2019 Edition 3 by Farrago Magazine

Art by Timothy Wood Contribute to Farrago by emailing us at editors@farragomagazine.com! An email from a new contributor is like a big mug of tea on a chilly autumn day ~ invigorating and delicious.

CONTENTS

46 50

4/ News in Brief 5/ Calendar 8/ Bike (Un)Co-operative 9/ Werribee Wage Gap 10/ Casual Work 12/ Climate Strike Photography 14/ School Strike 4 Climate 16/ Federal Budget Breakdown 18/ Hurdles for Students with Disabilities 20/ Mad About Inequality 22/ Trendy Equality 23/ Satire 24/ Office Bearer Reports

28/ Double Take 29/ An Interview With Nobody 31/ Diaspora Dilemmas cw/ racism 34/ How to Make Bread 37/ Let Heroes Feel 38/ Living Well When You’re Unwell 39/ Regulating Language 42/ What Happens Next? cw/ homophobia 43/ Kiss and Tell cw/ racism, Islamophobia 44/ Mythologies

32/ 40/ 46/ 47/ 48/

D.I.Y. Monsters by Jordan Sibley Photography by Kespa Katsuk Flash Fiction Paint to Poetry cw/ anxiety Broken Lighter, Dead Bird cw/ blood,

drug use

50/ 十二秒记忆飞逝 52/ Aftermath 53/ guts and gutters 54/ A Thing with Feathers 57/ Detik-Detik cw/ implications of death 58/ Everywhere at the End of Time 60/ The Fairytale Gazette 61/ Schnitzel 62/ The Remarkable Quests of Raddish and Quill 64/ For and Against

COVER ART BY CHARANJA THAVENDRAN /

COLLECTIVE

THE FARRAGO TEAM

Contributors Quentin Bell Nurul Juhria Binte Kamal Mengjie Cai Jennifer Chance Vanessa Jo Di Natale Natalie Fong Chun Min Alison Ford Ailish Hallinan Megan Hanrahan Wing Kuang Jasper MacCuspie Tyler McRae Nicole Moore Luke Patitsas Marta Practicò Bella Ruskin Katherine Scott Morgan-Lee Snell Teo Jing Xuan Lucy Turton Emily White Fangying Zhou

Asher Harrington Ashleigh Hastings Stephanie Kee Tiia Kelly Wing Kuang Finbar MacDonald Marilla Marshall Sloan Amber Meyer April Nougher-Dayhew Ella Patrick Sarah Peters Yiani Petroulias Romios Bella Ruskin Chiara Situmorang Carly Stone Greer Sutherland Alison Tealby Teo Jing Xuan Taylor Thomas Finley Tobin Tharidi Walimunige Sophie Wallace Charlotte Waters Reina Wibawa Caitlin Wilson Lindsay Wong Freyja Wright Catron Allen Xiao Claudia Young

Subeditors Ruby Adams Vanshika Agarwal Daniel Beratis Clare Bullard Jessica Chen Bridie Cochrane-Holley Claire Thao Duong Nick Fleming Emma Hardy

Graphics Jennifer Luki Andreany Cathy Chen Bethany Cherry Van Ahn Chu Sonia Jude Kespa Katsuk Reann Lin Hayley May Amani Nasarudin

Editors Katie Doherty Carolyn Huane Ruby Perryman Stephanie Zhang

/ PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUCY WILLIAMS

Stephanie Nestor Monique O’Rafferty Miranda Park Anjana Ram Jordan Sibley Morgan-Lee Snell T-Dog eXtreme Charanja Thavendran Tiffany Widjaja Lucy Williams Timothy Wood Raymond Wu Yushi Wu Yi Xia Lizzy Yu Columnists Conor Clements Creative Literature and Writing Society (CLAWS) Jocelyn Deane Alison Ford Kaavya Jha Madeleine Johnson Sarah Peters Veera Ramayah Luke Rotella A’bidah Zaid Shirbeeni Iris Shuttleworth Lou Winslow

Beth Seychell Jessica Seychell Christina Smith Bella Suckling Tiffany Tang Cover Charanja Thavendran

Farrago is the student magazine of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU), produced by the media department. Farrago is published by the general secretary of UMSU, Reece Moir. The views

Social Media Sachetha Bamunusinghe Ashleigh Hastings Jaya Abela Chase Haslingden Siohan Honan Teresa Lin Bec Meier Sarah Peters

expressed herein are not necessarily the views of UMSU. the printers or the editors. Farrago is printed by Printgraphics, care of bald angel Nigel Quirk. All writing and artwork remains the property of the creators. This collection is © Farrago and Farrago reserves the right to republish material in any format.

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Content Warning:

COLLECTIVE

EDITORIAL We acknowledge Farrago is created on land that always has and always will belong to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. This land is stolen and sovereignty was never ceded, and no acknowledgement is enough to give it back. We pay our respects to elders past, present and future, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people who have been sharing stories and making art longer than anyone in the world. We thank readers for picking up our magazine and listening to what we have to say, and urge you to actively seek out, and listen to, the people whose land you exist on too. So here she is, lucky number three! Since you last heard from us, we’ve been enjoying the cosy weather, and using it as an excuse to wear sweaters and conspire in the Rowdy, as pictured above (our very shiny faces also pictured). We strode in to take the pic holding empty mugs as props, and a very distressed librarian exclaimed “no food or drink!” We’re extremely sorry for scaring her. Now the start-of-semester dust has settled and we’re all neck deep in assignments, it seems like a good time to reflect on where we are on our editorial journey. We became the Farrago editorial team late last year and since then have worked every single day putting out this big baby each month. It’s been a wild ride, but we adore Farrago, and are so grateful for the opportunity to put important pictures and words into print and distribute them across campus. We believe in nothing more than the power of media, and are so grateful to have access to a platform on which we can try our hardest to celebrate art and create change. As the editorial team, we are technically volunteers, but it’s essentially a full-time job. In the interest of transparency, we are reimbursed about 25.5k for the year we are in this position, which equates to about $480 per week before tax. We’re all students, some of us have casual jobs to pay the bills, and the fact remains that the poverty line sits at $433 per week. This is not to undermine what an incredible privilege it is to be here, but we wanted to shine some light on issues of accessibility in terms of who can afford to dedicate so much time to run the magazine. It’s a massive job, and we’re learning and growing every edition, every day even. Open up the news section this edition if you want to learn more about the climate strike rally from Lucy Turton (pg. 12-15) or read highlights from the federal budget from Megan Hanrahan, Wing Kuang, and Steph on pages 16-17. In nonfiction, have a read of Jemma Payne’s critique of one-way interviews on page 29, or learn how to make bread with Quentin Bell (pg. 34-35). Admire Jennifer Chance’s gorgeous multi-lingual poem ‘Detik-Detik’, and equally as gorgeous accompanying artwork by Amani Nasarudin, on pages 56-57, and flick to pages 40-41 to feast your eyes on Kespa Katsuk’s photography spread. We’re so excited for you to experience all of the incredible work our contributors have given us. Stay warm, Ruby, Katie, Caro and Steph

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUCY WILLIAMS /

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Content Warning:

NEWS IN BRIEF CHANGE THE RULES WHAT’S THE (DARK) MATTER? The University has received $5 million funding from the federal government to build an underground physics lab in Stawell. It will be the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere and will allow research to be conducted in a controlled environment. Scientists are hoping the lab will help in their search for dark matter.

The annual Change the Rules rally occured 10 April this year, attended by over 100,000 people, including Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and a University of Melbourne contingent of around 30 students. Protesters led by the NTEU rally each year for better working conditions and higher wages for workers. Our contingent protested for secure work, reversing penalty rate cuts and international students’ rights.

SES RESULTS

Results of the Student Experience Survey for 2018 have been published. Most undergraduate and graduate survey participates rated their overal education experience favourably, but the University of Melbourne did not fare as well as the average experience across all universities. For undergraduate students, the University scored only 58.8 per cent in learner engagement and 63.8 per cent in student support, but 77.9 per cent of students found their educational experience to be positive. For postgraduate students, these areas were more positive, but overall experience scored lower at 76.9 per cent. Across all universities, overall experiences were more positive.

HELLO BYELECTIONS After a few tumultuous months, by-elections are finally upon us. UMSU is holding a by-election for the following positions: Education Officer (Academic Affairs), Indigenous Officer, Queer Officer, and Burnley Committee. Nominations close 24 April and voting will occur 6-8 May. For more information, visit: https://umsu. unimelb.edu.au/ getinvolved/elections/

TO COURT!

CLIMATE HEALTH

University of Melbourne researchers have published one of the first accounts linking mental health and climate change.

The NTEU has taken the University of Wollongong to Supreme Court over negotiations in fast-tracking the controversial ‘Western Civilisation’ course at the Ramsay Centre.

FREE SPEECH Former High Court Chief Justice Robert French AC released his report for the review into freedom of speech on campus, finding that there is no campus free speech crisis.

CHEATERS BEWARE

Under new legislation Education Minister Dan Tehan wants to introduce in a future Morrison government, anyone who helps students cheap will face punishment and possible imprisonment.

CANCERED OUT

The University has received a $5.4 million funding boost from the Federal Government and the Movember Foundation to research prostate cancer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

ANON REGISTER

Chancellery has launched an initiative with the wish to “end bullying, harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination within this community” in the form of an Anonymous Register for Inappropriate Behaviour. The register is intended to inform the Unviersity of the scope of inappropriate behaviour and will not lead to any investigations into individuals.

/ ART BY SOMEONE SOMEONE

FEDERAL ELECTION CALLED On 11 April, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the election for 18 May. Parliament is prorogued for the coming weeks. Key seats to watch in the state of Victoria include Cooper, Corangamite, Dunkley, Higgins, Wills, Kooyong, and Isaacs. Follow Farrago’s coverage on Facebook and Twitter as we get closer to election night. If you are an Australian citizen aged 18 years or older, you are required to vote in the federal election. To enroll online, visit: https://aec.gov.au/

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CALENDAR : MAY WEEK 8

WEEK 9

WEEK 10

WEEK 11

MONDAY 29 APR

MONDAY 6 MAY

MONDAY 13 MAY

MONDAY 20 MAY

12pm: Support collective 2pm: Ace+Aro collective

TUESDAY 30 APR 12pm: WoC collective 1pm: Trans collective 1pm: Enviro collective 1pm: On Track & Syndicate 5pm: Welfare—Yoga

12pm: Support collective 2pm: Ace+Aro collective UMSU By-Election

TUESDAY 7 MAY 12pm: WoC collective 1pm: Trans collective 1pm: Enviro collective 1pm: On Track & Syndicate 5pm: Welfare—Yoga

12pm: Support collective 2pm: Ace+Aro collective 6:30pm: PoC film screening Mudfest artist applications close!

12pm: Support collective 2pm: Ace+Aro collective 6:30pm: PoC film screening

TUESDAY 14 MAY

TUESDAY 21 MAY

12pm: WoC collective 1pm: Trans collective 1pm: Enviro collective 1pm: On Track & Syndicate 5pm: Welfare—Yoga

UMSU By-Election

WEDNESDAY 1 MAY

WEDNESDAY 8 MAY

WEDNESDAY 15 MAY

WEDNESDAY 22 MAY

12pm: Women’s collective 12pm: Welfare collective 1pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy Laughter 1pm: PoC collective 1pm: Queer Lunch

12pm: Women’s collective 12pm: Welfare collective 1pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy Laughter 1pm: PoC collective 1pm: Queer Lunch UMSU International Annual General Election

12pm: Women’s collective 12pm: Welfare collective 1pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy Laughter 1pm: PoC collective 1pm: Queer Lunch

THURSDAY 2 MAY

THURSDAY 9 MAY

THURSDAY 16 MAY

THURSDAY 23 MAY

12pm: Queer PoC collective 1pm: PoC in media collective 4pm: Fitness class 5pm: G&Ts with the LGBTs

5:15pm: Meditation UMSU International Annual General Election

FRIDAY 3 MAY

FRIDAY 10 MAY

12pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy Writing

Creative Arts Grants Applications close

UMSU International Annual General Electionj

12pm: QPoC collective 1pm: PoC in media collective 1pm: Southbank PoC collective 4pm: Fitness class 5pm: G&Ts with the LGBTs 5:15pm: Meditation

5:15pm: Meditation

FRIDAY 17 MAY

FRIDAY 24 MAY

12pm: Mudcrabs Rowdy Writing

/ ART BY SOMEONE SOMEONE7

/ ART BY MIRANDA PARK

Has something happened on campus thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s made you mad? Did you hear about something dodgy? Or just have a story you think Farrago readers should know about? We want to bring you the best news possible. Let us know if you see or hear something you feel we should look into by emailing us at editors@farragomagazine.com or stephanie@farragomagazine.com. Confidentiality will always be upheld. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be afraid to speak up.

ART BY CATHY CHEN /

NEWS

BIKE (UN)CO-OPERATIVE AILISH HALLINAN CATCHES YOU UP

espite the new cohort of office bearers (OBs), the Parkville campus’ bike co-op has yet to reopen. Over a year and a half since its supposed relocation, both current and previous Environment OBs allege University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) bureaucracy is behind the delay. The co-op was originally housed in the John Smyth Building, but was forced to move after the building was demolished in late 2017. The co-op was allocated a space on the ground floor of Union House, which has still not been set up. A number of signs reading “Bike Co-Op Opening Soon” have been hung around the space since February 2018, but an official date for such opening has yet to be confirmed. This year’s Environment OB Will Ross told Farrago last month, “It’s looking like we might have the co-op running by the start of Semester 1 [2019].” However, the bike coop space in Union House remains unchanged. “O-Week has definitely [put] it on the backburner,” Ross since told Farrago. However, he remains confident the reopening is going to happen in the near future. 2018 Environment OBs Callum Simpson and Lucy Turton blame UMSU bureaucracy for the bike co-op’s delayed reopening. When they came into office, the pair claim to have been told by both UMSU staff and their predecessor Kate Denver-Stevenson that UMSU would assume responsibility for funding the co-op. As a result, Simpson and Turton did not allocate the co-op money in their Enviro budget for the year. However, when the 2018 UMSU budget was announced, no provision for the bike co-op had been included. Without funding, little progress was able to be made on the reopening. Turton claim both she and Simpson continually approached UMSU staff, but were constantly told they were too busy setting up the Ida Bar or just waiting on one more thing to get the co-op up and running again. Farrago reached out to UMSU staff involved with the re-opening of the bike co-op for comment These individuals declined and redirected comment to UMSU President, Molly Willmott. Willmott told Farrago that she anticipates the bike co10

/ ART BY SONIA JUDE

op will be open by the end of Semester 1. “There were a lot of considerations that had to be made in the planning and rollout of the co-op that has caused this delay. The union and stakeholders wanted to ensure that the service that we were providing out was the best possible, while also keeping the cooperative values of the project,” she said. Simpson described the process of trying to re-open the co-op as one of heavy frustration and disappointment. “In the end, [the bike co-op] just became associated with stress and feeling letdown,” he said. Students too are feeling frustrated by the delay in the co-op’s reopening. “Every week we get messages, multiple messages, to the bike co-op [Facebook] page… asking where the co-op is,” Ross claims. Some of such messages to the page include: “Hi, just wondering if the bike co-op is continuing into 2019? I am very interested in getting involved if there are still efforts being made to get it off the ground, thanks [sic]”. “Hey, just wondering if you guys still exist or are planning to return? Appreciate your help in the past”. “I just emailed [UMSU staff] saying how helpful the bike co-op has been etc. and asked how it’s looking for its return”. According to Turton, the situation with the bike co-op is part of a larger problem. “It’s systematic of broader problems within UMSU in terms of what gets prioritised and what doesn’t,” she said. “It’s just [sic] a problem that I think a lot of Enviro and other activist departments seems to have… [which] is not being taken as seriously”. Simpson also added, “the [UMSU] staff need to become better at listening to student representatives… not just continue to run the same services they’ve been running for decades”. In the 2019 UMSU budget, money has been set aside for “seed funding” under which the bike co-op has been named as a possible project.

NEWS

WERRIBEE WAGE GAP NURUL JUHRIA BINTE KAMAL AND JASPER MACCUSPIE INVESTIGATE

he University of Melbourne is currently facing legal proceedings brought by a previous employee, who Farrago will refer to as Lianne, on the grounds that her termination was on the basis of her raising concerns over gender discrimination. Lianne, previously employed as an animal coordinator, who managed the animals and farm at the University’s Werribee campus, is pursuing a claim in the Federal Court on the basis that she was made redundant as a result of exercising her workplace rights of requesting employment reclassification, requesting for a appeal, reaching out and to the Equal Opportunity Commission and then lodging a complaint. In 2016, following discussions with a male colleague, Lianne realised that she was being paid less, even though her tasks were more complex than those of her counterparts. Upon closer inspection of the respective position descriptions of her male co-workers, there was no difference. At that stage she was managing more animals and had a broader portfolio. Following this discovery, Lianne applied to faculty HR for a reclassification of her position, with the support of her supervisor, but she was denied. Subsequently, the University claimed that there was no process to appeal this ruling, but this was refuted by the NTEU. Lianne then requested this appeal process be initiated. However, after months of delays, the meeting to discuss the appeal never eventuated. While this was ongoing, according to Lianne,

new managers came into the faculty as part of a restructure and made Lianne’s position redundant. The responsibilities of this position were later offered again, but split into two separate roles, with pay at the current, or a lower rate. “[The University] knew that I was going for a reclassification for a pay increase and I would not be keen to apply for a lesser paying position,” said Lianne. “My particular role has now been filled by two people. So, the one job I was doing, there’s now two people doing it,” she said. When asked for a comment, the University provided a brief statement. “The University is defending a general protection claim brought by a former employee. It would be inappropriate for the University to comment on this matter while it is before the Court.” Should the action be in Lianne’s favour, she is seeking compensation for the salary difference back to when the application for reclassification was made, financial compensation for pain and suffering, and acknowledgement that her original position should have been reclassified. Currently, Lianne has being referred to the Federal Circuit Court for a hearing in May where she will provide evidence. There is no predicted date currently for a verdict. To this point, the University has not denied any of the evidence that Lianne has provided in her affidavit. These proceedings are ongoing.

