him up, he left, and the music kept playing.
Two Boys, Two Goodbyes
Kai hadn’t planned on cutting Michael off. There was no grand confrontation, no final words. One day, they were inseparable, playing video games after school, trading bad jokes, offering life advice during each other’s highs and lows. But everything shifted when they transferred to a new school for their final year.
That’s when the silence began.
It started small. Michael made a joke at Kai’s expense — his accent, his clothes. The others laughed. Kai laughed too. What else could he do? But inside, it felt hollow. And that hollowness stayed.
A week later, during one of their usual gaming sessions — one of the few rituals they still clung to — Kai mentioned something serious. His dad had just lost his job. Michael didn’t even look up. Eyes locked on the screen, he kept playing, reviving Kai’s character in the game while letting their real bond flatline.
That was the moment. Kai felt it in his gut: this wasn’t friendship anymore. Maybe it never really had been. So he stopped replying.
The first few days were hard. He’d type long messages, then delete them. But with every unsent text, he felt lighter. He started reading again. Sitting alone at lunch didn’t feel lonely; it felt honest.
Art by En-Mei
Months passed. Michael never reached out. Maybe he never noticed. And that was fine.
Some endings don’t need closure.
By Shivagha Sindhamani Pathak
Neel still replays the last conversation with Will in his head.
They were laughing — genuinely, warmly — over an energy drink after school. Then Will mentioned moving schools. It was sudden. His parents were relocating for work. “It’s not a big deal,” Will said. “We’ll keep in touch.”
But they didn’t.
Neel called. Once. Twice. Then a third time. Will never picked up. Never called back. Messages sat unread. Neel tried not to take it personally, but the silence felt too deliberate. The void Will left behind felt jagged, like glass edges.
He looked at the shared playlist they made. Still updated — but now only by Neel. He wondered if Will ever listened to the songs.
Their last photo sat tucked in a book on Neel’s shelf — two kids, shoulder to shoulder, laughing so hard the camera caught them mid-blur.
Was it all just convenience? Proximity? Did it mean less to Will than it did to him?
Neel never got an answer.
Two boys. Two endings.
One walked away and learned how to breathe again.
The other stood in an empty hallway, waiting for a door that never opened again.
So, which is it, is a sudden ending a gift or a wound?
You decide.
After It.
TBy Victoria Kao
hey come only in the night, in the faces that have long been dried by the thousands of suns that have passed since then.
They look and smile with eyes from those times — but not ones of age.
And I follow, returning to what has long been erased, speaking words that they have never mouthed but still thinking of the thoughts that would only arrive later without them.
But these moons continue to fall, continue lighting up dreams with memories that should have been left. They have been shredded into glistening shards of glass, ground into fine powder that can no longer take shape.
Because after too many times wearing a skin that was never real, I can no longer know what really happened.
BSolving the Riddle of Batman’s Big Issues
By Kira Atkins
atman is every girl’s dream — tall, dark, mysterious and frightfully rich — but he resides in a city even worse than Canberra. The 2022 film by Matt Reeves portrays Gotham as a city filled with crime where corruption runs rampant and although there is a police force, a masked vigilante that people call “Batman” takes matters into his own hands and exacts violent vengeance on criminals. As enticing as Robert Pattinson’s brooding portrayal made him, it is probably not worth moving to Gotham just for a chance with the caped crusader.
Would I recommend watching the movie? I would. It is three hours of immersive action scenes, captivating cinematography, and a thrilling plot. While it may be tempting while you watch to focus your attention on the beautiful Zoe Kravitz and Robert Pattinson, I do implore you to think about what may have inspired the creators of the movie to shape the narrative in the way that they did. Even superhero films cannot escape the necessity to reflect on society and how it adapts to the rise of social media.
Batman dons his mask and cape to stalk the streets of Gotham at night, always watching. He beats people who commit petty crimes to a pulp, and spares the ones he is too busy to attend to. He spends his billions of dollars on acquiring and maintaining new equipment, advanced technology, weapons, and vehicles. But would it not be a better use of his money, and indeed, his time, to simply redistribute some of his massive wealth to the many poor people of Gotham?
Would higher standards of living not help lower crime rates and alleviate the city’s issues that seem to stem largely from a great income gap between the rich and the poor? As his vigilante alter ego, the Batman keeps himself separate from other people in Gotham using his mask to intimidate. At the same time, Bruce Wayne himself stays looking down on the rest of the city, safe in his ivory tower.
One could argue that his father, Thomas Wayne, aimed to improve the city through setting up the Gotham City’s Renewal Program, which was founded during Thomas’ mayoral campaign. The project was planned to be a charitable fund which could bypass bureaucratic measures to help the poor. However, Thomas was killed before he could be elected mayor, and his plans were not properly set up or rolled out. Instead, the money that he left behind was appropriated and ended up funding the very corruption and crime that he had hoped to expel.
If Bruce manages to stay alive (which, admittedly, does not seem entirely likely given his propensity for danger), he could ensure that the fund works a second time around, instead of masquerading as the Batman. He would prevent funds falling into the corruption of Gotham’s police department, District Attorney’s office, and mayoral office. It seems ridiculous that Batman, who is supposed to be highly intelligent, has not yet thought of this.
Another illogical aspect of Gotham is its villains. Outside of this film, typical Batman villains tend not to be very scary and are rather comical. Take Penguin, who is traditionally surrounded by a flock of penguins and uses ice (frozen water, not the drug) as a weapon, a sharp contrast from the crime boss depicted in the movie. The Riddler, in the old comic books, wore a bright green suit and matching top hat, and his speciality is to leave puzzles for his nemesis to solve — not exactly what keeps most up at night. Yet the Riddler, in this adaptation of Batman, was different. Something about him instantly struck a chord and filled me with immense unease. It was not the Riddler’s tragic backstory, nor his obsession with brutally murdering people, that I found particularly disturbing, rather, it was how possible, even predictable, his character’s feelings and actions were.
Art by Suriana
Although people clowned him for having only 500 followers, the Riddler’s social media presence was a poignant display of how online presence can be used in the modern age to mobilise people to action — in a way that has been and is still being used by real-life influencers and extremists. Rather than convincing people to use their code to sign up to SkillShare or buy sponsored products, the Riddler used his platform to inspire multiple people to take up arms, destroy the city, and kill people.
This is not inconceivable. In Australia, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation recognises young, male ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) as potential terrorist threats. Incels spread their violent ideologies on social media platforms and share ideas in hopes of violent attacks in forums that become online echo chambers. This version of the Riddler strikes a chord because he resembles this very real threat. Someone who feels marginalised, without support would be likely to seek community online, though not every online community is created equally.
While certainly not as violent, online echo chambers have already affected a city closer than Gotham to those of us at ANU — Canberra. Inspired by truck drivers in Canada, who they had seen on Facebook, Twitter, and Signal, ‘antivaxxers’ from all over Australia made their way to Canberra. The so-called Freedom Convoy was protesting myriad mandates and restrictions that the various state governments had been imposing due to the spread of COVID-19. No masked vigilante showed up, perhaps because this group did not cause chaos to anywhere near the extent that the Riddler did in Gotham. But
it did alert people to the fact that the Canberra bubble can burst, and that groups of people were severely dissatisfied with the decisions made by people who hold authority over others.
The similarities between the Riddler’s supporters and the anti-vaxx movement was no coincidence. In fact, one of the follower’s usernames was ‘holdtheline81’ — a reference to the online movement Hold the Light, Hold the Line. This movement, aimed at opposing vaccine mandates, attracts a certain demographic of people who have similar values and may have faced what they perceive to be oppression and intimidation. These are different to the grievances for which the Riddler sought revenge, but the ways in which people were mobilised are similar. This demonstrates that the dangers faced by the people of Gotham may not be so extraordinary, and could be the cause for us to have real, serious conversations about the state of Australia’s societal cohesion.
Maybe not everyone read too deeply into this movie, but I certainly did, and maybe we should. Since the film was released, wealth disparities and political polarisation in America and Australia have only grown. Canberra may not have its own version of Batman, but there may be a version of the Riddler waiting to emerge. How can Australian society adapt to the increasing loneliness and marginalisation that accompanies less human interaction and more time spent online? Perhaps the Batman could be closer to us than we know. Perhaps he is there, watching, waiting to take vengeance.
Do you remember being an adolescent? Did you wake up on your 13th birthday and feel like everything had suddenly shifted? Acne. Periods. Voice cracks. Mind racing, body changing, 13 was big. It was the year you were made painfully aware of how different girls and boys were. Suddenly, you were told to act differently around the guy you’d been sharing lunch with since kindergarten. 13 was messy: so much happening inside your head and under your skin, and absolutely no manual on how to handle any of it.
I remember the weirdness. I remember boys being loud, rude, sometimes mean, teasing girls for fun. I remember starting to feel self-conscious. But I do not remember animosity. I’ve always thought it was just awkwardness that comes along with growing up, coming to terms with ourselves and others, nothing more.
Unfortunately, 13 isn’t what it used to be anymore.
And this is what Netflix’s 4-part series is all about.
Adolescence is no murder mystery. From the very first few minutes, we know that this 13-year-old boy has killed a girl not much older than him. What’s the show about, then? you might wonder. What prompts this review? you might think. It’s about the why.
Why do men hate women?
Adolescence: Review
By Anuva Rai
Content warnings: Misogyny, Sexism, Sexual Assault, Sexual Violence
Why do YOUNG BOYS hate girls?
How is this hate developed?
I wish we didn’t have to ask these questions. I wish we didn’t have to sit with the weight of it. I wish, on watching this show, this review and our thoughts could end at the brilliance of the craft: the staggering performances, the haunting cinematography, and the technical feat of shooting each episode in a single take. I wish we could just fixate on how Owen Cooper (Jamie) delivers a performance so raw it makes your stomach turn; his first-ever role, and somehow already one of the most chilling portrayals of a child on screen. I wish we could talk only about the eerie stillness of certain scenes, the razor-sharp pacing, the sound design that pulls you into bedrooms, classrooms, and silences you didn’t expect to sit in.
