Grapeshot Magazine | X

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LAST DAY TO ADD UNITS TO YOUR PROGRAM

SYDNEY GAY & LESBIAN MARDI GRAS

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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 1: X

CONTENTS 7 NEWS

25 REGULARS

51 CREATIVES

8 NEWSFLASHES

26 THE CHALLENGE

10 7 THINGS I HATE ABOUT MQ

28 GRAPESHOT UNDERCOVER

52 THE PLANET EATER: A SHORT STORY

12 THE FALLEN SOLDIERS

30 YOU ARE HERE

14 WALANGA MURU INTERVIEW

32 SHAME YOUR UNIT

16 THE BENNELONG BY-ELECTION

34 POP-CULTURE REWIND

18 SURVIVAL OF THE SANCTUARY

36 ILLUSTRATED: CAMPUS FOOD REVIEWS 38 ASK AN X-PERT

20 THE RISE AND FALL OF #METOO

39 FEATURES

22 ENDLESS WAR: AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZ ASHBURN

40 CUNTS AND KARL MARX: BATHROOM GRAFFITI

24 WHO GIVES A DENTAL DAM?

42 BLOOD SWEAT AND BEERS 44 THE XX MEN 46 LOVE YOUR SELFIE

54 POETRY 56 ART BY KANCHANA KRISHNAN

57 REPEAT OFFENDERS 58 LONG-FORM BOOK REVIEW 60 FILM 61 BOOKS 62 MUSIC 63 HOROSCOPES

48 FRISKY BUSINESS 50 BOOTY CALL

Content warning: Articles on pages 8, 10, 18, and 20 contain discussions of sexual harassment and assault. Page 44 contains a brief mention of suicide. If any articles in this magazine raise issues for you please contact Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14, or MQCare at 1800MQ Care.

EDITOR’S LETTER Hey MQ kids! For those picking up this mag for the first time – whether you’re new here or you’ve just been put off for a while by our rather garish yet artistically brilliant stands – Grapeshot is Macquarie’s student publication.

We publish news stories, interviews, memoir pieces, creative non-fiction, poetry, short stories, comics, photoessays, illustrations and smoke signals; if you’d like your name printed on these silky-smooth matte pages hit us up at any time at grapeshot@ mq.edu.au with ideas and submissions, and follow our Facebook page (search Grapeshot Magazine) to keep up with the goss.

This year is our tenth as a student publication, hence the X theme.

We’ve introduced two new regular columns for this semester: Ask an X-Pert, in which we’ll undertake the radical activity of ACTUALLY LISTENING TO SCIENTISTS (hit up page 38 to learn about cocaine-snorting bees), and You Are Here, where we ask writers to explore a suburb they’ve lived in with fresh eyes.

You’ll notice a bunch of construction and demolition sites on campus at the moment, and you’ll also notice that in this issue we’re a bit bloody whingey about it.

The thing is, it’s convenient for the university to have its students not care about the space that we all share. If we’re apathetic, it means they can shift, destroy, and tweak things all they like to get it picture-perfect for marketing flyers, and won’t have to deal with students kicking up a stink.

they tore it down. Many of them had invested their lives in Macquarie. We also felt it when the iconic courtyard gums fell to chainsaws over the break. As Dr Leanne Holt points out on page 14, bound up in those trees was the history of Macquarie and the experiences of every student who walked by their trunks for the last 50 years.

If the uni is a profit-hungry juggernaut, student apathy is the oil that keeps it running. I didn’t give a shit about the history of the campus I attended for my first two years of uni. Then I picked up Grapeshot and all that changed. I learned about secret tunnels and our radical history. I learned about shady dealings and corrupt leaders and the time the world-record for Most Tequila Shots in a Row was broken here.

With a quick turnover of student cohorts, this history can so easily be lost. Student mags act as a way of preserving this history like a shady lil mosquito in amber.

Check out page 10 for ‘7 Things I Hate About MQ’, a breakdown of the main points you need to know about Macquarie’s recent history to understand where we’re at. It might seem weird that a student mag is often so critical of the uni it operates out of, but it’s our job to be a thorn in the side, keep powerful (and extraordinarily well paid) executives accountable, and to advocate for people over profits.

Development can be a good thing. But as old concrete is ripped up and walls torn down, often people’s lives and histories are bulldozed too.

And it’s just like the end of the iconic rom-com starring Julia Styles and Heath Ledger. We can rattle off things that piss us off about this uni, but most of all, we hate the way we don’t hate you, MQ. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

We saw that when the uni kicked out a bunch of much-loved business owners from the old Campus Hub in the weeks before

- Angus xx

EDITORIAL & CREATIVE PRODUCTION EDITOR IN CHIEF Angus Dalton

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

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS + ILLUSTRATORS Olivia James, Kate M, Bohdi Byles, Zoë Victoria, Lachlan Marnoch, Amanda Burgess, Bianca Italiano, Ashton Love, Laura Neill, Emily Rose, Masumi Parmar, Liam Holt, Kanchana Krishnan, Hannah L. McHardy, Jarred Noulton

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD Eliza Kitchener, Jasmine Noud, Mahyar Pourzand, Zwe Paing Sett, Paul Russell, Anthony Ryan

PUBLISHER

COORDINATOR

Leigh Wood

Melroy Rodrigues

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.

GOT SOMETHING TO CONTRIBUTE? SEND PITCHES, IDEAS, QUESTIONS, WORDS, PHOTOGRAPHY, ART TO GRAPESHOT@MQ.EDU.AU

NEWS

NEWSFLASH MQ RESEARCH SHOWS PENALTY RATE CUTS FAIL In a survey that has surprised literally no one, it’s been found that penalty rate cuts have so far failed to increase jobs across Australia.

Following a decision by the Fair Work Commission last year to gradually introduce reductions to penalty rates for casual and part-time retail and hospitality workers, research conducted by Macquarie University and the University of Wollongong has found that rather than stimulate employment rates as the Commission had hoped, there has been no immediate job growth.

Dr Ray Markey of Macquarie University worked alongside Dr Martin O’Brien and Dr Eduardo Pol of the University of Wollongong to conduct the study. After surveying 1351 workers, researchers found that not only did employment fail to increase, but existing employees’ hours remained the same as they had before the cuts.

The decision to cut penalty rates was met with criticism from the Labor Party last year, who saw the cuts as detrimental to low-income earners.

There has also been concern that a disproportionate amount of young people are negatively impacted by the cuts as they are more likely to work casual and part time hours.

It was found that lower-level employees in fast food took the biggest hit when the cuts were introduced. Most negatively affected employees are predominantly aged between 14 and 20.

However, Dr Markey told Grapeshot, “this impact has been partially cushioned by two factors. First, a recent significant increase in the minimum wage will temporarily offset penalty rate reductions for some, although only in the short term before further reductions come into effect.

Second, penalty rates cuts for casuals

8 || News

were not as significant as for other workers.”

Dr Markey also points out that this is the first time empirical evidence has shown the impact of penalty rates on employment before or after the cuts.

“It is important to follow this initial study with a longer term one, because when our survey was undertaken the full impact of cuts being introduced in stages over time had not been felt.

This may have affected the results.”

The next round of reductions is due to come in June of this year, with a further 5% reduction for Sundays and public holidays, at which point consequences may vary from this initial study. However, Dr Markey does not seem optimistic about the prospect of positive results.

“The biggest contributor is consumer demand, which has been weakened by record low wages growth. The penalty rates decision only contributes to this weakening of employment growth.”

by Mariah Hanna

MQ VICE CHANCELLOR RESPONDS TO WOCO DEMANDS August 2017 saw the release of ‘Change the Course’ report, the result of an investigation by the Australian Human Rights Commission into sexual assault and harassment among university students. In the days preceding the release of the results, Macquarie held a student consultation and meeting to facilitate discussion about campus safety in relation to the threat of sexual violence on campus.

Jasmine Noud, then-current president of the Macquarie University Women’s Collective (WoCo), presented a list of demands that had been endorsed by 31 fellow student groups. These were published on the Grapeshot website.

Macquarie’s Vice Chancellor, Bruce S Dowton, sent his response to these demands on the 6th of November last

year to WoCo, leaving a three-month gap between the initial release of the demands.

In response to the demands, Dowton has ensured there are five trained responders at Campus Wellbeing with significant training in trauma response.

The Diversity and Inclusion team also hosted a series of consultations following the release of the report, with the aim of improving reporting systems to be more survivor-friendly.

The effect of these consultations is yet to be seen. He also notes the appointment of a Project Officer for RNA, intended to aid in the creation of a reporting process that aims to minimise the impact on the victim by eliminating the need for them to tell and re-tell their story.

The employment of an RNA Education Officer has seen a restructure of the Respectful Relationships program that informs students and staff about proper consent. This will be offered to staff and students this coming semester. However, another demand was to make a program such as this compulsory for all students. In response to this, Dowton only notes ‘discussions with the Academic Senate around making elements of this work compulsory for students,’ whereas WoCo very clearly demanded an iLearn unit on consent compulsory for all students.

Although a comprehensive response, this document seemed to point more towards what might come from discussions and development rather than affirmative and sudden action in response to ‘Change the Course’ and the demands of WoCo. The length of time taken for Dowton to respond to the demands is hopefully not indicative of his commitment to improving Macquarie in the face of the AHRC data.

Students seeking information or support regarding sexual harassment and assault should visit mq.edu.au/respect.

by Erin Christie

Ever heard someone on campus say that they’re so broke, they’re considering finding a sugar daddy? Turns out many of them weren’t joking.

According to data released by Seeking Arrangement, a website designed to pair prospective sugar babies with their sugar daddy of choice, Macquarie University is the third largest hotspot for sugar babies in the country.

Coming in behind Griffith and Deakin University, that’s a lot of go-getting students on campus. With the increasing defunding of universities and deregulation of fees, a degree can cost upwards of $80,000 these days.

That’s going to take you over thirty years to pay off with an average wage – and that estimate doesn’t even factor in the cost of living. Unless you have the luxury of living at home, you know how expensive rent can be. It’s not surprising that a lot of our fellow students are looking for alternative ways to rake in the cash.

Seeking Arrangement – which has almost 10 million members worldwide – reported that Macquarie’s sign-ups for the site were 53 in 2015, and skyrocketed to over 400 active members in 2017. There are over 100,000 female students in their database.

Like the 100,000 students in the Seeking Arrangement database (and that’s not even counting male sugar babies and their glucose guardians), I have first-hand experience signing up to seekingarrangement.com.

A friend and I joined in January of 2017 when I was commuting three hours a day to a part-time retail job, and she was unemployed. Our plan was to initially just check it out. The website is highly self-recommending, it even has its own blog with posts entitled ‘Why Sugar Beats Vanilla Every Time’ and ‘The Sweetest New Year’s Resolution’. It lists the benefits of being a sugar baby as finding a mentor, dating experienced men and being pampered. They even offer a free premium account upgrade if you sign up with your student email address.

Obviously, a desperate broke girl can easily be enticed by how amazing this all sounds. I had wondrous and grand visions of my own Pretty Woman shopping spree montage and Richard Gere trailing behind with credit card in hand.

I could move out of my sad share apartment and into my own place. That itself is a fantasy in Sydney.

Alas, my own anxiety stopped me from pursuing further on the website than a few middle-aged men messaging me ‘Hello, how are you?’, which resulted in me throwing my phone across the room and afraid to pick it up again. My friend pursued a little further in the conversations.

At one stage she was offered free professional photography, a few grand to stay in a city hotel for the night, and even an overseas holiday. However, she also did not continue these conversations, and eventually, we both closed our accounts.

This may or may not have anything to do with her receiving requests for golden showers from one daddy.

With the average sugar baby pocketing $3000 a month cash, as well as countless amounts of gifts, even having their HECS/HELP debt paid off, you can see why the offer is shiny and enticing.

Most sugar daddies aren’t seeking for anything more than companionship, any sexual relationships being entirely the choice of the sugar baby. It is a relationship of mutual benefaction and becoming less taboo and more mainstream.

Seeking Arrangement spokeswoman, Brook Urick, told news.com.au, “There’s been a shift in modern dating, not everyone is looking to settle down straight away. People are looking to better their lives, and if they’re not inclined to settle down, students want to level-up their dating. They want someone who can inspire and encourage them,” and this is the case for the thousands of sugar babies at universities across Sydney.

With the cost of university and living rising every year, numbers of student sugar babies are predicted to increase as well. If you are a sugar baby and reading this, I commend you for being your own business person. You have found a way to make the system work for you. Please live my Pretty Woman dreams for us all.

by Sarah Joseph

News || 7

7 THINGS I HATE ABOUT MQ 7 SHADY THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MQ N EW H E R E ? L E T ’ S B R I N G Y O U U P T O S P EE D .

CHAIRMAN MA

THE DEMOCRAZY SRC

Macquarie Uni may well be the only major university in Australia without a student union – a body that traditionally advocates for student concerns and decides how to spend millions of dollars’ worth of Student Services and Amenities Fees – and that’s all because of a now-mythic figure named Victor Ma.

We now have the Student Representative Committee, a body of students who are allegedly the ‘peak consultative body for undergraduate and postgraduate students.’ But the body is viewed as impotent by students, largely because of poor communication on the SRC’s behalf; for the last few years they haven’t allowed a Grapeshot reporter into their meetings, despite the fact that most other university SRCs have open, public meetings.

Dubbed ‘Chairman Ma’, the political science student dominated every major student body at Macquarie between 2002 and 2007; he represented students at the uni’s highest level on the Council,etwas chairman of the Student Council AND President of Maxim omnis et aliquib eribus ex esti dolori conestium SAMMaiossequos (Students at Macquarie), our former union. rae. del mil ipienest minisstudent rem est, iur am ex

eatur sequi offictotate acid mos minciet dolore But Ma’s ruleodit, crashed when itesto wastem discovered he’d transferred aover a quam faciafrom cus aut venda net esto nossit pedis etusa $200,000 student accounts to abla personal account.

He nihicia quo tionsecuptis ium volorep si aut wound up in volupta front of the Supreme Court.

After heuditatur was ousted volorent aut ipiet ilitasp erovit parumthe autas dolore, the uni jumped at the chance to dissolve student unionsus anddit volo blabo.

Omnim quatibus ea sequiaStudent poribus cideribusam council, stunting student representation. organisations serio consequby ibustibus, ilit ipsunt aliat velloriam were replaced U@MQ, a corporate subsidiary of the uni. vent elendiciis sectem aut fall fugitibus ut ipsant.

As an article about the of student unionism in Grapeshot pointed out last year, ‘Students now consumers, notmos et, Bus doluptaquam, que net are maximpor magnimil co-owners.

[U@MQ’S] corporate board has just one student autecab is ipsunt ese nisita soluptatat qui corem labore member in ten.’ volore qui ipsum faccatur ratet pori ne naturiassedi alianimus as asperehende voles aligenist ad quamus.

Theelis re-vamped SRC only controls $200,000 annually, compared with the millions controlled by USyd’s student union, Ad qui doluptat. Ut endellore pedit, ea simincidelit eatum and Ma’s downfall has led to an ongoing hostility fromdist the volute uni evelenest aut pliquis cipidusandae niet apelessi administration towards student politics and representation.

The nos ulpa vit, eos eos ad quas ressernamus, ommolut amAtur enmity has led to limp student elections and stunted student power – and that’s just how Macquarie likes it.

10 || News

Further, half of theexplace SRC aren’t elected the studentsitiusam body, sum nonseque atatin prae.byXernatem but appointed by alam university-organised panel. nimendit ent unt que volor soluptas eosThat desmeans sunt, in that half of the SRC consequae aren’t democratically corias mod ullitatia doluptate elected, miliquis leaving de erat. people suspicious that the university selects representatives Uci won’t soloragive ipsaped peresto to omnis perrunt that the uni quia a hardque time. quasperumque volorun tiumetur ressendi alia dolor sita When the panel process first in 2012, velleceatemo eicia sit lawas debis reintroduced dusandisquia imi, verspid Gemma Quinn, the outgoing student representative to estio cus et doloria eruptium ium alignam, torumquamus Council, told The Australian, “It’s a travesty.

This body will eseque nonsed ut dolorup tataquas dolore volupta doluptas be guided directed at every stage by senior employees et que nonand cusci doluptus. of the university. Independent voices will continue to be Rum reptasped que nonsed ma vendelic tem. Em que is qui quashed.” alit eniminctus alique rehenimil expel etur?

As for the students who were actually elected, the most Uptiae election officatium et dominated ligeniet a sanditatem expla doluptaspiet recent was by one ticket, Alliance, which apereperum, optatempore corem.

Lent Damien apiendebis was run by former Liberal Club president Pace,deria a experum ofes facim Eight quam ut facest hicient member thedolorestem hard-right faction. undergrad nominees iisquostius dantiantium nonRoribus acessuntum on his ticket volecus were elected, as compared to one from the dolorionsed ticket, ex et,Voice. nonsero officitibus abo. Agni autem progressive

CONCEPTION DAY

MEDICAL SCHOOL CASH-GRAB

Until 2014, Macquarie hosted Australia’s longest-running music festival. The birthday of the uni’s namesake, Lachlan Macquarie, falls during exam time, but someone counted back rero earum ipiscil itamus doluptatiur, consequam is ut ea 9 months and figured out the day he was likely conceived. consequas quas eos que volupti seditature re eserum Since 1969, we celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Macquarie’s fruitful illaborias et eatur, quam qui ut adis eum quodio. Nam fucking with a music festival that pulled great lineups (past hilluptat maximene sundunt opti a ant unt. performers include Birds of Tokyo, Bluejuice, and Flume) that Onsecae huge od qui occustodoluptum am quiatia Quia attracted crowds three stages around voluptatur? the lake. non excepudi a ipissi dolore perovidunt labo. Peraessedis There were mass streakings, a strange tradition involving nonsediamus. hidden garden gnomes, and in 2003 over a thousand punters Iminver natquos dest, conse magnat broke the world record for Most Tequila Shots perumqui in a Row. il in precturerro voluptur, qui archit laut mashindig. eum volorest Needless to say, Conception Day aut wasaut a fantastic fugit omnimin cum sinctior amus alignim oluptaepta comnis But in 2015, the festival was canned. et lam idit ut fuga. Quis sequid quatemporem de ne si ut qui The SRC Treasurer explained that this was due toumquam hitat sincid quo est maximil enduciendunt lanistr ‘unacceptable amounts of drug and alcohol abuse’. postiis qui ullis et autatia ducillu ptatur?

