Grapeshot Magazine | DEAD IN THE WATER

ISSUE 3: DEAD IN THE WATER

MAY MONDAY

TUESDAY

1

WEDNESDAY

2

THURSDAY

3

FRIDAY

4

SATURDAY

5

International Respect for Chickens Day

7

8

9

10

11

6 International No Diet Day

12

International Tell Your Crush Day

14

SUNDAY

13 Mother’s Day

15

16

17

18

19

20

25

26

27

International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia & Transphobia

21

22

23

24

National Reconciliation Week

28

29

30

31

Do you have an upcoming event? Let us know and we’ll do our best to include it in our calendar. Email grapeshot@mq.edu.au

ISSUE 3: DEAD IN THE WATER

CONTENTS 5 NEWS

19 REGULARS

39 CREATIVES

6 FUND-RAISING CONCERN

20 YOU ARE HERE

7 FACING THE FLOOD: INTERVIEW WITH NINA FUNNELL

22 ASK AN X-PERT

40 AN APOLOGY TO MY HOUSEMATE

8 CAN OUR GOVERNMENT TAKE EFFECTIVE CLIMATE ACTION?

24 GRAPESHOT UNDERCOVER

10 DECOLONISING SOLIDARITY 12 BOMBS AWAY: DENUCLEARISING AUSTRALIA 14 THE ADANI COALMINE 15 WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEF WITH MEAT 16 CHINA & GLOBAL SECURITY 18 INTERVIEW WITH A YOUNG ARMY RECRUIT

23 POP-CULTURE REWIND 25 THE CHALLENGE 26 ILLUSTRATED

42 MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS 43 LOST IN SENSATIONS 44 POETRY: OCEAN

30 WATER TORTURE

45 REPEAT OFFENDERS

32 LAW OF THE JOURNEY

46 LONGFORM REVIEW

34 DOLPHIN FUCKING

48 LIVE

36 THE SYMPTOM LIST

49 BOOKS

38 COLD CALLING

50 MUSIC

28 SHAME YOUR UNIT

29 FEATURES

51 HOROSCOPES

EDITOR’S LETTER The Government is moving ahead with a plan to install eight huge fans on the Great Barrier Reef in an attempt to reduce water temperature.

Yes, fucking fans.

four big banks, who all bailed on funding the project), people in the Kiribati are begging our government to not go ahead with the mine. Why? Their families are ankle-deep in water due to rising sea levels. Soon their homes could be gone.

When water gets too warm, corals get stressed and expel their polyps. That’s what’s causing the widespread bleaching you’d have heard about. When the polyps have been gone for too long because the water remains too warm, the coral dies.

Climate change needs to be at the forefront of every political conversation we have, because it causes or exacerbates every other issue. The refugee crisis in particular is made even more dire by rising seas and shrinking resources.

The science here is conclusive. Rising temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels is bleaching the reef. But instead of cutting back on the burning of fossil fuels, the government is going hell-for-leather to open the biggest coalmine in our nation’s history on the reef’s doorstep.

It seems that politicians will refuse to take proper action until Parliament is swamped by sea water. That’s why we decided to drown a certain few of them on the cover of this issue of Grapeshot, so they might realise what their failure to act could result in.

In the meantime, while millions of tonnes of CO2 are released into the air from burning coal that was dug up from Australian soil, we’ll keep the reef healthy by turning on the fans we’ve got, like our greatest national resource is merely a stuffy room in an uninsulated share house.

Get educated on the issues at hand on pages 8, 10, 14 and 15.

Also, Tess Peni’s feature on page 30 is extraordinary.

The absurdity of the government’s failure to act in the people’s interest on climate change is what inspired this issue.

Not only are climate scientists and 65 per cent of the public against the opening of the Adani coalmine (not to mention the

On the lighter side of things, check out Max’s investigation of a nude beach on page 24 and Nathaniel’s fraught voyage across the Macquarie Lake on page 25. Cure your fear of sharks on page 22 and 23, and if you’re brave, venture to page 34. I apologise in advance.

Yours in climate catastrophe, Angus xx

EDITORIAL & CREATIVE PRODUCTION EDITOR IN CHIEF Angus Dalton

DEPUTY EDITOR Sarah Joseph CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brittney Klein CREATIVE DIRECTOR James Booth NEWS TEAM Isil Ozkartal NEWS TEAM Mariah Hanna REGULARS EDITOR Nathaniel Keesing FEATURES EDITOR Erin Christie ONLINE EDITOR Max Lewis DESIGN ASSISTANT Daniel Lim EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Ilhan Abdi

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS + ILLUSTRATORS Teyah Miller, Naomi McLellan, MQ AYCC, Laura Fitchett, Tess Peni, Rhiannon Williams, Jack Kingsland-Willis, Lachlan Marnoch, Eamonn Snow, Rahel Cramer, Alice Batchelor, Threse Vargas, Laura Neill, Amanda Burgess, Jarred Noulton, Cassandra Barberis-Leon

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD Erin Bliss, Charlie Zada, Eliza Kitchener Grapeshot would like to acknowledge the Darug people as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.

PUBLISHER

COORDINATOR

Gail White

Melroy Rodrigues

NEWS

FUND-RAISING CONCERN

A STUDENT CALLS OUT MACQUARIE’S FUNDRAISING PROGRAM AS ETHICALLY QUESTIONABLE

A student who worked in the fundraising department of Macquarie University has raised concerns that students hired to raise money are securing donations in unethical ways due to poor management.

The student told Grapeshot that while raising money for the Vice-Chancellor’s Fund in the Office of Advancement, students were encouraged to mislead alumni and potential donators.

One area fundraisers are asked to highlight when cold-calling is the ‘mobility scholarships’ that the Vice Chancellor’s fund supports. On first glance, one might assume the mobility scholarships go towards helping people with a disability attend university.

These pieces of information were approved by the fundraising department “without knowing if they were right”, and Grapeshot has been unable to substantiate or find a source for these claims. We have contacted the university asking for sources for this information, but at the time of writing have not received a reply.

The student also says that there was a “cavalier attitude to credit card information”, and that, “we would often forget to tell people they were being recorded, and there was no way to delete the recording – this is something other places I have worked put emphasis on because it is breach of privacy laws in Australia.”

Rather, the ‘mobility scholarships’ fund business students to go on exchange to Asia.

“We all had some idea of what we were doing was unethical,” says the student. “Many of us raised concerns about the mobility scholarships issue. We were told to ignore it.”

“We were told not to correct alumni if they thought the mobility scholarships were for students with disabilities,” the source tells Grapeshot.

The student also pointed out that only students are hired to fundraise, and the hourly rate is an attractive $36 per hour.

“You don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” they said.

The student also says that “we would be very misleading with the facts on Macquarie programs we would talk about” when soliciting donations, and rather than being supplied with statistics and information about the research the Vice Chancellor’s fund supports, fundraisers were asked to research the facts and figures themselves.

The student says that the increased vigour of fundraising efforts at Macquarie reflects a growing trend in universities in the US and Britain becoming increasingly reliant on donations from alumni.

Our source says they cited statistics claiming that Macquarie was working on a cure for breast cancer and had discovered a way to reduce cancer growth by 40 per cent, and that a quarter of all MND patients in Australia are treated by Macquarie’s hospital. Fundraisers also told alumni that Macquarie has found a way to screen for breast cancer much earlier than previously possible, and also said that Macquarie is the only university to offer postgraduate accommodation scholarships.

Fundraisers had no idea whether any of this information was actually true.

06 || News

“Much of the cold calling involved preying on nostalgia of older Alumni. But so much of what is done is unethical or bad practice. Especially given Macquarie is a very different place from the university Alumni experienced in the 70’s and 80’s.

Asking those Alumni to give to our increasingly corporate, 1-million-dollar-a-year-salary-VC, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

The student says the university will be expanding its fundraising efforts to target current students too, with the implementations of on-campus fundraising days next year.

The university did not provide a comment before publication.

This story will be updated on grapeshotmq.com.au.

by Angus Dalton

FACING THE FLOOD

NINA FUNNELL ON THE TRAUMA OF STARING DOWN SEXUAL ASSAULT Content Warning: This article contains detailed discussions of sexual assault and harassment.

University campuses around Australia are finally being properly scrutinised about their policies surrounding sexual assault, and the sexual misconduct that has become embedded within college culture. Nina Funnell, Walkley Award-winning journalist and author of The Red Zone Report, has been at the forefront of reporting on and advocating for the prevention of sexual violence and misconduct.

In 2007, Nina was studying Media and Communications at the University of Sydney when she was assaulted.

“While travelling home, I was grabbed from behind by a man I hadn’t seen before. I had a boxcutter blade held to my throat and was dragged into a park where I was told I would be killed.

He then indecently sexually assaulted me before I managed to fight him off, and I fled.”

Because of the spotlight placed on Nina following this horrific and traumatic assault, other university students began to confide in her about their experiences.

“In the weeks and months that followed, there was quite intense media interest in my story, and I waived my right to anonymity. When you speak out publicly as a survivor of sexual assault, what tends to happen is you become a lightning rod for disclosure because people tend to identify you as someone who has gone through something similar and will likely have empathy as well as belief for other survivors.”

This disclosure from students continued when Nina transitioned into a staff member role at Sydney University. “As a staff member of the university I started receiving a lot of disclosure from students and that’s what really flagged for me what a huge issue sexual assault is, not just in the broader community where my sexual assault had taken place but also specifically on campus and in particular, within the college residences.”

These experiences led Nina to publish The Red Zone Report, which details incidents of abuse at universities around Australia, particularly within colleges. Since this report was released on February 28 this year, Nina has had over 100 victims of sexual misconduct come forward to her.

While this work is crucial, dealing with trauma takes its toll.

“Vicarious trauma is where somebody who has been exposed to repeated traumatic content ends up taking on some of the symptoms of the individuals who are primarily affected. In my case because what I am hearing is stories about sexual assault day in day out, over time some of those traumatic impacts begin to affect me and my own functioning. Vicarious trauma can result in intrusive thoughts, nightmares, feelings of numbness, avoiding work, sleeplessness, shifts in mood and shifts in diet and exercise.”

“People end up getting compassion fatigue, which means that they are not as sensitive to or not able to remain in that really empathetic space you need to be in order to be a journalist or a counselor, and psychologically, it can have a devastating impact on the person’s wellbeing to the point where they often drop out of the workforce.”

For Nina, it’s important to talk about the effects of dealing with this trauma. “There’s no question that I have and still do suffer from vicarious trauma, so I don’t shy away from talking about that. In university, even though journalists have some of the highest rates of vicarious trauma, nobody talked to us about it. So, I make a point of speaking about it to reduce stigma.”

Last year Nina was facing the potential risk of jail time after refusing to comply with a subpoena for all of her sources, which included sexual assault victims.

“The cumulative impact of processing your own trauma, while hearing the traumatic stories of others, while then also being constantly sued for defamation and also dealing with trolls who viciously attack you anonymously and relentlessly – those factors combined can make it an incredibly distressing line of work to be in.”

This makes having coping mechanisms and skills and opportunities to de-brief crucial. “I regularly debrief with counselors over the sort of content that I’m being exposed to, that’s the number one thing that allows me to leave what I’m being exposed to at work. I also have mentors that I will talk to and confide in about this stuff, as well as good friends who work in similar spaces, and we will often decompress about what we’re working on. More recently, I’ve had to learn a lot more about the importance of maintaining routine particularly with things like eating at the same time every day. In terms of self-care, being in nature really chills me out and so does walking my dog. There’s also a lot of grounding exercises that you can do when stressing out that can be quite useful.”

While Nina acknowledges that her work can be incredibly re-traumatising and distressing, she also sees it as a great privilege. “Usually, somebody is telling me their story because they’re motivated by altruistic reasons, they want change and they want their story to be told to break down the stigma of sexual assault, or they might be pushing for a particular outcome like consent training on campus.”

It would be easy to become completely disheartened in this line of work, yet Nina remains optimistic. “After 10 years of reporting on these issues I am absolutely appalled and disgusted by the institutional responses to sexual assault within university communities and I am horrified by the level of callous bureaucracy and institutional betrayal of victim survivors. My trust in them is at an all-time low,” Nina states. “However, where I do have trust and where there is huge optimism is around students. I am constantly in awe of the student activists around the country particularly with the women’s officers, including the women’s officers at Macquarie University and their intelligence, commitment, compassion and dedication to advocating for all students to be able to access education free of sexual harassment and sexual violence.”

“This work isn’t easy, but one of the things that has sustained me is the level of energy, enthusiasm and drive from the younger women and men who I see advocating in this space.”

by Teyah Miller For support regarding sexual harrassment and assault please visit mq.edu.au/respect

THE BURNING QUESTION

IS OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT EVEN CAPABLE OF TAKING NECESSARY ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE? Content warning: Mention of suicide David S Buckel was an American lawyer who fought for the civil rights of gay and trans people, and was instrumental in the legal battle that led to nation-wide marriage equality in the US in 2015. In mid-April, he burned to death in a park in Brooklyn, New York. He had set himself alight – using fossil fuels as a propellant – in protest of the world’s march towards climate catastrophe.

“Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result,” Buckel wrote in a suicide note sent to the New York Times. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Buckel is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died as a result of increasing heat levels, widespread droughts, and natural disasters made exponentially more deadly by climate change. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2030, 250 000 lives will be claimed per year as a direct result of climate change.

The burning of fossil fuels has raised the Earth’s temperature by 0.8 degrees. That’s enough to reduce the volume of summer ice in the Artic by 80 per cent and increase the ocean’s acidity by 30 per cent. We desperately need to meet our target of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees, set at the Paris Agreement, or we’ll be facing serious threats to civilisation as we know it.

Government Shenanigans Our federal government should be putting in place drastic policy change to ensure we can hit that Paris Agreement target. But during Question Time in Parliament you’re more likely to see our treasurer, Scott Morrison, waxing lyrical about the lump of coal he’s feverishly brandishing in the faces of the opposition, or a climate science-denying racist peeling off a burqa, than sensible discussions about climate policy.

In April, 20 Coalition MPs banded together to form the Monash Forum, a group bent on championing the purported benefits of coal and the construction of new coal-fired power stations.

Their supposed enthusiasm for coal goes directly against climate science – in a report released in November 2017 the UN emphasised the importance of halting the construction of new coal-fired power plants – and economic modelling which shows that energy derived from new coal stations would be vastly more expensive than renewables.

“The Monash Forum has been formed really just to criticise and undermine Malcolm Turnbull rather than be terribly interested in climate or energy,” says leading climate change authority, Professor Lesley Hughes. “I think they’re using that as a vehicle to wreak revenge on Turnbull for usurping Abbott.

It’s a government riven with strife, and the energy-climate issue is really just a tool in that strife. Unfortunately that means we

08 || News

still don’t have a price on carbon, we still don’t have an effective climate policy. Ever since the carbon price was abolished by government, Australian emissions have gone up every quarter.”

Professor Hughes (a Pro-Vice Chancellor of Macquarie) helped inform the government and the Australian public as a Climate Commissioner in the Gillard government. Tony Abbott’s first act as Prime Minister after Gillard was firing Hughes and disbanding the Climate Commission that she worked on. After Abbott killed the price on carbon too, federal climate policy is in ‘shambles’, says Hughes.

“Moderate elements of the current government seem to be hostage to the radical right wing,” she tells Grapeshot. “We are absolutely going in the wrong direction, to meet even our very weak and modest targets under the Paris agreement, there’s no

way at present we can meet them because our emissions keep increasing rather than reducing.”

Our government has the relevant information about climate change, and the power to cut subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and invest in lucrative and job-creating renewable energy industry. So what’s the hold up?

The Australian Fossil Fuel Industry – our NRA? Everyone is familiar with the extent that the National Rifle Association (NRA) works actively in the US to prevent gun control legislation by fostering powerful political partnerships, often lubricated by generous donations. Fossil fuel companies are doing the same here in Australia, and their influence is undermining democracy and stalling action on emissions reduction that should have started two decades ago.

Last year, the Minerals Council of Australia, an industry association made up of Australia’s largest mining and coal companies, spend almost $5 million on pro-coal ads. In 2016, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that another industry group, the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, had spent $5.5 million on campaigns aimed at obstructing effective climate policy.

In his book Populism Now! David McKnight writes, ‘The attack on pricing carbon in Australia was part of a long-term global campaign by some of the most profitable corporations on the planet. With the global coal and oil industries at their core, the fossil fuel industry had used lobbying, lies, spin and bullying to insist that the world keep following the path towards a climate catastrophe.’

While these huge associations attempt to sway public opinion with pro-coal, anti-climate science ads, the mining and energy industry also promotes a close synthesis between government and the fossil fuel industry.

The Conversation pointed out that Campbell Newman, the former premier of Queensland who tried to bankroll infrastructure for the Adani coal mine, had at least nine staffers who swapped between his office and fossil fuel companies, including the Adani Group. Michael West reported in February that, “well over 150 former and current politicians, political advisors and bureaucrats have either moved from the fossil fuel and mining industries into public office or vice-versa over the past decade.”