But alas, that would be a bit of a cop-out, wouldn’t it? Because this show doesn’t let you look away. It doesn’t let you retreat into aesthetics. It drags you, gently at first, then all at once, into the dark corners of the internet where kids get lost. Where a search for confidence turns into content on “alpha energy”, and before you know it, your sweet, awkward 13-year-old cousin is quoting Andrew Tate like it’s holy scripture. It sounds dramatic. But Adolescence shows you how undramatic it really is. How terrifyingly casual it is. How it’s just one video, one thread, one
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Art by Fiona
Across four episodes, we watch Jamie spiral, not because he’s evil or broken, but because he’s bruised and online. And that’s what makes it hit. He’s not an outlier. He’s familiar. He’s the kid next door. He’s someone you knew. He’s someone you thought you knew. And that’s what’s haunting about the show. It doesn’t give you villains. It gives you people. Real, painfully real people. And it forces you to ask the questions you’ve been dodging: How did we let this happen? Why were we so busy laughing at the red-pillers that we didn’t notice how many kids were actually listening? Why are we still so scared of talking to boys—really talking to them—before the internet does?
“I read an incident in the paper and it was about a young boy killing a young girl, stabbing a young girl to death and then not long after that I saw on the news on the television that you know it happened again in a different, completely different part of the country and a young boy had stabbed a young girl and if I’m really honest with you, both of those incidents really hurt my heart in a way and it just made me think what’s going on…” Creator, Executive Producer and Actor Stephen Graham speaking to Yahoo UK
The first episode starts with a brigade of police officers swarming what seems like this perfectly normal, loving family’s home. The horror is that they’re here for the boy. They think 13-year-old Jamie has killed Katie, a girl he went to school with. You don’t know the why, when, or how; all you see is this scared kid sitting alone in his room, looking completely lost. He’s peed his pants. He’s shaking. And you think, no way. It’s difficult to reconcile this image with the crime he’s accused of. Surely there’s been some mistake. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe someone’s lying. One minute, this family’s going through their usual weekday routine, breakfast and backpacks. Next, their home is being torn apart, and they watch helplessly as their little boy is being called a murderer and dragged to the police station.
By the end of the first episode, all doubts shiver and crack. There’s no speculation, no ambiguity: Jamie killed Katie. Then you see his father laying flowers where she died, while Through the Eyes of a Child, sung by the girl who plays Katie, plays in the background. And suddenly, it’s all real. A girl is dead. A boy killed her. And nothing will ever be the same.
It’s the third episode—short clips from it, I’m sure, have flooded your feed—where Jamie meets with a psychologist. We’re tossed in a brutal wave of horror and disgust. Now, with each layer being stripped away, you’re left to face the bare truth. A 13-year-old boy, bullied and isolated, pulled into the ugly corners of the internet, kills a girl simply because she didn’t like him back. And the hardest part? He probably doesn’t even fully understand what he’s done. Or maybe this is what you want to believe. That he doesn’t understand. Because that would make it all just a little less sickening.
And that’s the most concerning part: you want to blame everyone but him; society, parents, school, anyone but Jamie. You don’t hate him. You’re terrified of him. Terrified of how social media twists kids today. You’re disgusted when he tries to justify it, claiming other boys would’ve done worse. But hate? No. I hated that I couldn’t hate him. A boy who thinks so little of women that he kills a girl, and still, I can’t hate him. All I could feel was pure shock.
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And you hear these stories every single day: women stalked, assaulted, raped and murdered. But you never expect that kind of rage from a teenage boy. Still lanky, still growing into his voice, still figuring out algebra, and yet filled with that much hate. You never expect the misogyny to run so deep, so young. But it does. In a world where the manosphere thrives on TikTok algorithms, where influencers spew bile dressed up as confidence and success, where boys are fed a steady diet of “alpha” nonsense, where podcasts teach that empathy is weakness and women are objects to win or punish—a digital underworld festers. Where masculinity is measured in control, cruelty, and silence; where boys are handed scripts that tell them being human is pathetic, and rejection is humiliation worth avenging. Maybe we should’ve expected it. Maybe we haven’t been paying enough attention.
And this isn’t about villainising men, because of course not all men, but it’s too many and too often. It’s about confronting a culture that’s failing them and, in turn, failing us. It’s about the quiet radicalisation happening in bedrooms behind closed doors. And it’s horrifying, not only because a girl is found dead every now and then, but because we don’t know how to stop it.
And you see the family wrestle with this, too. They know they went wrong; they just don’t know where or how. They did everything by the book: they were present, supportive, and loving. And yet, right under their roof, a boy learned how to kill. Jamie’s dad blames himself. Maybe if he hadn’t pushed him into football. Maybe if he’d shown him that gentleness is also strength. Maybe then Jamie wouldn’t have ended up here. Maybe then he’d have had a better blueprint for what it means to be a man. And that final scene, the parents collapsed in each other’s arms, grieving something they don’t have a name for, leaves you gutted. Because it asks the question no parent wants to face: how do you raise a child in a world like this? How do you keep them safe from what seeps in through the screen? From voices louder, meaner, and more convincing than yours?
Adolescence is raw, it’s intimate, and it is unflinching. It forces you to confront the discomfort, the grief, the rage, the confusion; not just of what happened, but of how easy it was for it to happen. It isn’t easy to watch, and that’s the point. So, if there’s one thing you can watch, let it be this. If there’s one thing you can ask your parents, your brother, your boyfriend, your guy friends, any man you know, to watch, let it be this. Please.
Complain
TBy Christian Panetta
he air smells of rain, My feet tear themselves apart. I hit the ground like fragile glass, And the girl below me just complains.
There is bread, mouldy, on my desk, Buried beneath my lethargy. It takes one look at the sullen state of me, Yet complains nonetheless.
I take my sleeves and roll them down And soothe the ridges in my arms. My wounds leave no scars, And yet I complain, somehow.
I dream of what would happen when I break the tendrils ‘round my neck.
I’d take one final deathly breath — I’d have nothing to complain about then.
I could writhe in pills and keep them down Or let a thousand rivulets out. A scream, a bang, a lone, long shot. A silence, eerie, and the loss.
My blood will seep beneath the frame, And the girl below me will just complain.
Art by Avery
Merge Kings: Inside ANU’s Annual Fruit Merge Championship Cup
By Lea Fallen
Che Marie Reay building’s superfloor is silent — hushed murmurs from the back of the room are the only break in focus amongst the crowd on the sixth floor. Pleasant mobile game music plays from the room’s audio system while the audience watches, rapt, as small fruit fall into a bucket on the room’s four nauseatingly large projectors. The game, if you’re unfamiliar, is the recently popularised Fruit Merge, a mobile app where gamers merge different sized fruits together to achieve a higher and higher score. At the ANU, the game has received something of a cult following — this surreal scene being the annual highlight of this unique subculture.
There is a draw of breath from the audience, and on the projector we can see digital fruit cascading into one another with a satisfying pop-pop-pop. The fruit on the screen comes to a halt, and the room gives a scattered applause.
“There’s the second watermelon. She’s definitely going to have a good game.”
The whisper from beside me is from Jared Martoglou, the inaugural secretary of the club and final-round challenger to the 2025 ANU Fruit Merge Championship. A friend of mine in high school, Martoglou has invited me to tonight’s event to see him compete (and attempt to win) the cup.
The night is surprisingly well-attended: there is obligatory SSAF-funded pizza, a warm atmosphere, and many, many familiar faces. Despite the freezing weather and imminent exam period, Martoglou notes how many of his friends have shown up to watch him compete.
“I am a bit surprised, fair, but you know, they’d know that I’d show up for them if it was soccer, or AFL, or something. It’s just that I happen to be playing Fruit Merge instead.”
There is an abrupt noise from the audience, and I look to the screen to see that one of the player’s bright pink peaches has positioned itself exactly above the next place she needs to merge them. From across the room, it’s clear that her expression has darkened.
This challenger to the cup, the person who Martoglou must wrestle his intended victory from, is Yvonne Tala, president of the society and an ex-theatre hack who is quite well-known amongst the ANU’s various drama circles. She, too, has many of her friends in attendance tonight.
Tala, along with Martoglou, is one of the founding members of the ANU Fruit Merge Society — or ‘Merge Soc’ to its members — established only this semester to promote the playing of Fruit Merge on campus. Speaking to me after the event, Tala made it clear that this wasn’t just about the game.
“We think about gaming as this male-dominated space, but a game like Merge has this traditionally female audience. You think of them as, like, mum games.” She takes a moment to gesture around at the remaining crowd, “But look at who’s here! They don’t fall into the categories you think of when you think of mobile games; we’re young and social. Making the society happen was so much about making a community, a safe space, for everyone of all genders and diverse expressions to make yourself [sic] at home.
In a way, that’s what the game is about, too.”
Back in her game, Tala’s stack of fruit grows larger and larger, drawing dangerously close to the line at the top of the bucket that indicates the end of the road for her championship bid. As she places her last fruit, the screen chirps into a ‘game over’ screen and the audience applauds as she steps away. In the end, she created three watermelons, two pineapples, and numerous other fruits that netted her a score just under ten thousand.
Art by Avery, photography by Joseph Mann
Martoglou gives me a short nod as he stands up and walks over to the desk with the phone on it where Tala stands. They share an inaudible word and laugh together before Tala takes her seat and Martoglou takes the stage to another round of applause. He restarts the game and the audience quickly quietens, everyone’s eyes locked to the Subway Surfers-esque TikTok brainrot-styled gameplay.
The next twenty minutes are tense. Despite having no knowledge of Fruit Merge two hours ago, I find myself glued to my seat. Martoglou’s gameplay style differs from Tala’s — much more cautious, preferring to hoard his difficult-tomerge fruits until an appropriate way out can be found. Martoglou tells me later that maybe it’s reflective of their respective personalities:
“That’s what I love about Fruit Merge. It’s something different, hey. You can see that Yvonne plays it like she’s got a second life. I’ve never understood it, that kind of play makes me real nervous, but I respect it.” He smiles weakly.
Even before his second watermelon, Martoglou’s strategy is showing signs of fracture. It’s clear that he has a growing stack of blueberries and limes (possibly lemons) on the right side of the screen that he just can’t seem to get rid of. Even from my seat at the back of the room, I can see that he is sweating strongly, and the concerned oohs and aahs of the audience are surely not helping. In the end, Martoglou can’t hack it. His score, barely more than eight thousand, has cemented Yvonne Tala’s place as the Fruit Merge Championship Cup holder — at least for the rest of 2025.
“Well there’s always another year,” a grinning Martoglou says to me afterwards. It would be hard to tell that he just got demolished in this mobile game: his attitude is somehow more enthusiastic than it was on arrival.
“That’s part of the merge, yeah? It’s not just about winning and losing, it’s about having fun, having community, feeling like you achieved something. That’s what Fruit Merge is all about… that’s what we want it to be.”
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Art by Frankie
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Photography by Henry Carls
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Art by Frankie
Why do Women in Gothic Literature Faint so Much?