Qui (Rumour quod modi has it that consequam people woulddis buryintibuscia bags of pills by the lake a week utatecto dolori nonsedi omnim before the festival, on dolupti the day would sail through security rerumquatem fuga.and Nam oriostem.

Namet voluptibus and dig them up). id unti iumqui dentur, sentur? Aximiniminis del ium fugit,

Against the will of peak medical bodies and students nationwide, Macquarie is starting a private medical school and charging students $256,000 for the degree, making it the volupta consedio quibus dolorroriae il est, adit velectatur second most expensive medical degree in the country. Industry rectus exceseque nusciist, sapidentis cusciat quaesed leaders said that the move would continue to lock people from eius et dolor rectius sitis id ent officae sendebi squatinus low-socioeconomic backgrounds out of the medical industry. digenditate poresseque pero berchiciet voluptae. Nam There is also a huge over-supply of medical students faccaeste pre inihicit, qui consecest fugiatem es compared porestem to internships and jobs available, meaning another vention serenda ecabo.

Itatiatiore quae con medical conem qui school just isn’t welcome.

Thecon fact that will be berum aliaect orenditatasi plis students destoratur, si forking omnihit out hundreds of thousands dollars to go to ut a medical audandiae maximod eiur, of iliquat iissimod faccae school sed qui that can’t promise jobs led the President of the Australian blaborem harchitthem officil maios earcide desti comnienducit Medical Students Association describequi the audi plans omnimenim as acianietur?

Quiderc hiciumqto uatiam ‘devastating’esandremquibusam ‘irresponsible’ on behalf of the remquae facerum, cusuni. as voluptus veribus ventet aliquid quatium restin eatur molupici sitaero riaepernam aces qui blaboreptam et voles moditatem hitis serumet archici llendebit mi, nihil is alit, quia vel in ra senecti Last year, revealed that the university offici autaGrapeshot dollo magnatur molent voluptur sed magnam eum planned boot expellabore out them a majority of the university’s ut ut alistosam, maximpo rrupid que is int, odic independently-owned businesses the oldpelisci food court was temperfere num voluptatius autasdolest offici suntis demolished and the Campus Common area built.millaboria et fugia preped etnew omnimolorrum ra voloreped consequia pa et quideles apis a Marxine’s cuptatur acculpa dolupta Lost to the carnage was the historic café, which natur, necto maioritinis sit, coffee sunto and volestrum hicillam fuga. had been serving up excellent moist banana bread Itam, quam, tistrum volorep eroviditjoint qui since the 70s,nati and utatia Wickeddolupta Mexican, a cheap-as-cornchips quia quidebis modissit fugialives dolorest, re vero owned by a couple who odi had ullestem invested their in the te business. mil eaturio nseruptatur raecaes molluptat quia sediti sunt la Sue, one of the owners of Wicked Mexican, told Grapeshot: consecte et as uta invelicid moluptu ribus, is exped quias ex “We’re too young to retire. We don’t want to be forced on to the everum nat. dole for the first time in our lives.”

Oluptate sedi cuptaernat.

Many members of staff, who had worked at Macquarie for over Ne vitas asimet aperit adit fuga.were Nequam dolorit, ut a decade, were told their outlets beingquatibus closed and weren’t hitio conseniscia dolo beatureius volent, endis accupta givenque a reason why. Students were dismayed to lose their nonem etand aut rallied audit, behind eat. business owners to no favouriterempos eateries,

sam iconic excessim eius esbash conseque non pra dolut est officatur The Macquarie was replaced with the terrible moluptatese quidlame enis FAME festival; pliquid the vibe was anddit the aligenia event wasnimillaccae poorly volorum event nustiatur?Stonefield Qui cumplayed sequitoofficate publicised, so in liciature the end headliners an velesticourtyard. invelent fuga. Et ius nonsequis molent. empty Ide ererio velitecabo. delecte Aftervolorep the FAME fail, the FacebookIlitatiat page Bring Backvolorernatis Conception as rerum quatum quatus, ut es solo consequis quat Day garnered hundreds of signatures petitioning for the parume venet ea inus.of the original festival. Since then, a new, reinstatement watered-down festival Conception has started, Ximi, ut aut fugiat excalled esed RE: mollest quiasperibus doluptatat and has pulled headliners such as San Cisco, Montaigne and pelecatiunt.

Thundamentals.

Volorit lab illam fugiasi beaquas alique nient officimusda It’s a pretty timequasper – and because a smaller affair it’s lati nest, verumsolid accum atiorerit’s untiis et liqui omniet way easier to sneak in goon – but it doesn’t hold a candle cus susa voluptium, autem dolecat empore nimporest, est to the iconic, multi-stage, tequila-laden fiasco thateum wasfugiti the bea landent pra qui reperuptur, quo ea core int ex Conception Day of old. cum et quam iunt, quodit, nus aspeditio tem dolupta nullam aliquas eum eossitat.

BILLION-DOLLAR BRUCE

Cullecto que vel ipsam, simaximus del essequi dolupid eum a consequo quatat ab ipsaess invenis moditatur rehento ero Last year, Grapeshot profiled Professor Bruce S Dowton, id mo min nonsequ iatiscil et ut aut laborer eptaquatur?

Macquarie’s Vice-Chancellor; essentially, he’s the CEO of the Ligni(We quis nem solorae et id expliquodia sintus es di of omnist uni. have a Chancellor, Michael Egan, but it’s more a inis eumquia con estorer cienectum rest, as tem nonsedofque figurehead position – he’s busy with his work chairman voluptatibus quam, tem ipsant, sequaessum est et molorerita Newcastle Coal). volut et omniet parum ullandel in rehenia destis ium niame Turns out Bruce, the bespectacled, bow-tie wearing head doluptat. honcho isn’t totally on the same wavelength as students.

Perruptat plab im quis nobit ut quidi apiciis eossequatem When asked about engaging students on campus, he said: “To samenim usanis corum niscimi llest, suntur mo digendi me, today, you try to plan your timetable so you can cram as picataerrum harunt quatur? Quiberum, cuptatiae reriatur, a much of your university time into three or three-and-a-half or dolenis sit omnihil mi, quasimi, officiet arum ut ipsandantur four days a week, so you can preserve time for paid, outside sed ministi doluptatem faceatu samusci odis nis pelit eni work, to make money to support a party-living high lifestyle. Is ditatur, omnis estis dolesci umquod quid et, ommod eum that an accurate reflection?” alis dolut parciae. Ut et dellam lati ut et liciam nam fugiantis No, the most part, we’re dashing between uni and sitiaBrucey. nobistoFor volupta doleseque volupit quos con nobit laut work only volorporat to sit on the earciis floor of our overpriced rental properties dolupiet elenisi tiusanderum nimusam and into bowls od of Mi santweep ilit omnisimust ut Goreng. ressimodit, nonsendis rem delique veriaVC’s namsupposition laceari busdam, ea vella ullaenergy vel inimint The that students puteium as little into ant earcim si sumjust erum reresec tintur? student lifevelectas as possible so we can fund our ‘party-living’ lifestyles came as particularly that in loriore the same Us serchil luptatque volorumgalling ipsamgiven quatemo aut ut interview hequiduciam bragged thatderum Macquarie has hit aniatium billion-dollar laut aceat voluptatqui eum qui yearly turnover.

In 2016 Brucey also raked in at least 890,000 dolendi ut volorestrum am hitatem quassequatas sae pa dollary doos, straight out of your HECS debt.

CHAIN REACTION

avail. Aaut woeful lack of student on behalf of theexcea uni Agnis eossitaecto ernatibconsultation earumen ditatum ipsam didn’t improve matters;dunt, a motion passed by the SRC calling for ditatur sit acearupta et exerest rumque enempel magni more transparency in regard to the business closures did little assi sit etur aut unto officatem nis quiant reprepero blabore to improve theres dialogue university and voloribus students. ut mo explit odi minis between is rempethe coresse caecte qui nonseque porerci lloriorit qui doluptate pori accus por sandignienis volor re in pedit ium exerferchil evendae cone cone dunt ea inverfe rorpore mod que sere, od et moditis The university’s attitude media elitiusania estrum abo.towards Nam eastudent quo debis idicould duciabene libus described as rather CEOex of expla cum, as erem lam inveneTrumpian. ducia sa Last diamyear a sitthedenis U@MQ Grapeshot’s Editor-in-Chief she asked for od id mod fired explaccabo.

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Musda oribear ionecusci dellectem quibusam hit re When it volupti was blocked, instead of an article the Grapeshot nit officte moloremporem qui cus eum ut andunti corum and quisti team ran the line ‘This was an article about sexual assault tem.

Xerumand reria quistem ipsum Itnisimet ut aut harassment assault on campus. was blocked by voluptae. the Cienes nobita nihicium nissitaque dem etur sanderc imodit university.’ labore si blam re ea aliam ipsam estio. Et eaque omnis quis Students immediately rallied behind Grapeshot and Junkee ran peliquia voluptae lacerro conet ullor mos at endita simusan a news story about the censorship. We were eventually able to dantia sit quo que pra volecum alit quia run the piece online, but a tense relationship continues between Grapeshot and our ‘publisher’, U@MQ.

ALL ABOARD THE CENSORSHIP

News || 11

THE FALLEN SOLDIERS

CAMPUS GOERS REACT AS THE ICONIC 120 LEMON-SCENTED GUMS I N T H E C O U R T Y A R D F A L L T O C H A I N S A WS In 1968, four years after the founding of Macquarie University, a squadron of soldiers took up arms in the central courtyard. One hundred and twenty lemon-scented gums were planted in a grid, providing much-needed greenery and shade in between the hulking shapes of the three brutalist buildings that – until very recently – bordered the courtyard.

The trees were planted in the shape of a phalanx – a Roman military unit that would assemble into a tightly-packed formation in preparation for an oncoming attack. The trees’ establishment was emblematic of Macquarie’s classification as a ‘verdant’ university (Australian universities are informally categorised as either ‘sandstone’ universities, i.e. those established in the colonial era with inner-city campuses, such as USyd and UNSW, as opposed to the more contemporary ‘verdant’ or ‘gum-tree’ campuses founded later in synergy with native landscapes, like Macquarie and the University of Wollongong).

For fifty years the trees have stood guard over the university’s central hub. But over the summer break, all 120 trees were felled.

The campus courtyard was closed in October last year as Semester 2 came to an end, due to ‘advice that the age, type, location and microclimate of the trees there make falling branches a significant risk,’ as reported by an article published on MyMQ. ‘This risk is heightened during and following storms.’

Staff and students were immediately skeptical. One commenter wrote on a MyMQ article about the continued closure of the courtyard: ‘I was a bit surprised to see the claim in Friday’s email that the Courtyard was being closed because of concerns over predicted storms – the Bureau of Meteorology wasn’t predicting any storms and I’m pretty sure that the “microclimate” (really?) of the Courtyard doesn’t extend to creating its own storm activity.’

The commenter went on: ‘I hope this isn’t a cover-up for a tree removal project.’

Others linked their suspicions to the university’s mishandling of the closure of Campus Hub (C10A) and the abrupt dismissal of independent food businesses with little to no student consultation.

Under the moniker ‘Cynical Susan’, a commenter wrote: ‘Considering how poorly handled the C10A closure has been conducted, it seems very suspicious to me that there is a

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sudden, imminent threat from these trees within the same timeframe as the buildings closure.’

‘Is this really just some smoke and dust to justify ridding the courtyard of its soldiers to make way for more glass boxes?’

Mark Broomfield, Macquarie’s Director of Property, states that this wasn’t the case.

“There have been incidents at other sites (outside of the University), where the same species of trees had ‘dropped branches’, which led to injury. We had incidents of dropping branches in the Central Courtyard which was becoming more regular, hence our request for a more in-depth analysis. The trees were not being removed as a part of the redevelopment of the campus, but purely for safety reasons, as the courtyard is highly populated,” he told Grapeshot, citing a report from Australian Tree Consultants that recommended all of the trees be removed mid last year.

A different arborist company had been monitoring the trees for over 5 years, and handed over a recommendation management plan that recommended further diagnostics, but didn’t require full-tree removal. The university went to Australian Tree Consultants, who undertook diagnostics and recommended that the trees be removed.

The fact that the university seemed to ‘shop around’ for an arborist who recommended the removal of the trees sparked further suspicion among students and staff.

Many saw the mass felling as a stain on the university’s reputation as a leafy, open university as opposed to the brick-and-concrete laden campuses of the city – particularly as the planned construction of accommodation building on campus are set to infringe on the green space in front of the lake.

Above all, the prevailing response to the trees’ removal from campus-goers was one of sadness.

A photo of the cleared courtyard posted to the Grapeshot Facebook page in December sparked a huge response.

Hundreds of comments flooded the post expressing shock and confusion.

One student wrote, ‘It’s not my place anymore. In the last six months, mq has lost its heart. No longer a welcoming place to be, I wish I didn’t have to go back next year.’

Walanga Muru, the university’s Office of Indigenous Strategy, was involved in the removal of the trees and acknowledge the emotional and historical significance

the trees had on campus. Director Dr Leanne Holt was included in Property’s consultation committee and took the issue to the Aboriginal Advisory Board, who reiterated the particular importance of Macquarie’s natural landscape to the campus’s Indigenous staff and students.

“One of the things that one of the Elders talked to Property about was our connection to country,” Dr Holt told Grapeshot. “For us, all of the environment carries our stories, our songlines. The trees have captured our journeys and our experiences for the last 50 years.”

An Indigenous smoking and water ceremony was undertaken prior to the removal of the trees in an effort to acknowledge their history.

The university has promised to replant two trees for every one taken, although some argue that two saplings won’t replace a full-grown gum for its importance in providing habitat to native animals such as the critically endangered powerful owl.

“The replanting of the courtyard will take place as part of an extensive landscape overhaul of the courtyard in the next two years, while the major development works are underway,” says Mark Broomfield.

While most can understand the need for campuses to upgrade and redevelop for the benefit of future generations, it comes at a cost for the current students, and dissatisfaction is amplified by the university’s poor communication and lack of consultation regarding campus redevelopment.

For the next few years students will contend with huge construction sites on campus as well as the closure of the Macquarie train station, which will bring a litany of practical complications. For many, the tree’s felling represents the university’s disregard for its distinctive, verdant history, and symbolises the apparent prioritisation by modern universities of creating slick, Open Day-ready campuses in the place of a campus shaped, enjoyed and cherished by current students and staff.

It seems the trees, who stood strong and battle-ready for half a century, were no match for the chainsaws of an increasingly corporate, profit-driven university.

by Angus Dalton

News || 13

EDUCATIONAL EXCLUSION

ISIL OZKARTAL SPEAKS TO DR LEANNE HOLT, HEAD OF WALANGA MURU, ON IMPROVING MACQUARIE FOR INDIGENOUS STUDENTS AND STAFF Macquarie University has the lowest number of Indigenous enrolments in the state. It also has the lowest retention rate of Indigenous students, the lowest number of course completions for Indigenous students, and the lowest number of Indigenous staff.

Dr Leanne Holt, Director of Walanga Muru (the university’s Office of Indigenous Strategy), says these figures are largely to do with the location of Macquarie’s campus, but there are other factors also at play.

“We’re not quite in the regional area and were not quite in the middle of the city area,” she tells Grapeshot.

“Sitting on the north shore has this implication that it’s going to be expensive living costs.”

Holt is a Worimi woman (Karuah, New South Wales) who has further connections to Biripai Country (Port Macquarie). She submitted a PhD about the journey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s contribution to the development of Aboriginal education policy, and has been working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in universities for over two decades. While demographics is part of the reason for Macquarie’s low number of Indigenous staff and students, Dr Holt is quick to acknowledge the historical reasons for the disproportionately poor presence of Indigenous people attending university.

Aboriginal students were excluded from public schools in New South Wales, even in to the 60s and 70s, and the ramifications of that are still at play today.

Understanding the historical impacts of the exclusion of Aboriginal people from education is important when trying to understand why some Indigenous people are not encouraged by their family to undertake higher education.

“You’re talking about two generations back that have

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been affected by the educational exclusion of the 70s, so the community and family attitude towards educational institutions is very negative,” says Holt.

Holt said that the overall lack of academic confidence in Indigenous students combined with a lack of a robust cultural support system can also explain the low retention rates in Indigenous students at Macquarie.

“Many of our Indigenous students come through ‘Aboriginal Entry’ and so our students don’t come in a lot of the time with the academic confidence. There’s always that feeling that they’re not supposed to be here.”

Holt added that the feeling of cultural disconnect in universities is also present among Australians who are from a non-Anglo Celtic background and may be first in the family to attend university.

“A lot of our students are struggling with their cultural identity and who they are within a new environment…

I think you get that when you’ve got diversity among students; it’s not only Aboriginal students that feel that; obviously first in family and people from other cultural contexts feel it as well.”

Creating a positive university experience for Indigenous students goes beyond traditional academic support, says Holt.

“I think our biggest challenge is creating a sense of belonging and community; ensuring that this institution is just as much a home and a community for Aboriginal students as it is for any other student. I feel that most of the students need more than academic support; they need an engagement that’s strong and positive, that provides all the opportunities that you can take up to have a wonderful experience whether its academic, social or cultural while you’re at university, because it should be a positive time.”

The reason why Macquarie performed so poorly with its Indigenous community in the past is, as Holt identified, there had never been a consolidated approach across Macquarie University to solve the issues at hand: “It was always reliant on a small group of people or on the goodwill of other academic and professional staff across the university… you can’t rely on a small group of people to make the significant changes that need to be made because it’s a cultural change that needs to be made.”