The lobbying and swapping of staffers is so unethical that even BHP, the largest contributor to the Minerals Council, has disagreed publicly with the approach of the council and has threatened to pull out unless the body prioritises the reduction of emissions and stops swaying the government to build more coal stations.

The stakes here are incredibly high. The Galilee Basin, which Adani plans to mine, contains enough coal to push us 30 per cent of the way to the 2 degree global temperature rise. The Coalition is in full support of the mine, and Shorten’s opposition has failed to rule out funding. Together they are facilitating an inertia on climate policy that could lead to our end.

A Different Approach McKnight writes that we shouldn’t have expected bold strides from government in the first place.

‘Governments are attuned to interest group pressure and represent an establishment of existing players, not future generations. They operate in the short term and are dominated

by spin, not substance,’ he writes. ‘At best, they are capable of small incremental changes … waiting for governments to act decisively on the climate crisis will take a long time. Too long.’

That’s why climate campaigners are focusing their attention, for the time being, on the public.

When Gillard’s Climate Commission was ended by Abbott, Professor Hughes and the other commissioners founded the Climate Council, which secured funding to continue providing information to the public about the damages of climate change.

One of these areas is the Great Barrier Reef, a natural wonder and an asset worth $54 billion to the Australian economy that’s being killed by rising sea temperatures.

Hughes also researches the effect of climate change on individual species. She’s studied insects that feed on plants grown in high CO2 environments – “they don’t do well, because plants grown at high CO2 are less nutritious than when grown at ambient levels”. Hughes also says the NSW native long-spined sea urchin has moved south because of warming oceans, and is now wreaking havoc on huge kelp forests around Tasmania.

In addition to releasing nearly a hundred reports about impact of climate change on species, ecosystems, the weather and economy, the Climate Council launched the Cities Power Partnership last year. It’s a free program that allows councils and cities to significantly cut their emissions by installing renewable energy, promoting energy-efficient transport and educating the public on emissions reduction. So far, seven and half million Australians live in councils dedicated to the project.

Hughes says that even while federal government stalls, great action can be taken by smaller bodies and local governments.

“This reflects action globally on a sub-national level has been making great strides in contributing towards actually meeting those Paris Agreements,” Hughes says.

What can we do at Macquarie?

In the spirit of acting on climate change and emissions reduction on a local scale, Leanne Denby, Director of Sustainability at Macquarie, has been working to reduce emissions, improve water usage, and revolutionise waste management at the university for a decade.

Looking at other universities take responsibility for their carbon output, Denby is setting ambitious goals.

“UNSW have bought a solar farm. Charles Sturt and University of Tasmania are certified carbon neutral. There are these big statements coming out, and I don’t want us to just follow that trend of carbon neutrality – what’s next? What’s that big thing that we can have a statement around that makes us unique, and sets us above and beyond the carbon neutral train?”

At present, Macquarie Sustainability have a goal of 40 per cent reduction of carbon emissions, a tough target to meet as the student population increases. She says that we’re in dire need of concerted student support for a more sustainable campus.

“When I think about my colleagues at other universities, our student population is fairly disengaged in this conversation in comparison to the rest of the sector.”

If you look to the top of Macquarie, you’ll see Michael Egan, our Chancellor, who’s head of Newcastle Coal. It’s pretty clear we won’t be getting support for a more sustainable campus from the top end; as with broader politics, we need to demand change from the bottom up.

by Angus Dalton

News || 09

DECOLONISING SOLIDARITY

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A GOOD ALLY FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN THE FIGHT FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE? Climate change is not, and never was, just an environmental issue. Climate change is interwoven with every other aspect of our lives and our society – including systemic racial discrimination and colonial mentality.

It is time for a revolution, and one which begins with our own consciousness. We must peel back the layers of our surface identities, to discover the fundamental humanity underneath.

We must acknowledge the injustice and trauma colonialism caused and allow the space for healing that is desperately needed. And we need to shift our mentality away from colonialism. That was our past. Now millions of young people want a better, united future.

Last year I attended Powershift, a conference hosted by the largest national youth climate action network, Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), along with equal (if not more prominent) leadership by the first national Indigenous Youth Climate Network, Seed. Over 850 young people from all over the country came together to tackle the enormous problem we all face: Climate Change.

We heard raw, emotional, thought-provoking stories. Stories such as those told by Erial Tchekwie Deranger, of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) of Northern Alberta, who described the vast extractive operations in Alberta’s tar sands and the devastation to her people’s homelands in the boreal forests downstream – also known as the world’s lungs – which are now at threat of annihilation. I was captivated by stories told by Joseph White Eyes and Kandi Mosset, both members of the Indigenous Environmental

Network (IEN), who had been fighting on the frontline against the Dakota Access Pipeline and other invasive fossil fuel projects that have contaminated the water they drink and bath in. Water that is now an unnatural aqua blue. They had stood strong against armed forces pointing guns at their people, with sage and wheatgrass - their medicine - as weapons. I heard the searing passion in Kandi’s voice as she invigorated the crowd into roaring “WATER IS LIFE!”.

These stories mirror the struggles faced here in Australia: Adani’s proposed mega coal mine threatens to catapult our world into further destabilization of Earth systems while shredding apart land rights; exploration licences for dangerous coal seam gas fracking cover 83% or more of Northern Territory, threatening contamination of groundwater that feeds basically the entire northern part of Australia; and our own version of a gas pipeline being forced upon Aboriginal land, including sacred sites.

It was easy to notice the common thread. Underpinning every story was an interwoven theme of sustained racial discrimination, trauma and colonial mentality.

During that weekend I was struck by the realisation of the enormity of the fight First Nations people face. They have to battle socio-economical disadvantages, political oppression, heal centuries of wounds and traumas from genocide and deal with other environmental issues. The fight they face every day involves the deeply ingrained mentality of our entire society.

I wholeheartedly supported the prominent focus on Seed mob during the weekend and the Indigenous rising, considering these critical in our movement to create change. Yet it was not without discomfort and some shame: I belong to that category of our society known as “White Australia” due to the colour of my skin and blood lines that come from ancestry foreign to these shores. I am ashamed because even in my desire to create change, I have become aware of how colonial mentality has intrinsically infiltrated my own way of thinking. And it will take a lot of conscious work to eradicate that way of thinking to decolonise my own mind.

I asked Clare Land, author of Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles, to enlighten me some more on the topic. It was Clare’s workshop on being a good ally for first nations people that permeated my mind with these lingering thoughts.

NM: I know this may be difficult to summarise, but can you please explain what “decolonising solidarity” means?

CL: It has two meanings. Solidarity needs to be decolonised: And solidarity needs to be a force for decolonisation.

So firstly, non-Aboriginal supporters of Aboriginal struggles need to avoid colonising those struggles. On the whole, middle class white people are the ones with the greatest tendency to colonize/take over/be bossy within Aboriginal political scenes. Simply through not being aware of the dynamics and of the tendencies which we are socialised into, people like me – white middle class Westerners – are racist, and act racist and patronising completely without meaning to. While it’s not intentional it is not OK to do it, and it’s completely aggravating and ineffectual to try to act without understanding this. That’s why it’s really important for non-Aboriginal people wanting to be supportive of Aboriginal struggles to work out who they are politically and socially, seek out Aboriginal perspectives on what that means, and heed them. Hopefully my book circumvents some of the problems by providing some of the background reading you need to do.

Secondly, decolonisation is about the repatriation of land and power to Aboriginal people. Your activism has got to contribute to that, not to ‘reconciliation’ or other things that do not go to the core issues of land and power.

NM: How do you think decolonisation and climate change issues intersect and what can we learn from this intersection?

In answer, Clare suggests voices like Tony Birch (writer) and Robbie Thorpe (campaigner) who have greater expertise on this subject, referring to a quote by Robbie Thorpe from an interview she conducted for Decolonizing Solidarity: ‘We know: you don’t destroy these sacred places… If you remove the people whose job it is to be the custodians and the caretakers of this sacred garden, and go and rape it and pillage it and plunder it and create a big toxic pool, a toxic waste dump, well, you’re going to have problems, obviously … That’s what the land rights struggle was all about ... People have a right to that land, and the land’s also got its own rights … That’s the real law: the law of the land. You’ve got to respect the ancestor spirits.’’

NM: Your book, Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles, includes material based on your personal learning from your own activist work. Was there a particular light-bulb moment which motivated you to pursue this topic?

In 1998 I was co-editor of the Melbourne Uni student paper, Farrago. I wanted to support Aboriginal students so I suggested to (then) mature age student and renowned activist Gary Foley that we create an orientation magazine for Aboriginal students. He told me, ‘Don’t do anything unless you’ve been asked to do it’. That was the first time I was introduced to the idea that there is an art to being a supporter.

Soon after I was introduced to the importance of interrogating whiteness.

Foley gave me multiple lightbulb moments which eventually led to me wanting to understand the politics of solidarity as deeply as possible and my PhD (the basis for the book) was the vehicle for that. The direct impetus for the PhD was me being pulled up for being a jerk at a Black GST meeting (an inner circle meeting in the lead up to the 2006 Stolenwealth Games protests in Melbourne). In that moment I was shown that I had got too comfortable as a white person in a Koori scene. I think that my behaviour arose from a sense that I had ‘arrived’ at knowing how to do this stuff – but unlearning colonialist ways of being is not a project that can be completed.

NM: In the workshop we discussed the topic of interrogating “whiteness” and what it might mean to be “whitely”. Could you explain these terms?

CL: Whitely is a pretty cool term made up by critical whiteness scholars. Notably, all critical knowledge of whiteness originates from black and brown and Indigenous community members and intellectuals whom whiteness has been forced on.

Being ‘whitely’ is a way of being that arises out of 500 years of Western colonial domination. It leads to ways of relating that are dominated by white stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. To be whitely is to embrace ‘habits and dispositions that reproduce racial hierarchy and white privilege’. But crucially this in not about DNA or skin colour, it’s about history and socialisation. Therefore, not all white people are whitely and not all whitely people are white.

NM: What do you think is the most crucial work for someone, like myself, who is a non-Indigenous activist wanting to be a good ally in the struggles faced by first nations people?

CL: Start finding out the history of the mob whose land you live and work on. It is incredibly important and powerful to educate yourself about Aboriginal political history. About Aboriginal struggles from invasion to the present day. Many non-Indigenous people have never met or even seen (or recognised) an Aboriginal person and – speaking as one – our ideas of who Aboriginal people are, what the problem is, and who is best placed to confront those problems, are incredibly problematic. Amazingly deep-seated ideas and assumptions have gotten into our consciousness by a process of osmosis from the media and how our lives are and what we see around us, as well as through totally inadequate and inaccurate educational experiences. Finding out about Aboriginal people as political actors is firstly really humbling and inspiring, but secondly incredibly powerful for cutting through these dominant culture ideas of Aboriginal people as people for whom ‘good white people’ should be ‘doing something’.

by Naomi McLellan If you identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander you can get involved with Seed at seedmob.org.au. Find out about the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) at www.aycc. org.au. To read more about Clare Land’s book and supporting Indigenous struggles visit www.decolonizingsolidarity.org.

News || 11

BOMBS AWAY

AUSTRALIA’S ROLE IN DISBANDING NUCLEAR WEAPONS Think Australia isn’t a nuclear weapon state? That’s only a half truth. While Australia hasn’t actually developed nuclear weapons, our allegiance to the United States means we are supporters of nuclear warfare, and this support makes us as complicit in nuclear warfare as any other nuclear weapon state.

Nine nuclear weapon states exist in the world, but the media would have you believe that the only real players in nuclear warfare as the US, North Korea, and Russia. Australia boasts a nuclear-free status, but continues to support the policies of the US, which has no issue with flexing their nuclear muscles at any nation who dares to suggest a conflict.

Concerns about the development and implementation of nuclear weapons are nothing new, but in light of escalating international political tensions, it’s something that’s getting some much-needed attention right now. Particularly since the election of US President Donald Trump, who seems to have no issue with sabre-rattling with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, about the capacity, and apparent willingness, the US has to “totally destroy” North Korea (see Trump’s 2017 United Nations address and try not get your eyeballs stuck from rolling them too hard).

International leaders and bodies, including the UN, have been fumbling around since the first bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, trying to figure out how to best approach the growing issue of countries developing nuclear weapons with the potential to wipe out entire nations. Since the first use of nuclear bombs in 1945, new weapons of mass destruction have been developed that have the potential to deliver far more catastrophic results.

The US began testing the world’s first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s – a bomb which is thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the ability to wipe out hundreds of millions of people. T The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is an international organisation that is working for global nuclear disarmament, and in 2017 it received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts in promoting the United

12 || News

Nations Treaty of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, which has been adopted by 122 countries.

ICAN started out of Melbourne and formally launched in Vienna, Austria in 2007, after being inspired by the success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. By working alongside groups like the Red Cross, ICAN have helped reshape the debate on nuclear weapons and have successfully geared the international conversation towards elimination.

Despite its roots in Australia, ICAN has not been as successful in its founding country. In fact, during talks on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, the Australian government actively stood against any move to see the treaty enacted.

“Australia pays lip service to supporting a world free of nuclear weapons, while continuing to support the nuclear program of the United States. Our government seems reluctant to progress nuclear disarmament in case it upsets the alliance,” Gem Romuld, the Australian Director of ICAN, tells Grapeshot.

So, why do we actually need to support US nuclear policies? The short answer is, we don’t. According the Australia’s defence policy, US nuclear weapons are vital for our security, something which Romuld says is dangerous as it legitimises and validates nuclear weapons and threats of nuclear war. And, despite Australia’s claims, it has been shown to be possible to maintain an alliance with the US that excludes nuclear weapons, as New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand have, who are all signatories of the ban treaty.

“Australia has joined the treaties banning chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions, even when the US has not signed on. It’s time to take a clear stand against these weapons of destruction by joining the ban,” Romuld says.

Of course, it’s not only the threat of nuclear war that is detrimental to civilization, but nuclear testing itself has had devastating impacts on the environment, and a

disproportionate impact on Indigenous peoples worldwide.

According to Romuld, “nuclear tests have been carried out in 60 locations around the world, leaving behind radioactive contamination that impacts plants, groundwater, animals and human health.”

Seeing the effects of continued testing like this, one can’t help but to feel that international efforts to protect the environment are kind of obsolete.

A spanner was thrown in the works in April when North Korea extended the hand for denuclearization ahead of planned talks with the US later in the year, saying that it will stop conducting nuclear tests. If negotiations go well and North Korea commits to nuclear disarmament, it could have potentially enormous effects on other nuclear weapons states’ nuclear policies, and it would definitely lead to increased international pressure for other nations to follow North Korea’s lead.

Organisations like ICAN are more important now than ever in leading the conversation for nuclear disarmament, because clearly governments like ours cannot be trusted to do it for its citizens. Scott Ludlam points out in an essay for The Monthly, that it is in fact our governments that are using our taxes to maintain and upgrade nuclear weapons.

“For ten years, we focused on achieving a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons. Now that we have the ban treaty, we are mobilising worldwide to put it into effect,” Romuld says.

“Countries are now signing and ratifying the ban, and it will enter into permanent legal force within the next couple of years. The ban makes pariahs of nuclear-armed states and their supporters, including Australia. We can use this treaty to pressure financial institutions to stop financing the bomb, to pressure our governments to reject nuclear weapons and to show the pathway for their total elimination. The tide is turning against this weapon.”

by Mariah Hanna

News || 13

THE STOP ADANI MOVEMENT

MACQUARIE UNI’S BRANCH OF THE AUSTRALIAN YOUTH CLIMATE COALITION ON HOW THEY WIELDED PEOPLE-POWER TO HALT BILLIONS’ WORTH OF FUNDING TO ADANI Australia is currently witnessing one of the biggest environmental movements in its history. Millions of ordinary Australians have been taking extraordinary steps to prevent one of the world’s largest coal mines being built on our shores. The Adani Carmichael Coal Mine was approved to be built in the beautiful and ecologically rich Galilee Basin, where extracted coal would then travel 189km to Abbott Point on Great Barrier Reef to be exported overseas. This project largely demonstrates Australian Governments hypocrisy in signing the Paris Climate Agreement to lower emissions, their prioritisation of coal over sustainable industries such as tourism on the Great Barrier Reef, and their failure to acknowledge existing renewable energy technologies and investments into sustainable, long term industries such as solar and wind power.

Why is this mine a horrible idea?

The Adani Mine is a massive coal mine project, in the Galilee Basin in northern QLD. While its supporters cite the creation of jobs and cheap energy, in reality the mine will have devastating effects on the region, including the Great Barrier Reef. Even optimistic reports predict the mine will create just over a thousand jobs – while directly endangering the 64,000 jobs reliant on the health of the Great Barrier Reef.

Any jobs the mine creates will be temporary, unlike the jobs that investment in renewables would create, which would be long-term jobs that will exist indefinitely. Aging coal power stations means electricity from coal is becoming more expensive, and continuing to produce coal-fired power has a massive cost in environmental damage.