ART BY LUCY WILLIAMS /

NEWS

CASUAL WORK ALISON FORD ON THE CASUALTIES OF MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY SESSIONAL STAFFING

he implementation of mandatory Working With Children Checks (WWCCs) at the University of Melbourne has added to concerns of unfair treatment of casual staff, putting the quality of education at the University at risk. Legislation was rolled out at the end of 2018 to account for the small percentage of university students that are still minors, but it does not specify who should pay for the checks, and casual staff are bearing the burden. Unlike their full-time colleagues, casual staff are not covered by the University, and must fork out $123.40 to meet the WWCC requirement. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) wants the University to reimburse the full cost of the fee. According to Annette Herrera, an NTEU branch committee member for casual employees at the University, the issue impacts over 4000 staff and can realistically be covered by the University. However, the WWCC issue is “only the tip of the iceberg” according to Herrera—a small part of a large problem that involves allegations of underpaid employees, wage theft, and insecure work for casual employees. Joe*, a casual tutor as well as an academic at the School of Culture and Communication (SCC), weighed in on the costs for casual staff. “On average casuals make a whole lot less money than permanent staff, and, unlike permanent staff, we mostly have no assurance our contracts will be renewed semester to semester,” he said. “It seems pretty tone deaf to make the most financially vulnerable employees pay an amount which would be negligible for the University but is quite a lot on a casual tutor’s wage.” He added,“The WWCC incident is just one of the many ways that school management treats casuals as a problem rather than what we actually are—world class educators and researchers.” Casual workers are often forced to choose whether to help their students outside of hours, as their contracts and pay do not account for it. “Teachers love their students,” Herrera said, and they are “not getting paid for putting students first.” The new WWCC cost only adds further to the strain. Joe said that the University is “effectively getting free labour on a large percentage of teaching duties”, but, in 12

/ ART BY LUCY WILLIAMS

the end, a “sub-par class is actually all the University is paying for.” Herrera concedes that ultimately it is the University who decides how to spend its money, but it has chosen to put the pressure onto individual faculties, which must decide whether they will pay the WWCC fee for casuals. She remarked that some faculties, such as the Graduate School of Education, said that they would cover their casual staff on the basis that failing to do so would be inequitable. An increase in casual staff has been raised as a concern in many university institutions. Almost 50% of staff at the University of Melbourne—comprising “lecturers, tutors, research assistants, coordinators, lab technicians, administrators, project officers, customer service, ICT support, [and] library workers” according to the NTEU—are employed on a casual basis, despite that many of them “have worked here for years”. Benjamin Kunkler, a casual at the Asia Institute and SCC, believes that it is a “general trend across the University.” “Casuals are meant to be cheap, and convenient—and the WWCC is an extra expense,” Joe said. “The truth is the whole University sector in Australia has been using casuals as a budgetary band-aid for decades.” Moreover, Kunkler said that the University of Melbourne “likes to look and sound like a responsible employer, but often their practical decisions show the opposite, disadvantaging sessional staff and students at the same time.” There is also concern surrounding how poorly the new requirement has been communicated to staff along with the policies surrounding the WWCC and payment options. Some permanent staff have been appalled to discover the discriminatory conduct. Joe attested that “All the permanent staff I’ve spoken to support casuals in fighting the decision—they had no idea we didn’t have it covered by the school.” Kunkler observed the same strong reaction from some permanent workers but said that “other full-time staff are indifferent.” In a statement, a spokesperson for the University of Melbourne said that the checks were introduced late last year “in order to ensure a safe environment for children and meet the University’s obligations under the Victorian

NEWS

Child Safe Standards.” Nobody that Farrago spoke to disputed the importance of complying with these standards. Kunkler pointed out that the WWCC is designed to protect the vulnerable, and “vulnerability does not disappear when [students] matriculate.” However, he went on to say that “Sessional staff are on the front line of teaching, working closely with the students in the tutorials, meeting with them for consultations, and so on. What does it say about how seriously the University management takes the issue of child safety, if they are unwilling to do all they can to ensure staff are safe to work with children?”. Furthermore, with “only a small pool of students being under eighteen,” Herrera questions how the information gathered from the WWCC is being used, as there has been a lack of transparency in the University’s information policy. There has been widespread support for the campaign to have casual staff reimbursed for the WWCC fee, with over 423 petition signatures at the time of writing. Herrera is confident that the campaign will succeed and said that if the NTEU wins by earning a reimbursement, it will send a clear message that the Union “will push back” and “continue to call out differential treatment of staff.” In a bid to gain support for the campaign, NTEU has reached out to the University of Melbourne Student Union and the Graduate Student Association. Unfortunately, they were unable to confirm their support or provide a comment to Farrago. If the University chooses to support the reimbursement, it may improve its image as a global and modern leader in higher education. According to Herrera, it is up to the University to determine the image it presents to the world, and she questions why, if the University insists on world-class facilities, “don’t [casual staff] have world-class working conditions?” In response to the campaign, a spokesperson for the University of Melbourne stated that “the University is currently reviewing the process … and will consider the feedback received to date on areas of improvement and concerns raised from the introduction of the WWCC process.” Despite the University opening an avenue for

discussion, some are afraid to come forward in case it jeopardises their prospects of being re-hired in the future. “There is a sense among sessionals of anxiety about agitating to improve our conditions, because we worry that full time/tenured staff may find us a nuisance, and not hire us for the same subjects next time,” Kunkler said. “I think this fear is sometimes pre-emptive and paranoid, though understandable given the general conditions of insecure work.” Herrera says that it is vital to increase student awareness, citing that it was learning about her own lecturer’s situation when she was a student that prompted her to get involved with the situation of casual employees at the University. “Staff conditions affect student learning conditions. It’s a staff issue [and] it’s a student issue. It affects everyone,” she said. *Individual’s name has been been changed.

Full Statement from the University of Melbourne “Every day, members of the University of Melbourne community interact with children, both as our students and in a variety of other settings including through our child care centres, during outreach to secondary schools, during school visits to campus and while conducting research at home and abroad. In order to ensure a safe environment for children and meet the University’s obligations under the Victorian Child Safe Standards, the University introduced late last year measures to ensure appropriate fit and proper checks take place and we now require many employees to hold a valid Working With Children Check (WWCC). The University is currently reviewing the process following the extensive implementation phase and will consider the feedback received to date on areas of improvement and concerns raised from the introduction of the WWCC process.” University of Melbourne Spokesperson (statement)

/ PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILL HUNT (TOP) AND KEO LIM (BOTTOM)

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALAIN NGUYEN (TOP) AND WOLF ZIMMERMANN (BOTTOM) /

NEWS

SCHOOL STRIKE 4 CLIMATE LUCY TURTON REPORTS

n Wednesday March 15, an estimated 150,000 primary, high school, and tertiary students across the country walked out of class to protest the Australian government’s persistent inaction on climate change. Ignoring calls from politicians, principals, and university leadership alike to remain in class, around 40,000 people in Melbourne joined approximately 1.6 million students across more than 100 countries in “sacrificing our education to save our future,” said 17-year-old Northcote High School student Marco Bellemo. National Union of Students (NUS) President and University of Melbourne student, Desiree Cai, told Farrago that “school students have really taken the lead in ways that politicians and others haven’t.” For Cai, the role of university students in the School Students 4 Climate (SS4C) protests is “to back up the movement that school students have created” and reinvigorate the need for students to get informed and involved in climate action. Anger towards politicians and the systemic barriers to climate action were common themes throughout the day. The much-publicised derision of Prime Minister Scott Morrison was a source of frustration for school and university student strikers. In advance of 2018’s November school climate strikes, Morrison said during Question Time that “kids should go to school… We do not support our schools being turned into Parliaments… What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.” Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten also urged students to protest outside school hours and on weekends. Cai told Farrago that the responses from the two major political parties were “really disappointing” and “out of touch” with the current political climate. The politicians’ responses proved that “direct action is what young people need to continue to do to hold politicians to account,” she said. Speaking on behalf of the Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN) on March 15, University of Melbourne alum Tori Ball said, “If the government cares so much about education, they won’t keep cutting its funding.” University and school leadership were also condemned by striking students as indecisive and cowardly in the face of climate crisis. University of Melbourne students sent an open letter to Chancellery ahead of the strike, invoking the University’s own Sustainability Plan, and its commitment to “lead strongly and act decisively” on climate change. The letter requested Chancellery’s support for the climate 16

/ ART BY ANJANA RAM

walk-off, and further demanded: “i) a public commitment that no student or staff member will be penalised for joining the climate walk-off. ii) an official email to all staff and students advertising the 10:30am meeting point outside the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.” Acting Vice-Chancellor Mark Considine responded to student demands by stating succinctly over email that “the University has agreed protocols which govern the use of [official communications]” and as such “this request falls outside those guidelines. “It’s disappointing that university management haven’t come out in clear and explicit support of the students striking for climate justice,” UMSU President Molly Wilmott said in a previous statement to Farrago. In contrast, the University of Sydney’s Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence wrote a campus-wide email in support of the climate strike, and agreed not to penalise staff or students leaving class to participate in the strike. Similarly, the University of Technology Sydney asked “staff to make accommodations where possible, [sic] for students who miss classes,” citing its signatory status to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to which the University of Melbourne is also a signatory. Dozens of trade unions, including the Australian Education Union and the National Tertiary Education Union, the union for university staff, publicly endorsed the school students’ strike. An open letter penned by Australian university students received over 250 signatures from academics, with 75 signatures from University of Melbourne staff offering their “support as academics to the school climate strike on March 15 and all those taking a stand for the future of the planet”. Capturing the movement’s complex feelings of anger and hope, school student Bellemo made a point of acknowledging “all the voices of the people who have been silenced” in the international struggle for climate justice. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nationssponsored climate change research body, emphasised that even limiting temperature increase to 1.5 ˚C from pre-industrial levels would see a rise in extreme weather events such as droughts and flooding, and species and ecosystem extinctions. Even this level of warming would trigger “climaterelated risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, [and] human security,” especially for the most vulnerable populations, the 2018 report read.

NEWS

“We are demanding that our future is no longer down Swanston Street, with participants unexpectedly exploited by the rich and powerful, and that we have directed to sit down and block the busy Latrobe Street clean land, air, and water,” Bellemo said. and Swanston Street intersection. For the student activists, in response to climate University of Melbourne student Matilda Elliott said disaster “there’s nothing like a good yell,” Ball said, citing that during the impromptu walk down Swanston Street protest as one part of a “complex web of resistance”. “cars were narrowly driving around people, I personally Speaking at the State Library on March 15, they said didn’t feel safe there and I was worried for any new that tertiary students were “honoured to be following the students who might have been too nervous to voice their lead of the primary and high school students who are safety concerns,” Elliott told Farrago. taking the future into their own hands today.” “Next time we will do things differently,” Ross said, University students joined the strike in solidarity with, referencing the “unplanned” route. “There needs to be an and upon invitation from school students. However, easy way to get out of… this kind of improvised activity.” there was some confusion and conflict around the roles He also said that informed consent needs to be a priority of university students and organisations in the organising in future actions. and promotion of the March 15 strike. Aside from the safety issues, Ross and Cai were both In a Facebook group independent from the NUS, set up “blown away” by the strike’s attendance and high energy. for “spreading the climate strike” to universities, members “I think the school-kids have the advantage of optimism and hope,” Ross said. wrote about school student organisers’ University students are often “juggling disappointment about “prominent NUS too much” and instead feel a lot of Facebook pages and NUS posters that that university “frustration around lack of action and have appeared at O-weeks.” justice” on climate change and student “[They] look like they are calling management haven’t welfare. a Uni Student Strike [sic] over the come out in clear and For young people, “looking forward top of the school kids [sic] event on explicit support of the to the rest of our lives,” there is often a March 15, despite the fact it is clearly students striking for climate sense of “terrifying hopelessness,” Cai a uni student contingent to a preexisting school event,” Adam Adelpour justice,” UMSU President Molly said, citing government cuts to welfare, as well as the threat of runaway wrote after requests from school Wilmott said in a previous climate change. student organiser Jean Hinchcliffe statement to Farrago.” “Often in the student space, there for university groups supporting the are barriers [to protest]… 150,000 strike to amend their messaging. people is just a whole lot for students,” she said, referring NUS Ethnocultural Officer and former University to national attendance estimates for the strike. of Melbourne student Hersha Kadkol conceded on Empowering students ahead of May’s federal election Facebook that the event with inaccurate messaging was is a priority for the NUS, Unimelb Enviro Collective, “meant to be taken down.” and the SS4C movement. Getting “the university University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) administration on board” with climate action is important Environment Officer, Will Ross, told Farrago that the for the Enviro Collective, with enrolling first-time voters a university-level base-building for the SS4C strike was key action for NUS. complicated by the differing agendas of student groups. The SS4C movement will campaign to make the “It’s always a bit of a juggle between these groups,” federal election a “climate election,” with the goal to elect Ross said, referring to both the campus and national representatives who will fulfil student demands of 100% student organisers. renewable energy by 2030, stopping the Adani coalmine, Ahead of the Melbourne strike’s commencement at and preventing all new coal and gas projects. the Treasury Building, a contingent of university students As a Castlemaine Secondary School student told the gathered at the State Library of Victoria for speeches and Melbourne crowd at the Treasury Building on May 15, to march down Swanston Street to the main rally. “this strike is a representation of just what young people Some attendees raised safety concerns around can achieve… But it’s not the end.” the University of Melbourne contingent’s march from campus to the State Library, which entailed marching

“It’s disappointing

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FEDERAL BUDGET BREAKDOWN MEGAN HANRAHAN, WING KUANG AND STEPHANIE ZHANG BRING YOU THE HIGHLIGHTS

he 2019 Federal Budget was announced on April 2, setting the tone for the Federal Election set on May 18. Taxpayers are set to benefit, with both the current Coalition government and Labor opposition in favour of a tax offset to be introduced this financial year. The Coalition placed major focus on low- to middleincome taxpayers, infrastructure, and health, while Labor’s budget reply speech criticised the budget’s lack of urgency in addressing rising costs-of-living, climate change, and cuts to school and hospital funding. Finding the budget paper too long? Here are the highlights.

Higher Education In the name of creating “a world-class higher education system”, the Coalition government announced investment of $17.7 billion into university sector, with the amount expected to rise to over $20 billion by 2024. It also agreed to offer a two-year funding of $5 million dollars to the University of Melbourne’s Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory construction project. Following its support for regional students in last year’s budget, this year the Coalition government has promised $93.7 million of scholarships for students studying in regional campuses in the coming four years, for either university or vocational education sectors. The Coalition has also introduced a $62.4 million project focusing on the development of literacy, numeracy, digital abilities and other foundational skills, with remote Indigenous communities prioritised in the implementation of the project. In the budget response speech, Labor proposed an extra 200,000 university places to be opened for Australians. Also announced were $200 million for a ‘Rebuilding TAFE Fund’, which would focus on TAFE campuses in regional and suburban areas. For students who are on Newstart or Youth Allowance, there will be no increase under the Coalition. Instead, the 18

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Coalition will invest in new technology for recipients of welfare, which will automatically report income, rather than individual calculations and reports. This is estimated to save $2.1 billion over five years.

Transport and Infrastructure A core focus of this year’s budget, the Coalition announced that $100 billion has been allocated to upgrading infrastructure over the next 10 years. In Victoria, a further $2 billion has been allocated for rail upgrades between Geelong and Melbourne, and $500 million for additional commuter car parks at stations to ease traffic congestion. For the Northern Territory, more than $200 million has been promised to upgrade Kakadu’s infrastructure and roads. Jabiru, the location of the biggest employer in the region, the Ranger Uranium Mine, is set to close in 2021. The funding will be aimed toward creating infrastructure to encourage more tourism, which will aim to keep the economy of the town functioning. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, however, did not specify when the Northern Territory would receive this funding. Labor leader Bill Shorten announced his party’s intent to deliver transport plans in “every state and territory,” by upgrading metro and rail in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as a cross-river rail in Brisbane, further works on the ACT light rail, as well as upgrading infrastructure in Kakadu and the Northern Territory.

Tax cuts Key in this year’s budget was a tax offset to middle and lower income brackets, which the Coalition announced would come into effect this financial year if re-elected. Labor was supportive of the tax offsets in their budget response. Single-income households would be eligible for a $1,080 offset, double what was promised in last years

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budget, and families with two incomes would receive up to $2,160. While ten million Australians would be eligible to benefit from the $159 billion in additional tax relief, only around 4.5 million Australians would see the full amount. Tax rates will also be reduced. Taxpayers earning between $45,000 and $200,000—roughly 94 per cent of Australians—could have their rate reduced from 32.4 per cent per dollar to 30 per cent per dollar. In his budget reply, Bill Shorten favoured the tax offset announced by the Coalition but announced that Labor is planning to further extend the tax relief for Australians who earn below $40,000. He also announced Labor is not in support of flattening the tax rate like the Coalition is.