In September 2016, Macquarie introduced a 10-year strategy that aims to lift the number of enrollments and improve the retention rate of Indigenous students, as well as increasing the number of Indigenous employees at Macquarie. Closing the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students is something that all universities in Australia have been encouraged to bring to the forefront of their strategic agenda.

In March 2017, Universities Australia launched an Indigenous strategy which is the first national document of its kind that seeks to increase the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled in university, as well as aiming for equal success and award course completion rates for Indigenous students.

Going forward, Walanga Muru is investing in first year advisors, which are third year students or above, that will be mentors for Indigenous students in their first year.

They have also invested in ‘Studiosity’ which is an online tutoring program which Indigenous students can access 6 days a week. Commencing this year, Holt is certain that both the mentors and the online program will assist future Indigenous students in their university journey at Macquarie.

The importance of having Aboriginal people in higher academic professional roles and as employees in a University environment is what Holt identifies as the simple fact that we need Indigenous answers to Indigenous questions.

“When we’re talking about workforce; we’re not just doing it to help with numbers, it’s about valuing the contributions that the community brings. Faculties really need to realise if they don’t have the expertise to be teaching Aboriginal studies. It’s a fact; what they need is Aboriginal expertise.”

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY HAS THE LOWEST NUMBER OF INDIGENOUS ENROLMENTS, THE LOWEST RETENTION RATE OF INDIGENOUS STUDENTS, AND THE LOWEST NUMBER OF INDIGENOUS STAFF IN THE STATE. Although last year Macquarie was ranked 23 out of 40 national universities for access, participation and success for Indigenous students, the university has also had its highest ever number of Indigenous students graduate last year, as well as growth in the number of Indigenous research higher degrees.

Holt is also working towards looking at systems and trying to provide input that improves university life for all students, such as pushing the date for withdrawal from units without academic penalty to a later date.

Holt believes that through a consolidated approach, Macquarie can be a successful place for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

“It’s about providing a space where students feel not just safe, but inspired, and that they feel inspired within a strong cultural environment. We need to work on the whole university environment becoming a good environment, not just for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander students, but for all students.”

by Isil Ozkartal

News || 15

THE BENNELONG BATTLE INSIDE THE CRITICAL BY-ELECTION THAT RAGED ON MACQUARIE’S DOORSTEP

THE GOVERNMENT’S PANIC

KK’S COMEBACK

After the government spent months feigning stability as politicians were bowled over by dual-citizenship fuckery, Malcolm Turnbull must have truly citizenshit his pants when Bennelong MP John Alexander was struck down in the chaos.

If Labor was going to serve up anyone who could disrupt Alexander’s expected return, it was Kristina Keneally. The Las Vegas-born journalist became NSW’s first female premier in 2009, and after resigning from Parliament in 2012, Keneally has maintained an active media presence by hosting several shows on Sky News and writing for The Guardian.

The government was clinging to a one-seat majority; if it lost that majority, parliament would be destabilised and Labor could potentially trigger and win a vote of no confidence – which would bring about Turnbull’s resignation and the fall of the government as it stands.

When Fairfax Media revealed it was likely Alexander was a dual citizen with Britain, and therefore had been ineligible to stand for parliament at the time of his election, he was forced to return to Bennelong and fight for re-election.

Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce had been in the same situation a few weeks beforehand – similarly risking the government’s slim majority – but had reclaimed his electorate of New England with flying colours. Many expected Alexander to do the same with Bennelong; bar a brief stint by Labor’s Maxine McKew in 2007-10, the electorate has been held exclusively

by Liberal white dudes named John since it was created in 1949 (seriously: John Cramer until 1974, John Howard from 1974-2007 and John Alexander from 2007 to now).

But then came Keneally.

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Since 2015 she has worked with Macquarie’s Graduate School of Management as a mentor for women students.

Georgie Slater, Women’s Officer of MQ Labor, was hired by Keneally to run the campaign’s organising centre as hundreds of volunteers descended to thrash out the most high-stakes political contest since the 2016 Federal Election.

“It was a desperate campaign – for both sides,’ Slater told Grapeshot. Slater started work on the campaign the day the results of the marriage equality postal vote came out, and it was revealed that Bennelong was one of the 12 Greater Sydney electorates that returned a majority no vote.

In a demonstrably conservative area and Liberal stronghold, Labor went pedal-to-the-metal; Slater organised over 55,000 phone calls to Bennelong’s constituents while an army of doorknockers took to the streets of Ryde, Epping, Eastwood and Macquarie Park.

LET THE SHADE CAMPAIGN BEGIN

STUPOL SHENANIGANS & PROTESTING PUNTERS

“Our main target was health, and the fact they were closing down the Medicare centre at Eastwood,” says Slater. “John Alexander has literally done nothing for the electorate. In the 2016 Federal Election he just ran on the party platform, he didn’t actually make one promise to Bennelong worth noting.”

When Malcolm Turnbull and Gladys Berejiklian showed up on campus to bolster the Alexander campaign by announcing a $100 million deal for a major new transport interchange for the Macquarie Park precinct, they were met with protesters objecting to the federal government’s cuts to higher education.

Slater also said that the John Alexander campaign was preoccupied with dragging Keneally over her former ties to the disgraced Labor Party politicians Eddie Obeid (who was jailed in 2016 for misconduct in public office) and Joe Tripoli (who was found corrupt by ICAC last year).

Cameron Colwell, a student who attended the protest, said: “I think it was extremely gross of Turnbull to turn up to Macquarie University station due to the contempt his government has shown university students by attempting to further cut funds, and personally I think the bus hub plan was pork-barrelling to save his government.”

The Liberal Party created a website, kristinakeneally.com, that claimed Keneally was a ‘puppet’ for Obeid and Tripoli, and accused her of running one of the most ‘chaotic, scandalous and incompetent governments in Australia’s history’.

“It was a low blow,” says Slater. “Everyone who’s actually done their research knows that she actually testified against them and helped put them in jail.”

The Liberals also targeted people of Chinese ancestry – who make up over a fifth of Bennelong’s population – by handing out scratchies that read in Mandarin, ‘Scratch the panels below to reveal the consequences of voting Labor’, inferring voting in Keneally was a bad gamble.

Meanwhile, Slater reported that a number of sexist comments had been made to her by Liberal and conservative campaigners, including ‘you know you’re supporting a communist bitch, right?’ and that she was taunted for pursuing politics as a woman. She also says the police had to be called when two elderly volunteers were knocked down at a pre-polling booth.

Wynne, on the other hand, says a car full of Labor volunteers hurled expletives at him and his fellow campaigners as they were doorknocking.

THE RESULTS

“In general, it was all dirty campaigning on [the Liberal Party’s] behalf,” says Slater, although she concedes that someone on her side did indeed confront John Alexander while dressed as a chicken.

Despite neck-and-neck polls leading up to the day of the by-election, the Liberals were successful in their bid to continue the rule of White Johns and save the federal government from political catastrophe.

But Patrick Wynne – President of the Macquarie Uni Republic Club and campaigner for John Alexander – says the Liberal Party campaign was ‘overwhelmingly positive’, and attention on the Obeid scandal was limited.

“The Labor Party essentially tried to make the Bennelong by-election a referendum on Malcolm Turnbull, and they anticipated that a lot of people strongly dislike him, but the political reality is that there are people who support him,” says Wynne. “People said that they accept Malcolm Turnbull as a leader and that they accept his vision going forward. He represents the best of the Liberal Party.”

“I feel like that wasn’t a major part of the campaign, that was one part of it,” said Wynne. “Overwhelmingly the campaign was exceptionally positive in focusing on individualism and small business, and being a good local member, which is what John Alexander has done during his tenure.”

“I took issue with some of the Labor volunteers – there was an undertone that was very aggressive, and inherently political.

I felt like the voters didn’t like that approach, the constant political jabs commonly instigated by Keneally.”

The campaign did turn volatile at points; John Alexander was in hot water just before election day when it was suggested he had violated parliamentary rules by failing to declare income from renting his $4.8-million crib in the Southern Highlands.

Alexander was also roasted on Twitter when a photo was posted of him posing with call centre volunteers ‘chatting to local residents about creating jobs through tax breaks’ – but none of the phones were plugged in.

Keneally had to shake a bad look when she was accused of handing how-to-vote cards to dementia patients in a retirement home, and her campaign line of defending the closure of the local Medicare centre was undermined when the ABC pointed out that the closure was the actually the result of a decision made by the Federal Labor government in 2009.

But Labor also found a reason to celebrate, after achieving a 4.8 per cent swing against Alexander, making the historically Liberal safe-seat marginal.

Shorten claimed after the results that the path was set for Labor to claim the seat at the next Federal election, although Wynne says “I don’t see any feasible pathway for them to win the seat. They’d have to dramatically change their message, in my view, to appeal to the changing demographics of that area.”

Kristina Keneally won’t be returning to Macquarie any time soon, as in the weeks after her loss it was announced she would be taking Sam Dastyari’s spot in the Senate.

She said her priorities in parliament would be constitutional recognition for Indigenous people and social justice causes.

She said: “I believe our society is most healthy when our most vulnerable members are supported, protected and included: people with a disability, their families and carers; babies and children; and older people and pensioners. I will always put their needs at the centre of my work.”

by Angus Dalton

News || 17

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SURVIVAL OF THE SANCTUARY ERIN CHRISTIE DIGS THROUGH THE WOMEN’S ROOM ARCHIVE

Walking past the swanky, new and improved glass-fronted E7B, you might notice the giant hole in the centre of campus.

To you newbies out there (welcome!), this used to where everything was hip and happening at Macquarie. Among what is now rubble, you could find $5 nachos, a big homey student bar, and a cute-as-hell cafe called Marxine’s that was established in the 70s with a kicker cappuccino; all of which have been moved, removed, or destroyed in the new efforts to reconstruct.

Also lost to campus is the old Women’s Room – which was once the favourite place of many at the North Ryde Campus. This is-slash-was an exclusive safe space for women-identifying individuals, existing in the back corner of the third floor in C10A. This hallowed room was home to laughter, tears, venting, conversations of silliness and solidarity. For me, it has been a place to cry, a place to sleep, a place to discuss and a place to learn. And apparently, it has been such a place for many others over the last twenty years.

You’ll find many things if you dig through the archives of the Women’s Room. The first notable find was a red flyer from the 90s, promoting the space with the words ‘A ROOM OF OUR OWN’ printed across the top. Its location is advertised as Level 2 Union Building - back in the day we had both a Student Union and a Union Building. The author of the flyer has written ‘what’s in it for you?’ and answered herself the space is a place for free information on topics such as women’s health, housing, domestic and sexual violence and women’s legal status. It was also described as a place to use for ‘activities like jam sessions, painting, writing.’ The creation of the space was clearly an amazing achievement for the Women’s Collective of the time. However, they weren’t without the troubles that still permeate the existence of Macquarie’s Women’s Space and Collective.

Up until the dissolution of the Student Union, it seems that every year the space was given a new journal. Women would write to each other about everything, such as exams, work, politics and parenthood. On the 25th of September, 1992, an anonymous character wrote ‘Long live sisterhood!’ On the 4th of August that same year, ‘Emma’ wrote: This is a beautiful place where we can come … and not have to fear being criticised and judged … but rather, are safe in the knowledge that laid bare at your most vulnerable point you will

be comforted, nurtured, protected and healed.

Although the fear of misogyny that permeates the entries is still relatable, it is also nice that the sentiment of the room is still what it was 25 years ago. However, with the destruction of campus beginning at the end of last year, the fate of the women’s room is a source of concern for many.

The new Women’s Room can be found in MAZE, the new ‘student group space’ that has been opened one level above MUSE. Administration had the Macquarie University Women’s Collective moving their books and furniture into the glass-walled room before they had decided to frost it, meaning anyone could see into the space. This compromised the safety of anyone inside using the space for its safety - whether that be women who had removed headscarves, or women seeking to avoid their sexual harassment perpetrator on campus. The doors of the space are also currently broken, and do not lock, meaning anyone can enter (although Campus Engagement says as the space is used by some ‘at risk’ students, it cannot be locked in case staff need to enter). The new space is more likely to be invaded due to its central and visible location.

This proved to be an issue in October last year, with a group of men attempting to enter the space by sardonically claiming they identified as women. Fortunately, the then-current Vice President and Secretary of the Women’s Collective were inside the space and able to deter the situation.

The newly elected President of the Women’s Collective, Erin Bliss, has expressed her concerns for the space, especially in response to this occurrence. “There were women in there who had removed headscarves, there were women in there sleeping. Also, security is rarely seen on level three, meaning there is potential for lack of safety and potential for members to be harassed or approached by those not welcome in the space.”

The safety of the space will hopefully improve over the semester through consultations with the Women’s Collective Executive Team, who plan to control the space and keep it safe. However, it seems very unlikely the space will reach the sense of sanctuary that used to exist before it was bulldozed in the name of redevelopment.

by Erin Christie

News || 19

THE RISE AND FALL OF #METOO O L I V I A J A M ES O N W H Y R O B U S T R E P O R T A G E I S ESSE N T I A L T O T H E M O V E M E N T Content warning: The following article discusses sexual assault and harassment.

The #MeToo movement has dominated the media in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace. Offending behaviour ranges from the hotly debated conduct of Aziz Ansari on the ‘worst date’ of the victim’s life detailed in a Babe expose, to the criminal sexual assault of over 150 women by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

Offences are, in some cases, historic, but the outrage is fresh.

The 2018 Golden Globes red carpet was transformed into a coordinated political protest, with stars like Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Ewan McGregor and Viola Davis donning all-black attire and ‘Time’s Up’ pins in protest of the widespread perpetration and cover-up of sexual misconduct.

In a bid to effect change that extended beyond the entertainment industry, eight actresses took the opportunity to invite activists as their plus ones. Emma Watson was joined by Marai Larasai, the founder of IMKAAN, the only UK-based charity to offer support to black women and children who are victims of violence. Saru Jayaraman, a workplace-justice advocate for restaurant workers, accompanied Amy Poehler. Meryl Streep extended her invite to Ai-Jen Poo, the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Michelle Williams stood in solidarity with founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke.

The ‘Times Up’ legal fund, a collaborative effort of over 300 women within the entertainment industry, was another effort to expand the movement’s reach. With nearly $20 million donated, the fund serves to provide subsidised legal support for victims of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace who are otherwise unable to pursue justice. What is clear is that both women and men are recognising that this issue in universal, impacting all areas of work and threatening educational institutions. The 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground shone the spotlight on sexual assault on US college campuses and relied on a plethora of studies to back up its assertion that roughly one fifth of students would be sexually assaulted during their time at university.

While media coverage has been dominated

by American victims, perpetrators and statistics, many Australians have been working tirelessly to address the issue of sexual assault and harassment domestically.

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2017 report ‘Change the Course’ found that just over 50% students reported being sexually harassed in 2016.

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Further, 7% of students were sexually assaulted on at least one occasion between 2015 and 2016. These statistics, whilst disheartening, are not necessarily unique. The most recent ‘personal safety survey’ from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicated that over 50% of women and 25% of men had been sexually harassed in their lifetime.

Conduct such as passing comments on an individual’s body and sex life and non-consensual groping, fondling and kissing have also substantially increased from the last survey in 2012.

Equally as troubling is the fact that the number of women to report this behaviour dropped from the already dismal 17% in 2012 to 15% in 2017.

In light of this, the recent deposing of Don Burke and Craig McLachlan, two icons in Australian media, by the allegations of sexual misconduct from multiple women is a significant step forward. With an litany of victims coming forward to accuse these men, their statements of innocence have been largely disregarded by the Australian public. Don Burke’s claim that his conduct is a misunderstood symptom of his self-diagnosed Asperger’s was understandably canned by Australian media.

And while a portion of reporters argue that McLachlan has been unfairly vilified, the response from the public and his employers has been mostly proportionate to the slew of accusations and paper-trail of reported incidences that were never properly investigated.

However, the #MeToo movement stands to be threatened by the instances of poor reporting.

The report that Geoffrey Rush, former Australian of the Year and Hollywood heavyweight, had engaged in ‘inappropriate behaviour’ has aided the attempted lampooning of the #MeToo movement in Australia.

Rush is suing the owner of the Daily Telegraph, Nationwide News Limited, and the journalist who penned the series of articles dubbing Rush ‘KING LEER’ and a ‘sexual predator’.

The articles, which linked Rush to the disgraced Don Burke and Harvey Weinstein, were based entirely on an undisclosed allegation supposedly made to the Sydney Theatre Company.

The details of this allegation are non existent, with the Daily Telegraph only reporting that Rush had engaged in ‘inappropriate behaviour’.

This lack of journalistic integrity evidenced by the Nationwide News outlet gives ammunition to opponents of the #MeToo movement, who try to destabilise the credibility of women coming forward by questioning the validity of allegations and the motives of the women coming forward.

French actress Catherine Deneuve signed a letter in conjunction with 100 other women that denounced the #MeToo campaign as a ‘witch hunt’ against respectable men. In doing so she legitimised the unfounded belief that women will leaps at any chance to blow their company-supplied rape whistles and cost a well-meaning man his job.

But the reality is that the prevalence of false allegations is wildly conflated, and women are much more likely to allow a crime to go unreported than to report a falsified sexual assault.

Around the globe, instances of false allegations of sexual assault are universally below 7%. The Home Office found that only 4% of reported sexual assaults in the UK were false, whilst collaborative studies of the US and Europe placed this figure between 2 and 6%. It should also be noted that global studies agree that a third of sexual assault cases go unreported, which could be explained by the immense scrutiny victims face when coming forward as well as the fact that, as reported by RAINN, for every 1,000 perpetrators 994 will walk free.

Australia also has uniform defamation laws across the nation, which operate stringently in favour of those claiming to be defamed. Legally, defamation cases such as the Geoffrey Rush case are only dismissed if the claim would violate freedom of political communication, be in opposition to the publicly accepted truth, or be deemed trivial by a judge.