Adani has also been given an unrestricted water licence, allowing them to use as much water as needed in the project at no cost. This is happening at the same time nearby farmers are struggling with strict water restrictions placed on them due to drought. The large amounts of water the mine can use will likely lead to tighter restrictions on farmers, which will threaten their livelihoods. Our government is investing in a project that not only damages our land but also makes it harder for Australian farmers.

A year in the Stop Adani campaign Since May 2017, Stop Adani have been tirelessly campaigning for major Australian banks to rule out funding of the Adani project. Thousands of petition signings from bank customers, along with ongoing sit ins at local branches, resulted in two of the three major Australian banks, NAB and Commbank, pulling plans to fund the Adani’s mine and the railway it needs to tranport coal. One of the last Australian banks to fall was Westpac after efforts were ramped up leading up to their 200th birthday. Westpacs planned to celebrate their birthday at Carriageworks in Redfern, so the Stop Adani campaign organised their own birthday party for Westpac on the street.

We had DJs, music, good vibes, and had guests inside at Westpacs birthday questioning their role in funding Adani.

14 || News

The CEO was then forced to get up in front of his most respected guests and explain that Westpac had not ruled out funding the world largest coal mine. Shortly after this public embarrassment, Westpac made a formal statement to rule out the funding of the mine.

After its failure to secure private funding from any Australian or international bank, the Queensland Government stepped in to loan the Adani Carmichael Coal Mine project $1 billion dollars of taxpayer money. This loan would be granted from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) fund, however this left farmers and the tourist industry questioning why they had not received any government assistance, and the public questioning why their money was going toward funding the flailing dirty coal industry.

So the Stop Adani campaign redirected their efforts towards the QLD State government, and coming up to the state election scheduled for November, pressured candidates to vow no public money would go towards Adani if they were elected. This effort consisted of extensive awareness and educational campaigns, letting the public know what was at stake, and resulted in candidate Annastacia Palaszczuk announcing that if elected, she would use her veto powers to stop the $1 billion dollar loan.

After Palaszczuk won the November election, her very first action in parliament was vetoing the billion dollar loan.

Now? Roughly 65% of Australians do not support the mine, yet the government is still trying to find avenues to grant public money to fund its construction. The most recent advancement has been through the EFIC loan – Export, Finance, and Insurance Corporation – which uses public money to fund private companies and projects. The government has not ruled out the EFIC loan, so the Adani campaign is focusing on telling the government this sounds like an EFIC fail, and that any private businesses supporting the mine will lose public respect. This has already emerged with AECOM – an engineering firm working with Adani – having to cancel their 2018 university recruitment talks due to the large turnout of protestors.

With an ever-changing environment and challenges ahead of us, it is important to get as many people mobilised as possible. Adani still has not secured funding, and has had to push back 2018 targets due to lack of completion. We need to keep our pressure up and send a strong message to the Australian government.

The mine is on its last legs, but we still need perseverance and all the help we can get from the public to stand together and fight. If you would like to join the movement, sign up at www.stopadani.com. Follow or sign up to AYCC North Shore and Macquarie and get involved with like minded individuals in our local and state actions!

by Macquarie Uni’s AYCC

MAKE EARTH GREAT AGAIN WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEF WITH EATING MEAT

Everyone cares about the environment, right? We judge people who litter, who buy water in plastic bottles and who admit to not recycling. We will binge watch Planet Earth and Before the Flood, blindly sign change.org petitions to stop Adani and yell at baby-boomers who don’t believe in climate change. But there is one massive part of climate change that is widely ignored and pushed under the rug.

straight to growing the feed used specifically for livestock farming needs, the water used for the animals themselves and the processing of their meet. If you transfer these figures to a global scale, and account for the 6 billion land animals that are raised each year (predominately through forced insemination), it just makes sense to switch to lower meat diet.

Over half of all global greenhouse gas emissions comes from animal agriculture. Further, 56 per cent of drinkable water in the world goes into animal agriculture and between 80 and 91 per cent of Amazon rainforest destruction is due to clearing land for animal agriculture.

Every burger patty you eat is the equivalent of 2 months-worth of showers. A meat eater uses more than 18,000 litres of water a year through diet alone, a vegetarian uses just over 5,000 litres, and a vegan uses just over 1,000 litres. It literally doesn’t matter how many 2-minute showers you are taking, or the water efficiency of your washing machine, if you’re still eating a high meat diet.

What is animal agriculture? Anything that goes towards that chunk of meat in your mouth.

In the current climate we live in, it should be impossible to ignore the main cause of global emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have told us that a 2 degree rise in global temperature would result in a climate crisis; widespread drought, natural disasters, massive species extinction, rising sea levels.

Levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest point in two million years, and the average temperature in Australia alone is up by 1.45 degress. This should terrify you. We are actively creating a world that the next generations will no longer be able to live in.

There is something you can do though.

Global researchers have claimed that a world-wide switch to vegetarianism would cut greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds. Two thirds! Before you ask, not all those emissions are solely from cow farts. It also comes from the production of feed, the transport used to transfer the animals, the processing of the meat, and then the transport to your supermarket or butcher.

And people are taking action.

Between 2012 and 2016, 1.7 million Australians switched to a vegetarian diet. Vegetarians now account for over 11.2% of the population. That’s over 1 in 10 Australians. The average vegetarian creates 3.8kg of greenhouse emissions through their diet a day (2.9kg for vegans), and the average meat eater creates 6.8kgs. Vegetarians and vegans also use far less water.

Dropping meat overnight isn’t a possibility for many Australians with our culture built on meat pies and democracy sausages. But Meatless Mondays are a thing there’s even a whole website full of facts and easy meatless recipes. Australia has the fastest growing vegan market in the world, with new and realistic fake meat products coming out regularly. You will find at least one vegetarian option at every restaurant you go to, and full-veg restaurants are in abundance in Sydney. Just recently both Nandos and Grill’d brought out new vegan burgers (give them a try at the Macquarie Centre; being veg isn’t all salad and tofu). Not only is reducing your meat intake good for the environment, but it assists with weight loss and lowers your risk of cancer, heart attacks, kidney/gallstones, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

On average, vegetarians and vegans live 6-10 years longer than meat eaters too.

You don’t have to be a radical vegan to care about your own health and the environment. Start by being conscious about where your food comes from and what goes into making it. Have a meatless day a week or opt for meatless meal every day. Cut red meat out of your diet. Try new foods. You will feel healthier and better about yourself for helping the environment, and who doesn’t want to feel good about themselves for slowing our hurtle towards global catastrophe?

by Sarah Joseph

Australia is slowly but surely moving back into early 2000s drought territory. Over 70 per cent of available water in Australia is used in agriculture, and the majority of that goes

News || 15

THE RISE OF CHINA AND WW3 AN INTERVIEW WITH DR ADAM LOCKYER

The era in which we live in is often referred to in international relations as the ‘Post-9/11 period’. Terrorism and violence perpetuated from non-state actors is the defining factor of post-cold war conflict in many minds.

However, according to Dr. Adam Lockyer, the biggest threat to Australia’s national security and international stability is the rise of China, and not terrorism.

China has been creating islands out of reefs in the South China Sea – a crucial passage for many trillions’ worth of trade – and militarising them, creating advanced ‘fortresses’ where a few years ago there was only sea water. At the time of writing, a plan has been revealed for China to build a military base in Vanuatu (an island country in that owes China over $220 million in debt), that the Sydney Morning Herald wrote would ‘see the rising superpower sail warships on Australia’s doorstep’.

Dr. Adam Lockyer is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology. Before his role at Macquarie, he was a Research Fellow in Defence at UNSW and held several positions in high ranking institutions both in Australia and abroad. He also spent four years serving for the Australian Army.

“The biggest security threat at the moment is the rise of China and the redistribution of power in the Asia pacific,” he says when I ask him about most significant current threats to our national security. “In international relations, we say that conflict is most likely when there’s a disconnect between the actual distribution of power internationally and the distribution of benefits. At the moment, China feels as though it has rising military clout and it is modernized both economically and militarily and yet America still makes the rules, and the rules are set so that America wins most of the time.”

China’s power in the Indo-pacific region is indeed rising.

After the launch of the ‘reform and opening’ program in 1978-1979 by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese economy and military went through a huge restructuring. Since 1990, the size of the Chinese economy has been multiplied by thirty and is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. In 2013, China overtook the US as the largest economy in PPP. Post-Cold War, China’s military power has also increased, as military expenditure has increased twenty-fold over the last two decades.

16 || News

China is what Lockyer refers to as a ‘revisionist power’.

This means that they want to change the international rules to more accurately reflect the new balance of power.

In fact, China refused the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration regarding South China Sea disputes in July 2016 proving their unwillingness to comply with a rules-based international order. In addition to this, the recent ‘trade war’ between China and the US highlights growing tensions between the two states.

According to Lockyer, Australia is in a position of uncertainty in this situation: “The US up to this point at least, has not been willing to share power [with China] and so you have this friction emerging and that is causing a whole bunch of uncertainty in Australian foreign policy and where we stand in the world” Lockyer criticizes the Australian 2016 Defence White Paper for its ambitious nature and not having a realistic survey of what Australia can do and what we have the power to change: “The policy makers in Canberra have been putting off making hard decisions. At some point decision makers have to say this is our priority, this is what we can do, this is the immediate threat to Australia. We need to use our economic, military and diplomatic weight to try and shape the immediate environment so we can mitigate the worst effects of any growing rivalry, not just between China and the US, but also between China and Japan and China and India.”

The Turnbull government’s view on how to deal with the rise of China unsurprisingly aligns with the US. This view was expressed in a speech in June 2017 to the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore where Turnbull called for: “New sources of leadership [in the Indo-Pacific] to help the United States shape our common good”. Turnbull also criticized China’s use of force in the South China Sea and encouraged security dialogue between Australia, Japan, India and the US. Despite this, Australian media and politics seems to place an emphasis on terrorism over geopolitics. I asked Lockyer why this seems to be the case.

“You have vested interests at play here. The media sells more newspapers talking about terrorism rather than talking about boring geopolitics and China and the US – that doesn’t move for newspapers, whereas ‘explosion!’

does. Because of that, it gets more attention in the media and the more attention it gets in the media the more frequent we think it is. And so most people overestimate the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack.”

In fact, ABS data shows that more Australians have died from domestic violence in just two years (over 318 in 2014 and 2015) than from terrorist attacks in Australia in the last two decades. Lockyer states that politicians also have a vested interest in talking up the threat of terrorism, “because the more scared you are, the more you’re going to want to look for security, and the more you’re going to think that voting for certain politicians will make you secure.”

On the escalation of global tensions into war, Lockyer says: “It’s not beyond the realm of your imagination that there could be a war”. However, Lockyer believes the nature of the conflict will make conflict between US and China less likely to escalate.

“If you think about WW1 and WW2, they were land based; they were fought on continental Europe. If a shooting was to start tomorrow between US and China in the South China Sea, it will be on sea or even in the air. If you said, ‘Will China and US be shooting at each other in our lifetime?’ I would say more likely than not. At some point the two will clash, whether it’s in the South China sea or somewhere else … Whether that is going to escalate in to World War 3 is hard to say.”

“THE BIGGEST SECURITY THREAT AT THE MOMENT IS THE RISE OF CHINA AND THE REDISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN THE ASIA PACIFIC.”

by Isil Ozkartal

News || 17

It may be because it’s never crossed my mind to join the army, but I never noticed the scale or scope of defence force advertising until it was pointed out to me. It was only then that I started to see it everywhere. On billboards, posters, flyers. If you’ve trudged through the Macquarie University train station in the past few months, you’ve probably walked past one of these advertisements splayed on the ad boards.

The more I thought about it, the more I remembered all the times I’d heard the words, ‘ever thought of a career in the defence force?’ enthusiastically delivered over the radio. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen those ads on TV or in previews at the movies that are 30 seconds of soldiers performing drills through the mud, then piloting aircrafts against some kind of rumbling, suspenseful music with a voiceover challenging you to ‘discover your army’ – you know the ones. Anyone who attended Macquarie’s O-week probably noticed the stall for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) with recruits handing out flyers to students.

In 2017 it was announced that the NSW government would invest $1.25 million in a university led initiative to boost defence-related research and development, with Macquarie University being one of the seven universities involved in the program.

Why all the intensive marketing towards students? The ADF offers what’s called a Defence University Sponsorship (DUS) which means you can have the cost of your degree covered, you can be paid a salary while studying, and you’ll have a job with the ADF when you graduate. Sounds sweet, right?

But of course, your time is what you will be offering in return.

Once graduated, participants are required to serve full time for the number of years they were sponsored, plus one year, with a minimum commitment of three years. So, if you’re like me and you’ve taken an ungodly amount of time to finish your degree, it could be a potentially 5-8-year commitment.

This doesn’t seem like something most university students are thinking about when they see a poster asking them to join the defence force.

For an organisation with such pervasive marketing strategies, the ADF remains pretty furtive when it comes to actual details of any kind. I spoke with Chantelle Larkin, a participant in the DUS program who joined the ADF after completing a Bachelor of Psychology Honours. The first thing I noticed when setting up the interview was the big CLASSIFIED notice at the end of each email.

I asked Chantelle about the selection process that she went through when she applied for the DUS program.

“I was flown to Brisbane for my OSB, which is the Officer Selection Board, so there you have interviews with officers on a panel. You have group activities, public speaking, a lot of physical challenges, team building exercises. For example, one of them was…” It was then Chantelle caught

18| | News

herself. “I’m actually not sure I can mention this right now, from memory. They said don’t give specifics away, because I remember when I was researching online there was very little out there,” she recalled.

“There is a lot of information on the website, it does give you a complete rundown of what to expect,” Chantelle tells me, but after a quick skim of the Defence Jobs Australia website, I can see that the ADF keep details of what to expect close to their chest. “I think in order for it to be a fair process, some information and the specifics can’t be given away because they want it to be fair to all applicants across the board.”

A role in the defence force carries a lot of weight in the title itself, and it’s little pieces like this that make the defence force even more enigmatic, but Chantelle says working with the ADF is just like any other job. “You wear a uniform, you have colleagues at work who are your mates. You enjoy going to work, it’s essentially like any job.”

Of course, it may feel like a regular job, but working with the defence force does have a certain degree of foreboding that other jobs don’t have.

“I think anyone who wants to apply at the ADF needs to have the realisation that you may get deployed at some point in your service with them,” Chantelle acknowledges.

“Obviously right now the escalating political tensions are not a positive for anyone, and you would hope that it would never get to the stage where Australia would get involved in frontline combat, but I think in terms of me, if I had the opportunity to get deployed overseas I would 100% take it in a heartbeat because it’s something that I want to do for myself, my family and friends and most importantly my country.”

One surprising aspect that a role in the ADF can offer that jobs in most other industries can’t is the potential to work in an industry that is seeing a boom in opportunities for female leadership. The ADF has taken steps in recent years to increase gender diversity within the defence force.

According to the ABC in 2017 16.1% of full-time, permanent ADF personnel are women, and 82 women hold senior officer positions, compared with just 48 in 2012.

“When I was going through selection I was definitely surprised by how many female applicants there were.

Considering that from media and pop culture you would assume that types of military services are male dominated, and they probably still are. But seeing the number of women and the opportunities and pathways that there are for female applicants, it was definitely surprising. It’s comforting and inspiring to know for future individuals if they do wish to join.”

by Mariah Hanna

REGULARS

20 || Regulars

YOU ARE HERE

THE GREAT ESCAPE

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life living in a small town 100 kilometres south of Sydney. It’s called Albion Park Rail, and it’s nestled between the mountains and the lake.

Albion Park Rail is known for satanic murders in the 90’s, traffic jams and the creepy abandoned milk factory that I’m shocked hasn’t been burned down yet.

Growing up in regional Australia is tough. There’s nothing to do once school is over. There’s no jobs. There’s not enough support for people who don’t quite fit in. There are rampant drug problems, violence and crime.

It’s a two-hour train ride into Central Station. I know this trip better than I know myself. Most of my mornings these days begin with a 4:30am wake up, a 5:30am train and an arrival at Macquarie Park around 8:30am – without a chance to stop to breathe in between.

The South Coast line curves around the coast, slowly merging into the Royal National Park and up through to the Shire. I have vivid memories of my 16-year-old self, finally allowed to catch the train to Sydney by myself on the weekend.

My friend’s parents criticised my mother for letting me leave the area without a parental escort. I loathed the ocean, the mountains and the way the train always smelled like death on a Saturday morning. I envied everyone I knew that was lucky enough to live near the city.

I couldn’t wait to get out. Most kids at my high school only went to the city once or twice a year, sometimes not even that – I couldn’t possibly think of anything worse.

I would catch the bus each morning to my high school just up the road from the lake that was infested with bird lice, and by the end of the week I would catch the train to Sydney and go to punk shows with my HSC notes in my backpack.

My walls and journals were adorned with trinkets and memories from Sydney. It was literally a shrine for the city of my dreams. In my head, Sydney was a wonderful place.