By Chiara Hackney-Britt CW: Mentions of blood
Okay girl, I get it: your boyfriend turned out to be a vampire, and that’s not what you thought you were getting into. I know those red curtains are a little frightening and you’d rather be in literally any other room. I know that you really don’t want to be in this creepy dark passage lit only by your dwindling candle. But I’m afraid dramatically falling on the floor won’t get you out of the situation. You can’t help it? Oh dear. I suppose we’ll have to take this up with your authors.
We’re all familiar with the idea of the fainting damsel — the fair maiden, who, by the delicacy of her nerves and nature, tends to gasp and flop sideways or backwards (or forwards? Doesn’t matter, whatever shows her best angle) onto the floor. Or onto a conveniently placed, silkyvelvety (but slightly dusty, for the aesthetic) couch. Or into the arms of a man, who is possibly (probably) to blame for her fainting in the first place. I found myself wondering, after having consumed various forms of media from this genre, why it is that so many women are spending half of their precious page time just fainting — or at the very least, being in a state of hysterics and only one step away from fainting. It’s as if some pandemic were breeding in the halls of medieval
abbeys and in the attics of grandiose, haunted manor houses. But is there an actual reason as to why these women were fainting so much?
I first wondered if fainting was simply a matter of nutrition between our time and theirs, circa the 1800s. Today, we know much more about what is beneficial for our bodies compared to in the past. And with all that stormy weather, these fine ladies weren’t seeing much sun, likely leading to some severe vitamin D deficiencies. Some research suggests that low vitamin D levels are, in many circumstances, correlated with syncope. My other thought was iron deficiency — still common today, especially among women. Inadequate iron levels means insufficient delivery of blood to the brain, which in turn can cause fainting.
Perhaps even a lack of sleep — born out of spending all night writing of one’s fears in a padlocked diary by candlelight — meant that any time or place became free real estate for a spontaneous switch-off, but you’d think the body would at least wait until one was out of immediate danger before snoozing for a bit. Overheating is also a common cause of syncope, but this doesn’t seem to fit with the Gothic genre — so often the castles are damp and cold with a wintry gale blowing outside and icy rain clinking against the windowpanes.
Exposure to blood can also be a trigger for syncope. And what with vampires, gruesome murders, and bloodied ghosts, the Gothic genre has plenty to go around. But it isn’t so much the blood itself as the shock of seeing it that can result in one collapsing dramatically.
Aha! Now we’re getting closer to a cause. After all, what is the Gothic genre if not a labyrinth of terror after terror? Its settings usually involve old architecture, rich with gloomy archways, dark corridors, and thick voluminous, dusty curtains, all of which are perfect places for some wicked creature to lurk, waiting to spring out on an innocent young maiden and give her a fright. Bonus points if this creature happens to be a vampire, face already dripping with blood — this will result in an extra dramatic faint. Murder is also a common element within Gothic novels, which, funnily enough, can cause a bit of a shock. Superstition, the supernatural, and all that unfamiliar, frightening stuff are further conventions that are characteristic of Gothic fiction and hold opportunity for sudden surprise or heightened emotions — and, you guessed it, fainting.
But it is not just the supernatural causing shock and fear in these women. Much Gothic fiction, especially that written by women, acted as an outlet to express the fears they faced in society, as Diane Wallace discusses in her book, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Gothic heroines are almost always subject to someone or something, rarely in full control of their own lives, and usually trapped somewhere or in some situation. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, for instance, the protagonist is trapped not only physically in her husband’s manor house, but also in a marriage with a man that, as she finds out gradually throughout
the novel, has a past she knows remarkably little about — especially the truth about his late wife, Rebecca. In Jane Eyre, the namesake heroine is also bound to the confines of a house presided over by a man with a similarly murky, sinister past. As Gothic heroines like these faced supernatural creatures or ill-intentioned men (and often the Venn Diagram is a perfect circle), so too were women of the time trapped by society’s rules and standards, which rarely favoured their wellbeing.
And that’s scary too! You don’t need a sudden, gruesome shock to be frightened, when your entire reality is, in a way, out to get you. The Gothic is, in many ways, a metaphorical simulation of women’s fears, and syncope could therefore be a method of communicating that fear — those emotions of fright, shock and helplessness. I guess I can also appreciate using syncope as a narrative device: a way to ‘show, don’t tell’ just how terrified the heroine really is.
It’s common knowledge, however, that in the Victorian period — when lots of famous Gothic fiction, like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jane Eyre, and Dracula were written — beauty standards were somewhat inspired by a romanticisation of tuberculosis: thinness, paleness, feverish rosy cheeks. Whatever floats your boat,
I guess… but also, that’s weird. So was fainting just another way to uphold this harmful standard of feminine beauty? Not all of the novels I mentioned above centre fainting as a theme, nor were they all written by male authors with pens dipped in misogyny. But, my point stands that the Gothic genre was hugely popular in this era, and there were far more texts floating around the handful that were remarkable enough to make it into literary canon. Fainting fits the frail beauty ideal perfectly: a show of delicacy, a removal of oneself from the action. So it isn’t an outlandish suggestion that syncope was used to uphold this strange and dangerous beauty standard — emphasising how helpless and beautiful these maidens were against their dark, perilous surroundings.
Pressing ‘Snooze’ to ABC Classic
By Grace Williams
Best paired with Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 in C Minor, Op 67
Each morning I wake up to ABC Classic; dynamic string sections or mellow woodwinds shake me from sleep.
Groggy and half-asleep, I pick myself up and lean forward towards a 2004 clock radio, stained on the side and clouded with dust — a leftover token from a childhood home long-since sold and filled with new clutter. It sits proudly on a rehomed desk, once belonging to a faceless mid-century clerk for the Australian Public Service. My head starts to pound.
Raging cellos bellow Beethoven, each unified bow latching itself onto the inner lining of my skull. My bones grow heavy, my eyelids droop. My mouth runs dry.
The violins screech through the room in erratic threads of quavers and semiquavers. My vision clouds: radio-static specks populate the air before me in patches of grey and white. My eyes shake. My neck goes limp. My heart takes its place.
Countermelodies bicker as I brace myself to stand. My legs grow chains and my arms grow brittle. The room swirls through a cloudy night sky.
Beethoven pauses. I catch my breath.
The horns roar in the second bellow. I flinch, and the jolt sends me sideways. I desperately brace my arm on the wall to the right, catching a potential concussion as the violins cry and wail in fast runs and arpeggios. Flashes of heat run up my
spine in a crescendo, contrasting with the bitter cold of the Canberra morning. The room disappears, with only grey and white speckles in its place. I hear the long-held refrain and brassy horn begin to drift off, letting a soft violin and oboe conjure an airy concert hall and filling it with a sonic haze. I fit my head between my knees and wait for my room to return.
With the third bellow of the cellos and horns, this time in a triumphant major key, I hoist myself onto my feet. My legs begin to wobble, like a toddler learning to stand. The specks dance through the mid-morning like fireflies. I take advantage of my limited time upright, stumbling heavily through the too-small room, hips slamming into corners of night-tables and toes jamming into chair legs.
I strike the clock radio into silence in time with the violins (before the cellos can shout their refrain) and hold my hand on the dimpled plastic. The music vanishes. I breathe. Nausea begins to flood up through my stomach and into my lungs.
I launch myself back to bed, through the avenue in which I came. The room feels emptier than it was on the journey here. In two steps I have planted my torso onto the closest section of the mattress, lying parallel to the pillows, legs dangling haphazardly off the edge.
My vision returns; the clouds clear. My heart still races but begins to settle back into my chest. It feels safe again. It feels like home.
The cycle repeats ten minutes later.
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Art by Sara
Faint of Heart? Hardly
By Lily Amos
hey called it swooning. Fainting. Syncope. A collapse of the body that was never quite separate from a collapse of expectation. Women throughout history have dropped to the floor, not only from blood loss or shock, but because society taught them to fall in paintings, in operas, in novels.
So, for this piece, I thought: why not imagine how they would speak for themselves?
What follows is not history but speculation: a chance to hear the voices they were denied.
1. Dido (Queen of Carthage) (Ancient World and Renaissance depictions: specifically Homer’s Aeneid from epic tradition, and Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s artwork, 1778)
You think I fainted from love? How quaint. I was a queen before I was a lover. I carved Carthage out of dust and defiance, a city born from exile and stubborn will. My people called me strong, cunning, unshakable. I ruled with steady hands and a sharp mind.
Then the gods decided otherwise. They whispered to Aeneas, bent our wills, lit false fires in our hearts. Love was not mine to choose, it was a trick, a divine script. When they ordered him to leave, he left. And, suddenly, the strength that had carried me across seas and through grief buckled beneath the shame of betraying Sychaeus, my first and truest husband.
The poets like to tell you I swooned for love. No. I collapsed beneath the weight of gods who treated me as a pawn. My faint was not fragility but fury, a body overwhelmed by the impossible: to be both sovereign and subject to their games. I was not doomed by Aeneas. I was doomed by Olympus.
2. The Virgin Mary (Medieval Europe)
(As depicted on altarpieces and in countless artworks 12th-16th C, due to the late middle ages idea of ‘Lo Spasimo della Vergine’. Based on the Christian Tradition and the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus)
They call it The Swoon of the Virgin. A moment of holy grief, captured in oils and gold leaf. But the truth is, they couldn’t bear the sight of a mother screaming. That would have been too human, too loud. So, they gave me silence. A silent fall.
At the foot of the cross, my body folded under the weight of a son unjustly murdered. It wasn’t surrender; it was protest. But they painted it as purity. They softened the horror.
Men needed my collapse to be beautiful. So, they turned my raw, physical grief into something sacred and passive. They made my pain consumable.
They call it divine suffering. I call it erasure.
3. Juliet Capulet (Shakespearean stage depictions and various adaptations of Romeo and Juliet)
They show me as the perfect tragic maiden, collapsed in white silk, lips parted in eternal innocence. For centuries, I’ve been the swooning girl in oil paintings and candlelit stages, all fragility and beauty.
Heinrich Friedrich - 1792, Tod der Dido
Cesare da Sesto - 1510, The Swooning Virgin Supported by Three Holy Women and Three Studies of Men
They never ask what it takes to faint on purpose. The tension in your jaw. The calculated timing. The knowledge that if you misjudge the dose, a temporary comatose becomes permanent.
They think I was naive. Sixteen, foolish, swept away by love. But I knew what I was doing. I took the Friar’s potion not because I was helpless, but because I refused the future set out for me: a forced marriage, a life not my own. My “death” was a staged collapse, my rebellion against a fate I refused.