People with disabilities and mental health The government is delivering a $1.1 billion ‘Strengthening Primary Care’ package. The package includes $448 million in increased funding to enhance the care and services GPs provide to high-need patients, and $187 million to increase the patient rebate for a further 119 GP items on the Medicare Benefits Scheme from 1 July 2019. In ensure critical research has long-term funding certainty, the Coalition has announced the investment of $5 billion through the ‘Medical Research Future Fund Ten Year Investment Plan’. In addition, the government has announced $737 million over seven years to deliver more services for people living with mental illness, including $461 million for youth mental health and suicide prevention. The money will be going towards a variety of mental health programs. $111 million is being provided for 30 new Headspace services by 2021 to support young people, and there will be another $152 million to reduce waiting lists for Headspace services. The Early Psychosis Youth Services program will be extended for two years with the $110 million set aside in the budget, and the

government is hoping to trial eight adult mental health centres with $115 million. There will also be $54 million over the next six years to establish four specialist residential facilities for people with eating disorders. Labor criticised the freeze on National Disability Insurance Scheme staffing under the Coalition government. Announcing a plan to add $2.3 billion of funding toward cancer research and treatment over its first four years in office, Labor plans on covering the costs of millions of appointments and reduce the price of medicine.

Jobs and Skills The Coalition has also announced a Skills Package of $525 million, aimed at improving vocational education and increasing the number of apprentices. 80,000 apprenticeships will be funded by $156.3 million of this package, and incentive payments of $8,000 will be given to employers. Apprentices will also receive $2,000 if they choose to undertake training in areas listed as a ‘priority’ skill for Australia. In line with the Coalition, Shorten also proposed funding to increase vocational training, and to “reinvigorate jobs in the construction sector”. To do so, Labor aims to allocate further funding for TAFE in conjunction with renovations of campus buildings. This would create 150,000 new apprenticeships, as well as specific support for older Australians wanting to learn a new trade or skill set. Labor also intends to use plans for infrastructure to further vocational and apprenticeship training. With the Federal Election announced for 18 May, this budget will be in the hands of the voters. Keep an eye out for further coverage from Farrago on this crucial election.

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HURDLES FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES VANESSA JO DI NATALE LOOKS INTO ACCESSIBILITY

tudents with disabilities have lower levels of higher education attainment than non-disabled students. In 2015, the Australian Government’s Institute of Health and Welfare reported that for people with a disability, 20 years and over, only 15% had a Bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 31% of people without a disability in the same age range. Disability intersects race, gender and sexuality, and we have a department for each at the University of Melbourne. So why then, do we have a history of disability being overlooked on our campuses and within our student unions, perhaps most pointedly exemplified by the delayed establishment of a Disabilities Department and important Disabilities Space? And why do university services like Stop 1, which students with disabilities depend on to make it through their degrees, remain so difficult to access? As a student with a disability, I understand some of the challenges. I’m a neurodivergent woman and when I become overwhelmed and exhausted by too much sensory information, toilet cubicles are my safe (albeit stinky) refuge. A Disabilities Space where I could have connected with other students with disabilities would have worked wonders for me in the friend-making department had it been around when I first started at the University. This year, the first ever Disabilities Space in Union House was created. However, the Disabilities Department is still waiting on the University to approve the refurbishments before it becomes open to students. Student representatives and a space built for students with disabilities are both significant achievements given what the National Union of Students’ (NUS) Disability Office Bearer, Will Edwards, had to say about his 2018 National Conference (NatCon) speech in regards to the inactivity within university settings and student unions around disability advocacy: Over a phone-call, he explained that he asked the gathered audience to “Compare NUS’ commitment to last year’s [2017’s] Yes campaign to the abject lack of engagement with disabilities activism by so many in this organisation. Two out of four factions at this conference didn’t even write one disabilities policy between them. Activists in this organisation have ignored the needs of 20

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people with disabilities for too long.” The importance of a Disabilities Space cannot be overstated for students like Angie, who is on the autism spectrum and has bipolar I disorder and anxiety: Angie said they’d, “like to think Melbourne Uni is inclusive of people with disabilities.” Yet, “Some days [at university] I get quite close to having meltdowns/panic attacks. There isn’t exactly a lot of spaces I can go that’s devoid of people and sensory stimuli,” they said. Angie goes on to say that whilst the University has “accommodated my learning needs--the fact that I have a [Student Equity and Disability Support] SEDS plan is living proof of that…sometimes I feel like because my disabilities aren’t as easy to see as a physical disability, that what I’m experiencing isn’t as valid, which makes me feel quite ostracised at times, and makes me feel like my voice isn’t as heard.” Some of what the NUS Disability Officer Bearer Will Edwards had to say about university services also rings true for students with disabilities who have used the University’s Stop 1. Edwards said in discussions with student disability departments at universities across the country, that it was common for students with disabilities to be left waiting weeks for a response or have their emails go unanswered from their university’s support services. “Yeah from all the different university disability officers I’ve spoken to that’s been what I’ve heard,” Edwards said. During a business conference in 2017, the former head of University Services, Paul Duldig, spoke about these changes: “The view was the student experience was highquality in terms of teaching but not necessarily high quality in the services being provided.” He also said university services had previously had a “very fragmented approach” and offered “quite a disjointed service.” This is clear in the differing experiences of students who have used the service. Henry, a student with fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis; conditions which “mean that [he is] in chronic pain and [has] chronic fatigue” said that as an institution, the University “has been structured to place the burden of effort and

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responsibility on me, the ‘person with the disability’.” Henry said, “Stop 1 is a nightmare. The website is wildly counterintuitive and the long wait times act as a strong disincentive for seeking the help you need.” This is extremely concerning as some students with disabilities rely on counselling services and the SEDS team for immediate advice and academic adjustments. Lucy Birch, the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) Disabilities Department Office Bearer for 2019 says the Special Consideration process is still confusing, and for many students experiencing difficulties that impact on their studies, the accommodations on offer aren’t widely known to them. “Students don’t always know what they’re eligible for. The late withdrawal option isn’t always known by students. Students often don’t know anything about the decision-making processes since they are not public. It can feel like rolling a dice, not knowing if you’ll get a late withdrawal or a special exam.” Late withdrawal refers to the decision students can choose to take if they suspect they are going to fail a subject. If a student has a medical reason or experiences an unexpected circumstance, they can withdraw without financial penalty. “Many students have said if they hadn’t gone to UMSU Advocacy they wouldn’t have known that there were other Special Consideration outcomes. When acceptance is received via email, there’s only ever the one adjustment awarded. However, there are many options for adjustments and if you feel as though you have been given the wrong solution, appeal is a little known next step.” I have personally been in this situation. Last year, I was unable to graduate from my Bachelor’s degree because my subject coordinator failed to provide adequate accommodations for me. I was instead given the inappropriate option to re-sit my exam but in the same conditions that had made the task inaccessible to me in the first place. I received a fail mark for the subject, and was ignored when I tried to explain why the “accommodation” was inadequate. If I had not gone to UMSU Advocacy, who informed me of my options, I wouldn’t have graduated. I would have just accepted the outcome of my subject coordinator who didn’t

understand my disability. Much like our labyrinthine bureaucracy, our campus also poses great challenges. A few months ago, I met a legally blind woman who was a former student at the University of Melbourne. She told me she had transferred to another university because she had ruggled to get around the Parkville campus. “It was four or so years ago now. So it might be different now,” she had said. But Birch says physical accessibility at the University needs further improvement. “The mix of modern and old architecture at the University means that in the past ten years there has been a concerted effort to focus on disability accessibility but there are still many outdated buildings that still cannot be accessed.” She also said that the Disabilities Department this year has a “campaign budget going towards more accessible tutorials. Some hallways in older buildings are too narrow for wheelchairs and cluttered tutorial spaces where tables are in front of the door ways are also a problem.” Caroline is a student with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which “makes it very difficult for me to attend classes, concentrate…sit still for extended periods of time (I get muscle cramps and pain), and finish assignments on time”. She says of the accessibility of the University, that “a lot of students struggle to find accessible study spaces which hopefully the new Disabilities Space will go towards fixing.” Independent of the Disabilities Space, steps are being taken to make the University more navigable for students with a disability, namely with the use of Accessibly, a website and app which uses three pins: accessible, partially accessible and not accessible to indicate a location’s level of accessibility. However, like the Disabilities Space, despite the University’s plans to use Accessibly this year, it remains unclear when exactly it will be rolled out. From the current lack of a Disabilities Space, and the inaccessibility of the university campus and services, it is clear that profound barriers to educational attainment are still very much a reality for students with disabilities at the University of Melbourne. 21

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MAD ABOUT INEQUALITY MADELEINE JOHNSON SPEAKS TO STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES

imited data seems to exist about the prevalence of disability amongst the student body at the University of Melbourne. Is this because there are relatively few students with disabilities, in which case, is it because there are barriers to them accessing higher education? For this article, I spoke to three students: two had vision impairments and one a hearing impairment. As a non-disabled student, I hope to centre the voices of these students in this discussion. I also hope to discuss mental health related disabilities in a future edition. How does having a disability affect one’s education? The three students I spoke to told me about a wide variety of accommodations, or, as one student put it, ‘workarounds’, they employed to complete their studies. Ronny Andrade, a PhD student in the field of humancomputer interaction, who has a vision impairment, said, “I’ve always tried to cope with it in the least intrusive way. For example, a way in which it affects is I can’t really see the whiteboard, and when I was doing my undergrad: for example, we’d have a whiteboard maybe as long as this wall, like 8 metres. And I would just move from the left to the right of the room, like in class, while the professor was writing. I’d tell them in advance, and the professor would understand, wouldn’t mind. ... Then here, because people don’t really use whiteboards anymore, that’s not a problem. Here with the fact that they upload the slides helps me to follow what’s going on. I have had one or two classes where the professors upload the slides after the class because they have some in-class exercises. But I sent them an email and I told them ‘I really do need the slides in advance, could you please send them to me’, and they say ‘yeah, sure, we’ll send them to you as long as you don’t share them with anyone else’.” Bridie Cochrane, a fourth year Bachelor of Arts student, who also has a vision impairment, she also relied on slides being distributed in advance of class. She said, “as problematic as it may sound, I am lucky in terms of I present as able passing. I pretty much just have my glasses, and occasionally I have to pull out my phone to take pictures, or something, and then zoom in, or I have a big cursor on my laptop, and enlarged font on my phone.” Both students told me that their vision impairments didn’t prevent them from finding their way around campus, but they had concerns that this would be an issue for students with more severe vision impairments. Ronny was concerned that “for someone with low vision, [who’s new to campus], with all the construction going on, [might] experience trouble finding their way around.” Bridie told me that “Lack of braille trails on

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campus is a problem for people with canes or guide dogs.” She told me she occasionally used Lost on Campus to help navigate but that that wouldn’t be appropriate for students with more severe visual impairments as “Lost on Campus is still primarily visual, as well, because it’s a map app, so you still have to be able to view the map to get around.” Yige Zhang, a second year Bachelor of Science student with a hearing impairment told me: “I have some minor to moderate hearing problems, so if it’s in a smaller room, and people speak quite loudly, just like face-toface, I don’t have any problems. But in the lecture theatre, it’s really big, lots of people there, the recording might not be that good and because of the echo, I do have difficulties, and every time I need to go back home and listen to the recording again.” He also said infrastructure available at the University to students who use hearing aids: “Basically, there are two modes on the hearing aid—one makes the sound louder, the other is telescoping—it just listens to the microphone directly. But the quality of telescoping in each lecture room is different.” All three students were reliant on either lecture recordings or slides being made available in advance, and found that this was automatically the case for most of the subjects they had taken at the University. When it wasn’t, Bridie and Ronny had been able to access slides by contacting teaching staff and requesting them. No one I interviewed was able to speak to whether issues arise for students with disabilities in courses that are taught mainly by writing on a board, where PowerPoint slides are unavailable and lecture recordings capture just the audio. Yige also told me about the challenges of participating in a tutorial with a hearing impairment: “I find in tutorials, small group discussions might be a little bit hard for me, because, as an international student as well, the English ability might also be a factor for me as well. People in a small group, … people sitting around a table, might talk in different volumes. And there are other people at another table might affect your hearing. …But usually, because I’m doing science, there’s not much group discussion. But I used to have Arts classes in the past, just last year, and group discussion is quite annoying.” He also said his hearing impairment may have made it more difficult to learn a second language: “you find it harder to listen. … for the volumes with higher frequencies, for example, the character ‘s’, that’s really hard for me to hear. For others, like ‘j’, that’s easier.” He also mentioned how being Chinese and having a disability had intersected for him: “In my culture, my

mum said she doesn’t want me to have a hearing aid, she wants me to overcome by myself, because if I have that, she will think that I have some problem, that I’m different from other people. So there might be some people with hearing problems in China that don’t have hearing aids, also because of the high cost.” As a PhD student, Ronny also raised with me that issues can arise for academics with disabilities when fieldspecific software is inaccessible. In particular, he knew of an academic with a vision impairment having issues with software called Overleaf. Overleaf is a documentsharing program similar to Google docs for documents containing formulas and is widely used for collaboration in STEM fields. According to Ronny, it is also completely inaccessible to screen-readers. So how do students feel about the support services offered by the University? Ronny and Bridie had both interacted with Student Equity and Disability Services (SEDS), and Yige also told me that he’d had positive experiences accessing support services through Stop 1. Regarding SEDS, Ronny said: “They’re lovely people. They’re amazing, but I think they’re understaffed, and the thing is they also have to deal with special consideration. … They do get very involved. They work together with a student, they develop a comprehensive plan and strategies to facilitate their integration to normal lectures and work, stuff like that, and they can arrange for someone to take notes for you, or to make recordings, which is really helpful.” Ronny also mentioned Andrew Normand, who runs the Web Accessibility Program at the University. “He usually runs studies with students with disabilities, and he gets them to try different software or different websites of the university. I know he has done extensive research on accessibility in the LMS.” He also told me about Andrew’s website where he has tips for teaching staff in supporting students with disabilities, collated from students’ experiences and perspectives: https:// www.unimelb.edu.au/accessibility. As a casual tutor myself who has never heard of or seen this website before, nor received any particular training around supporting a student with a disability, I’m amazed Andrew’s resources aren’t more widely distributed nor a central part of teaching training programs. As a current GSA Councillor, Ronny also told me about how he had started work on a Disability Advisory Committee, which looks at disability throughout campus and offers actionable suggestions on how to improve accessibility. The Committee has already been involved in providing advice to the new Melbourne Connect project. However, these students also faced issues in accessing

the support the university provides. Bridie told me she’d once been required to fill out a paper form to be granted special accommodations whilst recovering from eye surgery, and when she’d called Stop 1 to ask if she could fill it out over the phone because she was unable to read the form because of her surgery, was told she should get a friend to help her fill it out. Ronny also mentioned that supporting students with disabilities is not part of all tutor training, although some faculties have begun inviting SEDS to give short presentations at their training sessions. Yige mentioned that some lecturers who like to pace don’t wear microphones whilst teaching, making the lecture recordings unusable to those who couldn’t hear during class and hoping to catch up. He also told me that being able to automatically caption lecture recordings, as YouTube videos already are, would be extremely useful for students with hearing impairments. He said a friend of his with a more severe hearing impairment, who was also an international student, had to drop out of a University of Melbourne foundations program due to lack of support for his disability. This all raises the question of how much the University is obliged to ensure its foundation programs are accessible. Ronny and Bridie both said their disability affects their willingness to attend certain kinds of social or extracurricular events that occur in and around the University, with Ronny telling me “I wouldn’t go to an event in a pub, because I don’t like loud and dark places, because I don’t see well ….Those types of events wouldn’t appeal to [me].” Knowing how to support students with disabilities can be extremely complex as students have such different needs. Students are required to be very proactive in accessing support. Ronny said: “We need not to be shy, to say, ‘I can’t hear well’, or ‘I can’t see well’. I guess if there’s stigma, try to move in and be cool about talking about these things, and recognize that if you need an extra hand ask for it which is difficult. It’s difficult, but it’s necessary, because we have saying in Spanish, ‘ if you don’t cry, you don’t eat.’ ” Bridie said, “There’s so much we can learn from each other. I only know my way of living, and I’m honestly super curious about what it feels like to be able to see things. We have a lot to offer each other. A lot of support to give. It’s almost just like we might just have different personalities.” I welcome feedback, comments and criticism, particularly from students with disabilities. I can be reached at madeleinej@student.unimelb.edu.au. I am currently seeking gender diverse (trans, non-binary, otherwise non-cisgender) students to interview for Edition 5.

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TRENDY EQUALITY FANGYING ZHOU REPORTS

report launched by the University of Melbourne late last year has found that the academic gender gap in Australian universities has narrowed over the last ten years and more females have achieved high level positions. This report was conducted by Professor Emeritus Frank P. Larkins based on data from the Department of Education and Training. According to his analysis, Australian universities have had an overall positive trend in promoting women’s representation, as demonstrated by the fact that nearly 1.4 female academics have been recruited for each new male academic since 2008. “The University of Melbourne has made significant progress in recent years. There have been a number of proactive programs promoting women into academic roles,” Larkins said. In the 2017 Annual Report the University lodged to Parliament, the proportion of female academic staff at the University is shown to have increased steadily from 46 per cent to 48 per cent from 2013 to 2017. Female professional staff retained a majority of more than 60 per cent. Larkins is positive about the future trend of gender equality at the University. “I have no doubt that in a few years we will see gender equality in numbers of academic staff”, he said. “Already there is equality with respect to salaries and working conditions. A 50:50 employment balance is not far away.” Larkins says his faith in the future of academic gender equality also lies in potential candidates in the future, which are current students. “In 2017 there were more domestic females than males graduating with research degrees, so the pool of talent is expanding,” he said. While these figures show one thing, some students are more sceptical. Madeleine Johnson has a strong feeling of gender inequality in her field of study. She is a masters student in pure mathematics and also the president of the Melbourne University Mathematics and Statistics Society (MUMS). She wrote a column on gender equality in maths for the last edition of Farrago. Many of her female peers have ended their academic pathway in maths after graduation. “Only one out of the six people I interviewed said yes, they want to do a masters in that,” she said. Madeleine thinks the biggest drop-off point of female students is between undergraduate and postgraduate. “To me when I was doing undergraduate subjects, it was like 25 per cent to 30 per cent [female students] studying math subjects and ... goes down to like 5 per cent to 10 per cent [in masters],” she said. 24

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It was even harder for her to find female lecturers to do projects with. During her whole undergraduate, she couldn’t even find one. She was surprised when she finally met two female lecturers in her first semester of her masters degree. The University’s engagement with Athena Scientific Women’s Academic Network also indicates a strong interest in promoting women’s representation in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM). It is a program aiming to improve career opportunities and outcomes for women in typically male dominated STEMM fields. News with emphasis on female staff being promoted to senior positions keeps coming and institutes centred on empowering women are surging. However, when Madeleine first stepped into a class almost occupied by male students she felt quite lost. “When I was studying I want to have friends that I can study with and feel part of the community, which is really important to me. Now it’s great, people who are studying there are great and there is a lovely sense of community, but it’s a real shame that there are not more women. It would be a lot better with more women”, she said. As an executive member of MUMS, Madeleine has set a quota of 40 per cent women in the club and reserved certain high-level positions for women or non-binary students. “In the University there are many student clubs trying to give women a voice, like Women in Tech and the Women’s department of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU).” The University is also making an effort. Various departments have launched their own programs promoting women’s representation such as Women of Bio21 and the Centre for Women’s Mental Health Research. However, female students like Madeleine haven’t felt the effects of these efforts. Madeleine only realized there were staff and professors at the University who care about this issue after starting her job at the MUMS and talking to them about her concerns over women’s representation in her discipline. She really felt alone when she was at the crossroads after graduation. “The university and individual schools should be really trying to take more proactive measures, and do better job communicating them with students. The sad thing is that even when the schools and faculties do great stuff, the students aren’t really aware of it. They don’t really know, so they don’t have impact on the students.” UMSU Women’s Officers did not respond to requests to comment on the University’s report.