A place where I was free to be myself, experience art and music. I wanted nothing more than to walk the streets of Redfern and Newtown by myself, visit the art galleries around the city on weekends and see live music every week.

I’d have a job in the radio industry, a terrace house and no longer experience the crippling effects of nostalgia for a place I’d never truly experienced beyond weekend tourism.

When I graduated at the end of 2015, I never made the move.

I’m still here, making the train trip four times a week into the city. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to love the lake, the creepy abandoned milk factory and mountains that surround me.

When I see the state of Sydney now, maybe I didn’t miss out after all? My favourite venues are empty, my favourite streets are unaffordable and I’m tired.

Sometimes, I wonder if Sydney ever really was how I imagined it. I often think about how different my life would have been if I’d ever made that move three years ago.

by Amanda Burgess

Regulars || 21

AS K A N X - P E R T

SHARK BOI AND LAVA PESCETARIANS E T H I C S I N T H E L I F E A Q UA T I C

Did you know we have sharks on campus? Yeah, don’t worry, you’re not the only one who just heard the Jaws theme in their head. It is that immediate heart pounding, hand sweating reaction that directs the current of much of our cultural understanding of sharks.

The cultural fear of sharks may be contributing to misconceptions about whether or not sharks feel pain. Culum says that while most of the appropriate experiments have yet to be carried out, pain receptors must exist within the physiology of sharks, since they date back to the annelids.

This fear has resulted in shark culling programs across the country, as well as the use of shark nets and drumlines, which are baited hooks used to lure and trap sharks. This has resulted in some troubled waters for our native marine life.

According to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, 577 great white sharks and 352 tiger sharks were caught in shark control nets in NSW between 1950 and 2008.

Sharks are not the only animals getting caught up though, other marine animals that die in the nets are referred to as ‘by-catch’.

Even without a specific experiment to test pain reception, there are indicators that sharks have complex social structures, even best friends. “Sharks have complex social lives, far more so than we give them credit,” says Culum.

“They preferentially hang out with specific individuals. We analyse this using social network analysis, which is a bit like keeping track of people’s Facebook accounts.”

What by-catch really means is non-lethal marine life, such as turtles, whales, dolphins, stingrays, dugongs, and harmless species of sharks. Over the same time period 15,135 marine animals in the by-catch category were caught and killed in nets, including 377 critically endangered grey nurse sharks.

There has been a huge amount of debate about whether or not marine life such as fish and sharks feel pain. The pescetarian diet, which adds seafood to a vegetarian diet, is a popular alternative to vegetarianism that supposedly maintains ethical values. Scientific research has swayed in the direction that fish do not feel pain the way humans do.

However, Associate Professor at Macquarie, Culum Brown, who specialises in the behavioral ecology of fish and marine life, believes that just because they don’t feel pain the way humans do, does not mean they do not feel pain at all. “People tend to forget that the reason we feel pain is because we inherited all the gear from our fish ancestors.

There is little doubt that bony fish feel pain in a manner similar to us.”

Culum has been interested in marine animals ever since he was a kid. “A few years back a post doc spent some time in my lab working of cognition in sharks and we have been working on them ever since.”

He works closely with our resident sharks here at Macquarie.

His research is motivated by a need to understand their behaviour. “Sharks are reasonably cryptic and can move huge distances, and being marine it’s very hard to observe them for any decent length of time. Sharks are one of the most vulnerable of marine animal groups. They also have a bad rep in the press, even though they are responsible for fewer than one death per year.”

22 || Regulars

This is done through acoustic tag technology, which allows researchers like Culum to figure out where the sharks go and what they do. Culum has tracked Port Jackson based sharks as they migrate all the way to Tasmania and back. They return to the same reef every year to breed, and develop complex social relationships with their peers.

These shark bois don’t sound all that different from doggos, well maybe with a few extra teeth. So why do so many people believe that it’s okay to cull so many different types of marine life? “People definitely treat fish as if they are in some way inferior to land animals. They are not,” says Culum.

We don’t know for sure if dogs, cats, chickens, or cattle feel pain the exact same way that humans do, but we are constantly campaigning for more humane and ethical treatment, as well as introducing legal penalties for mistreatment. If animals like fish and sharks are self-aware, in a way that is comparable to a chook, shouldn’t we treat them with just as much compassion? Culum is currently studying sense of self in wild mantas in Indonesia. His findings may well give a swell of support to our misunderstood shark bois and their ethical standing in society.

by Laura Fitchett

P O P C UL T U R E R E W I N D

(GREAT) WHITE LIES C AS T I N G S H A R K S AS V I LLA I N S H AS LEA D T O M I S P LA C E D C ALLS F O R C ULL I N G

Sharks freak most people out. But why? Because they’re big, often grumpy, have sharp teeth and dead eyes? Is that the real story? When you think of sharks, are they sharks you’ve seen in person, or the ones you’ve seen in movies?

If your only experience of sharks comes solely from the cinema, then I hate to break it to you, but your ideas about them are wrong.

Using some investigation and deductive reasoning I’ve figured that this irrational fear of sharks that people seem to harbour comes mostly from movies. And also, maybe the recent increase in unprovoked shark attacks. In a climate being significantly altered by global warming, we’re going to have to get used to sharing the ocean with its’ original inhabitants, and do our best to not upset them. This will only come about if we understand them, though…

A load of bull shark

Jaws. Ahhh, iconic. I’ll admit, the cheap horror of this movie made me laugh, but that’s because it’s nearly 45 years old. At the time this movie was scary as all hell. My uncle, who saw it in cinemas, had to wait outside for it to finish when the horror became too much. If the fake blood and even faker Great White Shark weren’t enough, the ominous music, famously known, make it a tad terrifying.

Also, watching the Shark chomp Quint’s legs with the associated crackling sounds is enough to make anyone queasy.

Despite this, I really doubt any Great White would be hanging over the hull of a sinking fishing boat, wagging its body like an expectant puppy, waiting for it’s victims to fall into its hungry jaws. My problem with Jaws isn’t the basic CGI, or the vaguely sexist notion that the shark’s first victim was a skinny-dipping woman (problematic) – it’s that it misrepresented the Great White Shark. The beast in Jaws is a vengeful creature, who seemed to have it out for certain individuals. What a load of bull shark. Although clever, amazing creatures, I can tell you now, you’re never going to be special enough to be personally targeted by a shark.

Speaking to the BBC, Oliver Crimmen – the fish curator at the Natural History Museum in London for more than 40 years – stated “I actually saw a big change happen in the public and scientific perception of sharks when Peter’ Benchley’s book Jaws was published and then subsequently made into a film.”

It has also been suggested that the number of large sharks living along America’s eastern seaboard dropped by 50% in the years that followed the release of Jaws. People are sheep, and with stats like these, it makes me believe they should be fed to sharks anyway.

Sharks are friends, not villains My earliest shark villain memory is Bruce from Finding Nemo. After initially scaring the stripes off the distressed Marlon, he easily befriends Dory, and ominously invites the two to stay with him and his shark friends. It turns out they have converted to a vegetarian lifestyle, and given up eating fish. Their AA-style meeting is iconic still; I doubt you could find me one Australian millennial who didn’t recognise the reference, ‘Fish are friends, not food!’

However, when Marlon hits Dory with the diver’s goggles, her nose begins to bleed. Bruce becomes the creature of prey he is built to be, and chases after the innocent fish. A children’s movie needs a villain, and Bruce, with his three sets of sharp impossibly sharp, cartoon-drawn teeth, sadly fits the mold. However, some research into Bruce told me he was voiced by Barry Humphries. The same guy that’s literally Dame Edna Everage. How can Bruce possibly be scary once we know this?

My favourite part of this representation is when Bruce, overcome by the smell of blood, begins beating his head against Marlon and Dory’s hiding place. Every time he leans back, his shark friends pop in. “Sorry about … Bruce, mate … he’s really … a nice guy.” I can’t help but think of the helpless defenders of sharks, and the angry, cruel people who thought culling sharks was a slightly good idea.

In a sea of negativity, it can be really hard to get across that sharks are friends, not villains.

And finally Did it ever occur to you that sharks own the ocean? They, and many other sea creatures, are the ones that feel invaded when you step into their habitat. They’re going to bite something that’s making them feel threatened. That’s called common sense. It’s not fair to enter the ocean and kill these precious members of a thriving ecosystem. That seems to be Australia’s solution for everything (see 1878), but it’s just not okay. Protect the sharks, guys.

by Erin Christie

Regulars || 23

UNDERCOVER

LIFE’S A BEACH

M A X LE W I S I N V ES T I GA T ES T H E ALLU R E O F N U D E B EA C H ES If you’ve been a fan of the undercover series since its inception (I know y’all are out there!) you’ve probably noticed a reoccuring theme, a narrative arc if you will. I’m often joking about my lack of general social skills and low self-esteem, because I use humour to defeat my weaknesses the same way anime characters use friendship to defeat evil.

That being said, when our almighty Editor-in-Chief posed this particular piece to me, sheepishly saying, “You’re gonna hate this,” I instantly knew it had to be done. “What if you go to a nude beach,” was his prompt, words hanging in the air like a bad smell. I can barely exist in front of strangers wearing shorts let alone with my whole business on display like rotisserie meat. The thought of also existing in a space with – let’s face it, old as fuck – naked adults with no romantic or sexual context to ease me in was also nightmarish. But you know what? Life is too damn short to not live a little, and also, if I don’t get naked on a beach there will be no article this issue. So I cast aside my judgements and decided I would expose myself to strangers in the name of student journalism.

A quick – and incognito protected – google search for ‘Sydney nude beaches’ led me to one that seemed like a good fit: Obelisk Beach, a small nude beach located in Mosman. About 100 metres in length and reachable down winding rock steps, it looked like a perfectly secluded and almost picturesque location where I could safely air out all of my parts without getting put on a register. Wikipedia also told me the beach was “attended predominantly by homosexual men” which was really great to hear, because if my brief stint Grindr has taught me anything, old gay men have no fucking chill whatsoever.

My plan was to hit up the beach in time to see the sunset, mostly so I wouldn’t get sunburn in parts unfathomable to me. I also decided to bring my boyfriend, partially to protect me from anyone that would dare to speak to me while my pasty shame was exposed, but also for general moral support, since I hate beaches and water and being outside.

After a myriad of what I would call ‘transport snafus’, we didn’t get to Obelisk until the sun had been gone for some time. The bus dropped us off at a roundabout and disappeared into the darkness, leaving us on a cursed, pitch black road. I felt like I’d just landed in fucking Innsmouth.

We wandered to where Google Maps was indicating us, deeper and deeper into inky blackness, until we found a sign pointing to a footpath that was completely dark. Aided by smartphone torches, we descended some stone steps for what felt like forever. At one point I froze, hearing rustling in the bushes either side of us. Waving my light in the direction of the noise, I held my breath and waited, a tightly wound spring ready to turn tail and run at any sight whatsoever. It turned out to be the breeze rustling some leaves, but I was on high alert.

24 || Regulars

Following the sound of crashing waves, we eventually reached the beach – and it was pretty fucking sublime. There was a wide and uninterrupted view of Sydney Harbour, now just a sea of tiny lights, some moving, some blinking, some stationary like dull stars. Occasionally ferries would sail past, a tiny collection of lights and shadow against the water, and too far away to see anything but our shadows. I was already a lot calmer, and I hadn’t even gotten my junk out yet.

It’s a curious feeling, having air on parts of your body that don’t usually get the chance. I hadn’t felt the sweet kiss of the wind on my private parts since my worst case of being dacked in Year 9. I lay on a towel and gazed out at the vista before me, focusing on the crashing waves inching closer and closer to me but never quite getting there, feeling soft, salty wind caress my soft, shitty body. Maybe public nudity isn’t so bad?

My meditation was shattered when I saw a beam of light on the sand to my right. My neck twisted back, in the direction of the stone steps, and I saw two shadow beings descending the steps with the aid of a flashlight. Suddenly I remembered that seclusion isn’t always a good thing. I could have all my limbs torn off and eaten like a subway sandwich and nobody would even hear me scream. There was also the fact that all my clothes and stuff like my wallet and phone where resting on a rock near the entrance. I was also completely fucking naked and there were other human beings here. Trying to act as natural as possible, I remained in my position on the shore and tried to ignore them. But the beach was no longer the peaceful spot it had been five minutes ago.

The two shadow beings hovered at the base of the steps for a while, before walking away from us, sitting on a rock and ominously smoking cigarettes and looking out at the harbour. Innocuous in hindsight, but I couldn’t help but think these figures were planning something shady, because only evil people smoke cigarettes. My anxiety reaching a peak, I got up and rushed to get dressed, getting sand in every part of my clothing I didn’t want it to be, and rushed back up the stone steps before anyone could catch us.

Upon reflection, my anxiety got the better of me once again.

But there’s no denying how utterly sublime the 30 minutes or so I spent at the beach were, before I was attacked by The Shadows. I can definitely see the appeal in dropping trou and experiencing nature without capitalistic restraints like clothing and discretion. If you’re curious, it’s definitely worth a go. Try to find a nice secluded spot near you and go a bit later in the day, and you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. And if shadow people show up and start smoking durries, don’t let them spoil the view.

by Max Lewis

C H ALLE N GE

CAST AWAY

T H E G R EA T V O Y AGE A C R O SS M A C Q UA R I E LA K E I’m ashamed to admit it, but I can’t swim. Several years ago, on a warm Australia Day, when global warming’s power-level was still under 9000, me and my friends thought it’d be a good idea to jump out off some rocks into deep water. It wasn’t a good idea. Was it a rip, or was I simply weak as a kitten? I don’t know, but I was drowning. The beach wasn’t getting any closer and I was losing energy. My life flashed before my eyes (which at that point was a bit boring to watch to be honest) and I thought that was it. Until my friends said to just swim back to the rocks a meter to my left. Long story short, I survived.

When I was challenged to sailing across the great Macquarie University lake, I must admit, I was terrified. Any body of water makes me nervous, and that lake looks filthier than douche water. Would I catch that brain-eating bacteria you hear about on A Current Affair?

To make things even more difficult, I had to make my raft out of recycled materials around campus. My wasteful ass was shooketh.

There was only one place I could go to build my vegan raft. It was time to go dumpster diving. I met up with Sarah, Grapeshot’s Deputy Editor, who was supervising, but not interfering, just in case I drowned or that mythical monster-eel that lives in the lake pulled me under. Which is also drowning I guess. We went to the goldmine of capitalist waste, the loading bay dump.

There were loads of half eaten food, mountains of unnecessary packaging, and bin bags filled with disposable coffee cups. The environmentalist inside me was screaming in pain, but the Macgyver in me was doing the hoedown throwdown.

I found half a pallet, which my Dep Ed pointed out had nails sticking out of it (I like to think it adds to the aesthetic), served perfectly as my raft. Now I’m not saying I’m fat – I like to think I’m juicy – so I immediately I know this 100% fat-free pallet won’t be enough to handle my jelly. I needed something more. Sarah, obviously a more experienced dumpster diver than I, pointed out the styrofoam down the side of the bin. It slid almost too easily into my pallet (That’s what she said). I have an ass that won’t quit though, so it was still not enough. I emptied bin bag after bin bag, trash raining to my feet, until I found one that didn’t seem to have a hole in it. I wish my inspection technique was a bit more thorough, as I was about to learn.

the old Campus Hub. After getting nakey and changing into something I didn’t mind ruining, I washed the bin bag in the lake since it was filled with… some sort of juice. It smelt like an infected belly button, don’t ask me how I know. If making goonshine or being hunted by cane toads wasn’t going to kill me, this was the challenge to do it. After cleansing the filth with even filthier water, I pressed my lips to the bag, half gagging, and made my floatation device. Until it started to deflate. Fuck. I had to act quick. I grabbed my impromptu boogie board and dove in head first.

Have you ever seen those videos where someone belly flops into a pool and water goes everywhere? Yeah, that happened.

To make things worse, the lake is actually super shallow, the water literally never rose higher than knees length, but the lakebed is super muddy, like quicksand. So my raft pretty much got stuck in the lake. I was already completely cover in dirty lake water, so what was a bit of mud on my feet?

It literally felt what I imagine wadding through faeces feels like. I was ankle deep and I just wanted to cry. Sarah was crying with laughter and filming on her phone, and I felt very attacked. I pulled my pallet out of the mud and decided that I couldn’t give up, and decided to power through.

The water never got deeper, but the mud sure did. I was literally knee deep in shit. I was screaming and crying, to be honest I’m shocked I didn’t get any attention from campus security. There was so much weird textures on the water.

Was it an eel, or just a used condom? I don’t know which I’d prefer. I made my way to the middle of the lake by the fountain, deeper in the mud than I was in water when I had to call it quits. The water was actually a nice temperature once I got used to it.

The fountain, on the other hand, felt like glass shards raining on me. I’m not a quitter, but I’m not not a quitter. There was no chance of me getting past the fountain. I gave up and made my way to shore, with Sarah very disappointed I failed this months challenge.