Not a faint but a feint: my final act of control. And you’ve been watching me swoon on stage for 400 years.
John Massey - 1777-1866.
4. Marie Antoinette (Accounts of Versailles court culture in 1774-1794 from 19th century speeches/ reports)
They said I fainted from corsets and champagne — pure indulgence. In truth, fainting was expected.
The salons were stifling, the air heavy with perfume and smoke, and our stays pressed ribs until breath was a luxury. To flutter and swoon was considered elegant, à la mode, and I was taught to do it well.
I was fourteen when they brought me from Vienna, a girl dropped into a palace of rules I never chose. Frivolity was not my nature; it was what they trained me to perform.
No one wanted a serious queen; they wanted a doll who smiled, pleased, and
fainted prettily. While my husband faltered and France starved, I played the part they had written.
When the Revolution came, the play ended. At the scaffold there were no perfumes, no couches, no fainting. Only the crowd, the blade, and my final slip as I stepped on the executioner’s foot and apologised. They will remember the feathers and the falling, but I know I was their scapegoat, standing to the end.
5. Scarlett O’Hara (Gone with the Wind, 1939)
They loved me fainting, didn’t they? The perfect Southern belle, corseted and pale, collapsing at the first sign of scandal. On screen, I was all sighs and silks, spent by heartbreak or the sweltering Georgia sun. They made fragility my costume, my cage.
But I didn’t survive a war by fainting. When Atlanta burned, I did not swoon, I tore down curtains and stitched them into gowns. When Tara was starved, I dug in the dirt with blistered hands. Every time I dropped, I got back up. Because Scarlett O’Hara doesn’t stay on the floor.
They wrote me to collapse beautifully. I chose to rise ruthlessly. My faint was never surrender; it was strategy. Tomorrow, I told myself, would always come. And tomorrow, I would always be standing.
Closing note
Five women. Five stories reimagined. Not one of them as powerless as history preferred. Syncope isn’t just a medical event; it’s a cultural performance. Sometimes it’s blood pressure. Sometimes it’s heartbreak. Sometimes it’s the only way to scream in a world that wants you silent.
So, the next time you see a swooning woman in a painting, a poem, or a film, ask yourself: is she really falling?
Or is she refusing to stand?
Wright,
I Keep Fainting on ANZAC Day I
have this habit of fainting at ANZAC Day ceremonies.
It was fine all through primary school, my first six years of the mandate. This is because the little kids, being the first in the procession of marchers, are always also the first to arrive at the park on the median strip where we lay down the wreaths. We would therefore get prime spots and our only concern would be to sit legscrossed. The whole town plus its satellite beach settlements turn up so that the streets, ovals and railway are stoppered up with cars. At a certain point in your life, which I’ve already now reached, not going feels like more of a put-upon than going.
In the middle of town, Anzac Street fronts out onto the highway. This must be an issue, now that I think of it. I wonder if they have to put up big signs ten kay out of town either way, saying, “Half of road closed, proceed really exceptionally quiet and slow” to warn the road trains. They must not listen, but.
I’m newly twelve now so I’m trying not to embarrass myself. The first step is to stand up straight and represent the school with pride. There’s about fifteen of us here that go to the stupid city school, and all the rest are at the big march forty kilometres away because they actually live near it. I wish Mum let me go to the state school. I wish she didn’t buy my uniforms two sizes up and brand new. I wish she didn’t care enough to iron them specially every day. I’m twelve so these concerns simmer away
like spag bol until I’m absolutely postal that Mum ever made me exist in the first place. My friends’ parents don’t make them go to stuff. I’m alone and untethered in this world. Mum and Dad get to sit in fold-out chairs outside the pub with the rest of the civilians. My old teachers are looking at me as if they know me, but they don’t even know I’m fully a different person from the last seven years now that I’m twelve.
A cattle truck gets its compression brake leant on a bit away, rumbling through all our feet and arses on the concrete, but the RSL rep perseveres with his speech. I wonder if its mealy machine gun chuk-chuk-chuk upsets him. Obviously not, though, he’s probably killed people. Does it remind him, even? I’m not quite sure if the army is evil or cool yet. I don’t even know how to swear yet. The big kids on the bus will teach me.
The sun is pouring down like hot rain on my scalp, because wearing hats is for babies and no one’s the boss of me. This is coming up now on the first time I learn what fainting is. I’ve never had anything bad or uncomfortable happen to me up ‘til this point, so this is kind of a big paradigm shift for me. When the edges of the world start vignetting and narrowing, I get really really scared and surmise that I’m dying right now, in the middle of the veteran’s speech. I have never lost control of my body like this before.
She has always been subordinate to me and always done exactly what I wanted; except for earlier this year when I randomly got boobs, but this is seriously different. These self-reflections draw vaguely down my spine and out onto the concrete, pooling under the heels of my MaryJanes, my little brain slipping confinement, as I spell and wooze and stumble into the Year Ten in front of me. She flinches and pushes me back upright. I can’t be expected to know what’s happening. My brain is rolling squelchily around somewhere over near the gutter. It’ll be sooo grotty when it comes back.
It returns to me once I figure out that if I keep shuffling around on the spot I can ward off the greyout. This is called the travails of adolescence. I have never felt so humiliated in my short life. I have proven to be a wilting flower who can’t ride out a bit of heatstroke. I am unworthy of this nation’s brave diggers and the lions will come for me at dawn, et cetera. I’m also a typical weak girl and this is the thought that cows me most.
Next year I’m thirteen. I haven’t fainted since and I’ve forgotten it was even something I can do. It’s consigned to the list of bodily functions that I haven’t unlocked yet, like armpit farting, or burping audibly. Or my period. I’m biting my thumb nail absently, and with a wet sluice, realise I’ve gotten a little of my cuticle. I spit it out. It’s hot and everything’s dried out again. We’ve all been arranged behind our canvas school banner. I’m very careful to stick in the middle of the pack and not stand too close to anyone, lest I be construed as taking an interest in the world or people around me.
We stomp our path we’ve done since we were fouror-so. We take positions. I make it five minutes into watching the laying of the wreaths before I’m swooning and everything is heatwaving so hard I take initiative and sit down on the spot. My face is on fire from the sun and the shame. My bum is on fire from the concrete. Everyone’s looking at me, the conspicuous hole in the crowd, and remarking on how lazy and disrespectful I am. Has anything this bad ever happened to anyone? I make Mum take me directly back to her 2006 Tucson, parked outside the daycare, sooking and braying the whole time, ruining everyone’s day and making sure we can’t get a sausage on bread from the RSL. I reflect so much heat and light I hurt to look at. Thus I fail to blend in and this will be the crux
of my problems for the foreseeable future.
The year after that Dad deigns to take us to the Dawn Service, because you have to go to one or the other. If we get it out of the way earlier we can have more of the day back. Danger has started to encroach quicker into my day, with my getting bullied out of bed at five, my walk to the bus stop at six, supervised by dogs in front of and behind fences, showing me their black and pink gums. This morning, the darkest and earliest I’ve ever seen, is safe and parentally sanctioned. It’s safe to drive to town in the work ute in the warmingup day like tea in the microwave. It’s not safe on the hostile school bus, with lots of Year Elevens in invariably cruel moods. Everything lightens as we three trace the road that curls inland, milk pouring in a little at a time, helping us look for roos.
We park up and shuffle out, stand ourselves out on the highway proper, a little back from the usual spot, and it’s cold enough to have a skivvy on. It’s not the heatstroke, but, is the thought that poses itself to me, a reared-back red-bellied black. So it’s no use, too bad, so sad, I suppose to myself miserably, and the sky re-dims. My feet slide gently just-so out from underneath me and I careen to the side like a domino, bowl my poor little brother over onto the footpath.
Try again. Let’s try again. Try: fifteen, in the RSL, hemmed in so tightly I couldn’t fall any direction if I tried? They should have medals for consistency we can put on our school shirts, because Dad has to prop me up. At least that medal wouldn’t be stolen, inherited valour. My head is a balloon, a sticky lollipop, staticked to my dad’s work shirt with long blonde strings. It smells like the durries he swears up and down he doesn’t smoke and his daily lunchbox mandarin. My heart makes half-leaps, over and over, like I’m failing repeatedly at that strength-testing show game where you’ve got to hit the plate with the hammer. The grey encroaches, it clears. Is this a medical emergency? I don’t want to have an emergency. I want to be self-sufficient and normal. I want to be like the older kids, who I idolise with abandon. They seem more fully realised, more settled in their place in our small society. Should I eat more salt?
I get my first period the next day. Iron, then, probably.
By the next Anzac Day, I have changed interminably. I am in Year Eleven now, so I’ve been enlightened to the fact that I’m actually better than everyone else. I’m smarter, I read quicker, and plus I’m gunna go to the city for uni, an idea these dropkicks couldn’t possibly entertain in this life or the next. This idea puts a metal rod through my back at the ceremony, around which I swoon, rather than over. I stay up. I realise that when I go to the city those people will think of me as an element of this set. I resolve thereupon to represent them properly and decide to become patriotic. I imagine everyone all thinking at each other, “I’m one of you! Community gathering, hey? Come here often? I’m Australian! Look!” It’s because it’s what I’m thinking, too. Everyone’s got this put-on selfconscious humility which I slavishly record and
cultivate. I defend the ideas of incipient little misogynists who would make fun if I concussed myself on the footpath. I oscillate between glorification and subordination until I am so dizzy I don’t even need to have a medical event. I don’t go back anymore. All of you sun-struck people are clogged up with remembering, that’s why you park across driveways and are always in hospital with heart flutters. One day I’ll be just like you. For now I’ll float around down south and make supercilious reprimands like “you people commemorate only certain things cos it suits you” and “you people drive big petrol-guzzling cars” and “you people eat white bread”, the big grey memory hole yawning waiting rearing up to cuddle me close again in a few years time. I am you, you are me, so forth, ad infinitum, ‘til I faint and die for the last time and am buried in the paddock outside town with you all, you people who hate me.
Art by Safreen
Fairy Circle
By Siena Yap
The rabbits didn’t always talk. But then again they didn’t always wear waistcoats or do business at the banks either. The cats haven’t quite come around to the talking business yet but they have become quite taken with the idea of hats. My Persian, Tibby, is quite fond of a fedora. My friend’s Siamese, Archimeowdes, is partial to a beret.
“I just don’t understand where they’re getting them from.” Alison keeps telling me. “It’s not like it’s one of ours; we’ve never even owned a beret.”