SATIRE

BUDGET CUTS:

CONFIRMED:

Stop 1 To Be Replaced with Google Form for ‘Unimelb Love Letters’

New Study Reveals South Lawn is the Optimal Spot for Making Out in Front of Everyone

MADELEINE CHETCUTI REPORTS

LAUREN BERRY HAS THE TEA

ollowing recent budget cuts, the University of Melbourne has decided to axe Stop 1, choosing to replace the student services resource with the ‘Unimelb Love Letters’ Facebook page. In an interview with the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Duncan Maskell, he remarked this was a natural cut for the university due to the popularity of question-andanswer posts being published by the page. “Why ignore a grass-roots, pro-bono program run by students? Unimelb Love Letters is the obvious answer for connecting students to the clear, concise answers they need.” “Adding a middleman means we get a breadth of responses”, Maskell said. “Deliberating over how many subjects constitute a minor can lead to a variety of comments such as: ‘it’s on the website you dumb fuck’ and, ‘hey, ever heard of Google?’” It’s not just the faculty that are excited about this big upgrade. Third-year student Jane Webber only wishes it was done earlier. “Those fuckers at Stop 1 don’t know shit. I’d rather some unqualified jaffys had been there to help me instead of waiting hours in that lifeless hell hole”, the biomedicine student told Farrago. Long-time fans of Unimelb Love Letters, however, are feeling the sting of this change. Damian Libson, a second-year who writes anonymous letters to himself to gain romantic traction, feels the future isn’t bright. “I was this close to finding a girlfriend. One more letter about how hot girls on campus find me would’ve done the trick, but who’s gonna see it when study-load questions take over?”, Libson said. Farrago reached out to Unimelb Love Letters for an interview but only received this response: “I just wanted to help people fall in love. I don’t know what this page has become.” According to a report released by the university, Stop 1’s physical presence on Swanston Street will be replaced by “expensive couches or some shit” by 2030.

major new study conducted by the Victorian Institute of Geography and Impetuous Osculation (VIGIO) has found that South Lawn prevails as the finest location on campus for couples wanting to flaunt their amatory success in plain view of an abundance of loners. After lurking in various shrubberies around campus—surveying the behaviours of multiple pairings for the purpose of science—VIGIO determined that no other sensual site or vegetation station could compare to South Lawn’s luscious greenery. “Couples wanting a roll-about in the open really can’t go wrong with South Lawn,” said a VIGIO spokesperson. “It’s a sunny spot. A cultural hub. The air circulation is paramount. Whether you’re into nuzzling, smooching, canoodling… it really caters for any public display of affection.” Two study participants, who prefer to be known as the portmanteau “Tomla” rather than as two separate entities, said they feel powerful knowing they’re being noticed. “We get a lot of attention. Sometimes intense stares. Of course, we don’t notice them most of the time… tee hee… because we’re pretty preoccupied. But we think [making out] is a really important way to give back to the community, you know, by giving people something to look forward to” Tomla said in unison. However, an anonymous witness said they found Tomla’s behaviour hurtful and wished “PDA was illegal”. “It reminds me of Maureen and I. It’s too painful. Maureen, come back to me… please?” South Lawn has long been a popular place for students to relax and get to know potential suitors. VIGIO hope the results of their study will persuade more audacious couples to make use of the highly accessible area. Other areas considered for the top position include the lunchtime queue for Castro’s Kiosk and the System Garden in summer. ART BY HAYLEY MAY /

CAMPUS

OFFICE BEARER REPORTS PRESIDENT/MOLLY WILLMOTT We’re hurtling towards the end of semester fast! When assessments and life get a little rough, or something unexpected happens, remember that you’re union is always here for you. If you are in trouble with the university or the law, come up to our Legal and Advocacy service for assistance and support. If you’ve come back from midsem and realised you have no friends and cbf with uni anymore, check out our website and look at all the events we’re running to make you feel at home at unimelb (ping stress less week in week 11). If you love democracy, vote in the byelections!

GENERAL SECRETARY/REECE MOIR Hello! Welcome to report to Farrago 3.0. It’s getting colder and I’m still growing into the sweaters my mum bought for me when I was 8 years old. What’s been happening in the Secretariat you ask? Lots of admin. Students’ Council has been happening; and the Proud Mary really does keep on burning. Something you should keep your eyes out for is an UMSU by-election. What I can tell you is that because we’ve appointed so many temporary OBs, they need to campaign to stay! This is so that your representation at UMSU can be transparent, and DEMOCRATIC!

ACTIVITIES/LIAM O’BRIEN AND OLIVIA PANJKOV Hi again! The Activities department is excited for two more events to get you through to the end of this semester. Keep your eyes peeled on our social media platforms for our annual Comedy Competition and the Semester 1 Trivia. We are always looking for people who want to have a go cooking or serving at our Tuesday and Thursday BBQs. Come up to us at 12pm at North Court on those days and let us know if you want to help out. Don’t forget to grab one of our Semester 1 Gig Guides on Tuesdays.

BURNLEY/JAMES BARCLAY No OB report submitted.

CLUBS AND SOCIETIES/JORDAN TOCHNER AND CHRIS MELENHORST Hellooooo we are busy with ze clubs as always and shall soon be even busier with 23 clubs being granted initial approval. We are inching closer and closer to the big 250 so until then we will attempt to stop Fiona from imploding. At the moment, we are doing exciting things with attendance scanners, diversity, audits, Club Awards Night and breaking our collective wrists. As always, emails are a word that needs to be mentioned in the C&S report. Good luck to all the new clubs who are going through affiliation, we’ll see ya’ll at the IGMs!

CAMPUS

CREATIVE ARTS/ELLIE HAMILL AND LUCY HOLZ Mudfest Artist Applications are now open! If you like making art in any form, get together a team and submit a work. Categories include Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Interdisciplinary Arts, Moving Image and Music, and all the information is available on the Creative Arts website. Applications close on at 9am May 13th. In the meantime, interviews for production roles in Mudfest are well under way, we’re assembling a talented and hard working team to bring you the biggest student run arts festival in the Southern Hemisphere!

DISABILITIES/LUCY BIRCH Come down to Beer and Boardgames held every even week during semester on Tuesdays. It’s a great way to meet people and chill out. Beverages and food is provided on the house! We also have free fancy lunches at our Mental Wellness and Disability Collective, 1pm-2pm every Thursday, level 3 Union House, Disability Space

EDUCATION ACADEMIC/DOMINIC ROQUE ILAGAN AND ELIZABETH TEMBO It’s been a meme of a time at Ed-Ac these few weeks past! Dominic, six weeks after appointment, had only just been given access to the Education Accounts (slow clap to University IT services)... Elizabeth on the other hand had been ill for some of this Farrago edition reporting period... still, despite these, still working on our campaigns and projects... lots of readings and papers and appointments to be had, lots of thoughts on the University’s Student Life Green Paper for which we’re going to be helping UMSU Executive draft a response.... work in EdAc still on track!

EDUCATION PUBLIC/CHARLI FOUHY AND CAMERON DOIG No OB report submitted.

ENVIRONMENT/ WILL ROSS

It’s that time of year again. Yep, it’s enviro season (hint: all seasons are enviro season). So what have we been up to? Well, we had a contingent to the School Strike 4 Climate demanding climate justice in the streets of Melbourne, and a snap action outside Richard Wynne’s office, in solidarity with the Djab Wurrung Tree Embassy. And RadEd Week has come and gone, looking at topics like climate grief, anti-racism, direct action, and deconstructing gender. We hosted a Student Forum on Sustainability, putting students and University reps face to face to discuss this urgent issue. What’s on? Collective is still running weekly—keep an eye out at the end of semester as we organise our collective road trip to Sydney for the annual Students of Sustainability conference. See you there!

INDIGENOUS/JORDAN AND MARLEY HOLLOWAY-CLARKE Wominjeka (Welcome) back everyone! The Indigenous Departement hope everyone had a relaxing and rejuvenating break and is ready to steam ahead for the rest of the semester. We are in full swing with training for the Indigenous University Games and so excited to travel to Perth to defend our overall win last year. The Under Bunjil team is working tirelessly so we can push edition 7 out very soon so sit tight! Apart from that; student lunches are always popular, the MU Sport social sport teams are strong, students are kicking goals in the classrooms and mob is closer than ever. Stay Deadly. Follow us on social media to stay updated: Facebook - /umsuindigenous; Instagram - @umsuindigenous. 27

CAMPUS

PEOPLE OF COLOUR/FARAH KHAIRAT AND MARK YIN A very warm welcome (back) from the break! A few exciting things happening in our department towards the second half of semester. We’re wrapping up our semester 1 series of Anti-Racism workshops, while things are starting to heat up with Myriad. Follow us (and our mag) on Facebook and Insta for all the details. We’ll also be getting comfy with our mates down in Southbank - keep an eye out for our collectives there, as well as our potluck open mic night. In the meantime, all our regular collectives are still a go. As usual, our door is always open if you want to get cosy and drink/spill some tea - find us on Level 1 of Union House!

QUEER/ANDIE MOORE AND RAPH CANTY It’s getting colder and UMSU Queer are here to keep you cosy with more events, more friends and more fun! The queer space is always open on Level 3, Union House if you need a hot cup of tea, coffee or hot chocolate. Come along to our weekly Trans, Ace/Aro and Queer People of Colour Collective as well as the bigger Queer Lunch and fortnightly G&Ts with the LGBTs: you’re sure to find some friends to fight the winter weather with! Also look out for submissions to our annual department magazine: CAMP! Don’t miss the chance to have your gay feelings in print. See you around lovelies!

SOUTHBANK/LILY EKINS No OB report submitted.

WELFARE/ASHWIN CHHAPERIA AND NATASHA GUGLIELMINO Hope you’re feeling refreshed, relaxed and recharged after the Easter break and are ready for those last few assignments and tests. We understand it can be a stressful time and to help you deal with it, we are bringing to you a Stress Less Week filled with free and fun activities in Week 10. We’re also starting the Welfare on Wheels initiative so look out for us on Mondays and Tuesdays at the Giblin, Baillieu and ERC in the coming weeks. Our regular Yoga & Meditation classes are also in full swing every Tuesday & Thursday respectively. Hope to see you soon

WOMEN’S/ARIA SUNGA AND HANNAH BUCHAN Hello, it’s Women’s again! We’ve been able to launch our collaboration with the Queer Department ‘Queer Gals Movie Night’! This’ll be running in week 7 and 11 again, 4:30pm in the rowdy. All queer women and non-binary students are welcome! Recently the university held Respect Week, and the Women’s Department participated holding an event in North Court, speaking to students on Friday the 12th of April. We had some drinks, shared why respect is important and what it means to us, as well as reflected on the safety on campus campaign so far. As always, feel free to drop by the Women’s room or the Women’s office and have a chat!

ART BY YI XIA /

NONFICTION

DOUBLE TAKE KAAVYA JHA ON WOMEN IN SPORT

port is an integral part of Australian national identity. Some of our proudest moments as a nation have been Ian Thorpe’s swimming success in the 2004 Olympics or the triumph of Australia in 1983’s America’s cup, and our sporting star players ascend to become national heroes. But something has been missing from this shining image for a little too long, namely, our female athletes. A large part of Australian culture is rooted in the values and rituals behind sportsmanship: honestly, camaraderie, strength in the face of adversity – but these characteristics aren’t restricted to a specific gender. As social changes in Australia slowly evolve the national makeup, more diverse representation in sports is slowly but surely making its mark too. Women in sport in Australia have been making huge strides across a multitude of games, and the public is starting to take notice. Nonetheless, not all of this new attention has been good. Despite the awe-inspiring successful of the AFLW (Australian Football League Women’s) this year, the season has attracted an abundance of nasty comments from men on social media who view themselves as the makeshift gatekeepers of Australia. These are the people who refuse to believe the shift in Australian culture, away from the ‘old boy’s club’ mentality where women are expected to be domestic caretakers. What will it take to reach a point of equality for Australian sports? It is important to note however, that the AFL as an institution has been around for 122 years and has a long and storied history, whereas the AFLW only kicked off in 2017. It is inevitable that it will take time for the AFLW to catch up, but I am sure that that point is inevitable. Regardless, there are still some concerning elements about gender equality in sports; with the most strikingly obvious one being pay. A common counter-argument to why women in sport do not deserve equal pay is that at the end of the day, major sporting organisations are profit-driven enterprises. There is simply not enough interest from the public that generates revenue for them, and in turn, for wages for the female athletes. While the AFLW Grand Finals was a very special day, not only in cementing Erin Phillips as one of the next generation’s Australian sporting legends, but also in the phenomenal audience turnout. Before the finals, the AFL

/ ART BY RAYMOND WU

stated that an audience of 30 000 would be a “massive endorsement” for the future of the female sporting league. But the crowds turned out to support the players, with an inspiring and roaring success with over 53 000 viewers in the stadium, a drastic increase from the 7000 stadium viewers of the finals from the year before. During 2018, AFLW athletes received between $10 500 to $20 000 for the top-tier players. Maybe then, the salary of AFLW athletes should increase by over sevenfold to reflect the exponential rise in finals viewership? After this 700% increase in salary, this would mean the top AFLW players were getting around $140k, which would still be less than half of the average salary for AFL male players… Yikes. Another counter argument made by the male guardians of the internet is that women do not deserve equal pay because the quality of gameplay is lower in women’s sports. However, this is a cyclical problem; as women’s leagues are paid less for the same sport, it means that it is not feasible for athletes to survive on this salary and hence are unable to quit their day job. Thus, it is not possible to train full time and even harder to get the team together to practice and strategize, meaning that inevitably there is a lower standard of gameplay. Fun fact: Serena Williams is the only female in the world’s 100 highest paid athletes. The other 99 are all male. Another component of the modern-day female athlete is – perhaps unfortunately – social media. Between 2011 and 2013, only 0.4% of total sports sponsorship, an area worth $427.2 million, was allocated to women’s sports, but nowadays this figure has increased substantially. Now, many of the world’s most famous female athletes like Lindsey Vonn and Simone Biles have won million-dollar sponsorships along with their Olympic gold medals. But for the less globally renowned, female athletes feel pressure to appear conventionally hot to garner mid-tier sponsorships to fund their careers. Where to, from here? The vast majority of the disapproval around women in sport are from older generations, with outdated values and expectations of women in sports. Perhaps the big leagues can learn from University level sports, where the athletes . It may have been an undervalued and underappreciated history, but for women in sport, it’s only getting better.