Could I have gone around? More than likely, but like when I almost drowned years ago, you don’t think straight when you’re panicking deep in water... or shit.

by Nathaniel Keesing

After chucking the mess back into the dumpster, it was time to make the pilgrimage to the Macquarie lake. Carrying everything by myself (thanks Sarah) I reach the duck shit-cover shore. It was much wider than I remember. I hadn’t actually seen if for half a year since they destroyed

Regulars || 25

I LLUS T R A T E D

WHAT’S IN THE DEPTHS OF MACQUARIE’S LAKE? BRUCE In your Earth language you know him as the Vice Chancellor of Macquarie Uni. In the language of the Old Ones, however, he is Mgvulgtnah shuggoth, an ancient being of unknowable power and greed. Do not wake him from his slumber.

M Y H O P ES A N D D R EA M S O F UNIVERSITY SU C C ESS I haven’t seen either these or the lake since beginning of semester, since construction ostracised it from view. I hope they’re all at peace together.

26 || Regulars

D EA D R EGULA R S EDITOR

EELS

A Grapeshot regulars editor of semesters past who failed to cross the choppy surface and mean currents of the lake. Luckily it’s a popular position, so we swapped him out with a doppleganger at speed.

Every creepy body of water has a myth that there’s a giant albino eel in residence, and Macquarie’s lake is no exception. Rumour has it there’s actually a breeding pair, ready to feed their brood with the odd duckling and meat from the occassional overly bold instragrammer who wanders too close to the lake’s edge.

T R EASU R E C H ES T The six million dollars’ worth of funds raised through Student Services and Amenities Fees each year by the uni doesn’t roll over each year, and it’s unclear what happens with the leftover dosh. Rumour has it the unspent cash gets shoved into a chest and is guarded zealously by Mgvulgtnah shuggoth until it’s transferred quietly into his Christmas pay packet.

Regulars || 27

SHAME YOUR UNIT

LING292

E D I T I N G A N D P U B L I S H I N G I N A M UL T I - M O D AL W O R L D I was confused for a while over whether I was the pain in the ass, or this unit was, but after chatting to multiple peers, I was happy to realise how not alone I was in my complete contempt for LING292: Editing and Publishing in a Multi-modal World. After what seems like the endless essay expectations of an English degree, it was exciting to see an option for a unit that’d have me doing what I enjoy much more: judging other people’s work and making it better. This was nowhere near as straightforward as I thought it would be, which still strikes me as vaguely hilarious, being as I am, a freaking editor at Grapeshot.

The first assignment involved editing a passage that was submitted to go into a textbook about Chinese history. It contained some bullshit story about how an Emperor won a battle by blinding his enemies with some shiny, silver fabric that he flashed in the sunlight. This seemed like total bullshit to me, and after running it by my history-geek boyfriend at the time, I was assured I was correct. We were supposedly marked on fact-checking, so even if I hadn’t nailed everything, I expected to be praised for my understanding of fake history. Nope. I got marked down because my comments were ‘too judgmental’. ‘Editors are supposed to work with their writers, not make them feel bad about their writing’. Sorry, what? It’s nice to hold hands and kumbaya, but writing is a very competitive industry. If you expect the people reading your submissions to ‘just be nice’, you have a world of trouble waiting for you. All up I got 51%. Steam came out of my ears. I messaged my Grapeshot team: I feel like slamming a copy of Grapeshot in front of them and saying DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM *hysterical crying emoji*.

The clash between my mark and my budding career weren’t the only beef I had. As Dux of Year 12 and consistent over-achiever, I’d never gotten 51% in my life. The next assignment wasn’t much better, sitting at 60%. Also, the fact that it was a group assignment really ground my gears. Not to over-generalise, but I think a lot of people who aspire to be editors like to sit alone with a page full of words, a pen, and silence. Collaboration isn’t our strongest suit unless absolutely necessary. Also, the reality that I might actually fail something was becoming much too real, and I was freaking out.

Me aside, though, this unit really did suck. The lectures were less about putting publications together and more about this finite form of editing, which sadly, I think is coming to an end in this era. Everything is online nowadays, with endless information competing for our attention, hardly anyone seems to be paying attention to typeface. Try telling that to our convener though, who spent lectures and lectures on it.

28 || Regulars

It took all I had not to slam my head on the desk when he showed us a trailer for the History of Helvetica. JESUS. Maybe I’m being a tad unfair. Our convener, lecturer and tutor were all the same dude, who was just clearly weirdly passionate about the editing process. And perhaps this just goes to show how learning things in uni versus learning things at work will always be completely different. However, I literally took nothing from that unit that’s been applicable to Grapeshot. Until now, I guess.

by Erin Christie

FEATURES

WAT E R T O R T U R E

TWO DECADES OF FIGHTING FOR AUSTRALIA’S REFUGEES I’m on a long-distance bus full of refugee rights activists, headed from Sydney to Woomera Detention Centre, where 1,500 asylum seekers are detained in the remote South Australian Simpson Desert. It’s a 20 journey to the site. We are a mishmash bunch of members and allies of the Refugee Action Coalition. After too much singalong and upright sleeping, our bus finally stops in the middle of nowhere at the end of a bumpy track, 500 kilometres north-west of Adelaide. There’s not much out here except an old petrol station. Woomera’s population dwindled after its heyday during the Cold War, when it served a long-range weapon testing facility.

The protesters get out and stretched numb limbs, tired from the ride but invigorated by the sight of the razor-wired compound in the distance. If we wanted to get closer, we just had to walk across no-man’s land: a dry ditch in a red dirt plain dotted with hardy islands of spinifex.

It’s only three weeks after planes flew into the New York World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001; a month after the Tampa affair that left 433 Afghani refugees stranded in limbo between Indonesia and Australian on a Norwegian tanker; two months before the ‘Children Overboard’ saga will rocket Prime Minister John Howard’s popularity skyward just in time for his November re-election; and one lowly week before he and his Immigration Minister, Phillip Ruddock, start implementing The Pacific Solution that will end in locking up refugees on Nauru and Manus, thus removing them from our physical and psychic reach, via the world’s widest prison moat.

The Government kicked things off by moving the goalposts. By “excising” Australia’s remote offshore territories (Christmas, Ashmore, Cartier, and Cocos Islands), out of Australia’s migration zone, one could no longer apply for refugee asylum if you reached these places by boat. Politicians fiddled with the famous Migration Act of 1958 (governing immigration to Australia) so any boat arrivals to those places (‘offshore entry’) was now classed as ‘unauthorised arrival’, thus illegal. BOOM. Your refugee visa application is declared invalid. Go directly to detention. Do not pass Go. Asylum seekers took greater risks and headed for the mainland instead. Many people died during long, dangerous, overcrowded boat journeys.

Ministers also thought up Operation Relex – ‘turn back the boats’ – but their pièce de résistance was the opening of Manus and Nauru Regional Processing Centres. The pre-9/11 polls showed a wilting Liberal party was now surging ahead with every ‘strong leadership’ decision made during this time when the world was feeling insecure. Labor Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, took to the Migration Act to its mind-boggling illogical conclusion in a race to the bottom, culminating in the actual Australian mainland being excised out of our own migration zone (yes, you read that right), in 2013.

The camp seemed asleep, and it felt as though we had the advantage of surprise. Perhaps Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) knew we were coming, but this was a few years before social media. Maybe they had locked everyone

30 || Features

down within the bowels of this shabby, overcrowded monster.

There were over 400 children in there. Stories of self-harming minors suffering sexual abuse were being reported by nurses who were ignored by management, and Ruddock had gone into full shoot-the-messenger mode. Other busloads of activists arrived from Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide. We started making noise: banging drums, barking into megaphones, singing protest chants, playing Arabic music. We wanted the asylum seekers to know we were there for them, to feel welcome. We waved banners and flags and flew kites. It did not take long before we spotted them, through the haze of metal fencing, emerging from the demountable buildings. Huddling in groups, there were ten, twenty, fifty … hundreds.

The uniforms arrived. ACM guards in fully padded, batoned, helmeted, blue and black riot gear nervously patrolled the external perimeter of the camp. We edged across no-man’s land till we were 500 metres apart. It was hard to make out any prisoner in detail; they stood in clumps staring across the Outback at us, as if disbelieving that real Australian people had come. They seemed quiet and hollowed. We were rowdy, colourful, obnoxious. We began to infect them with our rage, our privilege, our demands. The ACM guards attempted to block the prisoners’ view of us by parking an empty livestock road train in front of the fence; so they climbed onto the roofs to see us better. The desert was so flat, and we were barely higher than the tufts of cane grass. Out came their banners and flags, they started to bang things, too. They appeared to hold a meeting. You could hear them singing something like a national anthem. We see you. We hear you. Solidarity happened.

The sun was getting hotter; we didn’t stop to eat or drink. We continued to wave and shout, then formed a human banner: people wore large lettered t-shirts. It took a while to get everyone in the right order; it had to be correct.

CL O S E T HE C A M PS On our side of no-man’s land we had the local police corralling us. Their uniforms were plain khaki, to match their dull beat.

They were fat and moustached under wide brimmed hats, and tried to psych us out by filming the protest with a mini DV cam-recorder. They inserted themselves between us and the detention centre and crossed their thick arms, but were disarmed when the activists handed over boxes of donated fluffy toys and toiletry supplies to distribute to the refugees. A few chatted and smiled; some of those feral girls were pretty distracting.

The cops were fewer in number, spread out along the line, with the invisible law filling the spaces between them. Some people didn’t see the law and meandered through the gaps. The line moved closer; now we were 300 meters away. I had already used up most of my film – this was the pre-digital era. I was a 30 freelance photographer and concerned citizen. Most of my images so far were of the protestors: a quirky rabble which included my mother. We were all there to bear witness to what was being done in our name.

A fire broke out in the detention centre. They’d dragged out mattresses and set the pile alight. We could see smoke rising.

The refugees were sending a distress signal. You see us. Help us. We tried to run toward them, but the law swarmed. Shit got serious. Grumpy cops begged us to comply. We inched closer.

With each drumbeat or chant, with each flag or t-shirt torn off and waved from the desert or camp roof, the activists and the asylum seekers felt closer, felt some of our impotence unblock, felt some sense of explosive relief from injustice.

Then the truck came.

This was not your regular fire truck. It was something from a movie: Mad Max meets LAPD riots; a hulk on wheels; a grey-blue desert whale that aimed its angry spout toward the fire. I began to scream in desperation– “Who has film!?”

Running up to people I’d never met and begging, “Do you have any film?” Everyone was all out. I finally chanced upon a man who was staring at the horizon, at the war, at the Enlightenment ideals being wrestled to the floor and put in an ugly headlock, all its dignity irrelevant– he threw me his last roll. Use it well.

I loaded my camera fast. I’d been drilling for this kind of moment back in my Bondi flat; every time a helicopter flew over (which was many times a day) I ran to my gear: film loaded-check, aperture set, shutter speed and ISO-check. Focus, aim: shoot the chopper. Like a soldier training for any surprise attack. Here I was, holding steady at the wobbly law line: ready, aim, fire.

The truck was power-hosing the pyre through the chain-link-barbed-wire, just one of the barriers that denied these people their humanity. It was armoured, with super-phat tires hunched in the sand on its low wheelbase, belching black smoke and growling at the screaming refugees. It was political power made machine. It aimed its water cannon at the fire, then next to the fire, then not at all at the fire but into the refugees. Simmer the fuck down, it said to their once hopeful, now fear-filled faces. Water was the weapon Australia aimed at illegals; it was trying to wash them away like dog shit off the driveway.

Some detainees were distressed by now and managed to rip a bit of fencing loose. God knows what the guards on the inside were doing to them. One man who had already survived a war and a perilous boat journey, climbed to the top of the fence but could not face what awaited him on the other side: an agitated swarm of batons, boots and bile. The local cops were not sure which way to look– they had their backs to the camp, eyes trained on us. Our law looked over its shoulder and did not like what we could all plainly see.

Perhaps Immigration minister Phillip Ruddock chocked on his morning toast when he opened up the Sydney Morning Herald the following day and saw my photo on page 2. Or not. In hindsight, 17 years later, if I had known they were planning to move the camps offshore, using more water as their weapon, an entire ocean to isolate and defeat them, I wonder if I would I have begged for that film. Bloody hell, did I help make things worse? Activists reported the riots were provoked by the actions of the guards. Ruddock criticised the Refugee Action Collective and accused them of causing the riot, but he knew his government could no longer use the desert as a barrier to keep his political pawns hidden, and by hidden, dehumanised.

This was the week they initiated resorting to worse measures; their final Pacific Solution.

I grew tired after that. Burn-out they call it. It’s not just a physical weariness, it’s heart-weariness. During the last two decades the Australian Government found the political will to inflict every conceivable cruelty upon the detained refugees. Their policies white-anted the law and our hard-won human and refugee rights. They wear down their own citizens till we can no longer feel compassion. It flinches the soul. You can’t bear it, just like them, you can’t bear it. So you clock out, disassociate.

But I’ve rested now, somehow repaired, and I’m returning to the fight. It isn’t just the people seeking sanctuary that the government has messed with. Their values have unstitched of the fabric that was so meaningfully woven from the lessons of World War 2.

How to go on? Three things I know, through valuable mentors and experience: (1) Anger or disgust is necessary to get you off your arse and do something, it’s okay to feel it, but don’t let it be the only thing that you have; (2) You can express– you must maintain – empathy and compassion. The least you can do is acknowledge their trauma and accept their humanity – this you will survive, they have. Find a community to do this with, whether it’s a like-minded friend, a refugee charity or forming a documentary crew. It helps. Finally, (3) Sustainability: when you need to take a step back and recharge, don’t fully disconnect.

Find ways to self-care but retain a niche where you can, at least minimally, remain alert to moral transgressions. Even if it just means admitting to yourself, ‘This sucks.’ When you eventually re-engage you will not have abandoned your ship of core ethical values; you will not have shelved the part of you that celebrates the fair go character of our country, the aspect of our species that has evolved by connecting.

by Tess Peni

Features || 31

LAW OF THE JOURNEY

AI WEI WEI ON COCKATOO ISLAND

A splash of water. A semi-inflated plastic raft holding only a few wooden planks and forlorn boots bobs up and down the sea. A man bundled up in a puffer jacket and hoodie leans over the railing of a ship following the raft, snapping pictures it continues to drift over the sparkling ocean. He signals to a man who is pulling in the boat.

This scene is the beginning of Ai Wei Wei Drifting, a documentary that plays on one of three screens on a wall plastered with thousands of photographs in a warehouse on Cockatoo Island for this year’s Sydney Biennale. This isn’t just any old artist co-opting a movement for a praise. Ai was and is a refugee both in his past and present.

“Can I jump on it?”

In 1958, his family was removed from their home in Beijing as part of the Chinese government’s purge of intellectuals, artists, writers and poets who opposed the ruling party and had to be ‘re-educated’ by being sent to live and work in labour camps. Ai’s father was one of China’s most celebrated poets at the time. The family lived in callous conditions and were forced into underground trenches, where they were continuously assaulted by authorities.

He fumbles a little, and hops in with the help of a couple of boatmen.

He snaps a few more pictures.

“Where do you want us to go?” The seamen ask.

“Go a little bit further,” he says, standing firm in the rubber vessel as it teeters, trying to accomodate the sudden weight of a person.

“I have to be quiet for a moment” he says as he sizes up the feeble raft, his face an impassive mask.

This is Ai Wei Wei, Chinese dissident artist and activist, who in recent years has made the global refugee crisis the focus of his work.

32 || FEATURES

Mirroring his father, Ai Wei Wei became exiled following the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan as he relentlessly pressured the government and led an investigation to uncover the names of over 5,000 children who had perished due to the lack of solid infrastructure and government negligence. He also put up an installation made of 9,000 children’s backpacks, forming a message written by a mother of one of the dead infants.

For this protest, Ai Wei Wei was jailed and brutally beaten by police. He hasn’t felt safe in China ever since. His deep emotional attachment and disturbance toward the current refugee condition is so much that he spent two years travelling to 40 refugee camps across the world. In Drifting he appears incredibly pained and disturbed by the conditions of refugees and oppressed people all over the world, and he ruminates on his life as an exile. Despite this, his notoriety has led to him receiving a professorship in Berlin, where he lives a comfortable life, so his current experience of displacement is somewhat worlds away from the Syrian refugees in the camps he trudges around in for the documentary.

On the other TVs the same raft floats in the ocean, in different time lapses, in an endless loop. The photographs that paper the walls vary, from selfies with distressed-looking men and women in life jackets smiling weakly into the camera, to images of the sea, more rubber rafts and the dozens of people in them readying themselves for the perilous journey over the ocean.

The films are just a small part of the main attraction, which sits just a few steps away from the wall piece. Law of the Journey is an enormous 60-metre long inflatable boat made with the same materials, and in the same factory, as those shipped off to Turkey to be used by displaced people to travel to Europe. It is loaded with hundreds of faceless rubber people, squashed together wearing rafts with their heads bowed and shoulders bracing against an invisible tempest.