I don’t know why she’s so weird about it, the cats look good in the hats. That’s why they have them. They didn’t need to get them from anywhere, that’s silly. I hop over a garden gnome rushing to cross the street and she’s still going on about the hats.
“And that’s the other thing, how on earth do they stay on their head? That’s just not – it’s not physics.”
“Physics?” I ask, as we take the shortcut through the big brass mirror in the car park behind the local convenience store. They’re running a sale on rat magicians, but I don’t have any memories to spare after spending them all at the arcade last weekend.
“Yes, physics! I swear everyone’s gone mad.”
“Do you mean psychics?” I ask. Alison gets things mixed up sometimes, but come on, I’m starting to get a little worried for her. There are a couple of clairvoyant cheetahs down the road, but they don’t like to be grouped in with cats. And she was talking about hats, what did they have to do with hats? Cheetahs would never wear hats, you’ll only ever see them in gold jewellery.
“No, I don’t mean psychics!” She exclaims, I think rather meanly, given she’s the one being confusing.
“Physics? Don’t you remember physics? We had to do that project on inertia for year 8 science. That’s physics.” I nod my head slowly, sometimes with her it’s easier to just smile and nod these days, it seems to make her less upset. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work this time. She scowls at me like I did something wrong and buries her head in her hands as we walk.
Shit, she’s not looking where she’s going and nearly steps into the perfectly round ring of mushrooms, capped with a red nearly as rich as the sun that lights up the night sky.
Luckily I’m there for her, I always am, and I’m always watching. I’m good like that. I grab her by the elbow and pull her to a stop.
I nod to it with my head and whisper, “Step quietly and hold your breath.” She looks at me with a strange face I don’t understand, but does as I said. I hang to her elbow as we cross around the fairy circle, as light on my toes as I can be. Her steps are clunkier but I can tell she’s trying. “When did we get those?” She asks, an odd tremor in her voice. I shrug, I don’t think I’d ever seen one before but my mothers warning words about the wild rings well enough in my head that it hadn’t mattered.
“It’s fine now.” I say. “It’s behind us now.” Alison shakes her head with a frown, but I barely notice because speaking of things the colour of the sun that lights up the night sky, the sky is turning an acrobatic orange. I look at the pocket watch always in my hand, it’s a few ticks past evening. We should be home by now.
I look up. Like really look around at my surroundings. My hands twitch as I realise that while we are on a lovely path through the forest we are not on the lovely path through my forest.
I groan, the mirror must have been feeling a little tricksy today, or someone broke it or cursed it. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.
“The trees,” I mutter.
“The trees?” Alison’s eyes search mine, the bags under them particularly full in the dying evening. Like a sack of clothes bulging at the seams.
“They’re all wrong,” I sigh, finally noticing the way the lowest branches just crest my head, not my shoulders like they usually would. And the way they’re pine trees with spears for leaves, not the eucalypts with cutlasses that I’m used to.
“They’re wrong…”
Alison stops dead.
“The trees are wrong? That’s what you’ll accept is wrong about this stupid place?” She’s upset about the wrong thing again. She does this a lot. “Yes, this isn’t our forest, I don’t know where we are.”
She glares at me. “You’re kidding right.” “No need to be rude.” She knows I pride myself on my seriousness.
She doesn’t start walking again. Instead a strange thing happens around her eyes, clear rain is pooling on the tips of her cheeks. I hear a rustling to our right. A fallen log lies among the trees.
“Hold on.” I say as I approach it. I get down on
my knees, feeling them dig into the dirt. A twig pokes my shin.
“What on earth is it now?” Alison calls out to me. When I don’t answer she sighs heavily and I hear her walking behind me.
I peer into the log, inside two battalions of insects are lining up against each other. Ant men and Beatles, cockroaches and a few ticks. One side is draped in blue, the other in red. They sing battle songs and clap their limbs together. Alison’s face swims into view on the other side of the log. Her frown deepens as she takes in the scene.
Alison lifts her head above the log and I follow suit.
“We have to do something,” she insists. Puddles have now formed on her face.
“Like what?” The insects will fight, everyone knows that that’s what they do. She shrugs helplessly. But looking at her face I suddenly wish there was something we could do about it. We sit on top of the log together. Finally I ask, “What’s that thing you’re doing with your eyes?”
She almost laughs. “My what? You mean crying?”
“Crying.” I wash the word around my mouth and nod. “Why is there liquid involved?”
“I don’t know.” She actually laughs this time. “It’s crying, that’s just what it is.”
I shake my head, she’s so strange sometimes, she just has stuff come out of her eyes and she doesn’t even question it? “Why do you do it?”
“I don’t know.” She replies again. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. “It just happens if I’m sad I guess. Or frustrated or overwhelmed, or just upset.”
“So you’re upset right now.” I ask.
“Yeah. Yeah I am. I’m sick of everything being weird and stupid and not making sense and everyone just pretending like it does. It’s like–” She takes a few shuddering breaths, closing wet lashes over wet eyes.
“It’s like I fell asleep and then I woke up but I’m still asleep, because nothing makes sense to me anymore, and everyone else seems to have it all figured out, and my heads just all tumbled up, like a ball of string knotted and knotted into itself. Sometimes I feel like nothing is real, none of it, not even me, I’m here with you and reality is all–”
She gestures vaguely outwards, before seeming to slump into herself as she whispers, “I just want to go back to sleep, or just have my brain shut off, all of this shut off and either wake up somewhere that makes sense, or not at all.’”
I’m not sure why I do it, but I reach out and wrap an arm around her shoulders and draw her into my body. We sit like that as the sky dances in orange above us. Eventually the crickets start up and the music swells around us. Violins and trumpets, a bold timpani and a precious flute. I disengage from her body and standing up I offer Alison my hand. With a cautious grip she takes it. I draw her into a dance, a waltz, a mazurka, I’m not sure. I’m not sure either how long we dance for, but when we finally break apart, we’re standing back outside my house with its crooked yellow door and swaying lavender garden. Today the roses intertwined with the fence are white. I notice my face feels weird, and when I touch my cheeks they’re wet. Alison looks at me and smiles, properly this time. She takes my hand and we walk together down the path to my house.
Flowers, Fairytales, What Look Like Stars
By Christian Panetta
He finds himself in a stasis, In manic panic and doctor’s office lighting.
Illustrations sprawl on the wall; Flowers, fairytales, what look like stars.
This isn’t even a hospital.
The doctor has frenzy in her eyes. She asks a simple question, he lies. What does she know?
The illustrations span the room, Floor to ceiling and back again.
They sprawl obnoxiously, they speak insincerely. They remind him of his father’s office,
But that was years ago, wasn’t it?
Had the doctor finished her sentence?
Her eyes flood with tolerance, He sits restlessly.
There is a rabbit on one of them, White fur and frosty eyes. It looks so fake,
But it’s enough to stir his memory.
Rabbits are terrifying things, Their noses twitching and legs that kicked. Their glossy eyes, their glossy eyes.
The evil in them. The doctor stops suddenly.
The rabbit stares lifelessly. Is everything alright?
Who was it that said that?
Her sleeves cuff at the wrist. Her pen taps restlessly.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
The grass the rabbit sits on is just as poorly painted.
Bite me, bite me, bite me, it says The room seems to scream at him.
The walls seem to close in.
The air rips his skin with jabs of cold
And the doctor scares him.
The pen pounds like a drill In her hand
And suddenly, he is eleven years old again.
The paintings look amazing and he thinks Yes, yes, I could do that.
The paintings from his childhood Weren’t nearly as impressive.
The lights cry brightly, His eyes well with wetness.
He tries to stop it
But it’s the first real thing that’s happened.
The doctor says nothing.
Syncope, while medically referring to the event of fainting, can also emotionally express the disjointed or dissolute: a moment of weightlessness in a storm of confusion. It’s the swooping of your stomach during aeroplane turbulence, or the light-headedness of a shock you never thought possible. It encapsulates the dissonance in contradiction, which is both difficult to conceptualise yet essential to the human condition. Even physically, it is the internal process of survival; your brain sacrificing your body in the name of continuing its existence.
In honour of Syncope, Woroni Radio has curated a decadent list of popular songs that we believe are most suitable for swooning onto a chaise longue, battling with the hypocrisies of the world around you, and (hopefully) surviving the icy loneliness of a cold Canberra winter.
The Feminine Urge — The Last Dinner Party
The Last Dinner Party is a music group that utterly screams Syncope. Combining glam rock elements with classical technique, the band’s music perfectly encapsulates the dissonance and unexpected harmony of modern and traditional fusion. They feel both timeless, and perfectly reflective of our own era. Dealing with the conflicts of femininity and gender expression, queerness in a society of religious or cultural guilt, and the freedom and frustration of love that cannot find a name, The Last Dinner Party encapsulates how it feels to surrender to the uncertain.
Within their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, no piece does this better than The Feminine Urge, which details the hypocrisies of gender ideals using both modern and historical imagery. The piece itself feels as though it reflects on gender frustrations of the romantic period, whilst also conveying a very relevant message to femininity today.
The poignant lyricism in the prechorus, “I am a dark red liver stretched out on the rocks / all the poison, I convert it and I turn it to love”, realises the expectation of women to bear the burden of emotional responsibility whilst also upholding a facet of effortlessness, absorbing abuse,
Woroni Radio’s Picks: Songs to Feel Faint to
By Grace Williams
CW: brief mention of sexual abuse
mistreatment, or disrespect, and returning only affection. This is expressed more directly through the chorus lyrics: “Do you feel like a man when I can’t talk back? / Do you want me or do you want control?” The Feminine Urge also expresses how this expectation is taught through the intergenerational trauma of women throughout history, as seen through the line: “Here comes a feminine urge, I know it so well / to nurture the wounds my mother held”.
The steady ‘60s-style beat adds to this vintageyet-modern style, with the shakers and brushed snare disorienting the listener, materialising the feeling of overwhelming burden veiled under a guise of ‘the carefree’.
This piece is best accompanied by a run through the woods in a flowy dress and an inner-suburbsmum level of wine.
Sinking Feeling! — Chloe Slater Chloe Slater has long been a favourite on my playlists. A UK-based indie artist, she focuses on creatively addressing issues of gender and class disparities in modern society. Her alt-rock fuelled style uniquely expresses the contradictions and dissonance that accompany living in a patriarchal and capitalist world. Although I also recommend her song Fig Tree (an honourable mention in syncope-inducing works), which draws on the works of Sylvia Plath to build upon the guilt and disorientation of failing to meet societal expectations as a young woman, I believe that Slater’s earlier work, Sinking Feeling!, more directly addresses this concern.