NONFICTION

AN INTERVIEW WITH NOBODY

JEMMA PAYNE CRITIQUES THE DREADED ONE-WAY INTERVIEW

t’s February. Another semester, another lot of a company money, algorithms don’t actually have to fully housemates, classmates, lecturers, textbooks… But automate tasks. It’s sufficient to foist the labour on the some students are already thinking ahead to next year: consumer, or, in this case, the job applicant. hiring rounds for 2020 government and corporate Worse, there’s the “shadow expense”. As we’ve seen, graduate programs are opening—and closing. automated hiring processes allow huge companies to For an increasing number of applicants, these largesave on expenditure by treating hopeful candidates—and scale recruiting operations include a one-way video their time—as disposable. But these also require money, interview, also known as a pre-recorded interview. which deepens disadvantages between applicants. Basically, you log onto a third-party recruiting website, Not long ago, the main cost of a job search was you’re asked questions and you have a set amount of your interview outfit—which is hard enough; there are time to record your answers. Someone at the company charities dedicated to providing professional clothes to will review your videos later. Apparently. people in this situation. Now, you need a good webcam, It’s a fact of life that the resume and cover letter you an internet-connected device and a fast, reliable spent hours writing and tailoring to the position could connection. And a private place to interview. Too bad if be chucked out after a glance. But at least you live in a share house, or a share room. “Instead of rocking up it was once a human glance. Increasingly, My “interview” begins. I’ve settled for to an office over-dressed your CV is read by software. the laptop webcam, and am braving the One day in early February, an algorithm and eager, I’m trying library wi-fi. The company’s hiring manager smiles on me and I’m invited to complete introduces himself in a recorded video. To to turn my sharean online psychometric test for a large hundreds of candidates? To thousands? international company. I think I’ve bombed house bedroom into Someone from HR does a piece-to-camera, it. But, within the hour, more good news— a passable imitation setting me “business challenges” I’ve got I’ve “made it” to a one-way video interview! three minutes to solve. of a video meeting Along with, for all I know, every single I speak self-consciously to no one, like booth.” some twisted version of the selfies my other person who’s applied. I spend hours, days preparing: researching questions, generation is supposedly obsessed with. I feel like thinking of possible answers and reading the company’s a stage manager, videographer, director, lighting annual reports. Everything I’d do for a regular job operator, improv actor and nervous/hopeful job interview. Except that I doubt any human at the company candidate all in one. has seen my resume. While I’m telling my webcam how I’d approach an HR See a problem here? issue, some people start talking loudly in the next cubicle. When preparing for a personned interview—whether I plough on, hoping my microphone isn’t picking up too face-to-face, Skype, or telephone—the applicant knows much of the noise. The “interview” ends with another they have a chance, as the company is investing HR video from the hiring manager. resources in interviewing them. There’s at least some Two hours later, I get a mail-merged email. reciprocity of risk and expenditure. With automated “We welcomed the opportunity to get to know you processes it’s easy to “lead on” candidates, making them better… Unfortunately, after careful consideration, we will jump through time-consuming hoops that cost the not be progressing your application…” company nothing. (I then have the opportunity to give my views on the A video interview also entails more work for the recruitment process, USING EMOJIS!! They range from a candidate. Instead of rocking up to an office overdressed green :D through a yellow line mouth to a red sad face.) and eager, I’m trying to turn my share house bedroom … into a passable imitation of a video meeting booth. Kind regards, “Shadow work” is what Craig Lambert calls labour [Company] Recruitment that someone would previously have been paid to Follow us on: LinkedIn | YouTube do. Scanning groceries at the self-checkout, filling in Replies to this message are undeliverable and will not reach government “self-administration” forms online… To save the Human Resources Department. Please do not reply. ART BY BETHANY CHERRY /

/ ART BY TIFFANY WIDJAJA

Content Warning: racism

COLUMN

DIASPORA DILEMMAS VEERA RAMAYAH ON EUROCENTRIC BEAUTY STANDARDS

’m known in most circles as the loud, extroverted one. I know how to make an entrance, and, like fireworks, you can almost always hear me before you see me. I am often asked about where I get my confidence from, and how I have the ability to seemingly be so “intense” all the time. I usually smile and wave it off, citing some variation on the saying, “I get it from my Mama,” (which is completely true by the way, my mama is most definitely my absolute inspiration) and move the conversation along. The truth, however, is much darker. I’m aware that this sounds very ominous, but the outer layer of confidence and ever-present toothy grin are only relatively new additions to my everyday routine, after years of undiagnosed self-hatred. I spent the majority of my teenage years thinking I was ugly just because white boys were not attracted to me. Some of you may be quick to blame those boys for having bad taste (to which I wholeheartedly concur), or a teenage need for validation based on physical appearance (you would also not be wrong). The real culprit is only one that I managed to really pin the blame on years later, after my journey into activism. Eurocentric beauty standards, or the current mainstream standard of beauty, are standards that promote Western ideals of beauty to the entire world. Whiteness has become the default by which we judge everything, and when you are anything but what the world considers beautiful by these standards, it’s easy to see how self-hatred, doubt and internalised racism can wedge its way into your psyche. To ‘quantify’ this, Eurocentric ideals of beauty place the following characteristics as the most beautiful; a slim nose, light skin, long lashes, straight hair, light coloured eyes. These characteristics are associated with European features and provide impossible standards for WoC/PoC more broadly to measure themselves up against, which only paves the way for a hatred for natural, ‘ethnic’ features to be built. Eurocentric beauty standards have and continue to make me feel as though I do not belong. That who I am, as I am, is not enough. That unless I have golden hair or light eyes that I’ll never be the beautiful girl that’s sung about in any pop song, the protagonist in any Young Adult novel, or the lead in any romantic comedy. And it’s not hard to see the clear progression in

thought. If your standard of self-worth is, like many other impressionable teenagers or young adults, based on how many people find you attractive, as a woman/ person of colour, you will ALWAYS fall short. Not only will you always fall short of the unattainable criteria, but you will also inevitably attract the wrong kind of attention; the attention of those who are a sickly kind of sweet, and hungry only on the basis of your melanin content and nothing beyond that. The internalised racism that Eurocentric beauty standards have promoted and even perpetuated is realistically going to take me a lifetime to unlearn. This doesn’t mean that I don’t love myself as I am now, but even now, as I have grown to be comfortable and appreciative of this brown girl body, I still find myself consuming media and longing for long blonde hair, a slimmer face and lighter eyes. To snap myself out of this endless glorification of ‘white’ is a conscious process and one that goes down as comfortably as a vodka shot (if you can do a vodka shot without flinching, you have an amazing poker face). I started unfollowing mainstream white models, and instead found a whole community of brown girls and boys on Instagram to redirect my feed to. I’ve found a newfound appreciation for my melanin, my unruly eyebrows and all brown everything because of this. This self-curated selection of media has allowed me to mentally and physically decolonise my thought processes and media simultaneously. PoC communities on social media are trailblazing the way for the normalisation of non-Eurocentric beauty through representation. With mainstream media recognising the effectiveness of including PoC in their content as well, in the future our screens will start becoming better pictures of the diverse landscape around us. Although this inclusion is not without its own set of problems. Corporations have discovered that diversity is the new “sex”, in that it sells. After so many years of constantly falling short in terms of Eurocentric beauty criteria, of attempting to mould myself to fit a definition of beauty that was predicated on my exclusion, I’ve for lack of a better phrase, said “screw it”. I’ve made a conscious effort to create my own definition of beauty, one that is centered around PoC and finally, I’m not falling short. I’m measuring up against my own ruler.

/ ART BY JORDAN SIBLEY

NONFICTION

SCIENCE OR ART? QUENTIN BELL TEACHES YOU HOW TO MAKE BREAD

borrowed the River Cottage Bread Handbook (highly recommend) from family friends about a year and a half ago, read it near cover to cover, and started baking. Since then I have made a name for myself amongst friends and family as the bread guy, bringing fresh bread to picnics and potlucks, or making mouthwatering focaccia when hosting a barbecue. I’ve often heard baking likened to a science. Where cooking is an art, full of inspiration, innovation, and improvisation, baking is different; there must be exact measurements, careful mixing, and precise temperatures. I find baking a lot like mathematics: the foundation is exact, very scientific, starting with very specific amounts of flour, water, yeast, and salt. But beyond that it becomes an art: feeling when the dough is properly kneaded, judging the rise, coercing it into specific shapes, and finally the baking, not a controlled spring but a desperate hope the bread will puff up and form a crisp crust and light, airy crumb. There can be a lot of science that goes into cooking; Heston Blumenthal’s molecular gastronomy is a great example of just how far, and ridiculous, that can go. However, any bread recipe that calls for water that is 23˚C and specifies rising to the minute not the appearance or feeling is losing understanding for precision. While such measurements will work, and if followed exactly will produce good bread, any deviation or human error may careen out of control as such recipes allow for little judgement and recovery, teaching you to do without thought. Understanding when dough is well kneaded, risen, or proofed, and when loaves are well baked by your own senses frees you to experiment and take risks. You could be out camping, carefully stretching the gluten from your chair, kneading it in the air like wringing a teatowel, later putting the loaf in a hot casserole pot to bake in the campfire. So, get to know the feeling of the dough as it is kneaded, the stickiness before and silkiness at the end, the spring of well-proofed loaves, and the hollow sound of a well-cooked loaf. Practice the art and skill, with feeling trumping precision. Then experiment, try some other flours, add some fruit and nuts, spread dough out on an oiled tray, let it rise, push deep holes in the risen dough, and sprinkle with flaky salt, rosemary, and olive oil, then bake for fresh focaccia. For other flours, I love spelt, the same ancient grain the Romans baked with. It needs a bit more kneading due to a lower gluten content, but gives a lovely, flavoursome brown loaf that is perfect for winter soups. Rye is another option, but by itself the low gluten content forms a hard, uncooperative, sticky dough. Fortunately, the dough doesn’t benefit much from kneading so only needs kneading until thoroughly mixed. Then flour the loaves well and don’t slash as the bread barely rises but cracks attractively while proofing and baking. You can even try sourdough, catching local wild yeast and lactobacilli bacteria in a cultured starter to provide your own rising agent, with the added benefit of longer shelf life and a taste unique to your starter. There’s a great rustic pleasure in baking bread, so let’s look at how.

RECIPE Ingredients: Makes two large or three medium loaves - 1kg flour + 2 handfuls for coating (or other extras instead) - 600g warm liquid (usually water, but could be cider, milk, or even yoghurt) - 10g dry yeast - 20g salt - Optional: - Some oil or fat (a good slug) 2 handfuls of extras (nuts, seeds, fruit)

ote the proportions, as most bread is made not by a specific amount, but taking a percentage of the weight of the flour as guides for the other ingredients. The flour is 100%, then 60% of that weight in water, 1% in dry yeast, and 2% in salt is a good guide. Some flours or loaves like ciabatta need more water. Plain flour can be used, but a higher gluten content white bread flour, which contains about 12% protein, will work better for white bread. However, I recommend starting with wholemeal (brown) wheat flour before attempting white bread flour or other grains. White bread is one of the hardest loaves to get right as small mistakes are much more noticable and a light, delicate crumb is essential. Other grains such as rye or spelt give great flavour, but their lower gluten content can leave them dense and difficult to work. 36

/ ART BY YUSHI WU

NONFICTION A nice mix of seeds, nuts, or fruit can be added to the dough and used to coat the loaves. Oil is handy during the rising stage and can be added to the dough when mixing to prolong the life of the bread, as well as adding some flavour.

INSTRUCTIONS

ix the flour, yeast, and salt in a large mixing bowl, then add the water and mix by hand (they won’t stay clean) to a slightly sticky, combined dough. If using small extras or oil, add those now and give a good mix. Larger extras are added at the end of kneading. Turn the dough out onto a clean bench; it will stick a bit to the bench but that helps your kneading. If overly sticky add some more flour. To knead, push the fingers of one hand into the bread about a third of the way along it, then push the dough down and away with the heel of the other hand. You are stretching and developing the gluten membrane that keeps gas in and allows your bread to rise. Gather the bread back together, turn it and repeat, kneading it for about 10 minutes, by which point it should be smooth. With white flour it feels almost silky at this point, and much less sticky. If you’re unsure, stretch the dough apart whilst holding it up; you should see a thin membrane that easily lets light through. Next, form the dough into a round by placing it smooth side down, pushing it down flat and roughly circular. Then fold in the top edge to the middle, rotating it by a small amount (1/6 to 1/8 of a revolution is good) and folding down the top edge again until you’ve gathered all the edges in the middle. Flip the rough ball over, and, with mostly flat hands, gently squeeze in the bottom, where all the flaps you just folded come together. Lightly flour OR oil the dough and place it in a clean mixing bowl at least twice as big as the dough. Cover with a damp tea towel or wrap the bowl in a clean bin bag and leave in a warm spot (your bench should be fine) to rise until it is about doubled in size. This can take anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half. Once it has doubled in size turn it out onto the bench and prod it down firmly but gently with your fingers. You may form a round again and let it rise up to three more times to develop better gluten structure and flavour, or split it up and form it into loaves to proof. Once you are done letting it rise, divide the dough into roughly equal parts. Our measurements can make two large or three medium loaves, or many rolls. Then form them into rounds (or another shape, get inspired!) and coat them with a good dusting of flour or wet them in a bowl of water and roll them in your extras to cover them. Next, leave them covered on a floured board to proof until roughly doubled in size, feeling puffy and springing back into shape when gently squeezed. This takes between one and four hours. I’ve found it better to err on the side of overproofing rather than putting them in the oven early; a little overproofing gives lovely large air holes, and a lot gives a slightly collapsed loaf. Before they are finished proofing, preheat the oven to 250˚C or as high as it will go with a heavy-bottomed tray in the bottom and a tray in the middle with good clearance above it and enough space for the loaves. I find two large loaves easier to fit in a 60cm oven than three medium. Shortly before the bread is done proofing, boil a kettle of water and grab a sharp serrated knife. Once the proofing is finished take the middle tray out of the oven, carefully lift up the bread and place it on the tray, then gently slash the tops with the serrated knife. Cutting between one and two centimetres deep, the slashes should open nicely if the bread is properly proofed. Slashes control rising and provide a nice bit of decorative contrast with your coating. Then, working quickly to keep the oven as hot as possible, put the tray with bread back in the oven and pour boiling water into the bottom tray to create a good amount of steam. After 10 minutes, check on the bread. If it still seems very pale, turn it down to 200˚C; if it is browning quickly take it down to 170˚C; otherwise bring it down to about 180˚C. In total, large loaves will need around 45 minutes, medium around 35, and rolls around 15, each give or take five minutes. They are done when the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the base, though an extra 10 minutes rarely hurts, at worst giving a thicker crust. Let the bread cool on a wire rack, it’s still cooking and releasing a lot of steam. You may tear it while warm, but let cool completely before slicing it with a good serrated knife. Now go on and get baking; it’s great for pouring all your worries into, or to put breaks into your study as you check its rising. Best of all, at the end you get a fresh loaf, with full knowledge of everything that went into it. 37

NONFICTION

/ ART BY T-DOG EXTREME

NONFICTION

LET HEROES FEEL

TYLER MCRAE IS QUEERING SUPERHEROES

’m not by any means a superhero connoisseur. I’ve never read a comic book and most of the time I need the post-credit scenes of Marvel movies explained to me. While I’ve heard that many hero stories on paper are interesting and intelligent, I can’t help but notice how all of these action-filled hero films are just plain boring. When you look behind the dazzling special effects and choreographed fight scenes, where are the characters? It’s pretty easy to figure out what tropes each new superhuman is supposed to fill; rule follower, rule breaker, wise cracker, hesitant hero. But many of these figures end up empty behind the eyes. No personality, bland values laid before the audience like day old oatmeal, relationships with no significance, no stakes, no feeling. Shiny graphics and sexy actors can’t absolve the filmmakers of the fact that their characters are dripping in apathy. When Black Widow encounters her former lover, missing presumed dead for years, their relationship is resolved with a nod as indifferent as if they were strangers. The content of Wonder Woman’s ‘I like humans’ speech is so at odds to her dull and robotic delivery it’s comedic, her epiphany made ridiculous and utterly unfulfilling. Scarlet Witch, having experienced the death of her brother as if she were in his body, rips out the core of the big bad robot, responding to the loss of her closest relative with the same monotone violence all heroes seem to resort to. Her grief, like the grief of so many others, is glossed over, hardly revisited. The basis of their distinct lack of humanity, I think, lies in superhero films’ place as a platform for masculine fantasy. Despite the meaningful contributions of women and others to the genre, superhero films continue to be a man’s playground. The aesthetic filmmakers seem so invested in is constructed with a specific audience in mind; straight men. Suggestions that Aquaman was successful with women because of Jason Momoa’s abs, regardless of accuracy, reflect an assumption that heroes are for men with female viewers a profitable bonus. These films show heroes as stronger than strong, physically and emotionally. In order for men to become a hero, the pinnacle of masculinity, it seems you must leave your past life behind; including all of the emotional experiences that make you human. For the male heroes especially, emphasis is placed upon masculine rationality and detachment over feminine emotion. What we’re left with are super men with a range of emotions that

include: Concerned For The Innocent, Pissed Off, Rage™ and Nothing At All. This emotional disconnectedness applies just as much to the female heroes. Joss Whedon’s reported concern with his female stars still looking appealing while fighting aliens in slow motion is indicative of how women in superhero movies are produced in a specific way. They seem to be following Laura Mulvey’s work like guidelines, their only job to hit the appropriate beats until they can call their construction a film. Women’s responsibility to be beautiful limits their emotional range to Smirk, Damsel in Distress and Nothing At All, with female anger too unattractive to expose to the (straight male) public. Even the occasional sweet relief of a hint of connection between two parties is just empty calories. Genuine romance or relationships are forgone in favour of generic heterosexual Horny Love, always between a feminine woman and a masculine man, one plot point away from twisting their relationship into trauma and tragedy. There are exceptions. Venom is one rare example of a film with a protagonist that feels like a real person, a characterisation applauded by much of the audience, although not the critics. Captain Marvel is a rare moment of respite from the lack of grief heroes seem to show. Carol’s loss is explored throughout the film, and her relationship with Maria is allowed to exist and be resolved realistically. So here’s my argument: bring some more queerness into the picture. Queerness necessitates a level of vulnerability and emotional intelligence. The entire process of coming out, even to oneself, involves a reflection and interrogation of the self that these films about traumatised, abandoned, punished and idolised heroes could benefit from. Is it surprising that Venom has become a gay icon? Tom Hardy and his parasite have more chemistry than many a hetero romance. Carol and Maria’s relationship is easily interpreted as romantic, though the film offers little in terms of concrete representation. Even Thor has become an honorary lesbian icon following Thor: Ragnarok. His particularly benevolent form of masculinity is characterised by respecting women and wearing his heart on his sleeve. Living as a queer person means living a life steeped in truth and emotion, be they positive or negative. No more apathy. Let heroes feel. 39

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LIVING WELL WHEN YOU’RE UNWELL LOU WINSLOW ON VISIBILITY

elcome to Living Well When You’re Unwell, a column that answers all your questions about navigating uni, life, relationships, and jobs with disability and chronic illness. How can you tell if someone has a disability? -Anonymous Over 90 per cent of disabilities are invisible, meaning you cannot tell someone has a disability just by looking at them. So, in most cases you cannot tell if someone is living with disability. You might be able to tell if someone has a disability if: - They have a visible disability, or - If they tell you Disabilities come in all shapes and sizes and affect people differently. Practicing empathy and not making assumptions is key to ensuring people of all abilities are treated with respect. I am in my 20s but I have a disability parking permit. How do I deal with people giving me looks or saying mean things because I don’t look disabled? -Tired of the Looks Unfortunately, it’s quite common for young people with disabilities to be shamed for parking in disabled spots. I’ve heard horror stories that range from harassment to nasty letters being left on windscreens and even to individuals getting fined for using their own disability parking permits because they don’t “look like they need it”. There’s no quick fix to solving this problem, but if you’re comfortable with it, you can use these situations as a teaching moment. If someone speaks unkindly to you, you can remind them most disabilities aren’t visible and that disability isn’t discriminatory towards age. Although stigma is lessening, there will always be situations like this when people do not understand. Just remember you’re doing nothing wrong by taking care of yourself. What resources are out there for young people living with disability in Melbourne? -Unsure of Where to Start There are heaps of resources for young people with 40

/ ART BY REANN LIN

disability in Melbourne and Victoria. Some of the best resources around include: - Youth Disability Advocacy Services - Disability Resources Centre - Student Equity and Disability Support at University of Melbourne - UMSU Disabilities Department - Vision Australia (for those who are blind or have low vision) - Expression Australia (for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing) This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start. Some of these organisations are great for advocacy, some are great to learn about your rights, and some are great for building connections. I am afraid to tell people that I have a disability. Do you have any tips or advice? -Scared of Stigma I do. Here are some things to remember when you’re coming to terms with your own limitations and abilities: - You are deserving of having your access needs met. - You aren’t burdening others by asking them to make things accessible. - You are deserving of respect and kindness. - Although you deserve respect, kindness, and accessibility, sometimes you will be faced with just the opposite. This isn’t a reflection of you, but of the other person’s ignorance. - If you’re faced with ableism, try not to let it wear you down. - Even when it seems too difficult, don’t stop advocating for yourself. Even though there are laws in place and advocates all over the world, people with disabilities still do undergo unfair treatments and perception. This world was made for able-bodied people, so don’t get discouraged by all the barriers you may face. Navigating the world with a disability is challenging, but it’s also brave. Have a question on the general topic of disability and chronic illness? Send an email to livingwell@ farragomagazine.com to get your question answered. You don’t have to be living with a disability to send a question— any questions you might have about disability and health are welcome.