Ai was inspired to make this piece after observing refugees squashed into overcrowded boats of the coast of Lesbos.

In photographs, the boat looks almost ordinary, but in real life, it’s monumental. For one, my head comes up just below the end of the raft, and the rubber figures in the raft are twice as big as the boat they’re squeezed into. The sheer enormity of it alone is confronting, and the urge to turn and run away from the glaring call for recognition is hard to resist.

The boat is accompanied by the sounds of Ai’s voice in both Mandarin and English, and the quiet echoes of conversations from pdopld who are observing from above, or tiny figures who have reached the end of the boat, make the lofty warehouse feel like an enormous tomb.

The white platform the raft sits on, covered in quotes about the pain of exile, and the predicament of refugee life, borrowed from Zadie Smith and Edward Said to the Epic of Gilgamesh, only amplify the dolefulness of it all. Behind the TV wall is a rickety staircase where there’s a better and fuller view of the boat.

From there, looking down at the boat, one feels both privy to and concealed from the pain and experience of the hundreds of faceless silhouettes, and it serves mention that each and every figure’s head is turned away from the viewer, with their head bowed down crying, the weight of the world on their shoulders, and its rejection too.

The installation is quite at home here in an industrial establishment not too different from the one in which it was made. The doorless building allows for the rushing winds from the harbour and the fishy smell of the Parramatta River permeates the air. Ai Wei Wei’s work is the centrepiece of the Sydney Biennale. The irony of a piece of artwork that forces art-goers to come face-to-face with the refugee crisis, and in turn, Australia’s own crimes against refugees, being packed away on an island is almost too obvious to bear. It seems this is Australia’s way of dealing with anything that’s supposedly too large to accomodate on the mainland.

Ai knows this, and perhaps that is the exact reason why he chose Australia to be the new temporary home for this piece. It was recently on display in Prague, Czech Republic, a country which refuses to accept refugees, the reasons for which were the acceptance of (mostly) Muslim refugees would apparently ‘create fertile ground for barbaric attacks’.

In 2014, artists boycotted the Sydney Biennale, after it was found that its largest benefactor, Transfield Holdings’s subsidiary, Transfield Services, ran the Australian detention centres in Nauru and Manus Island. It also serves mention that the Biennale and Transfield were founded by the same person, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis. The boycott was successful, as it led to the festival severing ties with the company, and the owners of Transfield Holdings sold their stake in Transfield services and distanced themselves from it entirely by changing their name to Broadspectrum.

Cockatoo Island itself has a deep history as a penal colony; most of its buildings were built by convicts. It is a legacy Australians remember fondly. They might even look kindly on and sympathise with convicts, who were mostly people who commited crimes by choice. They don’t extend the same courtesy to innocent, displaced, mostly brown and black people fleeing war and persecution before being detained in inhumane conditions. It’s no wonder Ai Wei Wei chose to bring the fight against the refugee crisis to the shores of the people whose country has one of the worst and morally bankrupt policies on refugees and asylum seekers.

As I leave the island and get ready to board the ferry back to the city, a display catches my eye. Eleven bars, each engraved with the name of a 19th-century prison for convicts, and jutting out of the platform it sits on is a plaque that proudly claims for tourists: “Be transported into our convict past”.

The sun reflects the shadows over the plaque, making it look like it’s confined behind prison bars. I can’t help but think the government, or whoever was heading the tourism initiative on the island, would be too happy to know that I was just transported into our shameful detainee present.

by Ilhan Abdi

FEATURES || 33

MALCOLM J. BRENNER ON FUCKING FISH BEFORE IT WAS COOL Content warning: Mention of suicide The 1960s and ‘70s are known as a time of liberality and the enthusiastic embrace of sex, drugs and free love - all that fun, hippie-related debauchery. For photographer, author and zoophile Malcolm Brenner, The Summer of Love marked the beginning of his story of star-crossed, interspecies love.

Brenner was in his early twenties in the A Liberal Arts student at New College, academically focused on photography He was a stoner, and still is. He is also

34 || FEATURES

summer of 1971.

Florida, he was and journalism. a man who was

romantically and sexually involved with a dolphin: an experience he has written a book about.

While at college, Brenner was employed at the once-popular Floridaland, an aquatic theme park near Sarasota. Here, he was tasked with photographing the dolphins for an upcoming book. It was also here that he met and fell in love with Dolly the dolphin.

Brenner began working on the resulting book, Wet Goddess, in 1973, soon after his experience with Dolly. It remained unpublished until 2010; it was 37 years in the making.

Although there would be a market for this sort of content in the most obscure corners of the internet, Brenner maintains that he wrote it for dolphins, not for zoophiles (people who experience attraction towards animals). It was his attempt at immortalising his dolphin lover, and venerating the intellectual capacity of her brothers and sisters.

Brenner knew he was a zoophile long before he met Dolly.

He says he first knew his sexuality was not ‘normal’ as a five-year-old when he saw the 1959 Disney film Shaggy Dog. Following this was his first sexual encounter, as an 11 or 12-year-old, with the female family dog. A regrettable and apparently humiliating decision, because ‘she wasn’t really into it’. After this it was just a bit of casual masturbation of the family’s male dog. Brenner jokingly assured me that this was because the dog’s arousal was so exciting to him as a young teenager, rather than it being because he’s gay; ‘I’m not attracted to men, or male animals, the way I am to women. So, while I may be a zoophile, thank the gods I’m not gay, huh?’ An interesting joke.

Since then, he had tried to suppress his zoophilic tendencies and maintain a degree of normality. That is, until he met Dolly. He tried to communicate with her verbally, and also states that they communicated with one another telepathically. He acknowledges that the amount of pot he was smoking may have been a contributing factor in these interactions. Nonetheless, he maintains that nothing like this had ever happened before, or since, despite his avid use of marijuana. He also informed me of multiple other reports of people, mostly dolphin trainers, who claimed to have telepathically communicated with their aquatic students.

This included Ric O’Barry, who trained the dolphins in the 1964 TV series, Flipper. I couldn’t find a single article where O’Barry acknowledged this, but who knows?

They flirted, Brenner took photos, and he and Dolly supposedly fell in love. Brenner had tried unsuccessfully to have sex with her early on in the relationship, and became a bit deterred. However, through their psychic communications, she told him she wanted them to try again. And they eventually did, in an apparently magical, consensual experience. However, everything soon fell apart with the bankruptcy and closure of Floridaland and the subsequent selling of the dolphins, and the separation of the star-crossed lovers. Brenner transferred to Evergreen State College for a year, after which he learned that Dolly had died. She had committed suicide. Brenner believes it was from a broken heart.

Brenner believes the contention surrounding interspecies sex is a result of humanity’s belief that we are intellectually superior to every other creature. However, there is also the question of whether animals can give consent. A question a lot of people have asked in this situation is, ‘why didn’t she just swim away?’ Brenner is sure she could have – a 400-pound dolphin could easily do so. She could just as easily drown you. The water is not an area of human domination. ‘It’s like being in a cage with a bear or a tiger,’ Brenner says. Nonetheless, contention remains.

In 2015 an award-winning documentary about Brenner was released titled Dolphin Lover. In this, he tried to explain the origins of his zoophilia, attributing it to the physical and sexual abuse he suffered in early childhood at the hands of his therapist, Albert Duvall. Duvall was a student of Wilhelm Reich, a controversial psychoanalyst whose ideas focused on ‘orgone energy’, a non-existent sexual power.

His practice was aimed at assisting his patients in achieving orgasm. Basically, he was a sex-crazed psychoanalyst who massaged his naked patients and believed the Earth was under attack from UFOs. Brenner’s parents were fervent believers in Duvall’s work. Brenner identified the sanctity he found in animals in terms of his sexual desires, and whether or not this was a result of biology or childhood trauma remains unclear.

Brenner has said that the whole experience with Dolly was life-changing, and shook him to his core. The years that followed were traumatic and confusing. He’s obviously received varying critiques, but he believes that if no one is confronted by what he has written, then there would be no point in writing it. Brenner is currently retired, living off his social security and the sales of his books, which spiked in the past few months after his review of Guillermo del Toro’s award-winning film, The Shape of Water, published by Huffington Post.

Zoophilia remained legal in Florida until 2011, and is still legal in 14 US states, as well as many of other countries throughout the world. This includes Japan, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, Russia and Cuba. I asked Brenner about his current practices, but considering the fact that it’s now illegal, he didn’t want to say anything incriminating.

However, he did also straight-up admit he hasn’t stopped being a zoophile, as his pet dog walked past his webcam.

by Rhiannon Williams

After Dolly, Brenner again devoted himself to maintaining a normal sexuality. That is, until 2000, when he purchased a German Shepherd named Pixel, who he soon became quite close with. Throughout all this time, Brenner has been married twice and has an adult daughter now, who designed the cover of Wet Goddess as well as the covers of his other books.

FEATURES || 35

Content warning: Mention of sexual abuse, eating disorders My brother was confused.

“I don’t get it. She became anorexic because he kept calling her fat? How dumb do you have to be to let that affect you?”

We were discussing singer Ke$ha’s case against her rapist and abuser Dr Luke.

‘Look, some people are just built like that, okay? They’re… weak and already have poor mental health’, I surmised, as I poured myself a cup of thick lugging mango juice. We were in our hybrid dining/laundry/toilet/rec room.

‘That doesn’t make any sense though.’

I ignored him, scoffing at his ignorance.

‘Leh, you’re drinking mango juice again, isn’t that how you got fat?’

He chuckled to himself, referring to an explanation my mother made up to account for my enormous weight gain in high school.

‘You know what,’ I mused, he followed me as I stumbled through the hallway, my shoes half on, ‘you’re lucky I’m not like that, else I would’ve gotten an eating disorder a long time ago.’

And with that, I slipped my heel into my Skechers, slammed the front door and stalked off into the sunset, to walk off the Big Mac and cheeseburger meal I had eaten for lunch.

In retrospect, I see that I fit most of the symptoms for bulimia, anorexia and binge-eating disorder. But at the time, a few months after the conversation with my brother, I just could not see past the fact that I did not display what I thought to be the most severe symptoms. I pored through the symptoms of all three major eating disorders, in a panic one night after a torturous self-interrogation session in the

36 || FEATURES

THE SYMPTOM LIST shower. Earlier that day I felt my body give up on me for the first time. After devouring a lamb wrap, my second meal of the day, I felt a deep sense of dread that grew and rose from my stomach, pushing its way up my oesophagus, trying to force its way out of my mouth. My skin crawled. Convinced there was a bug crawling over it, I scratched and scratched.

My heart rattled around in my ribcage. When I sneezed, my bones would pierce my lungs, every sneeze was painful, and I sneezed often now that I had become more susceptible to illness. I was close to tears. My body was finally catching up after years of mental abuse. I could not enjoy food, the great love of my life anymore.

‘Intense fear of gaining weight?’ Pfft. I may have been vaguely obsessed with losing weight and then gaining it back, but it was hardly intense.

‘Heightened sensitivity to comments or criticism about body shape, weight, appearance and eating habits. Suffers from anxiety or depression. Fluctuations in weight.’ Okay. Well, I’m sure numerous people suffer from these symptoms, and none of them have eating disorders. Besides, none of these signs seemed particularly worrying.

‘Social withdrawal/avoidance of social situations involving food. Difficulties with activities which involve food. Frequent trips to the bathroom, especially after eating.’ HA. See? I knew I was fine. I hardly ever went to the bathroom, except to urinate, I hadn’t vomited in years, and I was perpetually constipated. I loved eating, and I was always the first to suggest it whenever my friends wanted to hang out. I loved eating.

I was in control. I knew my limits. If I got to a point where it became unmanageable, I could switch it off faster than I could click my fingers. There was no way I could have an eating disorder. I would know, wouldn’t I? My skin still itched.

I discarded my pyjamas and slipped into some fresh ones.

There was no way I was letting my family or friends know.

I felt a deep sense of shame that I had never experienced when I thought of, or spoke about, anxiety or depression.

I sped up the street to my driving instructor’s bright red Toyota Camry and sprang into the front seat. My instructor was distracted, chattering in Farsi to her last charge who was now settled in the back seat, and her daughter, who was dressed in the uniform of the girls’ high school perpendicular to my house, a brand-new school vice-captain badge glimmered on her chest.

The driving instructor turned to greet me and gave a jolt of surprise.

“Wow sweetie, you’ve gained weight. Mashallah!”

I froze, and turned around to make sure she wasn’t still speaking to the girls behind me who were now deep in conversation.

“Me?” My breathing faltered.

“Yes, you’re looking a bit chubbier now darling. Well done.”

She patted my back. I knew she could feel that it was hard rather than soft, as it was when I was much larger.

I was completely flustered. For the last three weeks, I had been living in a bubble of satisfaction – that is, as much satisfaction as an eating disorder could allow. Every morning I would pull up my shirt or caftan, and turn left and right in front of the mirror as I pinched and rubbed my belly, finally flat after years of suffering with a gut. At every reflection, I gazed at myself with admiration and adoration. Of course, I still had the niggling voice in my head nagging me to cleanse whenever I so much as caught the scent of greasy food with a detoxifying tea or smoothie. I had my parents exaggerated wails about my malnourished and skeletal visage to abate the rankling voice, and a trip to the doctor’s a week before had shown me that I was only 58 kilograms, so what on earth was she talking about?

There must have been a mistake.

“What are you waiting for? Start driving.” I struggled to push down the hand brake.

Wouldn’t someone who had gotten chubbie be strong enough to push down the hand brake in one go? As I turned the wheel, I lifted my jilbab so that she could see the carpal bone sticking out of my wrists. I swallowed the wild questions bubbling at my throat. She must’ve made a mistake. I drove in a daze, my body moved on its own, while I focused on the looming tortuous voices buzzing in my head. Worried that I’d clued her in on my madness after her well-meaning comment, I struck up a conversation.

“Are you going anywhere for the holidays?” I asked, in a thick, wobbly voice, a smile plastered on my face as I turned at a roundabout.

“Yes, we’re staying in Dubai for about a month. Then-“ I was wearing a jilbab, which had the tendency to make my small face look very round, and I was wearing a loose sundress that I used to avoid wearing when I was 20 kilos heavier. Maybe I was looking a little bloated? I had been slacking off on my skincare routine lately, and I’d had pizza for dinner the night before…

My eyes flicked between the road, the odometer, and my body. Everything looked fine.

“Red light.” My foot slipped off the brake.

Perhaps I had a form of reverse-anorexia, where I saw myself as skinny, when in fact, I was actually fat. My heart beat erratically at my chest.

We passed a group of women jogging while dressed in gym gear, brandishing water bottles.

I was going to have the purge of the century when I got back home. Then, I would sign up to my mother’s gym and go at least four times a week. For the rest of the week I’d have limited meals, surviving on breakfast and some fruits, possibly. It’s what I deserved for slipping back to my old habits.

The erratic pounding of my heart subsided.

“Turn right here.”

I fumbled with the indicator and flicked it to the left.

Whenever someone asked me how I’d dropped such an enormous amount of weight, 20 kilograms (up and down) lighter than I’d been in 2014, I’d be stumped by the questions, and I’d give the least helpful answer possible.

“Um, I quit dairy milk?”

“I walk a lot?”

“I’m ... sort of vegan?”

I knew that my parents were aware of my issues, maybe they even knew, deep down that I had a problem, but they did not want to admit it to themselves. I knew that anyone who knew would keep an eye on me as I ate, tracking my eating habits with a mixture of disgust, pity and disapproval on their faces.

I needed to fix this. On my own.

I read article after article about struggle, about recovery, about life after ED. Each time an author displayed a photograph of themselves in their current happy, healthy state my heart would bounce in its cage. I rejoiced in their return to health, but when I imagined my recuperated self in those bodies, I recoiled in disgust. They looked just like how I used to before I lost all the weight. I was body positive, except when it came to me.

Why was I wasting my time perusing pieces about a life I could not imagine, if I was too afraid to get better?

I remembered a line repeated in endless films about moody, sick teenagers by new-wave psychiatrists, ‘I’m not interested in treating you, if you don’t want to get better.’

I thought about, the endless buzzing in my head about my body, food, my appearance. I thought about a life without the constant preoccupation. A life where I could wake up early in the morning, sleep before 12 a.m. in the evening, and have three solid meals a day. I thought about a life without the constant breakdowns, the panic attacks, the overwhelming emotions. A life where I wasn’t constantly indisposed, where I wasn’t constantly ruled by a routine where the smallest slip up would fill me with a panic and fear that I’d slipped back into my old habits. A life where I woke up feeling healthy and alive.

I took a deep sigh, unlocked my phone, scrolled through my contact list and tapped my GP’s phone number.

by Anonymous

FEATURES || 37

COLD CALLING

Very few people are strangers to the frustration of an unknown number appearing on the screen, followed by the greeting of an undeniable spiel of a charity phone call. For the most part, it’s often an immediate hang-up, a sympathetic ear wrapped up with an excuse, or a simple “fuck off.” But did you ever think what might lie beyond the sales pitch? For a while, I was one of those people calling unsuspecting Australians while they tried to conduct their days in peace. The land beyond the pitch, in my opinion, is a strange and morally questionable battleground.