Released in late 2017, The New Yorker’s ‘Cat Person’ short story detailed the all too familiar tale of a woman caught in an unpleasant sexual relationship with an older man. The story, which became conflated with #MeToo and Time’s Up, follows college student Margot, as she struggles to break off a relationship with a man with whom she had been having casual and unpleasant sex.

While profoundly uncomfortable, female readers were able to unanimously recognise that the behaviour of Robert, a man who would eventually call Margot a whore for not replying to his messages after ending their relationship, is not comparable to the conduct of a serial sexual predator like Larry Nassar or Harvey Weinstein. Women are not on a mission to destroy the lives of men that they had unpleasant encounters with because they are able to recognise the difference between ‘bad sex’ and criminal behaviour. Both the pernicious sexual entitlement of men - exemplified by Aziz Ansari’s conduct - and the blatantly criminal actions of Weinstein and other perpetrators of sexual assault have been called out over the last few months. These are different (albeit related) issues, and we are smart enough to have nuanced and productive conversations about promoting consent and ending sexual assault and harassment. No one is out to incriminate innocent people; rather, we are striving for common sense, safety, equality, and justice for victims.

For years women have stayed quiet, not because they lack the ability to distinguish between what sort of conduct is wrong or right, but because they knew that they would be opening themselves up to a litany of abuse, criticism and skepticism.

Now they are speaking, and we owe it to them to listen.

At the very least, the explosion of media coverage surrounding the #MeToo movement, paired with the exhaustive efforts of student activists campaigning for reform of university policy surrounding sexual harassment and assault on campus, has made it clear that for everyone - in every industry and on every campus - that sexual misconduct will no longer be tolerated.

by Olivia James

NEWS || 21

The word wasteland might evoke a barren, unused and forgotten space; something post-apocalyptic and isolated. For Australian artist Liz Ashburn, a wasteland is a battleground. Ashburn has spent the last thirty years of her career reflecting upon aspects of human experience, often coming back to war and the devastating, lasting effects it has had on the world - and the spaces left ravaged by boots, bullets and bomb craters.

Ashburn, based in Caves Beach just south of Newcastle, is bringing her exhibition w a s t e l a n d to Macquarie University Art Gallery in February. The exhibit is Ashburn’s interrogation of how war can impact the world and those embroiled in it, from the people in the trenches to the pilots in the aircrafts, the engineers, the families, and the civilians who battle to survive.

The show comprises of two parts, John “Jack” Harvey: The Great War, made up of pieces collected from a World War I veteran.

The second part, Iraq Suite: Endless War, is an ongoing collection of images in an Afghan artistic style responding to the invasion of Iraq.

“One work looks at it from a systemic viewpoint, but the work on World War I is a purely individual approach,” says Ashburn. “I’ve tried to look at it from both viewpoints. From the soldiers who are seen as almost interchangeable, when the fact is that each of them is an individual.”

Since Australia was first shocked by images of war when student papers and underground rags began publishing photos from the Vietnam War, which were eventually picked up by the mainstream press, society has become desensitised to the nature of war.

This is something Ashburn is very aware of, and she is determined to ensure history remembers what war has done to the world by emphasising the experience of the humans involved in war that often feel removed from the West’s coverage of conflict.

Looking to break away from the clichés of war documentation, and to cut through the plethora of images that are on tap through the media, Ashburn feels it is important to show a true and personal representation of the real experience of war.

Ashburn came across Jack Harvey after speaking to a friend about the repetitive narratives of war, and her friend told Ashburn of the things her father had brought back after World War I. “I wanted to have a different approach. That’s why I chose to look at it from the viewpoint – not even of one person’s experience – but of what one person kept, what one person brought home.”

War is something that has been represented in art countless times, and Ashburn wanted something more specific. Having access to Harvey’s personal belongings was an intimate look into someone’s memories; memories that likely haunted this person for most of his lifetime.

“In these images and objects so carefully preserved it’s possible to see his strong friendships with fellow soldiers, his love of family and his reluctance to destroy even the most trivial scrap of paper from his time at the front.”

The contrast between the styles of the two collections mirrors the contrast between how each war was viewed by the soldiers involved. Soldiers in World War I, the first Great War, had a very different idea of what was involved in war compared with those who went to Iraq. World War I was seen as an adventure, something that would be over quickly, while the reality was vastly different. While history has informed us of the horrors of war, somehow war continues to be seen as a solution to conflict.

When asked if The Great War held some sort of nostalgia for simpler times, before soldiers knew what war really meant, Ashburn vehemently responded that it doesn’t.

“No, no. I don’t see it as being sentimentalised or nostalgic or anything. It was something so traumatic [Harvey] couldn’t even bear to talk about it. It was awful.”

As someone who is intensely opposed to war, Ashburn is careful not to sensationalise it. She is selective about the types of images she uses, determined not to represent war as something tolerable. Despite this opposition she also sees the importance in recognising the individuals who find themselves in the endlessness of conflict.

“They’re not horrible people, they’re just ordinary people in an awful situation. And the people in the country that’s at war are just ordinary families trying to survive. I think it’s one of the sadnesses of humankind that we continue to make war.”

Most of the images Ashburn has chosen in Iraq Suite have come from photographers in Iraq, which Ashburn has reimagined in a traditional Islamic style of miniature painting. Vivid watercolours seep across paper, the beauty of the hues starkly contrasting with the haunting scenes they are painting. A child with his bloody face, a father kissing his dead son’s hand, a plume of smoke over a destroyed city.

Ashburn’s adoption of Afghan miniature style painting – something which she learned from artist Abdul Karim Rahimi – pays homage to Middle Eastern culture, a culture that Ashburn worries has been diminished due to years of constant conflict.

As artefacts, museums and libraries are destroyed in conflict, a culture’s collective memory is slowly lost.

“I think because of that, the Australian war museum – while I don’t see it as some sort of tribute to having wars – it’s really important that we have it, that we haven’t forgotten what happens in wars, and that Australia has been such a willing participant.”

by Mariah Hanna

News || 23

WHO GIVES A DENTAL DAM? W H Y WE S H O U L D B E A B L E T O A C C ESS D E N T A L D A M S FASTER THAN YOU CAN SAY CUNNILINGUS I don’t remember the first time I learned about dental dams and, as such, I suspect the circumstances were fairly unremarkable. What I do remember is the first time I Google-imaged them. Seized between internalised homophobia and a new-found feminist identity (I had just enrolled in ‘Introduction to Gender Studies’), I hastily struck the ‘enter’ key before I could reconsider.

It was not the first image that caught my eye but the horror-movie-esque depiction of a lady’s face, obstructed by a sheet of blue latex showing only a set of garishly white teeth. No way was that ever going near my vagina.

A dental dam, for those now afraid of the Google-search function (trust me – she’s still there), is a thin sheet of latex that acts as a barrier between the mouth and vagina/ anus during oral sex. They are intended to prevent the transmission of STIs (though their effectiveness remains under-researched) and are often promoted for use between LGBTQI+ women. Simple, right? Wrong.

As I’ve become more involved with LGBTQI+ activism, I have grown increasingly obsessed with dental dams.

Dismayed at their lack of availability at Woolies, Coles, or even a goddamn chemist, I’ve spent the last few years sifting through every store I can find. To my unending frustration, I am yet to see them placed on a shelf. In October 2017, I succumbed and Instagram-messaged a condom company founded on female equality asking they had any plans to produce dental dams – they didn’t.

It seems the only place one can get their hands on a dental dam (without visiting a social service organisation, like ACON) is via an online chemist, who charge $4.95 for three dams (and that excludes the $8.95 shipping fee). Imagine paying $5 for three condoms. To put that into perspective, you can buy a pack of 100 condoms for $25 from the same brand on the same site. This equates to a $1.40 difference in price per dam/condom. Safe cunnilingus, it seems, is a luxury activity; one that occurs so infrequently that you’d only need to purchase three at a time.

Many people mistakenly view oral sex as a non-risky sexual act when it comes to the transmission of STIs, but in reality, herpes, gonorrhea, HPV, syphilis, chlamydia and other diseases can be spread via oral sex.

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So, what do we do to prevent LGBTQI+ women from contracting STIs from their partners? Overwhelmingly, women who have sex with women aren’t using protection.

A 2010 Australian study conducted by Julie Richters found that 87% of women who had sex with women had never used a dental dam. Though I wonder, is this resounding disuse of the dam simply a sign of their rejection? Or, is it intertwined with their lack of availability and our lack of education on them?

In my journey, there have been two options suggested to me. The first is something of a DIY project - cut the tip of a condom, before slicing it down the side. The other is using Glad Wrap. Whilst Glad Wrap is cost-effective and available at your local Coles, it assumes something peculiar and out-dated: that LGBTQI+ women always have sex in the home. There is nothing less sexy than your partner reaching into the back of the car or their Mary Poppins handbag to whip out a roll of Glad Wrap.

These DIY-projects have led me to wonder whether this lack of commercial accessibility (and affordability) has more to do with the cultural idea that non-penetrative sex is not prevalent, or doesn’t count as ‘real’ sex. How can we market ‘safe-sex’ products to the queer community when our practices are not considered to be ‘sex’? Additionally, this argument bears a striking resemblance to the age-old ‘if men got periods, tampons would be free’ debate. The only difference is that men could be using dental dams on their partners. It is, more than anything, for this reason alone that I am constantly perplexed as to why one single sheet of latex, encased in a simple package, is so difficult to acquire.

Finally, in writing this article, I do not wish to suggest that queer women should always use dental dams. Nor do I wish to contribute to a moral panic where all sexual practices are designated as equally risky. Rather, I am an advocate for choice. We should not have to splurge our life-savings in online pharmacies in order to have the same rights as our penis-bearing counterparts.

by Kate M

REGULARS

THE CHALLENGE

BREWING GOONSHINE NATHANIEL KEESING COOKS UP SOME DIY HOOCH JUST IN TIME FOR FOMO One of my greatest idols growing up turned my world upside down when she turned to me one day and said, “You’re a bit of a bogan aren’t you?”

I couldn’t believe it. I had never considered myself one before. I am partial to a little outdoor ugg action. But did I really have the essence of eshays running through my veins? Could I really be related to Kath and Kim? When I found out my first challenge of the year was to brew my own goon, I just knew that this was my chance to connect with my supposed heritage. Was someone’s passing comment as valid as a DNA test? Is it even something you can test for? Well... no. But I could feel it. Deep within my subconscious was a lad ready burst free and pester someone for a ciggie. So I threw on my oldest, dirtiest Nike TN’s, turned my undies inside out and set out to make my own goonshine.

Googling how to make the delicious elixir of life turned out to be more difficult than I thought. A syphon? An airlock?! I’m not here to make ‘Bogans in Space’. Goon didn’t taste that complicated. There had to be an easier way. I eventually stumbled upon a simple two-step guide. Hey, I can count to two. And the recipe was sans equipment: all I needed was grape juice and baker’s yeast, then Bob’s your uncle (and brother)!

I packed my bum bag and headed to the closest late-night shopping at Westfield. My kin were in their natural habitat here. Do I dare approach? Would they accept me into the family? My Pig Latin was still a bit rusty, so I was too scared to frolic with my people.

First on my list was unpasteurised grape juice, as preservatives will kill the yeast. Is yeast conscious? Are they like sea monkeys? Are there yeast bogans, too? I

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didn’t want to take the chance of accidentally committing mass murder, so I spent a bit extra to get the good pre-pasteurised stuff. My plan was get two different flavours, then mix them together. That’s how you get that delicious twang of the humble fruity lexia. Next was to get my new friends: baker’s yeast apparently ferments quicker than wine yeast, and I’m lazy as fuck, so it was an easy choice for me.

But there was one thing missing from the guide. How could I have forgotten? I needed a goon sack! But where? The iconic foil bag was nowhere to be found.

I had to improvise, but the answer was simple. Bin bags. MacGyver would be proud. I decided that a lemon-scented liner would be best to give the broth an aromatic and full-bodied flavour.

2x Grape Juice: $10.

1x Bakers Yeast: $3.50.

1x Lemon Scented Bin Bags: $4.

Was this all the same cost as a box of cask wine? Well, yes. But that didn’t have the heart, love and care I was about to pour into my baby yeasties. I took my loot home and set about making my new children a home.

I sipped out a bit of grape juice and dumped the yeast directly into the bottle. That’s it. That’s how easy it is to make goon. (The cask wine industry HATES me for exposing this secret.)

Only a few hours after rehoming my yeast, a thick scum of froth was bubbling on the top of the juice. Kids can be so messy. The guide explains that it will take 10 days for the yeast to grow up and eat all the sugar in the juice, which they then excrete as ethanol, aka the active ingredient in every one of your messiest nights out.

The guide also recommends leaving it at room temperature but out of direct sunlight. I left the bottles on the floor in my room in case they wake up crying during the night, and I threw my PJ pants over the top to keep them in the shade - who needed all that fancy space equipment?

when it hits me. It stunk like the inside of Satan’s colon.

I gagged. Did I fail to follow two simple steps? Google tells me this is natural and the sulphur smell will pass in time. But FOMO won’t wait, and neither will I. I fill my makeshift Capri-Sun and head out the door.

I’m at the back of the bus to FOMO when I gather enough courage to take a swig - and it’s not too bad.

Tasted like juice, if the sweetness had been deleted. I did feel bad: my yeasties had done their job, and now I’m eating them? Some dad I am. They got the last laugh though. As soon as I swallowed, the foulest taste flooded my mouth. I, ingeniously, had to take another sip to wash it away. A vicious cycle ensued which left me gagging to survive at the back of the Vengabus.

I arrived at FOMO not drunk, but poisoned. Which is kind of the same thing right? My stomach challenged Post Malone as to who can sing the loudest. After several visits to the toilet, I decided to join the mosh pit.

Big mistake. “Now everybody jump!” shouted RL Grimes.

Sure, why not?

What was left of the toxic slush that I had imbibed forced its way back into my mouth. I couldn’t vomit on these half-naked people. My yeast children wouldn’t have wanted their slightly-digested corpses to slide down the arsecrack of the dude gurning in front of me. I forced it back down and continued to regret my existence.

I ended the festival dehydrated and destroyed. A lad next to me says “That was fucking sick brah!”, the irony not lost on me, I choked, “Yeah brah!” I feel like I had been accepted into the fold, but not without a newfound respect for my fellow bogans.

I feel like I’ll always have a bit of bogan in me now. But maybe it’s just some leftover yeasties.

by Nathaniel Keesing

Little did I realise the mother of all hot days was to come. Remember that 47-degree day we had in January?

Yeah, it did ... something to the goon. I got home to check on my babies, and to this day, I don’t know what it was. A thick scum had collected on the exposed walls of the bottle. Strangely, it was in a wavy pattern. Were my children artists? I felt a glimmer of pride and thought nothing of it.

The day had come. It was the morning of FOMO, the perfect testing ground for my new brew. I prepared the vessel that will contain the sacred beverage (AKA, my goon bag). It’s a thing of beauty. I open the juice bottles

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GRAPESHOT UNDERCOVER

THE GRAPESHOT X-FILES MAX LEWIS GETS HIS SPOOK ON IN THE WORLD OF PARANORMAL INVESTIGATION

As someone who’s a pretty major skeptic in basically every aspect of my life - from trusting people’s stories to believing I’m a lovable human being - I’m weirdly interested in the paranormal.

I’ve never had a spooky experience in my life; at most I’ve been creeped out by several rooms in my Mum’s house when she moved in, like the bedroom that had a lock on the outside, or the garage that had sharp wooden canes (the whipping kind) hanging on a wall.

But I digress; like a lot of people, I’ve spent hours fighting off depression by binge-watching Buzzfeed Unsolved. I began wondering if there were any haunted locations in our humble city I could peruse in a similar fashion. Despite being a little afraid of the dark (thanks childhood nightmares!) the idea of going to a haunted location and getting my bones eaten by a ghost was just too tempting. And, to be fair, some of the gadgets they use look cool as shit. Gathering my courage and my brownest pair of big boy pants, I set off on a paranormal adventure I wouldn’t soon forget, meeting friends, lovers and demons along the way.

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Ok, so maybe not. After contacting like 10 organisations ranging from “I’m an old dude named Steve and I’ll cure your ghosts”, to weird websites with grainy JPEGs of cemeteries or girls in white dresses with waist-long black hair covering their face and long diatribes about “worlds beyond ours”, I had little luck. I even tried contacting a paranormal investigator on Gumtree who offered a “free” investigation to do a sweep of my place, under the guise that my roommate and I were being attacked by spirits to no avail. Eventually, a woman by the name of Peta from Australian Paranormal Phenomenon Investigators (APPI) got back to me, offering a free ticket to a ghostly tour of an old heritage town in Smithfield. My duo of personal demons I like to call ‘Failure & Anxiety’ looming over me, I decided it was better than nothing and went for it.

I expected a shitshow of failed actors costumed in period garb shouting at me as soon as I arrived, but was thankful to see a bunch of regular ass people (mid 20s to early 40s), chatting and laughing as they got their gear ready. Peta, the founder of APPI, was a surprisingly level-headed individual,

GRAPESHOT UNDERCOVER

admitting she’s a “skeptical believer”. This was par for the course with all of the employees; one fellow I chatted with a fair bit (who I’ll call Spooky Greg) regaled me with stories of various encounters he’d had, yet admitted he too was a skeptic - “I’m an architect, so I try to be pretty logical.”

Peta tells me that they don’t get too many nutbars for clients either. The range tends to be grieving people looking for confirmation their loved one might be hanging around, skeptics like myself and Peta, and horror junkies looking to get their spook on; the latter make up most of what Peta calls the “repeat offenders”.

“This isn’t a tour, but a ghost hunt,” Peta tells me. With the guidance of the investigators, we’d be employing a variety of methods to unearth spooky activity, such as; the Ghost Box, a radio that switches between stations every fifth of a second or so, potentially allowing ghosts to speak; ‘table tipping’, a Victorian practice which is essentially a binary Ouija board wherein a spirit will tip a small table to communicate; and finally some more spiritual techniques practised by the resident Wiccan. Our hunting ground was the Fairfield City Museum & Gallery, part of which is heritage buildings lifted directly from ye-olde Fairfield and laid out to look like a small town.