COLUMN

REGULATING LANGUAGE CONOR CLEMENTS EXPLAINS STANDARDS AND DIALECTS IN SCANDINAVIA

intelligibility. So where do you draw the line? How do s a field of study, linguistics is a relative newcomer you split these dialects into languages in a way that compared to more established social sciences sufficiently accounts for the differences between them, like anthropology and psychology—but you might but without drawing arbitrary distinctions based only on expect that linguists would have at least agreed geography and not linguistic differences? where to draw the line between dialect and language. As you might have guessed, this arbitrary geographic Alas, as always, the reality is much more complex. distinction is basically the situation in Scandinavia; If you’re unconvinced, allow me to introduce the there exists a dialect continuum which can more or Scandinavian languages (language? We’ll see) of Norway, less be visualised as spreading from Denmark, to Sweden and Denmark. These three languages lie on Norway, to Sweden. Norwegians are the hypothetical what’s known as a dialect continuum, which, if you residents of town B in this scenario: they are the best at speak English as a first language, probably won’t be understanding the other two languages. something you’ve encountered before, but it’s integral to So what’s the go with the division into three understanding why it’s so difficult to discern between a languages if they’re on a continuum? Part of it is dialect and language. geopolitics. Though there are plenty of cultural To start, we need to define mutual intelligibility—a term used to refer to the ease with between them, “So what’s the go similarities which two speakers can understand one these three nations haven’t ever really with the division into three another. For example, someone from been unified. Sweden and Denmark languages if they’re on a Sydney and someone from Hobart have both have their own official standardised continuum? Part of it high mutual intelligibility in their speech, languages which are taught at schools as their varieties of English are nearly and regulated by the government. is geopolitics. Though identical. To contrast, that Sydneysider The situation is a bit more complex in there are plenty of cultural and a German speaker have low mutual similarities between them, Norway, which has had political unions intelligibility, owing to the fact that with both countries in the past. There are these three nations English and German have been evolving haven’t ever really been two written standard languages—one of separately as languages for thousands which is really similar to written Danish— unified.” of years. Mutual intelligibility is one of and no official spoken standard at all. As a the main parameters used to discern a language from result, it’s never really had a centralised a dialect. linguistic tradition; regional dialects are still abundant Now on to dialect continuums, which I’ll illustrate with here, and are frequently heard in media. Danish, on a hypothetical scenario: let’s say there are two towns, the other hand, went through standardisation much town A and town B. Residents of town A speak dialect A, earlier than its sister languages; its dialects that were and those in town B speak dialect B. These dialects have more similar to Norwegian and Swedish dialects have a high mutual intelligibility. Now imagine there is a third all but been lost, and with them has gone a part of town, called town C, which is located near town B, but the continuum. It’s probably not surprising, then, that further away from town A. People from town C speak— Danes struggle the most with understanding other no points for guessing—dialect C, which also has a high Scandinavian languages. mutual intelligibility with dialect B. But dialect A and There isn’t really a simple way to summarise the dialect C? They’re spoken by people who live so far away nuances of what some term the Scandinavian dialect from each other that pretty significant changes have continuum. There are many other factors, many of which happened over time. Keep in mind—both dialects can be differ from person to person based on exposure to understood pretty well by speakers of dialect B. different dialects, and many more of which are based on I’m sure you can see where this makes identifying historic differences. If nothing else, Scandinavia is living what a language is a very difficult task—do the people proof of two things: the aphorism commonly attributed from towns A, B and C all speak the same language? to Max Weinreich, “A language is a dialect with an army It would seem not, based on the parameter of mutual and a navy;” and that countries are basically fake. ART BY CATHY CHEN /

/ PHOTOGRAPHY BY KESPA KATSUK

Content Warning: homophobia

NONFICTION

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? BELLA RUSKIN NAVIGATES THE GRAVEYARD OF QUEER CINEMA

project. These filmmakers don’t have the practice or the t’s a Friday night and your day has been a little too financial backing to make a high-quality film, but they’re straight. Luckily Netflix has that LGBTQ section desperate to make something which speaks to them to fix things up. For the next hour and a half, one and their experiences. While other directors’ awful first of the worst films you will ever see in your life attempts may be hidden away, LGBTQ films are needed, flickers across the screen. It can only be one of so they remain in the spotlight. The Lord of the Rings the worst, since you would have faced the same director Peter Jackson began his directing career with Bad problem last Tuesday. Queer cinema is a mess. Taste in 1987. It follows aliens harvesting humans from a Not every queer film is terrible. In recent years, more small New Zealand town, as a part of their intergalactic high-quality, low-death-count films have been made. Love, food chain business. James Cameron first directed Simon includes zero queer deaths, one big happy ending Piranha II: The Spawning, also known as Flying Killers. and a $17 million budget. Carol, God’s Own Country and Though these films are obscured from the spotlight, Pride are also properly funded and very good. Not every queer first films like Is It Just Me? and What Happens Next terrible movie is queer either, but there’s a questionable pattern when such a high proportion of such a small group have unfortunately had runs on Netflix. Queer representation may not be ideal yet, but at least of films are so bad. If you’re not convinced, try to get through the entirety of The Guest House, it’s stepping away from past portrayals. From What Happens Next or The 10 Year Plan. Ursula to Scar, from Silence of the Lambs “Yet it is the ‘passion Academic and social critic Camille to Basic Instinct, queer-coded villains are Paglia suggests mediocre filmmaking rampant and damaging. Ursula was based project’ reasoning comes from a closure of community. off famed drag queen Divine, demonising a which feels the Without fear of persecution, LGBTQ real-life queer person. While Ariel is sweet warmest and people can now make films which and heterosexual, Ursula is a predator, appeal exclusively to them. There is no whose octopus tentacles are supposedly fuzziest–and makes need to educate the outside population seductive and scary, equating queerness to these atrocious films anymore, so these films are average, evilness. If the character isn’t portrayed excusable.” but desired by an audience who will as morally repellent or dangerous, they’ll consume them anyway. probably learn from their gay mistakes Another possibility is budget. Major film studios have soon enough. Brokeback Mountain ends in a gay bashing. historically had little interest in financing queer films. Lost and Delirious has one character denounce her depraved Many projects – including D.E.B.S., The Way He Looks lesbian ways, while the other commits suicide. Atomic and Were the World Mine – began as short films. Their Blonde and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel kill off their queer popularity eventually enabled them to be financed as characters the moment they find happiness. Queer film feature-length pictures, but the time between each often depicts the LGBTQ community’s depressing history, release indicates financial difficulties. Were the World and it’s tricky to create AIDS stories with happy endings, but Mine, a gay interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, misery and punishment are over-represented. was released in 2008 – but the original short, drolly titled Passion projects are something of a rebellion – Fairies, came out in 2003. It’s one of the most popular films like What Happens Next are a reaction to negative films from small production company The Entertainment representation. Queer filmmakers want to create happy Group, despite making only $123,789 during its run. stories. Maybe it’s catharsis, maybe it’s entertainment. The movie is laughed at, but with more financing the It might be the film they’ve been waiting years to create. production quality could have been better, making the Yes, these films are terrible. Everyone laughs at them, film less of a joke. talks about them, gives them the thumb down on Netflix Many of these films are low-budget and poorly made – but these films are obviously necessary and watched because they are filmmakers’ first projects. What Happens by people who need to see themselves represented Next was director Jay Arnold’s first and only directing positively on the screen. People love to hate, but the need and writing credit, suggesting that this was his passion for happy endings shouldn’t be dismissed. 44

/ ART BY CHARANJA THAVENDRAN

Content Warning: racism, Islamophobia

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KISS AND TELL A’BIDAH ZAID SHIRBEENI ON ONLINE DATING

inder. The dating app we hate to love and love to hate. fun facts, my sexual orientation and casually mentioned that I’m polyamorous. I also blatantly stated that I’m a A majority of women’s experience on Tinder tend to chatterbox looking to talk the ears off someone – nothing be same, of most, are quite terrible. I should know, I’m more, nothing less. Sad to say it didn’t manage to keep a woman myself. You download the app – fully aware slime balls away. that you’re doing so out of boredom – get into the “Do you know who Mia Khalifa is?” trance of swiping and end up matching with a bunch of “Yes,” I replied. people. Some you end up going on a date with, some “So, can you keep that on during sex?” you unmatch for being ultimate slime balls and some I clutched my pearls. Assuming I’d want to sleep with you just.. never get past the initial ‘Hey’. Typical, right? As you, is not cool but what else can I expect from being if navigating the disgusting and somewhat entertaining world of Tinder as a woman isn’t hard enough, try being a on a dating app. But asking me if I can “keep it on” is downright disrespectful to my faith and what I believe in. Muslim woman – one who wears the hijab. So is saving my number in your contacts as ‘Haram Snack Gasp. Such controversy. A hijabi on Tinder? What are Pack’ because I’m a snack you’d love to taste. Me wearing you doing here? How’s that like? a scarf around my head is not a fashion accessory and Well, let me answer that. Firstly, a quick disclaimer. I’m not has meaning to me. I know my pornstars, stupid. Tinder is where people go to get but I’m not keen on being one for you. “Me wearing a scarf laid. I know that. But I also know that I’m Don’t cast me in your fantasy. I’m not a around my head is not there for shits and giggles, free meals and fetish, I’m a woman, a person. meet cool friends to chill with. Yes, I’m one a fashion accessory Apart from being fetishized, I often of those people who go to tinder to look get sweet messages from men of my and has meaning to me. for friends. Actual friends. Making friends own faith. I know my pornstars, in university isn’t exactly the easiest, “You’re haram (sinful). You’re going to hell.” but I’m not keen on especially when you’ve got people “Nice. I’ll see you there,” I replied. running from tute to tute or people who He who plays with fire gets burned being one for you. .” and I get unmatched immediately. Dear live 2 hours away from university and aren’t going to stay much longer after a fellow Muslim men on Tinder, get off late tute to get to know you. Setting up a meetup on a your high horse. You’re on the app too. I get policed on a free day or a weekend seems like quite a big commitment day to day in the real world, I don’t need hypocrites in the (to me at least) and I’d much rather do my first phase online world trying to right my wrongs. of sussing people out from the comfort of my own bed Do I have to deal with this kind of nonsense? No, not – dressed in pyjamas and fingers ferociously hitting the really, but replying to stupid questions and requests does screen of my phone. If we don’t vibe, it’s no big deal, I bring me some joy and entertainment. On days haven’t spent THAT much time or effort on it anyways. when I don’t reply messages from interested parties, If we click, we’ll meet up. Some of these people from I get the occasional: “Reply me you Muslim bitch”. But tinder turn out to be amazing friends that I still have and some days I get a casual “ISIS” or “Terrorist” instead of a cherish now. Some of them I’ve dated or had been in a ‘Hey’ and my response to that is always the easiest. relationship with. I can write about these Tinder matches, Unmatch. but they’re rare. My Tinder profile was pretty simple. I listed a few

ART BY CHARANJA THAVENDRAN /

COLUMN

MYTHOLOGIES IRIS SHUTTLEWORTH ON GOLD DONUTS AND THE FAVOURITE

o you remember being five years old and making yourself sick on too much chocolate? Remember learning for the first time that there is such a thing as too much? It must have seemed like such a strange idea before that moment, that you could have too much of anything. We were born needing. Yorgos Lanthimos’ film The Favourite (2018) is ostensibly about power, but even more so about appetite. Queen Anne is transfixing. She wants cake, sex, affection, fine dresses. On a certain level, she wants respect but more than that she wants comfort. She wants to be enough. The film frames Anne as a morbidly tragic figure. She has lost 17 babies, and so seeks to numb her grief with food, sex and attention. The audience is both thrilled and horrified by the scale of her need. Anne is a lesser-known Queen. If someone has heard of her, the fact they are most likely to know about her is that she was morbidly obese and suffered from gout. The historical obsession with her body belies a fascination with the female body as a site of contradiction. There’s something puritanical about the way we survey bodies—especially fat, female ones. Pleasure is grotesque when viewed from this angle. We feel that we ought to be repenting for something. Excess and appetite are no longer status symbols. The ultra-rich are more likely to define themselves by their self-control, the way they can wield their bodies and time to productive and disciplined ends. No pleasure can be worthwhile in and of itself, all goods are instrumental to work and profit. The upper class are far less likely than they once were to define themselves by their feasts. This contradiction between performative displays of discipline and performative displays of consumption has reconciled itself by creating food that exists purely for its aesthetic qualities. Instagram food. Food that is not a meal but rather a spectacle. It usually involves gold leaf—or glitter—usually a substance that isn’t generally considered edible. It turns something mundane into an

/ ART BY MONIQUE O’RAFFERTY

event, an experience that is only available to a privileged few. You lined up for it. You travelled to Japan for it. It is food as a commodity, the point is not to eat it but to acquire and document it. It is axiomatic to say that one’s worldview will appear on their plate. It is a matter of ethics, access, taste, culture, hang-ups, desires and longings. Inscribed in this quotidian daily activity is an attempt to reconcile our highest and lowest impulses. I want to save the planet and I want a whole plate of cheese and I don’t know how to have it both ways. I want to go out and share a meal and I want to stay in, saving my money. The contradictions in my beliefs appear before me, three times a day. To spend $10 on a donut that was baked to be photographed belies a different set of priorities than to spend 50 cents on a donut from your local Vietnamese bakery. More and more of our daily activities are converted into labour. Even eating is something that can be performed, consumed literally, and then again as an image. Do you remember learning for the first time that your body is something you must control? That you must live a certain contradiction? That you must control your figure and you must avoid the appearance of vanity? I was changing out of my gym clothes last week when another girl came up to me to let me know that “all body types are welcome” in the class. I had not realised, lying on my back and pushing my head and shoulders up towards the ceiling, that my body might be something in need of special inclusion. Perhaps it is not so strange that we have been sold something to do with our food other than eating it. Is it wrong to want? I do not want to shame someone for their hunger. Perhaps my discomfort with food-asspectacle comes from the same puritanical discomfort that historians and courtiers felt towards Queen Anne, a desire to treat the body as a metaphor containing within it the vices and virtues of a nation. Can a cake ever just be a cake? A body just a body? Let us forgive our appetites. Eat up.

ART BY MONIQUE Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RAFFERTY /

CREATIVE

FLASH FICTION

PROMPT: DATING APPS

SURELY THAT’S BETTER THAN A ‘HEY x’? BY TEO JING XUAN R: hey pretty forward question but its chill so bare with me *laugh emoji*. Basically every girl i’ve been with has said I have a big dick but dk if they are just saying that to be nice cos they are all ex gf’s or really good friends so obvs they would just say its big. If I snap it could u give an honest unbiased opinion? H: R, you sent my friend you matched with the exact same message. Nice try bud. Just get a fucking ruler. R: damn caught.

AN ODE TO TINDER

BY KATHERINE SCOTT Phone in hand, glass of wine, You swipe on some gents, Oooh damn, he’s fine. Studies at Melbourne, must be a catch, Plus he’s got a dog, Sweeet, it’s a match! Fuck gender roles, send him a line, WAIT! He just messaged, “Babe u up 4 a good time?” Alright, you’ll admit that wasn’t the best, When it comes to his grammar, you’re not remotely impressed. You’ll agree to a date, sort time and a place. He doesn’t reply, you forget he exists. Until one day, a familiar face… He’s sitting in class, man you are pissed! You make eye contact, cheeks slightly toasted, He looks away… #ghosted.