The ambient synths pulse through the background, supported by distorted vocals that emulate a dissociative loneliness, as if the listener is alone in a crowded room. This contrasts a simple yet mournful melody and lyrics which describe the grief that comes with not growing into your own expectations.
This song is best accompanied by a maincharacter walk across Uni Ave on a frosty late afternoon, after not doing the assignment you promised yourself you’d do that day.
What Was That — Lorde
As the lead single from Lorde’s recent album, Virgin, What Was That connects emotional syncope to perceptive time displacement. The piece firmly grasps the lack of identity, place, or stable presence after a major shift, such as the end of a relationship. Through the fast-paced lyrics, Lorde explores how her sense of self is displaced coming out of a long-term relationship.
The unclarified syncopation in the chorus further conceptualises displacement, leaving the listener feeling disconnected from the main pulse of the music, as if jumping between time or emotion. Lorde’s lyrics bounce between resentment and sentimentality almost erratically, expressing how love and deeply entrenched connection stand parallel to the bitterness and dissatisfaction of her relationship, concluding the storm of memory and emotion with: “Now we wake from a dream / well baby, what was that?”
This work is best accompanied by crying at the club: blisters on your heels, dancing through the sorrow, letting the flow of the crowd take you where you need to go.
Motion Sickness — Phoebe Bridgers
When you imagine the emotional equivalent of syncope, the answer you’ll immediately find is Phoebe Bridgers’ Motion Sickness. Plucked from the 2018 album Stranger in the Alps, Motion Sickness has become the stock-standard for the contradictions of a bad relationship. Revealed by Bridgers to be about musician Ryan Adams (who has been accused of physical, sexual and emotional abuse), the piece explores the ‘conflicted feelings’ that come from mistreatment by a partner.
The even-paced drum beat, contrasted with the lilting melody, conveys the internal conflict of mixed emotions, supported by both steady rhythmic guitar and languid countermelodies.
This contrast is further expressed by Bridgers’ lyricism: “I hate you for what you did / and I miss you like a little kid” and later “I can hardly feel anything at all” and “There are no words in the English language / I could scream to drown you out”.
This song is best accompanied by a packet of the good biscuits and staring at your bedroom ceiling, or going on a long mental health walk up Black Mountain in too many winter jackets.
I Want You To Love Me — Fiona Apple
The all-emotional opening to her 2020 album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I Want You to Love Me speaks as the outburst after years of repression; the final plea of love in a world too wide for one individual.
The piece draws generously on nature imagery and references to a personal experience Apple had during a meditation retreat in 2010-11, where she claims to have seen a “a pulsing space between the people at the retreat — a suggestion of something larger”. This concept of the ‘pulse’ provides an allegory for the vastness of existence, with individual wants and desires seeming small in comparison. Apple uses this individual meaninglessness to fuel the emotional vulnerability of her plea.
The opening machine-like drumbeat and retrosynth in syncopation establishes this feeling of being lost. The drifting piano melody that follows conveys a weightlessness, symbolising the lack of emotional clarity, the mixed emotions of a somewhat-unrequited love, and further pushes the narrative to force the addressee to comprehend Apple’s words — her raw need to be loved by a person who will never reciprocate. The music itself feels like falling with no sense of when you will land, an identity being methodically unravelled, a line blurred over a long period of time. This freefall finally transforms into pure energy in the bridge, with Apple confidently proclaiming “And I know that you do / In the dark I know that you do”, while drums and strings bounce through the off-beats around her. This feeds back into one final chorus, repeating the perpetual triplet piano riffs, emulating a surrender to the ‘pulse’ and weightlessness: a final declaration before it unravels.
This piece is best accompanied by a situationship that makes you miserable, and a scratchedbeyond-repair meditation CD from your parents’ house.
Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Art by En-Mei
Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Art by Safreen
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller Read the Book ‘If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller’
By Emanuel Foundas
[1]
You are about to read a review of Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought from your mind.
[If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller]
The bustling world above fades into nothing but a whisper as you descend the writhing stairs to deep below the Earth’s rotten, molten crust. You are released from your downwards spiral unto the subterranean aedeficium of today, a sweet labyrinth without a minotaur, and a place you find yourself serially returning to with the dual predicament of having both too much and not enough time to spare. You breathe in the scent of fresh paper and celebrate your arrival at Boffins Books. Immediately, you ascertain your reason for being here as being beyond a regular routine, indiscriminate browsing — rather, you have come here for the sake of administering a very discriminate selection.
Today, you are here to buy a book, on the sole condition that it be a book which you have never heard of, by an author who
you regard similarly. And so you wander haphazardly past Books You Haven’t Read, Books You Needn’t Read, Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category of Books Read Before Being Written, Books You Would Read But Your Days Are Numbered, and, most certainly, Books Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You’ve Read Them Too.
You are charmed by the varying colours of the pages, by the contrasting spines rubbing up against each other as they nestle together on their shelves. However, despite it all, in the very corner of the room, hidden amongst piles of vintage fiction, you find that you cannot resist the call of a novel bearing the name, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. You pick it up, you turn the book over, you immediately like the fact that it isn’t a thick book — only 240 pages or thereabouts. The cover, which prominently features a train, a table and a still-smoking cigarette, now faces away from you as you indulge in that tantalising reading of the blurb. Ah yes — you cannot help but think to yourself — I have found my book.
[2]
But what sort of book is this?
We follow a Reader, one who himself acquires and begins to read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Unfortunately, the Reader’s reading is interrupted by a printing error which sends him back to the bookstore in search of the complete novel, but which ultimately results in increasingly bizarre encounters with ten different novels which always, and for unforeseen reasons, become unreadable when they are at their most interesting. We alternate between these novel fragments and the meta-narrative of our Reader’s search for the true novel, and by extension — the authentic reading experience.
Our Reader is joined by an excellent cast of colourful characters. Another reader, a beautiful Other Reader, Ludmilla, as well as her sister Lotaria, Professor Uzii Tuzii of the last living-dead language Cimmerian (or was it Cimbrian?), the elderly Mr Cavadagna of the publishing house, the artist Ernio who has taught himself how not to read, the tormented Irish author Sinnas Flannery, and perhaps, behind it all, Ermes Marana — the adventurer-translator who knows not a word of the texts he seeks to translate but who, with prophetic zeal -–dreams of proliferating a world of literature inseparable from Apocrypha and illusion.
[Outside The Town of Malbork]
Such were the many elements of the novel which drew you in — which made it one of those novels which you can proudly say you devoured voraciously and finished in only a handful of days.
And then once you had finished it, you made the terrible mistake of saying to a group of friends, “I’ve just finished this excellent book which I unconditionally
recommend, so much so, in fact, that I’m thinking of writing a Woroni review of it.”
[3]
So, you are to write a review — but how? You’ve never written a review of a book before, so perhaps it would be best to consult with those who have. You decide to turn to academia. Surely, you say to yourself, surely someone will have articulated in perfect English precisely what I felt when I read this novel!
But this turn to academia, almost as suddenly as it was taken, you realise was foolhardy — was undoubtedly a misstep. Why? Because as you read through one article, and then through another, you fail to understand what anything anyone is saying means at all!
Take this passage for example:
“Underlying Calvino’s metafictional agenda is faith in a literary cognitive potency, which thrives regardless of epochal interrogation of the written word’s subject-object terminal nexus. Calvino’s deposition of modernity’s proclivity unto scepticism and silence in favour of a neohumanistic, voluptuous array of writing’s signatures engages multiplicity and density in intellectual human activity, one which strives for a complete vision of existence as an aesthetic being.”
[On the Steep Slope]
It’s hopeless! It’s no good! Certainly, some out there can decipher the intended meaning to be communicated, but you are certainly not one of them.
However, you seem to remember having had grand ideas as you read the novel, so perhaps all you need to do is reread, and as you are rereading and re-remembering those ideas, you need only write them down so as to re-re-remember them.
[4]
And so you reread. And what ideas do you find?
Lotaria invents a machine which allows her to ‘read’ a novel by looking at the frequency of words. This reading of Lotaria’s is denounced by Calvino, who terms it pseudo-scientific, ideologically motivated, devalued, and degenerate. But how much in common does Lotaria’s way of reading have with the way that so many of us do our weekly readings? What proximal relationship exists between Lotaria’s machine and those LLM systems that probabilistically guess which word comes after the next?
And what about Ludmilla’s reading? That reading which Calvino presents as the most pure, ideal and perfect — a reading which is interesting! This beautiful Other Reader reads because she likes to read and nothing else!
What of the Reader’s reading? Aha — now you appear to have it! The Reader strives for the impossible — the complete understanding, that satisfying ending which imposes upon the multiplicity of novels before him something generic and intelligible.
Perhaps this is your angle?
Textual misreading is bad living. To read badly is to live badly is to interpret incorrectly, which is to enforce a single rule of interpretation that governs all that is.
You could write about how Calvino refrains from pursuing the one exhaustive book, how he instead tends towards partial images inscribed at the end of increasingly concentric circles.
There is not one story to be written, but many.
Do not endeavour to write the one, true book — for any such attempt entails only failure and frustration. Instead, write many books, and look to pursue the whole through its parts ad infinitum — in the style of Calvino, Flannery and Marana.
You collapse into your own hands. After poring over the chapters and text of the book, you have very quickly found yourself encumbered with too many ideas. But isn’t this always the case? Either nothing at all or everything all at once!
[Around an Empty Grave]
You once more despair. This is no good! How are you to write a review of a novel such as this? A novel which itself contains ten other novels? A novel which you enjoyed with all of your heart, a novel with so very much to say about reading and readers, about books and authors, about means and ends and revolutions and lovers and metaphysics and telephones and….
And despite all of this you don’t even know where to begin.
You turn inwards — you focus on a single thing — just one:
Why am I writing this? What is it that I am trying to say by writing this?
[5]
You are about to finish reading a review of Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. The novel is one that I very much enjoyed reading. In addition, it says a lot about so many things which matter so very much to so very many of us.
If you have the time, and I really implore you to find it if you don’t — please read Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.
AWhy Anora’s Critical Success Worries Me
By Bella Wang
fter watching a Brooklyn sex worker’s dreams of wealth be ruined by her debauched husband and his callous, Russian oligarchy family, I was (quietly) begging in the cinema for the film not to end with our heroine throwing herself into another man’s arms. One minute later, the film Anora ends with protagonist Ani crying in the arms of a man she met the day before, when he was attempting to violently arrest her. As closing credits appear on the screen alongside Ani’s cry, I was once again disappointed at Hollywood’s attempt to change patriarchal conventions of the industry.