I came to understand various things while I worked my short stint at a call centre. There are ups and downs to every industry; the obvious here being that the money is raised for charities by these companies. However, I want everyone to take a glance into the world of downsides that forced me to reach for the swinging glass doors of my workplace, turn my back and never return.

The first thing that irked me about the job was the way I was instructed to deliver my pitch. I lived in England for the first several years of my life, which has left me with a rather weak Australian accent. After a day of very little sales, I was pulled aside by a supervisor. I was asked why I thought I wasn’t making any sales, and in all honest, I was unsure. After listening to me make a few calls to regional Queensland, I was told my voice wasn’t relatable enough. I was told that my current pitch was far more suited to places like Metropolitan Melbourne. After dropping my voice a few octaves, and chucking in some true blue Aussie slang, I got to work pitching raffle tickets to my fellow sheilas and cobbas.

I was shocked by the difference it made. Hiding behind this false persona helped me send raffle tickets flying out the door.

After a while, it occurred to my why this was. In the scripts we are instructed to follow, we do mention that we are calling ‘on behalf’ of a certain organisation, but by throwing on this “manly man” persona, the lines between Call Centre worker and hearty volunteer were blurred. This sort of smoke and mirrors approach to selling tickets bothered me, but what prompted me to leave once and for all was the information left out of these deceptive pitches. The saying “it costs money to raise money” makes sense because it’s true, but how many people going through with these charity calls realise where their hard earned money is actually going?

As I began to master my new acquired accent and its delivery, I began to make more sales, meaning I would climb up through the tiers of the call centre. I went from making confronting cold calls to warm calls, speaking to those who had given some support before, to those who supported regularly. What became clear to me as I spoke to these supporters is that even from the lowest level of previous supporters, the overwhelming majority of people supporting were the elderly.

Call after call to elderly citizens I would hear complaints of tight pensions, hospital bills and rising rates, but regardless many continue to support, as they hold this volunteer organization in very high regard. It often played on my mind whether these people read the fine print of the tickets they were sold. The company I was working for split donations 60–40 per cent.

The Call Centre kept 60 per cent of the total donation and the remaining 40 per cent was sent to the organization they were

38 || FEATURES

fundraising for. I decided to take a look at why these specific numbers were used to divide up the money given in a kind gesture.

In 2014 the NSW Office of Liquor, Gaming, and Racing declared that “At least 40% of gross fundraising proceeds must go to the not-for-profit organization. Expenses, including prizes, not to exceed 60% of gross proceeds.” With this information in tow, I gave a quick call to the volunteer organization I was calling on behalf of during my time at the Call Centre. I wanted to see if there were a more effective means to help out with donations. After being bounced around on hold several times I finally acquired the information that if you process your payment directly to the charity, 100% of the proceeds go toward the cause.

It’s only fair to recognise that these Call Centres do raise awareness by bringing the charity to the forefront of the minds of the people they are calling, and that without these calls, people are not inclined to log on and donate of their own accord. But the lack of information voluntarily given on the division of donated funds is a few steps down an immoral path, and if these loyal elderly raffle ticket buyers knew that 100% of their donation could go to the cause, they would undoubtedly choose that method.

Of course, there is the possibility that these lovely old people are bloody keen on trying their luck to win the grand prize, but in my experience, they never ask about the prize, when it’s drawn or express any interest in the raffle at all. All they deliver is a great appreciation for the work that volunteer organisation does. So if you have a lovely nanna whose kitchen counter is flooded with raffle donation forms, let her know she can donate directly. If she supports one of these raffles once every couple of months and isn’t bothered about the prize, show her how to set a reminder on her phone, or set one yourself and remind her, it’s a simple task to save your gran a few bucks.

If that isn’t the case, best of luck in your next raffle draw you lovely old dears, you deserve it.

by Jack Kingsland-Willis

CREATIVES

AN APOLOGY FOR SWITCHING OFF MY HOUSEMATE’S FAN Dear housemate, This is an apology. And by the end of it, I intend to say sorry. But before I do, please let me explain myself.

The future frightens me, you see. An infinitely branching tree of uncertainties, collapsing every moment into the single trunk of the past. And a flock of threats lurks among the branches, cawing taunts at me like Australian ravens: Trump is going to drag us back to the dark ages. You’re going to end up in a job you hate. Species are going to keep going extinct. Harry Potter is going to get a reboot one day. You’ll never own a house. Climate change is going to destroy your world.

The last one I can take action on, even if it’s something tiny – switch off a light, turn my computer off at the wall. You get the idea.

Having lived with you more or less since we started uni, I am well-acquainted with your habit of leaving lights and other appliances running in your absence. I’ll admit that this has ground my gears. I’ve mentioned it to you off-hand, but, as we had fixed electricity bills until now, saving power was not high in your priorities.

So I made it my habit to switch things off for you when I happened past your empty room (This, by the way, is what I fantasise doing, whenever I walk through the uni at night, to that big, infuriatingly bright screen – I think you can see it from Blacktown – on E7B). It didn’t seem to bother you much outwardly. But I imagine, much like the UN nagging Australia to reduce its fossil fuel usage, it grated on you just a little. I blame my dad, in part – his policy of fining me 50 cents each time he found a light on in my empty room certainly helped form my aversion to wasted electricity.

We have just moved into a new apartment (new to us, that is – I think the building may predate European settlement). We had discussed limiting our power usage. Then, one night in January, I came home to see a whirling fan through your open bedroom door. I knew that you were at work and wouldn’t be returning for some time. Rolling my eyes, I stepped inside and turned it off. Honestly, at the time, I had it in the back of my mind that you might thank me, that maybe you left it on by mistake. This turned out not to be the case.

A little peeved that my Greenie soapboxing still had yet to pierce you, I then went ahead and sent you a text. Nothing accusatory, I thought, just to calmly explain that a fan does not cool anything down unless a person is in the room.

You see, a fan works by making the air around you more mobile. Heat moves from your skin into the air surrounding you, warming it up. The warmer the air, though, the harder it is for heat to migrate into it. Your sweat also carries heat into the air by evaporative cooling, and, by the laws of diffusion, it will do this more readily if the air it is moving into is dry. A fan addresses both problems, moving the “used” air away and replacing it with cooler, less sweaty air from elsewhere in the room. It lets your body’s natural cooling processes operate more efficiently. But it does nothing to cool the air itself – if anything, the added energy from the fan’s rotation slightly heats the room.

This was why I felt justified when, glowing with noble virtue, I entered your room and switched off your fan. However, the short version of this explanation may have come off less succinct than terse or condescending, and could have contributed to your less-than-pacific response.

40 || CREATIVES

“I like it on,” it came. “The air feels stale and the room feels warmer if I turn it off. If I’m gone for a short period, like work – ” several hours is perhaps not what I would call a short period, but definitions do differ “ – I leave it on.”

This response feels very Australian. We are a nation of independent spirits who can’t abide not doing our own thing. We’re told to use less electricity and reduce the pressure on our fragile atmosphere. Some respond to this with willing cooperation – others, less so. “We like our fans on and your meddling isn’t welcome.”

On the extreme end of this scale dances former senator Malcolm Roberts, founder of the Galileo Movement – a society dedicated to exposing “misrepresentations of global warming”. Among the Movement’s many dubious claims, you’ll find “usurping national sovereignty is the aim of fabricating climate alarm.”

This speaks to a prominent reason for climate change denial – a fear of the loss of individual liberty. This (perceived) conflict, between individual rights and the greater good of humanity, is at the heart of a number of humanity’s present woes – anti-vaxxing, market controls, gun laws in the US. A balance can be struck, of course. But Australians, I think, tend to baulk at any perceived infringement of liberty.

When you returned from work, another text arrived: “Please don’t touch my stuff, I feel like I’ve been clear with this before! I know it’s done with good intentions, but please don’t.”

Some further context might here be appropriate to any third parties reading this note. I have not been the perfect housemate. Your supplies have borne the brunt of my midnight snacking more often than I’m proud of. Crossing this kind of boundary had become a pattern of behaviour. I’m a changed man now – New Year’s Resolution, you see – but as it stood you had plenty of reason to be fairly pissed off at my intrusion. It could well have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I may have had the state of the planet and of our wallets in mind, but you came home expecting a pleasant breath of air on your skin, one small comfort after your thankless hospitality shift (which I have nothing but sympathy for, having only just broken free of the service industry myself). I took that little splash of relief away from you, not unlike the time I ate that garlic bread you were looking forward to. It was, in fact, exactly the sort of intrusion that libertarian resistors of the climate change message fear. Instead of driving my message home, all I did was give you more reason to ignore it.

On the scale of our apartment, it’s easier to let sleeping dogs lie. Your individual contribution is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, so I’m probably going to stop nagging you about it. When it comes to national and international attitudes, though, things probably do need to change sometime before we’re up to our chins in salt water. As I’ve learned from this experience, preaching and forced adherence are probably not the best ways. The more habits and beliefs are attacked, the more they tend to entrench themselves.

So, finally, I sincerely apologise. For switching off your fan, for my lectures, for repeatedly stealing your food, and (most of all) for comparing you to Malcolm Roberts.

You’re actually a very good housemate and a top bloke. I hope that we two, and humanity at large, can eventually find common ground on these issues. But attempting to force my ways on you is maybe not the best way to it. I’m sorry.

by Lachlan Marnoch

CREATIVES || 41

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS MY INTERGENERATIONAL (IN)SIGNIFICANCE In May 2015, eleven days before my nineteenth birthday, my Grandfather, Ezzy passed away. He had been in Sutherland Hospital’s palliative care unit for the previous week or two after deciding to cease all treatment for leukemia. His last moments were spent listening to Mozart in a private room that fittingly overlooked The Royal National Park.

Ezzy — a man of towering intellect and a total eccentric — had been sick for some time; and while his death came as no surprise, I still struggled with it. Compounding the obvious and unavoidable grief was an oppressive sense of regret.

There was regret that I hadn’t visited more, that I’d taken him being there for granted, and that I hadn’t shelved ridiculous notions of masculinity and told him that I loved him. Trumping all, however, was a regret that I wasn’t born earlier.

At the time, I was halfway through my first year of University and bursting with new knowledge and inspiration. I longed to bundle together every new thought, theory, question and idea, stuff it in a duffel bag and travel back in time so that Ezzy and I could explore it all together. Add to that my growing passion for bushwalking and hiking – Ezzy’s favourite thing to do – and this regret only grew.

Two months after his death, I stepped out across the plateau and, as the view slowly revealed itself, realised the incredible, strangely comforting feeling of total insignificance. It had taken my then-girlfriend, Shay and I almost four hours to hike to Admiration Point on the NSW South Coast in criminally unsuitable footwear, but this sight and this feeling made every poorly supported, blister-inducing step worth it.

I could see for kilometers in every direction without a single sign of humankind. All to be heard was the sharp breeze climbing out of the valley below and weaving between each needle-thin blade of waist-high grass. If I closed my eyes and inhaled, impossibly clean, crisp air flooded and filtered through my lungs.

It was as if for that short time, we were the only people on Earth – and you couldn’t wipe the grin from my face.

This was a place of total natural beauty not corrupted, commodified or conquered by anything or anyone. It was somewhere completely untouched by the invasive and often unhelpful hands of man.

Before then, my only experience of this sight had been through an old-school film photo panorama blu-tacked to the wall in the toilet at my Dad’s house. It sits around half a meter above the cistern – perfect eye level for when you have to go. Each photo has been positioned carefully to line up with the previous one and glued to a rectangular, black cardboard frame. Underneath the images, ‘Admiration Point’ is written in metallic white ink.

The appropriately named vantage point boasts views of Pigeon House Mountain and the Pacific Ocean to the east, Corang Peak to the west, The Castle to the north and far enough south to see Camel Rock on the Bermagui Coast.

It was an entirely strange feeling to enjoy a view that for years I had only admired on the bathroom wall while pissing.

42 || CREATIVES

Like finding myself on the set of my favourite TV show, I explored the familiar in a wholly unfamiliar way. My wide eyes traced each ridge, peak and valley through a new lens.

Twelve years prior and around thirty kilometers directly East, Ezzy and I had wandered the many tracks snaking through bushland opposite my Father’s house. I was seven years old, and Ezzy was helping me make my first botany book. He was the kind of person who could name and detail just about any Australian plant at a glance. That day, we giddily filled a plastic bag with the trimmings of native honey flower, tea tree, needlebush and wattle.

Once home, we placed each individual plant between two sheets of the aqua, A3 notebook and taped them to the paper. Ezzy labelled each sample first, then it was my turn.

When we were done, we sat a stack of heavy books on top and left our bush souvenirs to compress between the pages.

We processed and documented each plant with the same interest and awe that had inspired the panorama above our toilet. Dad had taken the photographs when he, Ezzy and a friend were on the same walk some years earlier. Dad credits Ezzy with fostering a love for nature, which they both passed down to me.

Dad’s love for nature was on full display the night before Shay and I set off for Admiration Point. We sat together at the dining table and looked through photo albums of the many hikes, camping trips and bushwalks he and Ezzy had completed. I felt inspired and excited. I’m sure that for entirely different reasons, Dad did too.

Still, though, my regret lingered. I was once again inhibited by a longing to travel back in time. I wanted nothing more than to thrust myself into the experiences captured in the photos I held.

The following day, after hiking the same track Dad and Ezzy had decades before me, I stood atop the same peaks, breathed the same crisp air and admired the same breathtaking sights over the Budawang Ranges. Ironically, as I basked for the first time in that utterly liberating feeling of insignificance, the significance of where I was standing became all too clear. I knew that both Dad and Ezzy had stood there with me, sharing that feeling, awe and admiration. Gone, if only for that moment, were feelings of regret.

I stared in the direction of my Father’s house and considered the A3 botany book and thousands of bladder-emptying daydreams that had led me to Admiration Point. It felt as though I had come full circle.

Much like my botany book, Admiration Point seems to exist on a timeline of its own. The many plants Ezzy and I collected fifteen years ago to this day remain intact and alive between the sheets of my aqua notebook. When I flick through its pages, examine the vista still blu-tacked to Dad’s toilet wall, or venture out into the wilderness, I feel no desire for time travel.

by Eamonn Snow

LOST IN SENSATIONS (TO LOUIS) We were standing in the middle of the lagoon. Looking over your shoulder, my eyes fell upon the calm dark water and the lush green mangrove forest enclosing it. Illuminated by the clear blue sky, the scenery seemed perfectly pristine, yet untouched by the human hand. Little sea creatures - juvenile stingray and schools of whiting - were floating around us, attracted by our motionless presence in their natural habitat.

We were surrounded by the sound of the wind, interrupted only by the sporadic tweet of a bird, human voices barely audible like a distant memory. The sensation of the waist-high water sent goosebumps onto my skin - or was it the soft touch of your hands on my body? Your slender fingers stroking my shoulders, tracing down my arms, my back, embracing my waist? With our faces close to each other’s, our cheeks would touch occasionally. Your hair would tickle my skin, sending shivers down my spine. Instinctively, our lips would find each other, separating only to caress each other’s necks, ears, shoulders before finding each other again. Lost in the sensation of your body, your touch, your smell, the smell of saltwater and the sound of nature around us, I forget – where were we?

In the middle of the lagoon. In paradise.

by Rahel Cramer

CREATIVES || 43

OCEAN

An ocean is in my chest I can feel wave after wave Swelling and breaking Against my ribs, heart and lungs Sometimes it travels up The tide becoming high enough To reach my eyes And hitting breaking point Not quite with enough force To spill over And let the ocean become two rivers Cascading down And swiftly wiped away I try to build a dam To prevent further chaos But an ocean is untamed And cannot be stopped so simply So I lie about my ocean If no one knows it’s there They cannot see what isn’t known And they would never believe I harbour such a wicked force of nature Inside my chest And let the waves crash Until it’s hard to breathe Tsunamis leave devastation But my ocean does not It simply continues in a monotonous cycle Waves lapping at the shores Crashing and breaking Slowly eroding the walls And causing unnoticed decay It’s subtle damages Disguised in gentle ocean currents Trick me into thinking This ocean is here for me But my ocean is unpredictable And cannot be contained

by Alice Batchelor

44 || CREATIVES

REPEAT OFFENDERS

LOVE, SIMON

Doubts crept in when I started seeing the ads for Love, Simon. Another gay white boy as the face of a queer coming of age film? As a pansexual Filipino, the novelty of queer representation tends to wear off when it’s the same brand of queer over and over again.

But I gave the movie a fair go. I know that change is slow and any representation is better than no representation at all. I did research on the novel the film was based on: Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.

Take note that I didn’t read the book, which may affect my opinion.

I was happy to see that Becky Albertalli, the author, made sure that her portrayal of queer youth was respectful, accurate, and authentic. That assured me as I obtained tickets for a free preview screening a little over a week before the movie was officially released.