UN-LOVED FLYING OBJECT

BY MARTA PRACTICÒ A silhouette in the darkness sighs. He scrolls the homepage of his dating app, with the heavy head of an old soul that does not have a life partner as everyone is expecting. The milky light of the screen takes on a blue hue: his eyes light up. “Hello! I am a generous creature with a lava heart ;) I am looking for someone to break my current unsatisfactory relationship, to build a better future, together. My soulmate does not have to be dirty and MUST be an animal lover (I have so many of them! <3).” The creature moved a tentacle on his device and some coordinates to reach its imminent conquest appeared on a big screen. “EARTH”.

/ ART BY LIZZY YU

Content Warning: anxiety

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Sarah plays on the association of colours and words to write her poetry using Taubmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paint samples from Bunnings.

RISE AND SHINE BY SARAH PETERS Choking through wattles that seethe and seize, Sputter specks of pollen thrown up like stars or a single bee returning gold to anyone she can. She has been hanging lanterns across buttercup blinds unopened, She is not ready for burning retinas, Honeystuck on candle glow, Counting her freckles until light returns. Halo goodness, goddess suggests that this is her silver lining, A glow she cannot touch burning up inside while you rub her down flower heads across concrete melting into butter.

ART BY LIZZY YU /

CREATIVE

Content Warning: blood, drug use

BROKEN LIGHTER, DEAD BIRD BY MORGAN-LEE SNELL

arty in the new house/ex-brothel. Each room has a two-way mirror. Now it’s all lengthy hallways and plastic flowers laced around the loft and a bong shaped like Yoda. Realisations at the party; - I’m stagnant - I’m afraid - that cocaine was more plaster-dust than cocaine - maybe I’m not ready but this cocoon is too comfortable and - I need to get free. Weird waves of self-expression, sometimes I’m so open. Tell strangers my trauma but can’t tell my mother. Been doing the crab thing lately, exoskeleton, non-confrontational, non-communicational, non-... But here I am with love seeping out my pores again, sticky hearted always, sticky date pudding, B tastes so sweet. Teeth so crooked, my butterfly boy, freckled chest so sweet, smells so sweet, familiar, way he walks, so sweet, can’t stand it. I leave bite marks on his nose, neck, ear, nose, nose, I love that nose. On the nights the fire burns too bold we wake stuck together by the clammy juice of his sweat (sweet) sweat. I know L can taste our love. We leave it lingering like a salty mist in all the rooms of the house. I know L can taste our love. I can feel it in the way he rests his curls between my neck and my shoulder. I don’t want to hurt people; all I want is love. Addicted to love. Would die for love. But I can’t do it anymore; holding him while he cries, walking into a room with B to find him sitting there expectant and wounded, can’t watch him smash old compost bins and abandoned streetside “it’s a boy” balloons in fits of pain. A week ago he punched the chicken coop, smashed the wooden door. Brought over an old egg, bleeding from the knuckle. One piece of wood sliced him good and it dripped onto his shirt. I wanted to lick it up, kiss him better, take his heart out of his chest and kiss that better too. You can’t ask someone to change a feeling. Now that I don’t feel so strong a desire to be inebriated all the time, I feel a strong desire to feel a strong desire to be inebriated all the time (addiction is easy because it’s consistent and because it’s certain). Now that I don’t feel so strong a desire to be inebriated all the time I take more notice of L’s early morning beers; drunk before 8AM, laughs unsteady and almost insane. I found out he was on crack on the weekend when he called. He asks how I slept last night and gives me “sorry,” for the push, for the early morning fit, for “if I scared you.” He says “I’m going fucking insane do you know what it’s like?”

/ ART BY YUSHI WU

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I cry into him over the kitchen sink. Feel ugly because all the evil is leaking out of me. We share a joint, then a cigarette, mostly in silence. Then I go home. The rings are a symbol, three glittering symbols of how we used to love. L’s, a mood ring set in copper and lime, slipped into my pocket one grayscale afternoon spent at Highpoint Shopping Centre. B’s I twisted together, wiry offcuts from the earrings I’d made Amie (great bones wrapped up in bits of bronze). L found mine on an escalator in Footscray, travelling up and bending down to pick up the small velvety bag filled with loops of rose gold. Stumbled upon, stolen, crafted. Our perfect symbols in shades of sunset. Still tied together at the fingers, white twine stretching between us, ring fingers wrapped in promises of golden tones and shifting emotions. The next-door neighbour dies in the night. The next evening we hear the midnight feathers falling from his new widow; great howling cries she sends out to the darkness. Saw a dying crow on the roadside the other day, all the feathers fluttering. Tell B I saw our future just to be a tease; “Please tell me what’s going to happen,” and me: “But baby if I tell you it won’t come true!” Can’t keep cycling through this pattern with L. I don’t love him the way he wants. He grows sharp teeth and those black eyes, hurts me. I cry and he goes to petals; wants me back, wants me bad. Rough carbon copy of so many first loves—that insecurity that can only be eased with tears, the aching of another. Enough proof that, yes, after all, you are loved. Our love was a novelty lighter shaped like a horse, we’d pass it round the circle and light each cigarette. Took turns sitting on one-another’s laps because we only had two chairs, three asses, and that was okay because we had our love like our lighter. We can never promise forever. But we like to, don’t we? I saw a dying crow on the roadside the other day, wing turned sideways, claws opening, closing like he was trying to grab at anything, anything. The rain came down, first gentle and then harder, so that all the feathers that had been fluttering in the breeze were slicked down and stayed that way. And the crow wasn’t moving anymore.

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十二秒记忆飞逝 BY MENGJIE CAI I 寻找一只蝴蝶迷失在田野

II 跟随早春的呼吸吹响十支风笛

III 追一只低飞的孤鹰踏入荒原

IV 在黑暗中爬上六十米高的烟囱触摸低垂的暮色

V 身后轰鸣的声音向你伸出冰冷的舌头

VI 你开始因为高度而感到摇摇欲坠的恐惧 VII 远方的草木开始沉默的枯萎

VIII 鸟兽在工厂的浓烟里丢失了声音 IV 西风试图扭转你的脖颈

X 世界开始通缉你自如的孤独

XI 城市的灯光在你的手心刻出规律的掌纹 XII 你找到了蝴蝶它是昆虫纲鳞翅目垂教亚目动物的统称

/ ART BY TIFFANY WIDJAJA

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12 SECONDS OF FLEETING CONSCIOUSNESS BY MENGJIE CAI 一

Tracing a butterfly, lost in the field.

二 Following the breadth of early spring, blew ten cornemuses. 三 Chasing a low flying hawk, threaded into a wasteland.

四 Ascending sixty meters to a chimney top, touched the falling dusk.

五 The cold sticky tongue of growling factories behind you. 六 The teetering fear of height across the spine of you. 七 To the silent death of distant buds.

八 To the lost voices of birds and beasts in smother. 九 West wind’s second attempt to twist your neck.

十 You are wanted for your effortless joy from solitude.

十一 City lights carve straight lines across your palm-prints.

十二 Butterfly found. Joint name of macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera order Lepidoptera

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AFTERMATH BY NICOLE MOORE My psych tells me: the breath is unique, It sits between the body and the mind, It is the mirror of things birthed at the bottom of oceans, of purple hands that cannot be wiped away, or the rot, stuck fast to overstretched baby skin. My breath is the wreckage of a plane, crumpled frame and far too much silence. That irritated me at first, the earth rolling quietly over always, even in a blizzard, even though the ceiling grew whiter and the air was just starch. You are doing fine I hear, from the man I once called a brother, from the woman in his mouth, exhaling the outline of our child’s name. And I know you didn’t know— Had a different idea of— Would’ve been okay if— I know. I made movies about it could never get all the angles right, all the sounds, could never quite get the story to make any sense. The version truest of you, I think, is that you like to believe in karma so one day you might fold me up humbly, place me next to the weight of your shoulders and grow a new face. As for me, I believe in some hour threaded through all the years where you still kiss my face of lemon rind and rough hessian, boulder-wide, fish-scaled, round as a copper coin. I am moving with the tide now, pulling at impossible knots: the slow mouth and the running river, the rebuilding and the shattering. Sometimes, again when the air is far too thin I cast a line back, the little hooks snagging on the sunrise, on the bed frame made of clocks ticking, on the plane gliding through the door. And here I am telling you Look. Look how far we’ve come.

/ ART BY MORGAN-LEE SNELL

guts and gutters

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BY NATALIE FONG CHUN MIN through the teetering squares of tram windows, a lone shoe, its wind-ridden strap unfazed by glass shards of artistic drunkenness, lying just a few feet away from— in a passing blur— the sentient lives of overworked clothes pegs, relegated to uniformly coloured afterthoughts— bulk-buys, dollar-for-dozen otherwise, never complement anything but loss around here. as the hours grow out of my company, they clamber like restless children, their precarious curiosity protruding in a packed tram, elbowing someone else’s back; I wondered what they saw out the window, whether it matched what they were hoping to see. this is what it feels like when time tries to slip away from your aimless grip but can you blame me, when whatever the opposite of oblivion is, has such an obstinate hold on me? things that fall out of people’s purses call out to me, imploring to be returned to what they are (not done being), what they’re made for, who they used to be with.

still, I wonder if I’m helping them by alerting their owners, by saving them from premature nihilism. still, isn’t being left behind worse than being thrown away?

I think now, of the hours— wonder who had the upper hand, who did the throwing and who’s doing the leaving and where does that leave me.

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A THING WITH FEATHERS

BY JOCELYN DEANE DM’s log: 29 October 2018 Day seven of campaign—The Open Cage, late at night After two radically different but equally long and depressing days at work, Kazimir and Andi made their way to The Open Cage to drown their sorrows in copious amounts of alcohol. Drimlock was already there, performing a set on stage, to the general disinterest and displeasure of most of the bar—with the exception of Emily Dickinson and her girlfriend Veronique.

nce, I was leafing through old Something Awesome forum posts and articles from the early 2000s. The only thing I know about Something Awful is that the Twitter user Dril used to post there. It’s weird to behold this sediment of the internet, pre-anything. It reminds me of the Natural History Museum or the actors playing Elizabethan criminals at the tower of London, totally committed to their historical roles, or maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Maybe the internet is a history machine. Much under the surface. I remember clicking a page of one-onone RPG blogs: two friends/writers for Something Awful documenting their campaigns for lulz. They’re playing The Call of Cthulhu, an RPG based on the work of HP Lovecraft, in which the systems and rolls conspire to make you weak, fearful and constantly on the verge of ecstasy. Each time you’re exposed to something weird you must roll lower than the number designating your total mental health; the outcome determines whether and for how long you are allowed to control your characters, who are normal people with normal backstories. In this campaign, Lisa Lopes, Kurt Cobain and Eazy-E from NWA are paranormal investigators, warlocks and spirit mediums, who eventually end up fighting racist

/ ART BY VAN ANH CHU

Pat Buchannan-esque demagogues, and pre-Gulf War Saddam Hussein who is controlled by Nyarlathotep, the dark herald who shall come from the east, the herald of Azathoth, the blind force at the heart of matter. X: I wanted the 1890s version, but you insisted on the 1990s for some reason. Y: I had my reasons. X: As Lovecraft is a harsh mistress, you created more than one character and I will help run them while you play your main character. Y: Yeah. My main character is Kurt Cobain. X: Based on him? Y: No. It is literally Kurt Cobain. X: I don’t know how I feel about this. Y: At the height of his power, Kurt Cobain turns from grunge music to cosmic mysteries. He has some additional skills which will help him research the occult and use magic. X: What about your other party members? Y: They are Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Eric Lynn Wright AKA Eazy-E. X: Are they mercenaries? Y: No, they are amazing performers, but also a demolitions expert and a linguist specializing in ancient languages respectively. X: Uh huh. How did they meet and form a group? Y: The 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. When Krist Novoselic threw his bass into the air and died on stage performing ‘Lithium’ and they all joined forces to turn him into salt and resurrect him. X: Did it work? Y Not really. He’s alive, but he came back changed. He’s pretty much phoning in his performances and he eats mice. X: Alright, I’m still not 100% on board with you playing

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real people, but still. Day 7 (cont.) Eventually, the party drunkenly stumbled across something resembling the plot. Said plot took the form of a missing child, Lissa, the niece of Drimlock’s boyfriend Davros. A stray dog immediately side-tracked them. This dog was rabid, so Andi sent for her mother Persephone, who’d be able to cure it. Persephone did so; however, in the meantime, the dog’s friends had arrived. They circled the party and attacked, and in the process exhibited some very strange behaviour, such as grotesquely stretching into a form more suited for climbing, and exhaling clouds of noxious smoke. Despite such monstrous mutations, the party dispatched the dogs without much trouble. Emily Dickinson cut open the stretchy dog, and discovered that its internal organs were writhing and contorting inside it, apparently trying to avoid her blade. Andi interviewed the surviving, no-longer-rabid dog, learning its name—Last—and the source of the dogs’ mutations—a bright light under a pile of meat in The Slags. The party returned to the task of finding Lissa. In wolf form, Andi tracked her scent, leading the party to a thick patch of razorvine: barbed wire plants. Kaz flew into the centre of the mass, collapsing himself as he made it out. The others got Kaz and Lissa clear and healed their wounds, then returned Lissa to her father’s house. The party had a few drinks to settle their frazzled nerves, then called it a night. Writing this column, observing us sitting around our invisible dinner-table, pizza boxes spread in the centre, I wasn’t sure how to write in the first person. The boy poet Arthur Rimbaud—calling for a “derangement of the senses”, a systematic breakdown of the ego/permanence of the self, vegetating in fin-de-siecle imperial France— wrote in a letter to his lover Paul Verlaine that “I” is an

other/person/body. There are more connotations in French. Lovecraft’s universe (Call of Cthulhu RPG included) is one in which disassociation from the self—static and strategically unknowing—is the ultimate terror. “Someday,” wrote Lovecraft, “the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Around the table, a player is talking about a graphic novel based around HP Lovecraft called Providence. A fictional queer writer, Robert Black quits their job after the first world war and begins a paper-trail following an occult alchemical text. They begin to conceive of this text as a metaphor of America: they visit analogues to places in Lovecraft’s work, working-class and immigrant communities, which in Lovecraft’s stories are written into sites of disintegration. It’s fine, it’s fine though, the player is saying: you see how much they miss, the writer, who isn’t HP Lovecraft but meets him later: they walk past a Kurdish man selling tomatoes and speaking phonetic Kurmanji, which is spelt—to the writer—like: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. You see how much they miss of themselves, trying to record it. They turn back to the game. This player doesn’t exist. I invented them. I Hmmm to myself. Sometimes describing my actions in character I say “Emily Dickinson does this,” sometimes I use the “I”. We continue playing. Game play synopsis written by Emily Morgan Harmann, with thanks.

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/ ART BY AMANI NASARUDIN

Content Warning: implications of death

CREATIVE

DETIK-DETIK BY JENNIFER CHANCE Detik pertama I was drowning and the world softened, an egg dipped in vinegar. Detik kedua I saw the fireflies again. They beat their golden stubs, swimming through the syrup trees. I captured them in jars and told my brother I stole the stars from the night sky. Detik ketiga My mother no longer sings as loud; she keeps hearing the last song she crooned to me. Her bones tremble with the rhythm. Detik terakhir We leave parts of ourselves in everything we touch. They break off like leaves, smothered by the wind, little seconds trickling. I watch myself in their eyes. In some, I am caught in the waves; in others, lost in the fog; in others still, I am nothing.

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EVERYWHERE AT THE END OF TIME BY LUKE ROTELLA

‘Everywhere at The End of Time’ The recovered journal log of Dante Telesphore: wayfarer and cartographer of the Melbourne North region. The contents of this document were excavated from an unidentifiable (although visibly sentient) creature from a bog 42.2km north-west of Melbourne. Scouts reported to have been perplexed by the creature’s anatomy as there was no telling where the man, manuscript and plantera began or ended, everything was disturbingly conjoined by clammy vines. Although most of the document was damaged due to exposure to extreme weather, a precalamity linguist decoded and translated the manuscript. The following is the short collection of extracts completed by former Japanese writer ‘Haruki Murakami’. He studied Telesphore’s writings on the new city of Melbourne for 3 years but concluded they were nonsensical, until he had a dream giving him a ‘transcendental and multi-dimensional perspective on the map that allowed [him] to see directions only conceived by the mind’s eye’. Murakami was reported missing at age 94. This document should find itself exclusively in the hands of graduate linguists and should not be distributed beyond NRMIT. Cy1/152. Hunters Rest. 37.5811° S, 144.7139° E The first time I encountered Victor was on a bleak, foggy morning exactly one year ago today. I find it fascinating that one can innocently tug at a single thread and accidentally unravel an entire garment. The grey abyss of sky, the isolated warmth of the bonfire amongst cold, overgrown ruins and the distant song of a hollowed traveller. All unravelled as a torrent of wind passed through the crumbling pillars; connecting two isolated points in time as if time were a tangled ball of unwoven thread. The smell of burning moss at the sword’s hilt and the crackling bonfire embers rising into the mist ascended my mind into the foggy void. It dropped me in a rowboat in a boundless oceanic plane with the faint shadow of a cliffs edge beyond reach. A wall of steam pipes and impossibly contorted valves can be seen through the veil of still water and in the distance; images of floating cities shrouded in gold and silver form and melt into the ocean within seconds. The temporal dimensions lay on an incomprehensible plane and deceived me into rowing towards the shrouded cliff for what felt like centuries. This would happen often in Hunters Rest: the waiting room between time and limbo. Thoughts would manifest then become runaways, only the trail of trodden dirt to prove that a thought once existed. Such a place is a porous sponge for thought, each branch away from the bonfire its own form of meditative seduction. The cliff to the west was popular amongst scholars. They would stand by the bonfire and look down onto the eerily still, endless sea to ponder and presumably produce the scribblings of madmen found deep in uncharted caverns, attempting to unlock the secrets of the modern world. Victor owed this condition of ‘hollowing’ to the tribulations of traversing the modern world or, more accurately, ‘standing at the edge of time looking down on the abyss, unable to decide whether to jump or wait for the calamity’. Unlike me, he wouldn’t fight the current, he’d allow it to carry his thoughts. In fact, he used a pre-war instrument (MIDI keyboard, image attached pg. 397) to recreate sounds of ‘human sorrow’. He showed me his music yesterday. Called it ‘nihilistic jazz’. Beyond the layered soundscape of drones and distorted buzzes, I couldn’t discern much aside from visceral screaming.