Inheriting the director, Sean Baker’s, cinematic style and subject matter from previous films, Anora follows a typical “Cinderella meets reality” narrative without many plot twists: Ani, a sex worker from a Brooklyn strip club, is asked by her rich, Russian oligarch client, Ivan, to marry him. Ani accepts, quits her job at the strip club and moves into Ivan’s mansion. A week later, Ivan’s Armenian godfather, Toros, breaks into their mansion with his henchmen, violently arresting Ani while Ivan runs away. Toros forces Ani to annul their marriage, as ordered by Ivan’s parents. Ani initially rejects Toros’ request, but has to agree to the annulment after Ivan’s parents threaten to ruin her. After she signs the annulment, one of Toros’s henchmen, Igor, sends Ani back to the mansion to pack up, where he learns that “Anora” is Ani’s real name. Igor drives Ani back to her apartment the next morning, returning her wedding ring. Ani initiates sex with Igor at his car, but stops when
Igor tries to kiss her. The film comes to an end with Ani breaking down and sobbing in Igor’s arms.
After watching the film, I have to admit that Sean Baker was successful in commercialising his movie. His dialogues are quirky and innovative, keeping the audience engaged. He put a spotlight on the sex worker community. When facing her in-laws’ harassment, Ani’s resilience and bravery makes her character shine. I also adored Mikey Madison’s performance of Ani. If Anora’s success had been like other commercial successes, receiving an average 5/10 rating, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. What has concerned me so much is the critical acclaim the film has received. From winning Palme d’Or last year to four Oscars in March, the film industry seems to be persuading audiences that Anora is a faithful and accurate representation of females in marginalised communities. This time, I have to question the critics’ choices.
Anora attempts to represent female power, and succeeds in some parts of the film. However, the film overall is eclipsed by patriarchal bias. The “male gaze” of the film’s portrayal of sex workers constantly made me uncomfortable. I doubt that such portrayal actually helps to normalise sex work, rather than just deepening the stereotypes. Additionally, the director’s patriarchal bias prevents him from creating a genuine depiction of the heroine’s feminine power. The heroine’s unrealistic innocence and obliviousness only comply with patriarchal conventions.
The crew of Anora repeatedly claimed that their filming of sex workers was to support and advocate the normalisation of sex work. “I will always be a friend and an ally,” said Mikey Madison in her Oscars acceptance speech. But the movie’s use of the male gaze damages the potential of this allyship.
What is the male gaze, exactly? This term was introduced by British feminist and film theorist Laura Mulvey to describe the exhibitionist way women are displayed in movies, often with an appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact, and usually in direct scopophilic contact with male spectators. Mulvey argues that the male gaze constructs the traditional “woman as image, man as bearer of look” gender binary in film, which results in two-dimensional, idealised female characters.
Male gaze is a recurring issue in Anora. Thus I question if, under these circumstances, the film could ever truly help to normalise the sex worker community. The shots in Ani’s workplace focus only on the sex workers’ actions and reactions. The director uses a variety of closeup shots of the sex workers’ facial expressions, and high angle shots to amplify the visual impact of the sex workers moving around the space. Accompanied by the strip club lighting, these shots fully immerse the audience into the
experience of observing their work.
What spectators would benefit the most from this experience? The male audience who long for erotic pleasure in front of the screen. The close-up shots of the sex workers’ body parts and their actions feed the male gaze an ideal sexual image. As a woman, I don’t feel I benefited from any of these shots. I agree with Laura Mulvey here, that the male gaze phenomenon allows for possession of women by male spectators, as in Anora it feels like the sex workers are controlled by their male clients. Therefore, I don’t think the scenes of sex workers in Anora really empowered this community, and I’m worried the shots would strengthen the stereotypical images of them. As a woman I can appreciate Anora’s intended allyship for sex work’s normalisation, but I think there is a better way to advocate for it than what the film presented.
Besides, I’ve always felt iffy about Hollywood’s obsession with sex workers. In the Oscar’s history, 16 best actress or best supporting actress awards have been given to women playing sex workers, making it the most popular role for actresses to be recognised in. Some of these characters did advocate for unfair treatments of this occasion, but majority of them, Anora included, made sex work look fun and lucrative. Perhaps it can be, but we cannot ignore the oppressive nature of this industry, coupled with the fact that many women may not enter this industry voluntarily, but instead may be forced to by desperate life situations.
“Is it that they are considered courageous? Or are some male filmmakers so unfamiliar with women from other walks of life, that their most deeply considered female characters, tend to be on the game?”
The Guardian’s Anne Billson asked some essential questions here, but Mikey Madison’s win showed the Academy has no intention of changing their favoritism towards actresses who portray sex workers. Aside from the portrayal of sex workers, I also distrust some aspects of Anora’s depiction of the heroine Ani. Occasionally her strength and resilience shine through, but the strong, intentional emphasis on her innocence and naivety drives home the patriarchal depiction of her femininity.
The story speaks for itself, asking audiences to accept that an experienced sex worker would believe in her rich customer’s wish to marry her after a mere week of her “service”, but her dream of marrying into wealth was destroyed by her husband’s parents. Not only have I read many similar stories on Wattpad or Webcom, but I do not believe an experienced sex worker would so easily trust in high society’s fairytales, and would be even less likely to enter a marriage without a prenuptial agreement. This suggests that when a man writes your story, the heroine has to be fierce and sexy to seduce men, and also stay naïve and empty-minded to comply with the patriarchal idea of females. While our heroine survived attacks from violent Russian henchmen and fought back against harassment from her husband’s family alone, ultimately, her heart had to be healed by a man who spoke for her and cared for her. The movie just had to end with the heroine crying in the man’s arms. This seems unreal to me, and unnecessary.
“In the male-directed movies, women often need saving in high-stakes situations, and
are often manipulated by men,” states American film critic Ian Kunsey. The unnecessary ending of Anora demonstrates the director’s patriarchal control of his female-oriented plot. It irritated me to watch Ani, who should be completely capable of driving the plot alone and owning a more powerful ending, be constantly devalued and undermined. I also disliked the idea that women need another man’s love to fight a toxic relationship. I think Sean Baker wanted to demonstrate some female power through Ani, but patriarchal arrogance prevented him from an authentic presentation of female qualities, as that would threaten his masculine control. Anora wants to tell a female story, but it still fails to fully empower women.
The industry needs better films than this. But Anora’s critical success also makes me think that maybe the film industry really has not seen a better, more genuine depiction of female identity for a while. Maybe the academy compliments Anora, because they have the same patriarchal bias as Anora showed. Even today, the majority of films are directed and produced by men, and to completely erase patriarchal bias and overturn stereotypes is hard for any man to achieve. So, the best way to create genuine depictions of females in film, whether they are sex workers or not, is to let women speak for themselves. But would the industry’s hundred-year-old patriarchal convention ever allow this?
In the aftermath of the Federal elections, the recently re-elected Labor government has increased international student subclass 500 student visa fees to $2,000, just months after the last hike in July 2024 that saw fees skyrocket from $700 to $1,400. The new $2,000 visa fee is just the latest in a trend of an increasingly transactional educational experience that treats international students as cash cows. For many of my international student friends and peers, watching this policy unfold has been quite distressing. Many of us are already struggling to get by, working multiple jobs within our limited 48 hours a fortnight working restrictions, oftentimes in casual workplaces where exploitation is rampant, and cutting corners in our accommodation, food, and entertainment, at the detriment of our university education. Every university student is doing it tough in the midst of the cost of living crisis, but it is undeniable that marginalised peoples such as international students are affected much more than others.
To be an international student in Australia is to seek opportunity, but simultaneously experience being a single cog in a $52 billion ‘international education’ industry, disproportionately facing the burden of an increasingly transactional education experience with both visa and university fees rising. There is no attempt to even mask this fee rise as good for students. In fact, we’ve seen services in our university decline, such as the now heavily understaffed ANU Medical Centre (the only one covered by the ANU’s recommended OSHC insurance policy), course cuts, and increasing class sizes.
On a national level, international students are blamed for migration, housing issues, inflation, and instability in universities. The international education business in this country has continued its exploitative financial growth for so long that it’s become a major export; so much so that it couldn’t be further detached from its heart of international students and their exploitation.
The $2,000 visa fee increase by the Labor government, alongside floating bringing back the international student caps legislation, is a slap in the face to the wellbeing of international students. These are the same students who have
All is Fair in Exploiting International Students and War
By Seungbin Kang
been unfairly vilified by political parties, the media, and racists in Australian society; who before, during, and after the Federal election seemed to punch down on the exploitation of international students in a way to win the race to the bottom in international student rights.
The Federal Government was elected on a mandate to take some action on student welfare, healthcare, the climate crisis, housing affordability, and to make our society as a whole more equitable. Instead, we’ve seen disastrous decisions by an elected Labor government, such as approving the extension of Woodside’s NorthWest Shelf Gas Project, contrary to the views of many who have voted for the party.
We should, however, make no mistake to think the Liberal party is any friend of international students or tertiary education, with Peter Dutton last year describing international students as ‘modern day boat arrivals.’
In their doomed election campaign, they pledged a new higher visa fees, a $2,500 university transfer fee, and a review into temporary graduate visas that allow international graduates to live, study, and work in Australia after they’ve completed their studies.
All this was pledged to address the “misuse” of the visa as “a way to gain access to the Australian labour market and as a pathway to permanent migration.”
Furthermore, the Coalition’s election promises brought a continuation of the same Labor policy to cap enrollments to 240,000 international students, 30,000 less than Labor’s policy.
Labor is undeniably complicit in this toxic discourse, more than doubling visa fees from $700 to $1,600 in their first term, making it the most expensive student visa in the world by far. The government has already reduced the number of years former students can stay on temporary graduate visas, and has reduced the age limit to be granted a visa from 50 to 35. The Labor government has previously attempted to cap international student numbers to 270,000, despite widespread opposition to the policy from international student advocacy groups, the National Tertiary Education Union, and other policy groups.
At a time when international students were looking for greater support, all Labor minister Katy Gallagher had to say in response to the Coalition was that “the government also wanted to reduce the number of international students,” and Peter Dutton was proposing a version of Labor’s policy.
To be an international student in the midst of this discourse is to be subject to discrimination designed to create fear and division towards our society’s most vulnerable are commonplace and we’re just told to ‘deal with it.’
The argument that international students are causing the housing crisis is an absolute farce
that is detached from the lived experiences of international students.
A recent study conducted by the Property Council of Australia finds just 4 percent of Australian rentals were taken up by international students (compared to the 6 percent taken up by domestic students). Moreover, it found that median weekly rent increased by 30 percent while student visa arrivals decreased by 13 percent in the four years between 2019 and 2023.