On the day of the screening, as I took my seat, my eyes were drawn to the red screen in front of me. It was displaying the poster for Love, Simon featuring Nick Robinson, Alexandra Shipp, Katherine Langsford, and Jorge Lendeborg, Jr. At least not all the people in the poster are white, I thought.

This is the life of a queer person of color: scavenging for representation and being hyper aware of the lack of it.

The lights in the cinema dimmed. I sat upright in my seat.

The movie starts…

I never thought a movie could make me feel so much in such a short time. Wave after wave of raw emotion – from joy to anger to sorrow – consumed me. So much so that I didn’t realise I was crying until I felt my shirt get wet. I took off my glasses, wiped my eyes, and put them back on.

46 || Repeat Offenders

Only to repeat the process at least two more times.

The cinema would always laugh out loud and together at comical scenes. There would be the occasional gasp at dramatic plot points. There were even a few clusters of sniffling during the emotional scenes, which I’ll discuss later on. In that cinema, we all shared the wonderful experience of life and first love through Simon Spier’s story.

Now, onto the real review.

The thing with Love, Simon is that it doesn’t say anything new.

Rather, it has compiled messages and themes from previous films with similar premises – themes such as coming out, figuring out your identity, dealing with homophobes – and portrayed them in such a way that’s suitable for the modern audience. It also gathered those messages and themes and made them more explicit and more mainstream than its predecessors ever could. This is mainly because we are in a context that is relatively more accepting of mainstream LGBTQI representation and the film was released in a more mainstream method, as opposed to previous queer films that were independently released.

Besides putting forth an explicit message about the queer existence, Love, Simon keeps the message honest as well.

You can tell that the writers and director have done real research with queer teenagers, slipping in nuances and intricacies that stories about queer adults can’t quite achieve.

The film understands the importance of technology in aiding our journey of self-discovery. The prominent theme of social media interlaces with character relationships beautifully.

From the endearing emails between Simon and Blue to the tweets that overlay the ensuing shots after the scene where

FILM

Simon sees the creeksecrets post about him, the film sends a clear but tasteful message that social media definitely affects teenagers’ lives. It is how we discover that we are not alone, how we meet other people with similar experiences, and how we develop and enhance our relationships with one another. It portrays a mostly positive image regarding technology, which is a breath of fresh air compared to other teen movies where technology plays a detrimental role to central characters.

There are also some powerful lines in the film that can shake a viewer to their core. For instance, Emily’s – Simon’s mother – speech to her son regarding his coming out. She talks about how in the years where Simon was closeted that “I can feel you holding your breath”. The metaphor of breath reminded me of how I had to be so careful about how I acted when I was in the closet. I thought of that time as holding my breath as I plunged myself into the sea of conformity. Taking care not to do this or that, to not engage in certain hobbies because they were ‘gay’. I may know how to swim, but that did not mean I could keep on swimming forever.

BOOKS

Then, Emily concludes her speech with the sentence that brought the most tears for me: “You get to exhale now”.

Coming out was just like that: being able to come up for air, to put down your defenses and finally be yourself.

The first time I came out, I said it all in one breath: “I’mgaypleasedon’thateme”. It brought a weight off my chest and eased a pressure in my shoulders that I didn’t know was there. I finally let my guards down and in that moment, all I knew was relief.

“THIS IS THE LIFE OF A QUEER PERSON OF COLOR: SCAVENGING FOR REPRESENTATION AND BEING HYPER AWARE OF THE LACK OF IT.” one of the reasons why I was so moved by the film. It’s like swimming at sea for such a long time and finally seeing land.

Hopefully, with this film, it influences the release of other films like it. Perhaps it will eventually lead to a media environment where you get a 50/50 chance of getting a movie about a queer couple when you turn to the romantic comedy section of Netflix. I wish it could happen within my lifetime, but, as I mentioned before: change is slow. But it is happening, and that is worth celebrating.

by Threse Vargas

Simon also mentioned in the film that “you’ve been pretending for so long you didn’t know you could stop”.

Coming out is preceded by a sense of obligation to stay closeted because that is the safer way to exist. However, that obligation becomes so ingrained that it becomes an irrational fear, leading to a need to stay closeted. Even with evidence of a more accepting immediate environment (like accepting family and friends, living in an open-minded neighbourhood), there are still teens who remain in the closet due to this self-perpetuated fear of ostracisation. I admit to feeling like this, where constant assurance of queer acceptance from my family was not enough to convince me that it was safe to come out to them, purely because of my self-perpetuated fear of the worst.

Another thing I like about Love, Simon is that it is normalising queer representation. It may not be revolutionary in terms of plot, but it is revolutionary in putting out something so... normal but also not normal at the same time. A movie about queer characters is treated as a special occasion.

However, a movie about queer characters set up with a template usually reserved for cishet characters? This is truly something worth checking out. This is one of the reasons why so many queer teens are drawn to the film: because they see themselves portrayed just like their peers. It is also

Repeat Offenders || 47

MOTH STORY SLAM What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done for love?

It’s Tuesday night and I’m at the Moth Story Slam, a monthly open-mic storytelling event at the Giant Dwarf theatre.

Founded in 1997 by New York poet and novelist Dawes Green, The Moth storytelling community has existed in Sydney since 2015. Every month there’s a different theme and this month’s post-Valentines day theme is ‘love hurts’. While the judging teams are scoring up the last story, the emcee is reading out love tragedies on slips of paper, submitted anonymously by audience members before the show.

I ONCE SLEPT WITH SOMEONE FOR AN ENTIRE SUMMER BECAUSE THEY HAD AIR CONDITIONING. Another slip is drawn.

I USED TO STUDY AT THE GYM SO I COULD SPY ON MY CRUSH. I TOLD EVERYONE THERE THAT THE SPORTY ATMOSPHERE HELPED ME CONCENTRATE. And another.

I TOLD A STORY HERE LAST MONTH TO IMPRESS A GUY, WHO LATER GOT UP AND TOLD A STORY ABOUT MEETING UP WITH HIS 62-YEAR-OLD GAY LOVER IN NEW YORK. I clap both hands over my mouth. Sitting beside me, my friend Phil, who had shared this story last month on his very first night at the Moth, slides down in his seat.

“Oh my god,” he moans, “that was me!”

A night at the Moth Story Slam is certainly an intimate affair.

This month featured a motley crew of love horror-stories, including a woman describing sex-inflicted bite marks on her chest, a young traveller who fell in love with a priest-in-training in South America. There was a teenager who had vomited through his (flyscreened) window after having his heart ripped out by a love interest, and catching his parents engaging in

48 || Repeat Offenders

oral sex on the very same night. Then an elderly man took to the stage and, in a grandfatherly, meandering tone, recounted the story of a near-fatal aneurism he’d had whilst masturbating one evening after his wife had gone to bed. (By way of justification, he quoted folk musician Stephen Stills: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”).

Being an audience member at the Moth is like sitting around a campfire with an all-ages group of friends. For the storytellers themselves, the rules are fairly simple; prepare a five-minute story. Know your story, but don’t memorize it, recite it or read it. You must adhere to the monthly theme and the time limit, but most importantly, a Moth story should be a personal story, something about you. A moth story should expose your vulnerability.

Tonight’s event is a particularly soothing balm. I’ve been kicked to the kerb and burned by love. I’ve had my share of horror dates including once carrying a 24 pack of toilet paper across the Woollies carpark on a first date with a guy took me ‘out to pick up a few bits.’ The point of tonight is, who hasn’t? It’s a humbling experience to watch a succession of people just like me sharing their deepest shame, hilarious misadventure or heart-wrenching disaster. As far as love goes, we’re all battle-scarred soldiers. Tonight’s theme truly unites the room.

When interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald, Dawes explained that storytelling is what makes humans unique, with their episodic memories and their ability to “ tell stories and include a bunch of data that is held together by a glue of emotion.”

That’s what keeps me coming back to the Moth. Live storytelling is human, raw and vulnerable. And when a bunch of brave strangers recount their personal lives on stage, we’re reminded that we’re not as different as we think we are.

by Laura Neill

BOOKS

LOVE & MISADVENTURE

BLOOD MERIDIAN

Lang Leav

Cormac McCarthy

Ever since I studied Judith Wright as part of my HSC, I have had a strong aversion to poetry. Love & Misadventure by Lang Leav was recommended to me on Goodreads, and I was pretty surprised to see it had a 4.03 rating – maybe this could be the book that got me back into poetry?

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a terrifying and epic tale about the exploits of a company of American scalp-hunters in the 1850s. I found it quite challenging to read because the violence of the novel is so horrifying, and the language itself is dense. The book comes off as incredibly realistic thanks to McCarthy’s extensive research – he writes entire interactions in Spanish and uses archaic words you’ll might have to research to understand. But the challenge is worth it – everything about the novel is outstanding. It confronts our ideas about human nature and what we’re capable of committing, and in turn, our sense of morality is questioned. Characters like Judge Holden have a clever way of presenting ideas as logical and reasonable when he argues for barbaric acts. As readers we end up trying to dispute his arguments, but they’re presented so eloquently that we find ourselves uncertain if we’ll be successful – and no characters in the novel find themselves able to discount his ideas, though we do find a promising moral centre when some characters attempt to.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. This book felt like I was reading back the posts from my Tumblr in 2013 when I was reeling from my first ever heartbreak. The book is separated into three parts: Misadventure, The Circus of Sorrows, and Love. I was particularly drawn to The Circus of Sorrows, as it sounded like a great name for an emo band. I had extremely high hopes for this book, and I mourn the loss of the hour of my life that I spent reading this.

I will admit maybe I am being a bit too over dramatic here – it’s not that terrible. It just reminded me too much of my Year 9 self. It reads like my diary once did, and I feel that if I had read this in 2013 this review would be much more positive.

I don’t know much about poetry, but I do know that a poem with the line “he makes me want to brush and floss” just isn’t for me. I can’t even begin to explain how much this line makes me want to throw this book into the bin and never see it again.

Nonetheless, I’m sure it has a 4.03 Goodreads rating for a reason. It’s a shame I just couldn’t see why.

by Amanda Burgess

We follow ‘the kid’ on his adventures, from fighting and nearing death many times to being captured by the authorities, but primarily we follow him as a member of Glanton’s company of scalpers. The horror we find as readers is that this band is being paid handsomely to kill Indians – with the proviso that they hunt only violent tribes.

But it gets worse: Glanton’s gang were real. The brutality of this side of America is exposed as we witness violence after violence and injustice after injustice: the entire novel is encompassed by violent acts or threats of violence. Some scenes remind me of A Clockwork Orange or Game of Thrones with their propensity to horrify, but other scenes are even more terrible. The novel is a gripping read for this reason, and at times you fly along despite the difficult language. The hyper-violence coupled with the realism of this epic allows McCarthy to genuinely challenge our ideas about humanity – the more the characters abandon morality, the more we as readers find ourselves compelled to assert our own.

Blood Meridian is the kind of book you have to wade through at times, but the quality of writing and the deep exploration of morality that are embedded in this odyssey are so rewarding that I would definitely recommend a read – or two.

by Jarred Noulton

Repeat Offenders || 49

MUSIC

SONG FOR ALPHA

CHIAROSCURO

Daniel Avery

Ocean Alley

Song for Alpha is the sophomore album from UK electronic producer Daniel Avery. It comes a full five years after his debut Drone Logic in 2013, and shows that Avery has what it takes to reinvent his sound while staying true to his roots.

Gone are the days of female vocal samples over analog bloops and snappy drum machines – a sound which he basically mastered and every white cis-male techno act copied forever after. Instead, Song for Alpha instead sees Avery exploring contemplative and reverb-soaked techno, with a lot less ‘club’ and a lot more naunce on display.

Chairoscuro: an effect of contrasted light and shadow

Tracks like ‘Projector’ evoke this perfectly; hazy keys harking back to the soundtrack to the first Silent Hill game loop languidly over ambiguous and far-away percussion. It’s all rather floaty in the best possible way; there’s no hard-hitting kick or synth lead to ground you, so you end up getting lost in layers of analogue melodies.

‘Diminuendo’ is the album’s ‘club’ track, but it twists that formula on its head and ends up sounding like something you might hear from a rave scene in a David Lynch movie.

A heavy kick sets the pace before an almost alarm-like synth squeal creates a weird hook, morphing its sound as percussion builds; crisp hats and an army of heavily delayed claps. A weird breakdown in the middle sounds like Avery’s studio collapsed in on him, but he quickly bounces back with the same gusto as before.

‘Diminuendo’ is a nice palette cleanser from an album chock full of shorter but more focused techno tracks. There’s a few gorgeous little ‘vignettes’ of songs like ‘Days from Now’ and ‘Embers’ that clearly point to a Boards of Canada influence in that they are tiny bursts of mysterious ambient melodies to give you a breather between the longer tracks. Given his debut was almost entirely 5-7 minute long tracks, it’s cool to see Avery exercise some restraint this time around.

It’s always nice to see an artist flip the script and experiment with new sounds, and I think Daniel Avery has done it pretty flawlessly with Song for Alpha. Ambient techno is a tricky genre for him to pull off – especially with his pretension as a ‘club’ artist, but he’s nailed it so well I’m mad he didn’t do it sooner. If you’re a techno fan and want something a little different, whack this one on while walking home at 2am and it’s sure to click.

by Max Lewis

Seeing their set at the Sydney City Limits Festival in late February, Ocean Alley’s performance faded into the darkness alongside the likes of veteran hype artists such as Dune Rats, Future and Justice. Since forming out of a backyard shed in 2011, the six northern beaches boys have released two EP’s and a full-length album with a few decent tunes, but they hadn’t produced anything that put them at the forefront of the Australian music scene.

However, where the band has sunk into grey shadows in the past, Chiaroscuro is the brightest lighthouse guiding its listeners to the promised land. A land dripping with psychedelic-rock hooks and reggae riffs to create twelve colourful tracks. Following a string of vibrant singles like ‘Confidence’, ‘Overgrown’ and ‘The Comedown’ (which came in at #48 in last year’s Hottest 100), the unveiling of their second album has taken the band to new heights.

The title serves as an accurate reflection of their career trajectory, but it is undeniable that Ocean Alley are currently at the top of their game; set to play Groovin the Moo and already selling out nationwide sideshows before they venture out for a North American tour.

It’s fair to say that whatever mood you are in – whether that’s severely pissed off after spending 1.5 hours searching for a car space or thrilled with surviving another week on a povo student budget thanks to Ubar happy hour – Chiaroscuro has got you covered. Polished, catchy songs, ‘Happy Sad’ and ‘Flowers and Booze’ play to their strengths, making it hard not to sing along and move your feet. ‘Knees’ slows the pace; a smooth endless loop with softer undertones that is strongly contrasted with the loud head-banger ‘Frostbite’.

The simple words on each track give you little excuse not to belt them out like you would playing SINGSTAR on Playstation 2 back in the day (kudos if you still do this).

Perhaps this is where they fall short. As melodic and sugary as they are, the lyrics are almost-too basic and lack depth. By making it relatable to anyone and everyone, the band hinder their ability to stand-out as originals, and instead must rely on an audience too lazy to scratch below the surface.

Still, instantaneous and fun music is their speciality, and people love it. Oozing with warmth, Ocean Alley have created a charming piece of work that will stay in your recently played even after these autumn months pass.

by Cassandra Barberis-Leon

50 || Repeat Offenders

H O R O S C O PE S

TAURUS

GEMINI

CANCER

LEO

VIRGO

LIBRA

SCORPIO

SAGITTARIUS

CAPRICORN

AQUARIUS

PISCES

ARIES

Mercury is in retrograde again. What an attention seeking douche. Remember that time Mercury said he sucked off all the other planets and got genital warts in his mouth, but they turned out to be coco pops? Fuck Mercury.

Maybe you’ll get your horoscope next month. Maybe.

That’s not a mole! It’s actually the physical manifestation of all your anxieties and existential dread! Might be a good idea to go to the doctor to get that checked.

Hot birth control tip! Tie a string around his balls. Let them wither and fall off. Attach the testicles to the back of your car so people know you fuck.

Then find someone else and use a condom!

Miss Vanjie… Miss Vanjie… Miss…

VANJIE!

You’re due to die in a freak wheelie bin accident this month. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Twerking is not advisable while incontinent.

When I think of you Sagittarius, all I can think of is spaghetti. Or tapeworms. Either way, add 2 cups of diced tomatoes, 1 clove of garlic and simmer for 20 minutes. Enjo

You are living in an age where you can be anyone you want. So tear off your human skin and live that reptilian fantasy. #ScaleSquad

We’ve had way more than 5 seconds of summer bitch! That satanic ritual where you slaughtered the entire Grapeshot team worked a little too well. Wait, who the hell is writing these?!

If you have kind parents who raised you well, show them you appreciate all they have done for you. Tell them you love them. Maybe buy them a gift to show you care. Small gestures will mean the world.

Fuck you. Fuck you for making us all look bad by how perfect you are. Oh, so one of your parents are literally an angel? Well la dee da. Fuck you.

Boob. Just the one. Remember that.

Repeat Offenders || 51

REGULARS