/ ART BY HAYLEY MAY

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Cy1/387. RAINE FOREST. 37.8610° S, 144.8850° E I feel as though my consciousness remained at Hunters Rest, Like flames wrapped around the sword’s hilt lodged in the bonfire. Men driven to madness by the self-instilled notion that god lies within writings of the old world. Derelict lake towns on fire. Ash and mud. Petrichor and scorched firewood. Sky like spilled paint. A chamber sonata couldn’t convey my ambivalent feeling of dread and apathy. After a while it becomes blotted like a Rorschach test. Murky black, scattered ink. White, plain paper defaced; an un-reversible mistake. Lately, that’s all I’m looking at. It’s all the same. All insanity. Cy1/389. RAINE FOREST. 37.8610° S, 144.8850° E ‘Those individuals who gaze upon Dagon’s true form will have their mind shattered across all planes of existence: the dream realm, tangible reality and the infinite possibilities beyond. Thus, the prophesied caretaker will save humanity from the edge of time. [text missing] Only the song of pure and untapped misery will join the consciousness of man and awaken the new god. When his counter is defeated the thousand eyes of Dagon may enter our realm and return Neo Melbourne to it’s primordial state. [text missing] When the old god reset the Earth, he lost himself and thus, had no canvas for which to base humanity upon. Humanity was ripped and torn into millions of fragments, weakening a singular format into a plethora of simplistic organisms. We will gaze upon the wonderful monstrosity of Dagon soon as a unified being.’ Translator’s notes: My dreams suggest strange things about this entry. I don’t believe it was written by Telesphore; at least willingly. I will meditate on this further over honey tea and Jaffa cake. Then perhaps the Old God will return to me with the missing pieces. Cy6/999. Hunters Rest. 37.5811° S, 144.7139° E I could never discern my thoughts from dreams. The minds eye is no less deceitful than our physical perceptions. As such the swirling void at my feet is as real as it is fake… Translator’s notes: Whenever I looked upon the page I’d feel as though my eyes were decomposing and melting into my skull. I would check the mirror to find they were A-Okay! The residual however, was a slight pain in my neocortex. For that reason, I don’t intend to return to Telesphore’s manuscript until tomorrow. For now, I will visit the 808s café for some R and R and carrot cake. I feel I am more deserving of that than ever.

TOP HEADLINES:

MAIN INVESTIVATION CONTINUED:

THE CINDER SAGA SETTING THE KINGDOM AFLAME

THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES: BRINGING AN END TO THE OPPRESSIVE ‘HUNDRED YEARS’ OF SLEEP

CINDERELLA SUED BY STEPFAMILY UNDER DEFAMATION

inderella’s stepfamily claim they have been shunned and avoided in society for being “unnecessarily cruel” to Cinderella after the official story about her childhood treatment was released. They also claim they have been portrayed as petty, as people immediately pointed to them as the accusers in the following backlash.

CINDERELLA’S CLAIM TO THE THRONE AS THE RIGHTFUL PRINCESS CONTESTED

couple of women have come forward with claims to the famous glass slipper which has gone missing according to official reports, presenting their feet as their evidence. Most of the women seem to have feet that fit perfectly into a detailed replica. “It’s absolutely inconceivable.” A royal commentator said, “I can’t believe someone could have the same sized feet. It’s unheard of for anyone except Cinderella to have perfectly dainty size six feet.” There are a number of people recorded with the same sized feet in the kingdom’s census, particularly in Cinderella’s generation, but it is rather dubious how only Cinderella was found to perfectly match the glass slipper. Statistically, our analysts found that there would be some duplicating of women if the Prince just focused on feet size alone. “There’s a conspiracy I tell you.” One of the women claims, “the royal entourage claims to have visited every household and Cinderella was the only one found to have the same sized feet. I bet they found themselves too high and mighty to walk along the streets and ask any destitute or homeless women who could have benefitted from the Prince’s love.” However, there are many that still jump to the defence of Cinderella and of the method in how she was chosen. “There is a lot to measure in a foot that would determine if the shoe fits,” A shoe expert says, “there’s the width of the foot, length, size of the heel, shape and slope of the toes as well as a whole host of other factors. The final deciding factor would have to be whether it is comfortable for the woman to wear. It takes a certain kind of effortless poise, a regal bearing, a light temperament and princess-like disposition to carry oneself on glass.” Many also call “bollocks” on the myth that the prince didn’t recognise Cinderella from the ball and relied on a superficial method of choice. 62

/ ART AND LAYOUT BY TIFFANY WIDJAJA

t turns out scientists have been secretly trying to break the sleep for many years, way before the tourists trampled the site as previously speculated. Queen Briar Rose and her new husband have recently honoured the researchers and the doctors who analysed and helped bring an end to the hundred years of sleep with a new breakthrough. The unidentified woman mentioned in the last edition has officially been reported as the queen herself. She was only one of the few who have made a quick recovery. Others are slowly being aroused. Sleeper city, as it had been nicknamed by foreigners since inhabitants were unconscious when explorers discovered them after cutting through the notorious Thorned Forest, has awoken. It has been an interesting phenomenon for the researchers to document the remarkable preservation of the citizens, with ageing being freezed in its tracks. For the purposes of refreshing people’s memories on the important events since no one was awake for all those years, the Fairytale Gazette has rifled through the classified archives that have been forced open for media use by the Queen. The archives reveal that a wise woman was found to be at fault for inducing the great sleep. This traitorous woman, who was convicted of attempted murder by concocting a sleeping potion, denied the allegations and any knowledge of the composition of the potion, which made it difficult for scientists to analyse in the attempt to find an antidote. Previous attempts to wake up the city had been unsuccessful In the hundred years, the woman has now rotted in prison due to old age as well as neglect from the guards, who are unable to fulfil their duties having overslept for a century. It has been difficult to collect any data in those hundred years to determine if a pattern has emerged, but it appears that since everyone woke up simultaneously, their sleep cycles are in sync. Scientifically, it seems almost natural, a sleep evolution if you will, rather than the work of a ‘vengeful’ and ‘envious’ old woman. What it does reveal is that everyone’s brain shut down at the same time in our kingdom and puts some doubt over the responsibility of the wise woman who may have been wrongly imprisoned for what appears to be a natural, albeit odd, event.

CREATIVE

SCHNITZEL BY LUKE PATITSAS A lady asked me for a chicken schnitzel and when I went to get her one I noticed that it was shaped exactly like Australia I knew she would never appreciate such a discovery so on my way back quietly stealthily I slipped and it fell and was replaced Later that night with the schnitzel clutched under my arm I took it into the study onto my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s map collection onto Australia My suspicions were confirmed The old bag would never have appreciated this discovery as much as I do.

ART BY REANN LIN /

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THE CREATIVE LITERATURE AND WRITING SOCIETY PRESENTS: THE REMARKABLE QUESTS OF RADDISH AND QUILL

POETRY THROUGH TIME AND SPACE BY EMILY WHITE

uill slumps over a desk littered with papers and lit by a flickering candle—placed a safe distance from the flammable stationery, of course. They had thought writing by candlelight might bring inspiration, but the gentle heat radiating towards their feathers just makes it more difficult to keep their beady bird eyes open. With a SQUAWK, Quill startles awake and clicks their beak—they must have drifted off. This poem is refusing to come out onto the page. But Quill is determined to finish it tonight, even if it means

staying up past an appropriate bedtime. “Why are you still awake?” Raddish’s accusation rings through the study door. “Inspiration waits for no man, woman or non-binary individual! If I sleep I might miss it.” Raddish slams the door wide open, causing Quill to jump with fright and knock the candle into the ink pot (it wasn’t a safe enough distance after all), which spills over the papers, which are now on fire, which spreads across the whole study, and both bird and cat are shouting until suddenly they’re not in the study anymore. It’s daytime. Quill looks around—they’re outside, on a street. But not a proper paved road, a dirt one. And instead of cars, there are carriages. “Are we in the past?” If Quill had to guess, they would say America, maybe Baltimore, mid-1840s. Quill looks around the other way. There’s no we either. Raddish is nowhere to be seen. Quill approaches a local human woman wearing a long dress and bonnet, and carrying a parasol and newspaper. “Pardon me.” Quill tries not to be offended by her look of shock; not everyone is accustomed to being addressed by such a good-looking raven. “Can you tell me when and where I am?” The human woman simply says, “ABC,” and continues on her way. She tosses the newspaper in a nearby bin, never looking back at the befuddled raven. 64

/ ART BY STEPHANIE NESTOR

Quill shuffles to the bin and retrieves the newspaper— the daily journal for Alternate Baltimore circa 1845. That seems to be the name of this world. The date reads 10 March 3019. “We’re not in the past, we’re in the future.” Quill chirps to Raddish, before remembering they are quite alone. Where could Raddish have ended up? It’s going to be hard having adventures without their fellow adventurer. Raddish’s eyes blink open. They shut again. Then open. There’s no difference, it’s very dark here. Raddish isn’t sure what to make of their current situation, but they sure are getting hungry. Quill plonks down on a bench next to a drunk poet.

The man takes no notice of them—he is too busy drinking and writing poetry. Quill remembers the unfinished poem on their desk, probably lost forever in the teleporting flames. With a grunt, the poet scrunches up his parchment and throws it earthward, where it lands at Quill’s claws. Suddenly the poet is staring at them, eyes wide with artistic lust—Quill recognises the look of inspiration, the very thing that had eluded them last night. “You just gave me a great idea for a poem.” The man reaches out a hand to shake Quill’s wing. He introduces himself as Edgar and gives Quill a business card, saying, “You’ve done me a solid, oh mystical raven. Call on me if you ever need a favour.” Looking up from the card, Quill once again finds themself alone. Raddish is very hungry now. They decide they can’t wait any longer for Quill to find them, they must go search for food. They bat a paw at the darkness, but can’t seem to find a light switch. In fact they can’t find any walls, either. They walk for what feels kilometres, but come across nothing except more darkness and their own grumbly tummy. “Hang on, Raddish is that you?” Quill thinks they hear the faint whisper of a switch in point of view.

COLUMN “Quill, can you hear me?” “I think so? Where are you?” “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m nowhere.” “Well I’m in Alternate Baltimore circa 1845, so I suppose I’m actually better off than you.” “You’re in the past?” “The future, actually,” Quill explains, “just hang tight, buddy, I’m going to get help! I’ll get you out of nowhere and we can have a nap and it will be lovely.” “Please hurry. I’m getting hangry.” Raddish rubs their poor rumbly tum and curls up on the ground that isn’t there. Quill pulls Edgar’s business card out of their feathers. It just says: call if u need, E. A. P. xoxo. Quill shrugs. It’s worth a shot. They fling their head back and crow for Edgar. Nothing happens. Then Quill remembers they are a massive raven and takes flight above the crude city of Alternate Baltimore circa 1845. The bird’s eye view works like a charm—Quill soon spots Edgar stumbling down a

side street and descends on him. Edgar’s moustache trembles with recognition when Quill lands. “I need your help,” Quill cuts to the chase, “I think my friend is stuck between parallel worlds, and really needs a snack. Can you help me get them out?” “Definitely.” Edgar ushers Quill further down the side street, until they come out facing a neat row of houses. “I don’t have long because I have to meet my cousin for lunch, but I know what will do the trick.” They walk through a regular front room into a very irregular back room, lined with shelves packed with glass jars full of glitter. “A good ol’ séance should work. Good thing I’m a witch and I can do those.” “I thought you were a drunken poet?” “A man can be two things.” There’s a flurry of activity that Quill finds hard to follow. Soon enough, Edgar is surrounded by pink candles and sitting cross-legged on a silvery carpet, hovering a few inches above the ground. He motions for Quill to join him, and, chanting various incantations under his breath,

sprinkles glitter in Quill’s feathers. “This will allow you to commune with the space between worlds.” Quill hears the unmistakable rumble of a hungry cat tummy. They would know that rumble anywhere! They call out but get no answer; the connection seems foggier this time. “It’s not enough,” Edgar murmurs, “we need something stronger than your voice—something so strong it will attract your friend’s attention even across perspectives.” Straightaway Quill knows exactly what they need. They hop to Edgar’s fridge and—with a stroke of narrative convenience—find exactly that: garlic bread for cats. Quill rips the packaging off and hovers the cat-friendly garlic bread over the candles. Soon enough a delicious garlic scented trail of steam is dancing out of the loaf. Edgar sprinkles glitter on the garlic bread. Raddish can hear the smell of garlic bread cooking; it’s an uncomfortable sensation because usually smells go in the nose rather than the ears. Hungrier than ever, and keen to leave this place, they turn and follow the sound of the smell. Quill jumps as the loaf is whisked out of their claw. They spin around to see Raddish hunched in the corner of the room, going to town on the garlic bread. It worked! They high five Edgar and swoop their friend into a big

hug. Raddish’s eating is interrupted, but they don’t mind. They missed Quill too. Quill sniffles. “The power of food and friendship.” “And witchcraft.” Edgar chimes in. “Ah yes, that reminds me. Would you be able to use those powers of yours again to help us get home?” Quill smiles innocently. “I would if I could, but I really have to get going. I’m running late for lunch with my wife.” “I thought you said you were meeting your cousin?” “Yes.” And with that, Edgar disappears. “What now?” Raddish asks, gulping down the endpiece of the garlic bread. Quill shrugs. “We stick around here and see what happens? I suppose you won’t be ready to eat lunch for a while now.” Raddish chortles. “Oh, sweet small-stomached friend. I’m always ready for lunch.” 65

FOR AND AGAINST: SQUAT TOILETS FOR BY MARK YIN

AGAINST BY ALLEN XIAO

ou know what’s better than mindblowing, gut-rearranging sex? Mind-blowing, gut-rearranging number twos. You heard it here first, and quite honestly, you’re welcome. Welcome to the secret, taboo world of squat toilets, arguably one of the last remaining bastions of human behaviour from the good old days, back when we used to shit into holes in the ground. Frankly, it amazes me that we ever stopped. This happened around four millennia ago and across a range of ancient societies, according to Wikipedia. Those ancients were right about some things, but oh so wrong about many others, including the correct posture of human defecation. That’s right: we used to squat and shit into holes for valid biological reasons. Meet your puborectalis muscle—it’s a bit like a rope looped around your rectum. A squatting position naturally unclenches this muscle, rearranging the colon just so, and leads to poops that are free-flowing and incredibly time efficient—which is important given that we spend 92 days of our lives on the can. How many of those days do we spend desperately clenching to squeeze out the last bit? I cannot stress this more: squatting lends itself to incredibly satisfying dumps. In fact, seated dumps can cause all sorts of crap, like haemorrhoids, constipation and bloating. Take a minute now to stop reading this and, no matter where you are and what you’re doing, imagine the experience of an effortless, 30 second poop. Imagine the efficiency. Imagine the grace. You’d almost wish it was just a little longer. I’ll admit that there’s an ease of access argument to be made in favour of seated toilets, but let’s also consider hygiene for a second. Squat toilets: a literal hole in the ground that never needs to touch your bare, exposed bottom. Seated toilets: a nesting place for bacteria from god-knows-how-many other people’s bare, exposed bottoms. Your bottom deserves better. Pooping really should be an impersonal experience that is entirely your own, and so it should involve no other bottoms besides yours. Bottoms’ rights matter. So next time you’re choosing which MSD basement toilet to use, stop, drop and do a squat instead. You and your insides will thank me. 66

/ ART BY STEPHANIE NESTOR

rguing this side puts me in—pardon the pun—a bit of shit. After all, most countries in Asia and the Middle East use squat toilets, right? As a Chinese person, it’s part of my culture, right? Did growing up in Australia infect me with internalised racism and colonial prejudice? Probably not. Firstly, squat toilets are uncomfortable as hell. Try squatting down, right now. No, not those half-assed hip thrusts you do at the gym to pretend you’re working out; I’m talking a proper, Asian squat. Feet flat, toes forward, centre of mass at your base. Hurts, doesn’t it? Now imagine holding that position for up to an hour, while taking care not to slip, making sure everything… lands where it’s supposed to. Our ligaments aren’t designed to bear so much body weight; in fact, there’s a greatly increased risk of osteoarthritis for habitual squatters. Beau Annoptham, resident toilet expert at the University of Melbourne, concurs. ‘It’s hard to aim. [And] it’s bad for your back if you’re there for a long time.’ I, for one, trust her insight—she’s made a comprehensive video review of the University’s cubicular offerings, but even she shied away from the squat toilet lurking in the MSD basement. Besides being ergonomically nonviable, squat toilets are a health concern too. While a lack of physical contact between skin and toilet might mitigate bacterial transmission, squat toilets also leave the public dangerously close to unprocessed human waste (especially if you slip and fall). I want to conclude with some history: did you know that the old word for ‘toilet’ in Chinese literally means ‘straw pit’? Even today, rural squat toilets are literally that—a deep hole lined with pathogen-infested straw. Those Japanese toilets with bidets and dryers are the polished, eye-catching exception, not the norm. While I can respect the decision to use squat toilets, don’t exoticise it; don’t confuse it for Asian culture. Recognise it as a byproduct of incomplete modernisation, reflecting the tensions between rural customs and the demands of an industrial, hyper-technological society. In the past fifty years, this conflict has permeated to all levels of life—even a space as intimate as the bathroom. Whew. That got deep. Let me go sit—that’s right, sit— on my toilet and have a big ol’ think about it.

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