Further research by the University of South Australia, published in January, also found there was actually no direct correlation between the cost of rent in Australia and international student numbers. The reality however is that international students are less competitive in the rental market, not having local rent history and credit and therefore having to choose exorbitantly expensive student accommodation. Last year at the ANU, rent in student accommodation increased by up to 8 percent. Many international students are now priced out of student accommodation and forced into poor living conditions through practices such as “hotbedding:” students sharing a bed in shifts to be able to afford rent. For many of us, this is being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
We’ve seen an alarming increase of racism directed particularly at international students. This is both in the digital space, with social media accounts showing algorithmic caricatures of migrant communities, or in physical spaces where walking in the streets of cities can get you at least an odd look, or more frighteningly an insult and slur or threat of violence in your direction.
This anti-immigrant sentiment intertwines with cost of living pressures and is amplified by the voices of political leaders. Why is it when international students commit their personal and family’s finances to study abroad, while also working, that political leaders choose to punch down on them? This racism perpetuated at the top makes our existence a struggle of dignity.We should be above that and call out the genuinely harmful effects this rhetoric has on people.
International students don’t want to be political footballs. If anything, the discourse has made people feel unwelcomed, confused, and threatened. Many of us come to this country to seek opportunity, and in response to our commitment, we are exploited and treated as cash cows.
But it’s not just that, international students want more than just not being political footballs, but rather to be seen and heard. Beyond society-wide cost of living pressures, international students pay upfront 4x the fees to our domestic counterparts without access to HELP loans, or any sort of welfare support. Shockingly, in some states, international students don’t even have access to public transport concessions, a basic concession offered to every other student..
A world is possible where we cut through all the noise in this toxic political discourse and fight for a world where international students are treated with dignity and fairness. We need to call for an end to the racist political discourse towards international students, and for the onus to be placed on the government to address core issues behind housing unaffordability and university education in this country.
Successive governments have refused to tackle tax reform and supply of public housing, prioritising landlords’ profit overhousing affordability. Universities embrace a corporate model of business, focusing on growth over teaching and research, and are built on the unstable foundations of international students and an ever-decreasing share of the pie from government funding.
Photography by Joseph Mann
Here at ANU, we’re witnessing an unprecedented level of staff and service cuts due to mismanagement by the university executive. With reduced staffing in the Medical Centre, and cuts of over 1,000 staff from our university, which leads to worse learning conditions, ultimately it is the students and staff that make this university community run who pay the price. We need to see governments take stronger action on raising the standard of housing and education in this country, and to reject this race to the bottom when it comes to migration.
Here in the ANU International Students’ Department, an autonomous collective of ANUSA, we are undertaking projects in semester two to advocate for the collective welfare of international students. This includes campaigning for more doctors and a free medical practice in the ANU Medical Centre, running an international students survey to amplify the voices of our peers on campus, and establishing a national international students representative body.
Alongside this, we organise community events, and other advocacy projects such as an international students publication and graduations advocacy. We are always looking for more international students to be part of our collective and domestic students to support our work. The struggle for international students and our rights is part of a broader struggle for justice in migrant communities, equity in education, and a fairer society for us all.
We must condemn attempts to exploit international students whenever they occur, whether that is more fees for less services, migration policies masquerading as education policy, or the continued cash cow extraction of our peers.
After all, for our major parties, all is fair in exploiting international students and war.
Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Photography by Henry Carls
Page 61. Woroni - Syncope - 2025
Art by Jalen Green
The AI-Generated Syncope of Education
By Kaz Marsden
“Evolve or die.”
This was a quote from solicitor Kelly Waring in a recent interview with the ABC, in which Waring emphasises how her use of artificial intelligence has benefited her litigation work: “This is not a case of whether we want to fight it or not, it’s a matter of evolve or die.”
AI has already left a stain on the modern workplace. As I continued to read the ABC’s article, I discovered that digital automation, or the use of AI, has significantly disrupted entry-level tasks for lawyers. This disruption has resulted in less work available for law graduates and stronger competition for entry-level lawyers across Australia, meaning that future law graduates will have to meet higher expectations to secure their first job.
This correlates with a recent Oxford Economics study which discovered that the unemployment rate among graduates is higher than expected at 5.8 percent, and even higher in technical fields. This is due to AI displacing entry-level tasks and employers replacing traditional graduate roles with AI, resulting in fewer available graduate jobs across all industries. The New York Times has already referred to this phenomenon as the “AI Job Apocalypse”.
As I read this ABC article, I was jolted back to secondary school when we wondered, ten years from then: will robots replace my future career? Our teachers showed us a website that would calculate an estimated percentage of how likely this was, and fortunately, no one seemed to generate a high percentage. Our teachers reassured us that our future jobs wouldn’t be impacted by digital automation during our working lives. Yet here we are, not yet in our careers, and jobs are already disappearing.
The worst part is, the Australian education system is evolving just as rapidly as the workforce in response to AI.
In a tertiary educational institution, AI infects almost every aspect of student life. Despite every one of my course convenors this semester trying their best to convince us that ChatGPT is unreliable and breaches academic integrity, it is without a doubt that many students will utilise this software, or other forms of AI, to assist them in completing their coursework. On the other hand, many course convenors have already integrated AI into their course as mandatory assessments or use AI to grade student work. Some course convenors encourage students to use ChatGPT in their courses, both as a convenience and as a learning tool.
Through various emails sent to ANU students, I became aware of the growing popularity of ChatGPT and was informed that ANU was developing policies to regulate AI use in an academic setting. But instead of heeding the warning, this awareness sparked a curiosity amongst university students: what is AI capable of academically?
This was two years ago, and since then, students across the globe have discovered that AI can be a fantastic study buddy. Today, ChatGPT can summarise readings, generate tutorial discussion ideas, instantly answer quiz questions, and even write your entire essay for you. AI in productivity software, such as Notion, can organise your calendar, analyse images to improve your drawings, and instantly translate text between various languages for you. Grammarly AI can even filter your university email inbox, so you only see ‘important’ emails, and it can mimic your personal writing style to write responses to your tutor’s emails before you’ve even read them.
So, what’s left for tertiary students to do? Digital automation can benefit students to an extent, but the capabilities and use of AI have extended far beyond convenience and easing our workloads. Now, AI learns for you. ChatGPT is seemingly as capable of graduating with a bachelor’s degree as we are, so it’s no surprise that digital automation has already displaced traditional graduate jobs, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
While the entry-level job market is rapidly diminishing, AI is also diminishing our cognitive performance.
A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared the brain scans of students who use ChatGPT versus students who don’t. In this study they found that students using ChatGPT had a 47 percent drop in neural engagement, resulting in a significantly lowered cognitive performance. Even after these students stopped using ChatGPT, their performance remained much lower than the students who never used AI. MIT described this reduced cognitive performance as worse than just dependency — it is an overall cognitive weakening. The only exception in this study was students who only used AI to enhance their work after they completed it themselves; these students maintained the best memory and brain activity.
I think that this proves that AI doesn’t assist learning, but rather reduces time spent learning, resulting in a weakened ability and willingness to learn when AI isn’t providing immediate answers. Instead of learning course content, we’re teaching it to AI, whilst unlearning how to learn ourselves.
While I personally refuse to use AI as a part of my studies, I have previously undertaken at least one course at ANU which involved
using ChatGPT as an assignment. We were instructed to read AI responses to prompts, critique them and note the ‘problems’ in the response, then develop an improved prompt and critique the new response. I think the intention was to teach us human anatomy by finding mistakes in AI responses and proving to us that ChatGPT is unreliable.
However, I think I learned more about how to alter text prompts until ChatGPT provides a flawless answer.
I wonder if this was the real idea behind the assignment — perhaps the course convenors were inspiring us to evolve for the modern workplace. But in reality, they only taught medical science students how to cheat on future assignments, and introduced many students to the mind-numbing skill of using AI to ‘learn’. I doubt that this has been the only course at ANU to implement similar assessments or learning activities with potentially unintentional and detrimental effects.
With lowered neural connections and reduced memories, students who use ChatGPT are inevitably developing an addictive dependency on AI to support their studies. According to New York Magazine, just two months after ChatGPT was first launched in 2022, 90 percent of college students in the USA used the software to assist them with assignments. Similarly, a survey published in the UK this year states that 92 percent of students utilise some form of AI, and almost one in five students in this survey admitted to including unedited AI-generated text in their assignments. This means that, this year, approximately 92 percent of students could experience a 47 percent drop in neural engagement, amongst other aspects of cognitive decline. I assume the statistics would be similar in Australia.
While cognitive decline is a serious issue, the spread of incorrect information by AI is also a concern when utilising AI as a learning tool. Many AI software platforms, such as ChatGPT, do not research or fact-check information. Instead, ChatGPT is a language predictor. The AI software ‘reads’ a selection of content to become familiar with its wording, then regurgitates it uniquely by predicting the next ‘correct’ word. AI language predictors have no awareness of accuracy. As a result, AI-generated text often includes false information, or is simply just ‘wrong’. However, as students we often miss the flaws in AIgenerated texts because we haven’t learned the correct information yet, resulting in us learning false or misleading ‘facts’.
Many of my course convenors this semester have spoken to their students about the unreliability of AI, as well as how we are unlearning how to learn by relying on AI assistance, but the convenience of speed and allure of reduced mental effort is evidently too tempting for overwhelmed students.
I am horrified to think of the impact AI will have on our generations’ brains, and how this will change education, the workforce, and society on a global scale. I hope that this use of AI in education will be some form of ‘syncope’, assuming that students will ‘wake
up’ and recognise how detrimental AI is for our brains and education, and resume the passion for learning that led us to university in the first place.
In the meantime, ANU has not yet developed a policy for AI use. Instead, ANU has a set of guidelines, the same as other Go8 universities, on how to use AI in academic work without breaching academic integrity. Instead of warning students against software such as ChatGPT, ANU has chosen to encourage its use to enhance learning experiences and aid the development of ethical AI skills. Whilst we can all agree that AI will inevitably be a part of our futures, should AI use be encouraged as a part of our studies? Considering how AI lowers our cognitive performances and reduces our ability and willingness to learn, I think Go8 universities should reconsider their current stance and restrict AI use in academia. The benefits of AI are far outweighed by its disadvantages for the student brain.
Regardless of ANU’s policies and guidelines, or advice from course convenors and other academics and teachers, or the opinions of other students, I think there is at least one piece of advice that we can all agree on: Use your brain.