First up was the Ghost Box. Stuffed inside an old general store, some guests and I hung out with Spooky Greg to try and get our talk on with spirits. The idea is that, due to the speed at which the box skips across stations, you shouldn’t be able to hear complete sentences or words over one syllable - so if you do it’s definitely ghosts. The first session was more lively, with one guest believing he heard his name called. Weirdly, a particular four letter word starting with ‘S’ used to demean women cropped up several times on the ghost box in here and on one in a different building.

It’s unlikely you’d hear that word on radio (especially that frequently) but then again it’s also weird to think a ghost would be throwing that word around so much. Much to the guests’ chagrin, the second session later at night yielded nothing concrete from the Ghost Box.

The Wicca table was pretty crowded to I didn’t get to engage with it too much, but I did have (what I believed was) a tarot card give me a cookie-cutter answer to my deep question about my life goals. I saw some people throwing dice with letters on each side and looking for recurring letters or phrases; the ones I saw frequently were ‘ran’ and, weirdly, that same great four letter word from the Ghost Box - the spirits must have been the ‘nice guys’ of their day.

At the end of both sessions we got free reign to explore, so I took the opportunity to venture into buildings like a schoolhouse to sit alone in complete darkness, essentially letting the ghosts come to me. Apart from accidentally scaring a group of women as my misshapen form emerged from the darkness, nothing happened. I even turned off the lights while peeing in the bathroom to let the ghosts get me at my most vulnerable, but that too failed.

According to Spooky Greg, that’s pretty common in this locale; “It’s way too cramped in here to really get any results. Places like the Parramatta Jail are so much better because you get the chance to be isolated”. Being in the middle of suburbia and next to a highway didn’t help either. I definitely got the sense the investigators weren’t in their element, so in the spook department the night was a let-down. That being said, it definitely piqued my interest in paranormal investigating; it was relieving to know that not everyone in the biz is a 100% ‘I fucked a ghost and now I have a ghost wife’ level nutbar. Most are just in it for the fun.

In the end, I’m no closer to proving that ghosts exist, but I do have a potential job opportunity following in the footsteps of Spooky Greg when my career prospects dry up so, y’know, swings and roundabouts.

by Max Lewis

I was dubious about table tipping; since the experiment relies on guests placing their fingertips on the edge of the table much like the pointer of a Ouija board, I thought there was potential for misleading shenanigans. The first session was nothing but me and two other guests sitting in a pitch black room asking the table questions like “Are you a man or a woman?” and feeling nothing but shame.

The second session was a little more lively; at one point we all felt the table lift up on one leg after about fifteen minutes of asking it questions, but given there were about seven of us around it, I wouldn’t take it to the bank.

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YOU ARE HERE:

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AUBURN: A RETROSPECTIVE I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Technically, in Auburn – with its ranking as one of Sydney’s lowest-income suburbs, and its high crime rate - every side is the wrong side of the tracks. But there’s one part of the suburb that’s more decrepit and run down than the other, and train line splits right through it like a border. On the Rawson Street side the station looks perfectly reasonable to the untrained eye of a newcomer or non-local at a glance, but there’s more to this place than people who haven’t gone further realise.

For one, Auburn Memorial park, just to the left of the station, has been prettied up and cleaned out. When I lived in the area and frequented it for doctors’ appointments about 10 years ago, playing in the park was completely out of the question.

The grass used to be littered with plastic bags, syringes, and doped-up vagabonds lying on the benches just across from the kids’ playground. The braver refugee kids (who had probably seen worse in their short lifetimes) would scream in delight as they swung in the air, while I stared at them jealously through the transparent doors of my GP’s office. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the park equipment, never mind play on it. Mum used to point out known felons as they passed us on the street and we’d clutch our chests, hearts hammering in fear whenever she threatened to hand us over to them when we acted out. I was banned from walking around the streets alone.

These days, the park is clean. Instead of used tubes, there’s a congregation of ibises littering the grounds. You can sit on the grass in the middle of the day, not worrying about getting pricked by needles and catching hepatitis C. There’s the odd retired old man lounging around the park, but it’s perfectly safe for a band of girls to chill in the middle of the day without fear of getting robbed, or worse. I mean, it could still happen, but it feels a lot safer.

The buildings, though, are almost the same as they were at the beginning of this century. Beyond the park, hiding behind the tightly packed terraces painted in bright primary colours, are ghostly restaurants that people never seem to enter, doctor’s offices, gentlemen’s clubs, and aromatic corner shops. Past the kebab house (that has maintained its status as the neighbourhood chip shop for over 20 years), the pub that’s been an Auburn staple since forever. Muslim locals steer clear of it as if there’s a forcefield surrounding it - in case their respective community members catch them staring wistfully at the Toohey’s sign and assume they’re raging alcoholics. Past the South Asian grocery where we used to rent old Bollywood films is a maze of streets lined with blocks of flats. This part of Auburn is frozen in time. Little developments have been made to spruce it up, apart from the face. The front of the station.

This part of Auburn is the land of housing commission – you’d be hard-pressed to find a white face here.

Almost 21 years ago, my mother was given a unit in an empty and looming red-brick flat on a nearly equally empty street.

Fresh out of a stint at Villawood Detention Centre, and all alone in the country except for the few Somali friends she’d made in detention, she lived in that solitary flat with just an adorable and chatty one-year-old (me) and a whiny and difficult to manage three-year-old (my sister). At night before she slept, she’d barricade the doors with all manner of household furniture; if she got any sleep at all. She’d often lie in bed shivering with fear.

It turns out her fears were warranted. A gang of thieves prowled the streets, targeting this specific area. The one time they came around to her place, was when a male cousin was visiting. They took one look at him and never came back for the remaining months until she moved into another run-down flat closer to the station. But they never stopped terrorising the neighbourhood, taking advantage of the little resources and protection the migrants had. We kept being moved for a couple of years until my dad came and we were able to rent our own home further down the other side of the station.

The red-brick flat is still there in the same spot. Having housed different newcomers for the past few years, its only indication of change is the black mould growing on the beige balcony.

My parents point out the house whenever we drive to the local McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme further up the street. We murmur “I know” as they segue into an unfounded lecture about the struggles they went through to get us where we are, as we stare glassy-eyed out the car window.

The network of flats stops at the always-packed Parramatta Road, bordered by the Nike Factory, Lonsdale and a world of department stores, fast food joints and industrial buildings. But further up the highway, there are more and more doddering houses and flats, and more refugees reside there, all the way down to Silverwater. The roads get darker and quieter the closer it gets towards the correctional institution.

The other side of the correctional complex is Blaxland Riverside Park, a breezy, high-tech park that goes on for acres. This is a favourite biking, walking and brunch space for rich old white people who hail from the other side of the Parramatta River, Ermington, and the nearby Newington, with its brand-new apartment complexes.

Sometimes, I think the fringes of Auburn are like a failing museum doing little to preserve the history of the suburb. On one of my walks from the station to the nearby Maccas, I came across a monochromatic, modern Australian townhouse in the midst of the sea of red and brown brick flats. It stopped me in my tracks. I don’t remember what structure used to be in its place, but it made wonder, how long it will be before the rest of the faulty buildings are sold to private owners and bulldozed to make way for newer establishments and gentrifiers, instead of being spruced up? Where will the newly arrived, and the rest of the public who need affordable housing services, go then?

by Ilhan Abdi

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SHAME YOUR UNIT

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SHAME YOUR UNIT

MAS202: SCREENWRITING AN INTRODUCTION BOHDI BYLES TELLS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCE LEARNING… WELL, NOTHING MAS202 Screenwriting: An Introduction was a required unit as part of my writing major. Truth be told, I’d thought about screenwriting before and it was going to be another asset for my writing toolbox. At the start of semester, I was genuinely excited to learn how to write scripts; by the end of semester, I was on the brink of a mental breakdown.

Lectures? Don’t bother. The first lecture was the prelude to the rest of the shit-show. The lecturer would walk away from the microphone so you wouldn’t hear roughly 50-60% of what she was saying. I took it upon myself to email them and let them know, to which they acknowledged it, only to continue doing it. By the third lecture, I realised how redundant lectures were going to be. What little I did get from the lectures was useless – this was meant to be an introduction to screenwriting, yet we weren’t being taught any techniques to do with screenwriting. We were told that this would be covered in tutorials. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

The assessments for MAS202 were structured in a way that they would continue to build upon one another. First, we were to take field notes for our script and present it for 10 minutes to the class, then develop a storyboard or treatment, which would help in constructing a final draft script. With my field notes, I was mortified to get 55% off my tutor. His only comment on my idea was that I should completely re-write it. Confused, I emailed the unit convenor and she re-marked my work, raising it by 18%.

following week, he told me I had to give my presentation because I hadn’t done so yet. Again, I pointed out that I did.

The following week? Yep. I got told to give my presentation again.

The final assessment was a draft script. By this late stage of semester, I had organised a meeting with the head of department to discuss all my issues: a tutor marking my work without reading it; a tutor forgetting repeatedly the work I’d done right in front of him; a lecturer who was useless at delivering lectures; a class where after eleven weeks, we still hadn’t learnt how to even format a basic script. The HoD put me in contact with a different tutor to help me for my script, worth 40% of my overall grade. After being contacted by her and explaining everything, she told me, “at this stage, you might as well Google how to write a script”.

Ultimately, what did I pay $828 for? An introduction to screenwriting? No. An introduction to nothing? Yes.

By Bohdi Byles Have you experienced a unit that deserves to be stripped naked, paraded through the streets and pelted with rotten cabbages? Let us know if you’re like to contribute to Shame Your Unit by emailing grapeshot@mq.edu.au anonymity guaranteed on request.

The presentations were a nightmare – there would be two done per week, so people were still presenting their field notes well into the second half of semester when it was pointless to do so. When I presented, I thought I did well.

I had a solid idea. I was nervous, but nothing out of the ordinary. I’d already received my mark and adjusted mark so I felt okay. My tutor looked at me and said, “I’ve never heard that idea in my life”. Given he had commented that I should change my idea, I was taken aback. How could he give me a mark and commentary, yet not know what the idea was? It wasn’t something abstract or otherworldly. The

Regulars || 33

POP CULTURE REWIND

THE ETHICS OF WATCHING THE WORK OF KNOWN ABUSERS

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POP CULTURE REWIND My life revolves around the eternal dilemma of what TV show or movie I should watch next. Recently this has been complicated by the realisation that there are a number of people in entertainment whose work I might not want to be watching. As workplace bullying, harassment and sexual abuse in the industry have come to light over the last few months, the ethics of watching the work of known abusers has crossed my mind a number of times. Recently, while looking for a show to start watching, a friend suggested Gossip Girl, a show that I’ve wanted to watch for some time. But when it was suggested, I hesitated.

Gossip Girl rang a bell for all the wrong reasons. Last year, Ed Westwick, the actor who plays Chuck Bass in the show, was accused of rape and sexual assault. Actress Kristina Cohen first came forward in November 2017. In a Facebook post, she alleged that Westwick raped her in his house.

On the same day that Cohen came forward, Westwick responded to the allegations in a tweet which read, “I do not know this woman. I have never forced myself in any manner, on any woman. I certainly have never committed rape”. Following Cohen’s allegation, Aurelie Wynn, a former actress also came forward. She alleged that Westwick raped her at a Los Angeles rental home in August 2014. Following the second allegation Westwick again took to Twitter, labelling both women’s claims as, “unverified and provably untrue”. Cohen subsequently filed a complaint with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) who is currently conducting an investigation.

Having researched the allegations, I knew that I wouldn’t be watching Gossip Girl at all. I couldn’t justify it to myself.

But my decision not to watch made me think about a much more significant question; is there anything fundamentally wrong with consuming the art of known abusers?

In a post-Weinstein world, it has been a question asked by many. Last year, as a number of Hollywood heavyweights were outed as abusers, the New York Times ran a piece entitled, ‘How the Myth of Artistic Genius Excuses the Abuse of Women’. Writer Amanda Hess pointed out that abusers “may be creators of art, but they are also destroyers of it”. Their art is valued by society because it has been created and embraced by their audiences. But the potential art – and indeed the potential contribution to society – of their victims are devalued each time that the ‘art should be separated from the abuser’ trope is repeated.

Dustin Hoffman, world-renowned actor and director, is another one of the many Hollywood actors accused of sexual harassment. Seven different women, two of who chose to remain anonymous, came forward with a range of allegations in late 2017. Hoffman is a perfect example of the way in which great work and abusive behaviour cannot co-exist. You’d be hard pressed to find a person who hasn’t seen a film featuring Hoffman. His Academy Award winning roles in Kramer Vs. Kramer and Rain Man are legendary. He played a lead role in the 1998 film, Wag The Dog, which is currently on the HSC Advanced English list of prescribed texts. These are all films which our culture views as great and profound pieces of art.

But can you really appreciate Hoffman’s nuanced performance of a sensitive father in Kramer Vs. Kramer when you know that he stands accused of exposing himself to a minor? Can you justify him as the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actor in Rain Man when you are aware of allegations that he sexually harassed multiple women? Is it possible to view Hoffman’s self-obsessed, manipulative character in Wag The Dog as satire or was his performance just a reflection of a more sinister truth?

I would argue that if you keep in mind the women he allegedly abused, who have been forced to watch as the work of their abuser is venerated by the rest of the world, it is impossible to separate an on-screen Hoffman from an off-screen Hoffman.

But how do audiences navigate a world in which the art of known abusers is tainted? Do you stop consuming all of their work? Do you stop paying to consume their work? Do you donate 20 bucks to the #TimesUp campaign and just go back to watching works that are now associated with abusers?

For me, the ethics of watching the work of known abusers goes back to the motives of the abusers themselves.

In committing acts of abuse, perpetrators strip victims of their personal agency, power, and in some cases, their potential. In my mind, the best way to go about consuming entertainment in the current environment is to throw all of my support behind work that showcases the agency, power and potential of abuse survivors. And in addition to supporting the work of survivors, it is equally important to support every individual and group that has been disempowered by the current hierarchy of the entertainment industry.

Thankfully, there is one simple yet significant thing that we can do to support those individuals and groups. We can change our viewing habits. That means watching TV shows with diverse casts. It means going to watch movies directed by women. It means demanding greater cultural representation in our entertainment. It means calling out anyone who relies on racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist material in their attempts entertain and make money. It means dismantling the prevailing system of power that currently exists in entertainment and building a new one by supporting the work of people who have been disadvantaged, erased and abused.

The moment that the entertainment industry as we know it began to unravel was when survivors of abuse stood up and declared #MeToo. Strength started with solidarity.

And now, if we want to truly move forward, we have to collectively commit to taking the power back from those who have abused it for far too long. It is our responsibility as viewers to take the little power that each of us has and use it to show the industry that abusers have no place in entertainment.

by Zoë Victoria

Regulars || 35

NEW FOOD ON CAMPUS REVIEWS THE NEW CAMPUS COMMON IS OPEN FOR BIZ; THE GRAPEY TEAM INVESTIGATED WHAT’S ON OFFER.

FALAFEL SNACK PACK

NOTHING

CHICKEN CURRY

I’m going to preface by saying the new food court has a goddamn depressing vibe (perhaps because the design was literally created for earthquake disaster relief) and I would rather walk in 40-degree heat all the way over to the Macquarie Centre than eat in a precinct with the personality of a bomb shelter.

Walking through the slim pickings at the new food court, if you can even call it that, my eyes set upon the mouthwatering fried rice at the Chinese food stall. It looks scrumptious, decadent; I could feel it in my bunions, I knew I had to have some. Unfortunately, destiny had other plans, since they only accept cash, and now the closest ATM is at the Macquarie Centre. I knew I wouldn’t survive the 20-minute walk to the Centre and back. I had to improvise.

My starvation-infused eyesight honed in on potential nourishment. Were there bugs in the pot plants to feast upon? None. The bins? Empty. My options were shrinking fast, just like my waistline. My eyes turned to the tables. Bacteria have calories, right?

I am one of those vanilla losers that commented aloud recently that Woolies coleslaw is rather spicy. So when I tasted a chunk of the potato from the chicken curry served by Sambal Express I was relieved to not detect a skerrick of chilli.

The curry was pretty tasty, although patrons with less pathetic tastebuds might crave some kick.

With that this in mind, I wandered around the food court looking for a meal. I noticed an interesting sign at Doner Kebab. Snack packs. Falafel.

I had never even heard of a falafel snack pack before, but I was very interested. It would be the perfect deep-fried Band-Aid for my wounds.

While it was pricey, it’s almost worth it. The two falafels were big, crispy and probably the best falafel I’ve ever had. There was just the right amount of seasoning on the chips, and they are very generous with the sauce. In fact, they have an ample selection of sauces too, so go wild and mix up some flavours. I was honestly surprised at how decent this tasted. If you’re ever looking for comfort food to fill the 5-dollar-nacho sized hole in your heart, Doner Kebab remains a tried and true excellent go-to.

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My survival instincts took the wheel.

I leaned over the table, opened my ravenous mouth. My tongue scrapped the forgot-to-put-the-lid-back-on mustard coloured table. It actually didn’t taste bad at all. The cleaners sure do a fantastic job. A slight aftertaste of musty pennies lingered in my mouth; could’ve been worse.

If I’m hospitalised from a bacterial infection, though, the bill’s on you Macquarie. And I only accept cash.

The side-dish of dhal seemed appetising until someone mentioned it was the exact same colour as the phlegm-coloured table we were dining at. Seriously, who decided baby-diarrhea yellow, traffic-cone orange and off-white was a colour palette pleasing to the eye for food court tables?

The curry came with a roti, and there’s no way you can’t enjoy a fried wheat-based product. But as I ate I did find myself lusting after the mountains of steaming pad thai, massaman curry and chicken cashew deliciousness served by the Thai Kiosk before the Campus Hub was torn down and the cheerful business owner was kicked out, despite thousands of signatures petitioning him to stay. The four rather measly options available from Sambal don’t quite seem to hold up. There are a few empty containers in the enthusiastically-hyped new campus common area - perhaps Macquarie could ask him back?

ROASTED VEGGIES & HUMMUS SUSHI WORLD VEGETARIAN SANDWICH BOX I suppose one good thing about the Campus Common is that I’m no longer spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing what to eat. Options are scarce, and become scarcer with the limited amount of food outlets that accept card or offer vegetarian options. With all that considered, I hung awkwardly out front of the tiny Cult outlet, not wanting to spend $10 on a sandwich, but knowing it was my best bet. Also, I can’t pass up the word ‘hummus’ in any context. I would eat it by itself with my fingers if the opportunity presented itself.

As another way to fill the void that is my personality I also recently became vegetarian, and let me tell you; most vegetarian sushi options are the pits. If you want cheap, vegetarian sushi, you should prepare for disappointment.

I kinda love Cult up in Y3A. They make a good soy mocha, and last week were even selling brownies with almonds and hazelnuts mixed into the batter.

Perfection. Their sandwich was on the same level of quality, but the Campus Common version is confusing. They still wear the ‘In Coffee We Trust’ logo across their uniforms, but there’s not a coffee machine in sight in the two-square-meter space they’ve been given. An array of milkshake options are written in chalk across the glass cabinet with the food in it, but no caffeine appears to be on offer. In coffee we trust, but only if it comes from Ubar.

My choice was the ‘Vege Box’. For six-and-a-half of your Earth dollars you get a pretty decent selection, like tiny cucumber boys, scroll boys with some pretty dang good tofu, and those tasty boys wearing a skin suit full of rice and tiny veggies. The tofu scrolls also had a mystery ingredient, which I initially thought was pineapple ‘till our deputy Sarah identified as a potential radish.

So, for $6.50 you get a decently filling meal that tastes pretty good as far as sushi goes, has a lot more variety than your average vegetarian sushi, and even includes mystery vegetables.

Rating: wouldn’t join the cult.

Back when I was a meat-eating trash-human and the Campus Hub didn’t look like Sunnydale High at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I frequented Sushi World as a source of cheap grub. As one of the few survivors of the Great Hub Calamity™ I thought I’d pay a brand new visit to ‘ol faithful in the year of our lord 2018.

(Note: I’d still rather peck through the trash like an Ibis than eat at your sorry excuse for a food hub, Macquarie).

Regulars || 37

ASK AN X-PERT

NOSE BEE-RS

THE INFAMOUS MQ EXPERIMENT WITH A LOT OF BUZZ Her name is Beeyoncé, and she’s no regular mum. After putting Blue Hivey to bed, she decides to unwind with a glass of rosé. Her husband Jay-ZZZ is away travelling for work, so she decides to call her besties over for a girl’s night out. She’s the queen of her social group, and her friends are the drones.

After predrinking and judging boys on Bumble, she pressures her friends into doing something a bit harder. She digs deep into her purse and pulls out a baggie of cocaine. They get absolutely toasted and dance their night away.

Ok, that wasn’t a real thing that happened. But while you’re drinking light beer at Ubar, bees are getting fucked up on cocaine.

It’s been 10 years since he conducted this wild experiment, but Macquarie University’s resident bee guru Dr Andrew Barron, an Associate Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, sat down with me to talk about how he became so invested in the research of our most important pollinators, and why his research on giving bees some nose candy revealed that they aren’t so different from us.

“I was always a kid that was fascinated by animal behaviour and I was particularly fascinated by insect behaviour. If we look at insects, we don’t know what we’re looking at, we don’t know whether we’re looking at some sort of completely instinctive robot that has no mind and is just following a program. Or are we looking at something that is extremely intelligent, extremely dynamic in its behaviour, that is intention driven, that has emotion-like behaviour even?” Surprisingly, they’re much more alike to humans than you’d think.

Bees can’t talk like us. But they sure can dance like us. When a bee has found a reward for the colony, she emotes a cute little jig to communicate with the rest of the hive on not only where it is, but what the quality of the reward would be.

Barron explains, “If we treated the returning bees with cocaine, what we found is that they overestimated the value of reward in their dance. Humans who have taken cocaine report that everything feels fantastic. Their experiences feel super intense and super good. And we propose that the honey bee dance was giving us a natural readout of the bees own subjective reward perception.”

But why though? Humans and insects have between 600-800 millions years of evolution separating us, yet this drug is having profoundly similar effects on both species. Barron believes there should be a way to learn more about how cocaine acts on human brains, if we can learn how it affects our stingy little friends.

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We won’t be having cocaine-infused honey on our Weet-Bix in the morning anytime soon though. Barron explains that to get ethical approval for this research, “We applied minute doses directly to individual bees, we’re talking about 1 milligram per bee. When the bee is making honey, she collects nectar from flowers and stores it in a special organ called the honey stomach. We applied cocaine directly into its bloodstream, so it could never access that honey stomach, so we weren’t polluting any of that nectar that they collected.” All I could imagine is tiny little bee-sized syringes and rolled up 5-dollar bills.

Despite this bizarre cocaine research having concluded several years ago, there is some pretty serious work still being done. Barron has two main focuses his lab is working on. First is his work with honeybee health and welfare.

“That’s responding to the problem of declining populations and the global bee populations struggling”. While saving our dying bees is important; our entire ecosystem relies on bees, focus of the lab is perhaps even more exciting.

pollinator that are incredibly the other

Barron explains, “the other line of research is very much pure neuroscience, and the focus there is to understand the functions of the honeybee brains. Ultimately the idea is that we want to understand them to the point where we can replicate them”. The future of bee research is looking to be very exciting. My only hope that we don’t end up with Black Mirror-esque killer bees.

By Nathaniel Keesing

FEATURES

Features || 38

CUNTS AND KARL MARX A RE P O RT F R O M T H E E 7 B M A L E B AT H R O O M

40 || Features

The public toilet stall is a time-honoured avenue for self-expression. Cubicle doors plastered with solicitations for a ‘good time’, dubious phone numbers, or profanity-laced exclamations can be found in bathrooms across the globe.

Curious about this phenomenon, I investigated the male bathrooms on Level 1 of E7B, the location of some particularly choice scribbles. Most of the cubicles are surprisingly lacking, but one stall has accrued quite an oeuvre. I turned the booth into my temporary study: the toilet lid became my office chair as I produced a pen and notepad to document what I saw.

with an uncomfortable connection to sexual violence) - for example, “Those exams really fucked me over”.

The graffiti itself contains a startling mix of the pseudo-intellectual, the vaguely artistic, the vulgar and the nonsensical. It was produced with a variety of implements – a dull rainbow of ballpoint pens, permanent markers, and thick graffiti textas. What I found odd was the conversational nature of the messages - chains of discourse linked by arrows (all pointing from the response to the original, in an unexpected display of adopted social convention).

It remains taboo for a female to enter a male bathroom, and vice versa. I can’t speak for female toilets, and I’m sure they’re peppered with their own doodles - but I doubt the word ‘cunt’ would appear quite so solicitously. It might be a fascinating exercise to compare the two. Nonetheless, this bathroom is, indeed, a male-only space, toilets being among the few (official) gender-restricted zones left in western society.

There are communiques from across the political spectrum from misquotes of Karl Marx (“The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains”), to the troublingly Reaganistic “TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS WORKS”. We have ecological messages (“Only economists and cancer cells believe in endless growth”) countering right-leaning Economics 101 lessons (“JOBS + GROWTH = :)”). In response to the ‘proletariat’ comment, someone has written ‘U want tyranny M8?’. Another graffitist has responded to “FUCK LABOUR” by criticising its misspelling of the political party’s name.

An apt comparison to the male stall might be online spaces like 4chan – and I’m not just talking about the smell. As anyone who has ventured there lately can attest, 4chan and places like it are toxic, male-dominated, and - like our stall anonymous and unmoderated. It’s little accident that the ads greeting me when I visited 4chan.org (and I cannot advise you strongly enough not to) were for revenge porn and exploitative articles (‘Shameless Drunk Girls in Awkward Positions’).

Then there’s “JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE”, which seems open to interpretation. Criticism of ideas is central – but not the constructive kind. Intelligent, cordial discourse is not the strong point of the toilet-stall forum. While there are some polite comments, the language in others is downright hostile.

Scattered among the written messages are visual images.

There is a pair of wobbly but competent ballpoint sketches of Daffy Duck and Rick Sanchez – which must have taken quite some time to complete. Further down is a crude stick-figure drawing in black marker, in which a person labelled ‘ME’ copulates, using a popular rear-entry position, with a person labelled ‘Jobs’. Was the artist here attempting to express a sexual attraction to - or perhaps disdain for deceased Apple magnate Steve Jobs? Or, more likely, was he expressing confidence in his future prospects in the job market?

The latter relies on an idiosyncratic aspect of modern vernacular - the idea that to ‘fuck’ or ‘screw’ something is to conquer it, to shape it to one’s advantage. A related notion is that to get ‘fucked’, ‘screwed’ or ‘fucked/screwed over’ is to be conquered, left disadvantaged, or violated (a concept

This has its roots in misogynistic attitudes, notions of sexual conquest - founded on the sexist misconception that only the penetrating partner (in conservative perspectives, the male) should enjoy sex, and that the receiving partner (traditionally considered to be the female) is to be submissive in the act.

This is a cultural phenomenon, certainly not exclusive to this bathroom; but I feel, although I have no solid evidence for this, that men are more likely to use sexual terms such as these to denigrate.

The toilet stall and its long tradition of off-colour graffiti could be considered as a precursor to this online environment.

Graffiti gradually replaced by forums and message-boards, themselves to evolve into Facebook and other social media.

Each evolution domesticated the online space further, until we were left with the relentless, commercialised, multilayered stream of coded socialisation that occurs on the mainstream internet. Perhaps the stark, simple act of writing on the back of a door, like the stripped-back 4chan interface, offers a retreat from this.

Toilet seat lids are not designed to be sat on for extended periods, as my buttocks were now making clear. After half an hour of scribbling in my notebook, I finally succumbed to their wishes and emerged back into the less fragrant world.

By no means do I urge you to seek out this particular construction of antagonism. Please don’t - there’s too much of that shoving itself at you on the internet as it is. However, the next time you find yourself on a public toilet, you might ponder more thoughtfully the elements of the human condition exposed on the back of the door.

by Lachlan Marnoch

Features || 41

BLOOD, SWEAT & BEERS A M A N D A B UR G ESS O N W H Y T H E L O SS O F A S M A L L A L L - A G ES B AR I N W O L L O N G O N G M ATTERS

It’s a Thursday night in Wollongong – a sleepy, industrialised regional city just south of Sydney. With a history of steel making, and crushing the dreams of all young inhabitants who one day hope to escape, but can’t due to the rising cost of living in the real city one hour north, it’s not exactly the kind of place you’d want to call home. Crown Street, once a bustling mecca of night clubs and violent glass bottle attacks, is now full of empty bars and restaurants. Between the remnants of failed businesses and vacant shop fronts lies something that is ours. Tucked away on Lang’s Corner at the bottom end of Crown Street is Rad Bar, one of the only places where Wollongong is more than just steel, an alarming drug problem and second-rate beaches.

As I walk into Rad Bar, I’m immediately greeted by a sticky floor and the smell of beer. Rad Bar is known for insanely fun shows, where a few brave souls will

42 || FEATURES

jump from the stairs onto the dancing crowd below, and legend has it an old man known as Party Marty will come out of the bar downstairs and yell about rock and roll. The walls are adorned with graffiti and art. A larger-than-life drawing of pornstar Sasha Grey covers the wall behind the makeshift stage. Upstairs, you’ll find a Metallica pinball machine and a window to climb through if you’re adventurous enough to risk death by jumping off the platform adjacent to the stairs. Rad Bar has one tiny dance floor packed with the young people keeping Wollongong alive by swaying to the sound.

I’m here tonight, not as a punter, but as an investigator.

What once was home to Wollongong’s underground youth culture now lies in turmoil. On May 29 2017, Wollongong’s local newspaper The Illawarra Mercury reported ‘Towering $45 million office block planned for Crown Street Mall’. The article spoke of the plans for

the development of the lower end of Crown Street; a revitalisation of a dead part of the city. It would have eight retail stores, offices, two sky garden terraces, plenty of office space and even a few vending machines!

However, one key piece of information was missing.

Lang’s Corner, the site of the proposed development, is one of the only bustling spaces left at the lower end of Crown Street. The grand plans to reactivate the city will ironically be killing off the last bit of culture the youth of Wollongong has left – Rad Bar. Within a matter of hours after the announcement, a petition to save Rad Bar was set up. Hundreds of Facebook comments praising Rad Bar for its position as a safe space and contribution to the regional music scene flooded the Rad page. Emails filled with passion and fury were sent to the council, with no substantial reply or update on the situation arising until months later in September 2017. The fate of Rad Bar is still in limbo, as the fight to save it from the hands of developers has continued into a court case: The Council vs The Redevelopers.

Chloe has been going to Rad Bar shows since she was 13. Always sporting a band shirt, she represents the future of the South Coast hardcore music scene, a subculture that calls Rad Bar home.

“I was a very anxious kid, but going to a loud, small and sometimes scary space where I didn’t know anyone really helped me come out of my shell.”

“Rad Bar was a learning curve for me. Without it, I wouldn’t be as confident as I am today,” she says.

“Although it can get a little scary at shows, it’s a safe space for young people where you can be who you want to be and still feel accepted”.

One of the most concerning aspects of the Rad Bar closure feeds into a bigger trend nationwide – there are hardly any all-ages venues left. It’s not just the kids in regional cities being shut out, some of the only spaces in Sydney that catered for all-ages audiences have closed as a result of the ongoing struggles the entertainment industry faces due to the draconian lockout laws.

“Being 16 means I’m not allowed to travel very far so shows out of Wollongong will be hard to get to. I’ve also just started up a band, and if we’re ever good enough to be playing shows, where are a bunch of 15 and 16 year olds supposed to play if there’s no all ages venues? No kids can actively be involved with the local music scene and help it thrive if there’s exclusions,” Chloe says.

Her concerns are mirrored by Niall, who runs a small independent record label, Vanity Records. “The problem with no all-ages spaces is if you don’t have kids coming to your shows, you don’t have a future generation – you’ve just got the old jaded people there who want

to see their mate’s bands and nothing else,” he says.

“You’re just going to have this space of negativity around, and you want the new kids to come in because they’re excited about the music, and without all ages spaces they’ve got nothing.”

The future of the arts in Wollongong is in trouble. Adding to the already existing threat of industries in the area closing their doors leading to thousands of job losses, the opportunities people have for fun once they clock off work are diminishing. There’s nowhere to escape regional life in this small city, unless you embrace normalcy, which isn’t an option for many people. It’s hard to find a place to belong. Rad Bar is a safe space, a rare gem for regional Australia.

In the past, South Coast hardcore has been able to grow and adapt elsewhere – but the charm of Rad is simply irreplaceable, and the community the space has created will be ultimately destroyed. The fact is, there are no other spaces in Wollongong city that could ever come close to the energy generated inside the walls of Rad. Lauren plays in Doll Holiday, a band from Sydney that has played Rad Bar several times. The venue presents an opportunity for bands from Sydney to expand their horizons and play to smaller and more connected crowds. With the closure of small community centric venues such as Blackwire Records, it is difficult to find a space in Sydney that is reminiscent of Rad Bar. “It is difficult to put into words, but every time I have been to Rad I have felt a sense of belonging instantly, which is especially rare for me as a female musician,” Lauren says. “Every time I have played Rad Bar, I have been approached after my set has finished and have been complimented on my playing which is something I do not experience very often.”

“I feel like there is a much stronger sense of community at Rad Bar than in many venues in Sydney. With what venues are left in Sydney, I feel like they mostly do not have any meaning and emotion attached to them.”

Back at Rad, I stand at the stairs and watch the crowd below, coming together through sound. Life can be alienating in regional Australia. It is a rough place to live – there’s not much to do, there’s not many jobs and it’s hard to like things that are a little different. How could this space possibly be given up, for the sake of a mundane office block? While the life of Rad Bar may be reaching an end, the space lives on in the stories, the photographs, the YouTube videos and the memories. It’s something a developer cannot take away - it’s something real.

by Amanda Burgess

FEATURES || 43

THE XX MEN Content warning: brief and undetailed mention of suicide We can all agree that puberty sucks. Between changing bodies and surging emotions, our hormones put us through hell. You’re teased if you start earlier than your peers and you’re teased if you start later. Transitioning from primary to high school is already a difficult time without everything you know about your body changing too. I don’t imagine many people would willingly opt to go through it all a second time.

However, I am one of the few that did. For transgender people like me, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is often lifesaving. Some trans kids are able to access puberty blockers, which delay puberty until the person either decides to go through with their body’s idea of puberty, or to have HRT, so they only have to go through it all once. For those of us who didn’t have access to puberty blockers, or who didn’t talk to doctors about them soon enough, we get a second chance.

I am a transgender man, which means that I was assigned female at birth due to anatomy and those good ol’ XX chromosomes, but my gender is male. Some of us realise this when we’re kids, others when we start to feel uncomfortable about our bodies during an oestrogen-fuelled puberty, and others around menopause. While we can realise that we’re trans at any age, those are the three times when identity formation happens the most frequently.

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So, I went about my childhood knowing that something wasn’t quite right from around the start of primary school, and there are so many times I look back on and wonder how it wasn’t obvious to me or the people around me that I wasn’t the girl they thought I was. But nobody had the words to help me figure it out because there’s so little accurate media representation of trans people, especially trans men. By the time I worked out who I was and what I wanted, it was too late for me to get any of the benefits of puberty blockers.

Luckily HRT is helpful at whatever age you start. It’s been more than two years since I started taking testosterone and it is undeniably like going through a second puberty, but this time it’s actually doing what I want, and each new change is exciting. It’s a very slow process when you’re desperate for things to change, and some of the most desired changes can take the longest. It can take as long as six months for your voice to break, and more than a year for facial hair to start growing in, but most effects happen a lot faster. Body hair gets thicker, periods stop, muscle becomes a lot easier to develop, and fat redistributes to be more around the waist than the hips. The timeline of changes is different for each person, but most of these things start to change within the first six months.

Despite not too many visible changes happening in the first few months, it’s definitely the most intense time, and not

just because it was the time in my life between the start of the HSC and the end of year 12. Hunger and libido both skyrocket and acne can also get pretty bad. These all tend to settle down soon enough, but it’s best to stock up on some steak and skin treatments in the meantime.

But, obviously, the main difference between HRT and puberty is that HRT is externally induced, rather than controlled by your own body. There isn’t a simple way to induce it and have it run its course, so testosterone has to be continually administered for the rest of your life. The most common way of taking it is through injections, and I have mine every two weeks. Because of the frequency, most doctors teach you how to do your own injections because it’s a lot more convenient than visiting a nurse every fortnight, so I’ve given myself over 100 injections by now. It’s a very effective way of conquering a fear of needles, that’s for sure, as are all the blood tests to make sure everything is on track.

A big downside of this is that you need to buy the testosterone.

It’s not too expensive, but the cost builds up over the years, and the Australian government has recently decided to screw us all over by taking the most common type of testosterone off the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) this year.

The PBS is what allows medications to be subsidised and for people who have concessional benefits (such as a Health Care Card) to pay a lot less. Since the concessional benefits are typically available only to people who can’t afford to pay for medications at their full price, taking testosterone off the PBS will hit the poorest trans men the hardest and many will struggle to pay more than five times the price for something that is widely considered lifesaving.

The costs of trans healthcare don’t stop there. To be allowed HRT or any surgery related to our transition, we have to be evaluated by a psychiatrist to say that we are capable of making the decision to go through with the medical process and that it is something that we need. On top of the psychiatric expenses (a single appointment can range from $250 to $500 and most psychiatrists ask you to come back a few times), it turns out that even the most common surgeries that trans men can have aren’t subsidised by Medicare at all. Top surgery (a double mastectomy with masculinising chest reconstruction) is the most common type of surgery for trans men and generally costs around $10,000 with no rebate whatsoever. Yep, we have to go through potentially thousands of dollars of psychiatric assessment to prove that this surgery is essential for our wellbeing, and then still have to break the bank to get it done. Or we can go on a waiting list to get it done on the public health system, which can lead to more than two years of waiting. To get the surgery we need, we either have to be rich or go through a few years of continued depression and danger.

Most trans men seeking top surgery are already taking testosterone and presenting as men socially, so having bodies that don’t align with what society expects of a man opens us up to transphobic hatred and violence. Trans men who haven’t had top surgery can use compression shirts (binders) to flatten their chests, but this is unhealthy long-term and can lead to less skin elasticity (which can limit the effectiveness of top surgery) and even fractured ribs.

On a psychological note, both gender-based discrimination and body dissatisfaction lead to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and attempted suicide for trans people. Forcing those of us without a spare $10,000 to wait a few years for surgery really is a death sentence for many trans men.

And that’s not even going into bottom surgery (genital reconstruction). While there are a few different kinds of surgery, there are very few surgeons in Australia who will perform even the two main types (phalloplasty and metoidioplasty). It’s hard to find the exact number because a lot of information is outdated – a problem in itself – but there seem to be only two or three bottom surgeons in the country.

Most trans men who have bottom surgery go overseas, which has extra costs for flights and accommodation. I wasn’t able to find prices for metoidioplasty in Australia, but for trans men who choose to have phalloplasty in Australia it can range from $50,000 to $70,000, without considering the costs of consultations and hospital fees.

To put it simply, medical transition isn’t as simple as a lot of high-profile transgender people make it look, where they can just disappear for a few months and re-emerge with their ideal body (*ahem* Caitlin Jenner). It’s a lifelong process that’s not even available to many of us and, with the precedent set by taking testosterone off the PBS, I worry about the future of trans men and all trans people in this country. Social acceptance may be getting better little by little, but it’s only one step in improving the standard of living for transgender people in Australia.

by Ashton Love If this article has raised issues for you please call Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14, or MQCare at 1800MQ Care.

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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘vanity’. - John Berger.

I like to think I can nail a selfie. In an insecure existence where my self esteem can be soaring one day and non-existent the next, when I’m feeling good, I’ll document it. My Instagram page is peppered with self-portraits, which have become more frequent with my acquisition of the iPhone X. In our modern world, the invisible weight of beauty standards is felt by women all over - we are pack-horses carrying all our own troubles, and society’s expectations of how to manage them. Exposure to beautiful, yet highly edited women runs rampant; we see them in magazines, on billboards, and most of all, on Instagram. Liking a photo I take of myself feels like an act of rebellion. However, there’s an ever-pervasive feeling that I’m doing something wrong, something self-indulgent committing an act of complete and total narcissism. Looking into it, I hoped to see where these seemingly baseless fears were coming from.

If you type ‘selfies + psychology’ into Google or Multisearch, you’ll be met with a plethora of think pieces on the insidious nature of the selfie. Why would people be taking these meaningless pictures instead of just enjoying the moment?

According to these articles, selfies are not necessarily ‘harmful’, just ‘unnecessary’, and ‘call me old fashioned’, but ‘I just don’t understand’. These are very often (I might go so far as to say always) written by the same character - a straight, white middle-aged man - whose worldview is limited to the one and only perspective he has ever allowed himself access to. When catching up with a male high school friend recently, he was quick to comment on one of our old peers - my ex-arch nemesis - saying how much of an #instaslut (hashtag included) she had become lately. Despite our spiteful history, I felt defensive of the girl, who is clearly up for the same sense of self-love that I am. I felt defensive of myself as well - I was posting just as many self-portraits in the same time-frame. Why was I any different? Was it because I make sure to hashtag #narcissism, in the hope of a touch of irony? Was it the angle I took them at, or that in some, I hadn’t been the photographer? What was it that kept me from being the so-called super offensive #instaslut? What I didn’t realise was that these men and their tired comments were literally the only problem.

Selfies are seen by many people as an attention-grab. Sure, the rush of self-confidence that comes with hitting 50 likes

is enjoyable, but it’s not the reason we take these pictures.

Young women are finding it increasingly difficult to find self-confidence in a world where ‘beauty’ is not open to interpretation, but rather a commodified notion. The global beauty industry was projected to hit $300 billion last year, with that figure expected to grow as time goes by. Business analytics has us shown advertisements for clothes, makeup, shoes, everything we might like across our social media feeds. We can’t escape this confected notion that we must always strive to be something more than what we already are, despite that ‘more’ never being clearly defined. Also, these expectations are filtered through the dominant gaze of society, which has always and still does belong to males. We view ourselves as males do, our self-image forever reinforced by their snide comments on our selfie-posting habits, or their meaningless think-pieces, and juxtaposed by an industry telling us to continue trying to look better. Which side is a girl to take?

Her own, obviously.

Sociologist Mary McGill’s 2016 TEDx talk addressed this very issue. Answering the question of “Why, at this particular point in time, are some young women choosing to self-represent in the selfie?”, she also asked, if their behaviour was considered to be narcissistic, why was that the case? Making a point of how femininity and narcissism are often inseparable concepts, she looks back to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist, philosopher and writer who published her seminal text The Second Sex in 1949. The Second Sex featured a chapter entitled ‘The Narcissist’, which noted that narcissism is constantly pushed on and aligned with women.

Despite this, De Beauvoir also claimed her belief that when a woman looks at her own image, perhaps in a mirror, she can become the bearer of the gaze and the subject, rather than continuing to exist in her constant role as the subject, as society would have it. This idea changed my mind when I considered the notion that the male gaze is ever-pervasive the one place I definitely feel I can escape it is when I look at the selfies I have constructed myself.

I’m pretty sure I can nail the selfie. But the definition of a ‘good selfie’ is different for everyone, as beauty exists within the eye of the beholder. And in my eyes, within a selfie, I can see myself as beautiful, powerful, and strong, despite existing in a world that constantly feels like it is fighting against me, always telling me to feel as though I am not.

by Erin Christie

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FRISKY BUSINESS

H O W W O R K I N G I N A SE X S H O P C A N SET Y O U U P F O R SU C C ESS I N T H E C O R P O RATE W O R L D Slogging through uni, I wanted a cushy retail job and fingernails that didn’t reek of Jagermeister and Red Bull at the end of a shift. At the time, these all seemed like logical reasons to take a position at my local adult store in North Brisbane. I pictured it being like an ‘adults only’ version of Clerks, chilling at the front desk and occasionally ringing through the occasional porn flick or dildo. Easy, right?

Wrong.

The two years I spent behind the desk at ‘Frisky Business’ was one of the most challenging student jobs I’d ever had.

And as it turns out, the skills I developed while peddling porn and discussing orgasms are now a great advantage to my more conventional career in management.

For anyone contemplating life in the wonderful world of adult retail, here are four key skills you will develop.

1. You’ll be able to talk to anyone about anything I mean literally, anything. Picture this: you’re standing beside a wall stocked with an artillery of vibrators and dildos. Your customer, an older woman, is holding a purple jelly rocket that’s covered with lumps and soft spikes. You point to the little ball at the base, which looks like a little sputnik. “It’s a clitoral stimulator,” you explain as you switch it on and show her the different cycles, from a light pulse to a full industrial-washing machine strength churn. You suggest she tests out the strength of the motor

48 || FEATURES

by touching the tip of the vibrator to the tip of her nose.

When she does this, her eyes pop out, as though on stalks.

As an adult store worker, conversations get real personal, real quick. Some people will seek out your expertise like you’re the fairy godmother of sex. (No kidding, once I had a man call up to ask me how many guys in Brisbane had eight-inch penises). With shyer clients, there’s a fair bit of work to do between the “Hi, how are you today?” and “Can you orgasm from penetration?” It all comes down to empathy; making people feel safe when they are in the store and empowered to buy what they need to do the job.

In business: Chatting with a stranger about how they like to climax is truly the apex of the awkward conversations, and once you’ve got them down pat, you’ll have a set of impenetrable nerves. Job interviews, key presentations, client networking events, performance reviews. And if there’s one thing that works even better for pre-presentation nerves than picturing everyone in the room naked, it’s picturing a wall of silicone vaginas behind them.

2. You’ll be able to sell anything with confidence You’ll be ringing through sales of weird porn, ball-gags, swings and nipple clamps all day long, but show the faintest tremor of a smile and you can kiss goodbye the sale, or at least the chance to upsell, no, value add latex-free condoms, silicone lubricant or non-alkaline batteries. After a few short months of selling kinky stuff with a straight face, your comfort zone will disappear over the horizon, and that is when you can truly sell anything.

One of my biggest sales was from a quiet man who came in looking for a masturbatory aid and ended up buying a $500 life-sized vibrating ass simply because I took it out of the box, laid it on the counter, and let him beat it for a while with the back of his hand.

In business: No points for guessing how this little skill-nugget translates. In the office, I like to use what I secretly refer to as the ‘rubber-ass’ technique when pitching a new idea or process to a manager or stakeholder.

I show her an example of the process, the spreadsheet or the idea in use, let her test drive, slap it around a little.

Furthermore, when you come from a sales environment where a rejected item is literally a biohazard, you’ll only sell what you know is the best solution, every time.

3. You’ll know the right time to lend a shoulder In sex retail, you’re not just a salesperson and an everyday, run-of-the-mill orgasm champion. You are also a sex therapist and relationship counsellor. Among the empowered singles and frisky couples was always the odd lone ranger looking for something to cure deeper marital issues. I remember listening to a miserable customer talk about how his wife didn’t want to have sex with him

anymore, while he nervously fidgeted with a bright yellow cock-ring shaped like a rubber duck. Rather than the ‘buzzy bath friend’, he left with a card for Relationships Australia.

In business: It’s just like I always say; a stranger in need isn’t always a sad man with a cock-ring. It’s important to remember that performance issues can be a result of a much deeper problem, and business needs should always be laid aside in times of personal crisis. Also, when you lay your hand on somebody’s shoulder in a business environment, they’re less likely to take it the wrong way.

4. You’ll realize the glorious power of ‘No’ Working in an adult store isn’t just all sexual empowerment and cackling bachelorettes. Occasionally, some lecherous shit will go down and when it does, you might be the only staff member on duty in a store with a back entrance and no windows. You’ve got to act quickly. The good news is, creepy men are normally harmless and dropping a good, solid ‘no’, will generally send them on their way. “Can I try on that fleshlight?” No. “Can you show me what these tassels look like on…?” No. “So… *big wink* are you a…?”

No, no, Lord Jesus, NO! One particularly memorable example was when a man in a button-down shirt approached the register, holding a balloon he had untied from the foldout sign outside the store. He was stroking it firmly, his fingertips shuddering down the rubber, and started to tell me a thing or two about what he liked to do with balloons as a tent rose in his pants. This took a little more than a ‘no’ – I ended up negotiating with him to leave the store if I gave him a fresh bag of balloons. When I threw in the balloon pump, he eagerly agreed never to come back.

In business: Once you’ve dropped a few solid ‘no’s’ in the faces of creepy customers, guess what - you’re well on your way to becoming a successful performance manager! Somehow pushing back on extra work, or giving Joe from Customer Service a warning about his temper issues won’t seem quite so terrifying.

So there you go, folks. Sell sex. Sex teaches you things about people you will never find in an expensive Harvard Business subscription. Sometimes I miss my days of awkward conversations, sweaty and embarrassed customers, and even throwing out creeps. I miss learning about people from the world of anal beads and plugs and fake vaginas. And most of all, I kinda miss the noble purpose of providing people with access to the most incredible orgasms of their lives without so much as having to lay a finger on them. There’s no job satisfaction quite like it.

by Laura Neill

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BOOTY CALL M E M O I RS F R O M A N ES C O RT

My decision to become a sex worker was quite a simple one.

For a long time, I had a fascination with sex and all things to do with it, and when I became sexually active at an early age, I discovered not only did my fascination begin with the mechanics of sex, but also the psychological impact as well.

For me, sex wasn’t only just pleasurable, but a pleasurable activity, like a sport, which I would partake in quite often.

The types of sex didn’t bother me either, whether it be rough, loving, long, short, slightly awkward or intensely passionate, with the variety often coming with the likes of Tinder matches and late-night booty calls. If I got to climax, that was a major bonus.

I attended Sexpo in the 2016, when my Tinder adventures began to fizzle out and I began looking for something different.

I met with a previous sex worker whom I bombarded with questions “for a friend” about the industry itself, and soon discovered that not only was this a viable option, but it had been an option for me for a while. And frankly, the amount of free sex I was giving out at the time seemed ludicrous.

From the beginning of my journey at Sexpo, through a recommendation, I contacted SWOP – the Sex Workers Outreach Project – a not-for-profit support network for sex workers, to discuss what on earth this industry holds and if I would be suitable for it. You see, my own anxieties took hold here – ‘What if I’m not thin enough?’, ‘I don’t look like a model, who would possibly want to pay to have sex with me?’ and the big one: ‘Am I even good at it?’

To my surprise, my questions were fruitless. I began to realise that men, whether it be old or young, didn’t base their attractions on what we see on TV and social media.

When paying for it, men will want what they want, whether it be a model or my very own chubby girl-next-door look. In the end we can’t help what we desire, even if that desire is out of what is considered ‘normal,’ we will often go for it despite what others may think.

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After a year and a half as an escort, I have had a variety of experiences. These range from working in a little brothel on the Upper North Shore where I encountered a man with a penis the size of a 600ml water bottle, who afterwards gave me a lollipop as a “thank you for trying”, to meeting men in a high-class escort agency who just wanted time to talk and snuggle. And of course, I had the regular drunk blokes in between who, to my surprise, were still quite respectful in their intoxicated state. My favourites would have to be my regular clients, who often took time out to come and see me and indulge in their utmost secret desires which could range from hard-core kinky sex, to just experimenting with their sexual desire of feet – an itch their partners couldn’t scratch. What I found most wonderful was that in the room, all judgments were put aside, and these men could tell me, or even show me, their deepest desires, everyday secrets, dreams, conflicts or whatever else was needed to take their mind off their own stressful life.

The thing I took home after almost a year and a half in the adult industry is that access to my body is a privilege. From the beginnings of my sexual escapades – or sexcapades as I like to call them – to the point where I was charging $450 an hour, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t what some people would consider just a commodity, but in fact I was providing a service and a privilege that only my body can provide. Interestingly, and against my first judgments, it was the men who paid that provided more respect to my body and its boundaries than the men whom I met on Tinder.

What can I say - it’s amazing how insanely attractive it is for even a 40-year-old man to politely ask if he can eat you out compared to a 25-year-old just going for it.

by Emily Rose

CREATIVES

THE PLANET EATER

The Planet Eater swung around the yellow star and closed in on his prey. He passed a gas giant and a dead rocky planet; an asteroid bounced off his long, worm-like body as he swept into the inner system.

The blue planet swelled into his view, emerging from the milky strew of stars. He could feel the radio waves emanating from it; see the spectral lines of molecular oxygen in its atmosphere, its swarm of tiny satellites. This was a planet at the peak of its lifespan. His mouth started to water.

He opened his vast jaws, matching the planet’s velocity with bursts of hydrogen once scooped from the shells of gas giants. His shadow swept over the planet’s surface like a global eclipse, and he closed his mouth around the great sphere. He slurped down the surface water, salty oceans flowing down his throat in a single swallow. The ice caps sent a chill through his teeth. Then his tongue emerged and swept over the planet’s surface, lapping up forests, cities and any habitat harbouring organic life. Finally, he pushed the rocky body between his teeth and bit down. It didn’t take long to crack the crust and crunch into the upper mantle, munching on burning hot grit and a soup of molten rock. He chewed and swallowed the planet a bit at a time, avoiding the dense core as an animal of more reasonable scale would the stone in a peach.

Finally, when all that was left was the solid inner core, he swallowed it whole. It would help crush and digest the rest of the planet, like a gizzard stone. Water, gases and organic material were sorted into a separate digestive system, while the planet’s bulk would be painstakingly dissolved and incorporated into his endoand exo-skeletons. The planet’s moon was dragging along behind him; he turned and swallowed it as an afterthought. He could probably use the silicon.

The Planet Eater stretched luxuriously, sighing in pleasure. This was what life was all about. The rush of the solar wind, the hot iron of a planet’s core in your belly, the complex gravity of a solar system tugging you this way and that. It was good to be awake again.

Completing another orbit of the yellow star, he scanned the surrounding space for a likely feeding ground.

Stable main sequence stars with a thick habitable band were the best prospects. Barren worlds are all well and good for the minerals, but planets with a thriving ecosystem are the key to a balanced diet. Locating a couple such systems, he listened closely for radio signals. Sure, there were a lot of planets with life but no intelligence, but they weren’t as easy to find.

He was in luck. A radio wave, faint but unmistakably artificial, was arriving from the direction of a yellow star slightly inclined from the stellar equator. A primitive species (like the one he was currently digesting) would have trouble detecting the signal; he, on the other hand, was covered in a vast array of radio-sensitive organs evolved specifically for the task. It was very kind of these organisms to broadcast their location so identifiably. Even if the species had blasted themselves to dust by the time he arrived, something would be hanging on - and besides, radioactivity was good for digestion. Life was pretty versatile that way. Frequently, organisms he had swallowed were able to find a new niche as parasites or symbiotes.

He picked a mountain range from his teeth, belched some excessively hot magma caught in his throat, and set out again. His planetoid-sized brain, having evolved with an instinctive understanding of maths and gravitational mechanics, computed the trajectories with ease. As he went he was very, very careful to avoid comets; objects moving that fast bore a threat even to him. He travelled back to the outer solar system and twisted into the appropriate vector. Then he dove inwards in a steep hyperbolic orbit, shot as close to the star as his body could bear; and then entered a slingshot that carried him straight towards his next destination. He fired one more enormous burst of gas to bring him up to escape velocity, and left the solar system.

The Planet Eater began to shut down into hibernation, settling into his armour and locking down. Judging from the destination star’s parallax, repeatedly measured during his orbits, it would take him just over a century to get there. Plenty of time for his body to process his last meal and prepare for a new one. He drifted to sleep hurtling through interstellar space.

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The Planet Eater shivered awake in the icy shell of a Kuiper belt, shifting a couple of chunks into comet-like orbits. The new solar system stretched out before him. The radio signals echoed strangely, interfering with each other in ways that didn’t make sense for a single source. The Planet Eater realised, excitement rising in his spine, that there were numerous planets taking part in the broadcast. His stomach rumbled, an impressive affair which sent ripples through the interplanetary medium. It was his lucky day.

His first meal was a large moon, a frozen shell concealing a delicious array of creatures. A colony of the transmitting intelligents resided there, in a huge network of ice caves between the surface and the ocean below. He probed the tunnels curiously with his papillae before swallowing.

As he loomed over his next target, a sparsely-colonised rocky world, he noticed a scattered fleet of spacecraft leaving in great a hurry. They were minuscule on his scale, not remotely worth pursuing, but they were the largest planet-born craft he had seen. One of the ships smacked against the inside of his teeth as his mouth closed.

Approaching his third planet, he felt the stinging blossom of a nuclear explosion against the skin of his head. Ouch, he thought. Having already had his fill of minerals, he sucked the biosphere from the surface and spat the planet back out.

The fourth world was the intelligents’ primary, judging by the abundance of artificial light shining from its night side. A wasp’s nest provoked, a barrage of nuclear weapons swarmed from the world, at his eyes, nostrils and mouth. He blinked them away, eyes watering, and lunged at the aggressor warships, but they darted nimbly aside. Let’s see how spirited you are with your homeworld in my gut, he thought. He stretched his jaws.

An object roughly the size and shape of a moon, but moving much too fast, slammed into the side of the Planet Eater’s head. With a dazzling crunch, it transferred just enough momentum to knock him off course. His tail grazed the planet lightly as he sailed past, tearing a deep canyon across two continents.

Dazed, he turned to see yet another large satellite flying towards him, motivated by a truly spectacular number of rocket engines. Distracted by the warships’ stings, he hadn’t noticed the moons’ orbits shifting. He tried to dodge, but agility is not the strong point of an animal with more mass than the average planet. The moon punched into his side, and he felt a crack spread across his carapace. A roar of pain would have been appropriate had there been a medium to propagate it.

The intelligents followed through with a redirected asteroid shower and a stray comet just for good measure. One or two of the rocks found their way to the vulnerable flesh underneath.

Too stunned to retaliate, the limp Planet Eater drifted as a third moon made its approach, accelerating to a speed no reasonable planetoid would consider, pushed by the vengeful desperation of a species on the edge of extinction…

She snatched the moon from the space in front of him and promptly crushed it between her teeth.

She wasted no time scooping up the remains of the other satellite-projectiles and turning her attention to the planet.

The glittering sphere seemed almost to give a resigned sigh as she wrapped her mouth around it.

Emerging from his stupor, the Planet Eater swung his tail gingerly, wincing as shards of pain crept up his side. That would take millennia to heal properly. His attention quickly turned to his saviour: another Planet Eater. Lights were glistening across her body, aglow with colours that spanned the spectrum. Her tail twitched seductively as she finished her meal. She was emitting a strong radio signal; she must have been behind the sun while he feasted, or he surely would have noticed it.

It was a mating call.

by Lachlan Marnoch

CREATIVES || 53

SCREEN PROTECTOR It’s odd.

And then I see you and you aren’t what I expected.

I sent you a text,

But you aren’t bad either.

you replied an hour or so later.

We walk home,

My “hey” met with a more sophisticated reply.

casual.

It’s been a minute and I already feel inadequate,

The conversation flowing,

Doesn’t the fact that this is happening through a screen,

a few boulders stem the stream at times,

supposedly make it easier?

I’m not too sure.

but it flows.

But we talk,

I unlock the bedroom door and

My confidence comes back up upon realizing that I might never actually meet you.

I already know.

And I am myself again,

The thirst.

My banter impeccable and you tell me that

The hunger.

You love the way I express myself.

I won’t get into details,

We talk about history and politics,

but in a word?

and for some reason it feels normal.

It was

But I suppose that’s the screen again,

Orgasmic.

being my little safety net.

The feeling of a strangers hands and lips tracing your skin,

Slowly it gets raunchier,

It’s like electricity pouring through your veins.

as my friend likes to call it.

But also,

It got to a point where through a screen,

it is deeply lonely.

I already can feel it.

fingers were dripping and wrists moved at a rhythmic pace.

The distance the screen put us at was no longer a comforting thing, no, it was a point of frustration.

So we decided for a week from that day, I’d get rid of my safety net, and so would he.

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by Masumi Parmar

CONVERGENCE 1.

I stare too long at horizons, expecting my outcomes to be parallel. A life lived in straight talk and straight lines, I avoid speculating on things I cannot see coming.

2.

I stare back at myself, a point of obscurity in my own blurred past. The future feels like silky midnight; I am lost in the darkness but know there is only forwards. My path dances as celestial arrangements for the universes in which I no longer belong, and I vanish amongst my own forgotten perspective.

3.

I stare longingly at her with linear intent; there are boundaries amongst which we are prisoners of choice and consequence. I punish myself in exile, a life lived side by side is an uncertain future. I dream feverishly of never meeting, and I am concerned by things that can no longer be anticipated.

4.

She stares straight ahead. I cannot tell whether she is seeing what she has been or what she will become, but in this moment she is. One track minds; we build a railroad in our disconnection and yet we cannot taste our own destinies. I lose myself; I am a distant horizon providing the frame of reference for my own disappearance. We both look forwards as our fates meet in the distance.

5.

I stare at us. I realise that a life lived in parallels exists on a path for convergence; a flattened life gains volume as two points cross that are assumed to never meet. I run my hands along her curves and expect origin stories to be told and made, pondering all that remains as it should.

THE WISEMEN 1.

The wise men wring their hands. It seems the all-knowing can taste the salt of changing tides, yet I just feel the stinging of old wounds. I consign myself to the limits of my own perception as an act of penance to all that I may not know.

2.

Revolution, born as the moon; a sickle fulfilling its destiny in a sky too devoid of character. The students ebb and flow in disorganised mayhem, but the barricades remain unmanned. I can smell the blood of the martyrs on winds of change, but the wise men only wash their hands. I consign myself to the gaps in my knowledge as a tool of avoidance for all the things I have chosen not to see.

3.

A preemptive strike, the mythic dragon in the night; a devourer of worlds and oceans snatching youth like a clumsy thief. Students lie facing up at a blank sky, silhouetted by the flaming pyre of their own resistance. Revolution is lost to the elements; the eye of a storm blind to its own destructiveness as it dissipates into nothing. The wise men have turned their backs but I kneel facing carnage that will never exist. I consign myself to the coldness of reality as a reminder of all that is not to occur. ‘ 4.

Perhaps I am a wise man after all.

by Liam Holt

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Art on previous page by Kanchana Krishnan | @literaryartjournal

BOOKS

THE LEBS

Michael Mohammed Ahmad I’m beginning to think critics and publishers of the literary world have incredibly low standards for the quality of writing coming from Western Sydney. When I received the manuscript of this book for review, I was excited because I’d heard great things about the work of Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The superlatives in the blurb gassed his writing to the extremes. One praised the language his last semi-autobiographical novel, hailed it as ‘lyrical, sharp and sensual’, and reviews for The Lebs called it ‘vivid and compelling’.

Reader, it is not vivid or compelling at all.

The story begins at break-neck speed. A whirlwind introduction of numerous characters and stories told within the first few pages, pronouns heading nearly every sentence, bombarding us with so many words that after reading five pages I found myself reaching for my inhaler – and I hadn’t uttered a single word out loud.

The dialogue is crass and awkward, the writing almost entirely exposition, the metaphors are weak, and when he tried to be poetic it felt awkward and fell flat. A lot of the evocative language seemed like afterthoughts, as if Ahmad was just checking off a list of things you should include to make a novel more engaging. He writes like the most inept writers who were relegated to intermediate English classes at my old Western Sydney high school.

The novel is an extension of a personal essay Ahmad wrote about Punchbowl Boys High School and his experiences there in the late 90’s and early 2000’s for the Sydney Review of Books. The story is told through the voice of Bani Adam, a character based on Ahmad himself. Like his creator, he’s a Lebanese Alawite Muslim, a small sect within the Shi’a branch of Islam. Bani Adam is an outcast, not just because of his membership of a minority sect, but also because he’s a sensitive nice guy among a group of the violent and unruly boys. ‘The Lebs’ are the majority at Punchbowl, a school made up of mostly Lebanese Muslim students, but including some Arab, black and Asian Muslims. They are their own worst enemies, and the fact that their teachers are unsympathetic and intolerant of them turns their school into a place of confinement.

Bani Adam is the anti-Leb. While the majority of the boys do nothing to overturn stereotypes of them (rather they encourage and relish in it), Bani Adam rejects his people and culture and constantly whines about how much he hates himself, having aspirations of whiteness.

He’s the model minority. He reads. He’s a writer. He says things like, “Specks of tabouli blazed in his eyes”, to describe an angry student, and his number one descriptor for every new character is to describe their olive and copper-toned

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skin – because how else would you know he’s poetic and also Lebanese?

He’ll tell you he’s not a misogynist; he respects and knows women on a psychological level, much as they’re repelled by him. While the boys in his class openly lust after and objectify their young manic-pixie dream girl of an English teacher, he recites the most fake-deep passages of books (that she recommends him) whenever he catches her in the hallway, waxes lyrical about her blue eyes and milky-white skin, and objectifies her, but in a poetic and fake-deep writerly way. He loves Lolita (sideye) and sees a resemblance between himself and Humbert… Humbert and his almost 30-year old teacher as…Lolita, a 12-year-old.

At one point she leaves the school, and her grooming (and abandonment) enables him to finally get a girlfriend.

In the last quarter of the book, he’s finished school and spends his time doing…theatre exercises and has monologue after monologue about his self-hatred and the displacement he feels amongst Lebs as well as white people. I’m serious. The last quarter is essentially unreadable. After the school anecdotes are done with, Ahmad struggles to find an interesting angle for his post-high school journey to self-discovery.

An early review by Books + Publishing hopes this novel will somehow find its way into the hands of a Muslim teen struggling with themselves, but judging by the awkward explanations of even the most basic tenets of Islam, and Arabic words that anyone who has had any kind of relationship with a Lebanese-Australian would know, it’s clearly not for our consumption. Ahmad has this strange habit of cramming every piece of cultural knowledge he has into this book to impress you, the non- Muslim, presumably

BOOKS

white, reader with preconceived notions about Lebs from Western Sydney. He really needs you to know that he’s an educated dreamer who reads Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and James Joyce (all while not fully understanding the message of their work). What’s even more maddening is his odd fixation with co-opting the struggles of Black Americans whenever he references their works like Malcolm X and Toni Morrison, as if it wouldn’t be more apt to allude to Edward Said, or Mahmoud Darwish.

“Why is she telling me to read Toni Morrison if I am too dumb to understand? I always thought Toni Morrison’s whole thing was that you’re not supposed to treat Africans and Arabs and Asians like buffoons.”

Well, that’s certainly a great way to insert yourself into the legacy of a writer who specifically said she unapologetically writes for and about black people, not you, a non-black person.

He also gives himself unsolicited license to repeatedly use the variations of the n-word – from negro to n***er – and to make comparisons between his, and other character’s feelings of displacement, to slavery, as if there aren’t a world of derogatory slurs towards his particular racial group to use – especially since there are no black characters in sight – and Arab-related things to find parity between. Frankly, it’s disgusting and insulting, and there is absolutely no purpose to it. Like, we get it, you know those words exist.

In a time where there’s heightened media attention and surveillance on Muslim communities in Australia, it’s valorous to write what is essentially a semi-factual memoir where a great chunk of the novel reveals the ‘extremist’ views – even if they may not be willing to act on them – of some members of the Lebanese and wider Muslim community that Ahmad grew up around. At one point in the novel, after 9/11, Ahmad describes a spectacle of celebration among the Lebs at Punchbowl in the days following the attack. I applaud Ahmad for living his truth (no matter how brutal and hindering it is for his community) and trying to un-bleach the current catalogue of Australian coming of age stories, but in terms of the actual writing, he does not do it well.

And even if you were to say the writing is the way it is because he tries to turn the everyday Lebanese Australian accent into prose, plenty of writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, have written in culturally specific forms of English without sounding like an inept Year 9 student who has overestimated their talent for creative writing. And many authors, such as Randa Abdel-Fattah, Nadia Jamal, and Taghred Chandab, have written in the voices of Arab-Australian teens without writing like 13-year-olds who write One Direction fanfiction on Wattpad. If publishing houses are just giving deals to just any old Western Sydney writer with a false impression of their talents, then hit me up, ’cause I reckon I can dig up a couple of the worst short stories written in my most formative years of high school.

by Ilhan Abdi

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FILM

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

Rian Johnson

The first time I saw The Last Jedi, I left more conflicted than Kylo Ren. I honestly didn’t know how I felt about it. I saw it at the midnight opening, after a generous helping of hype over the preceding weeks (I’m a massive Star Wars nerd, in case that isn’t apparent). This was with company who rolled their eyes every second scene and expounded on how terrible it was as they left the theatre. I didn’t say much in response, but deep down, I harboured a secret feeling that maybe that movie might actually be good.

A pair of less cynical friends talked me into seeing it again about two days later (I didn’t take much convincing). They gasped in all the right places and couldn’t have been more excited.

So yes, maybe that’s influenced my final decision: I really like that movie. A lot. Because jeepers golly fuck, The Last Jedi is cool.

I wish I could do a long-form rundown of this movie, because there’s a tonne to be said. It’s cinematic in a way that Star Wars never has been before, and it’s full of plot points that are weird and unexpected. While The Force Awakens was basically a reskinned A New Hope (not necessarily in a bad way), this one does what I had my fingers crossed for and uses that film’s familiarity to leap into new and unexpected places. Even though it does some twists on the stories of old Star Wars, it does so without completely ripping them off.

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It also makes effective use of its original trilogy characters while also introducing some strong new ones (Rose is my new favourite) and making (mostly) good on those from The Force Awakens.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its problems – there are things about it that really bother me. Is the comic relief cloying and kind of lowest common denominator? Yes. Is the middle of the plot meandering when it could have been focused, tight and effective? Sure. But no other movie this year has hit me with the same combination of nostalgia and novelty, while also thumping me right in the chest with genuine emotional impact.

If the reactions of my various friends – and Facebook fan groups – are anything to go by, it’s probably the most controversial Star Wars film, so your experience may vary.

But to me, the good more than outweighs the bad; The Last Jedi is firmly in the light side.

by Lachlan Marnoch

BOOKS

C A L L M E B Y Y O U R NA M E

André Aciman

Sensual and agonising, Call Me By Your Name was by far the best book I read in 2017. I only realised finishing the novel just why it had taken me so long to enter the world of gay fiction. The answer? Gay cinema. In every queer film I’d ever seen, the plot consistently surrounds some form of internal or external conflict against the concept of being gay. The relationship is always fraught will trouble based on disapproving parents, religions, and societies, or a queer person’s own discomfort with their sexuality.

These films are not by any means bad films, nor are they inaccurate portrayals what it is like to be an queer person.

On the contrary, these films are integral in sharing a truth of many LGBTQI+ narratives. They are, however, hard to watch.

I wanted something refreshing and gentle in its treatment of love. That’s where Call Me By Your Name comes in.

The difference between the films I’d seen and Call Me By Your Name is the distinct lack of external conflict surrounding the character’s sexuality. There are no factors within the narrative that aim to break apart or criticize the characters’ exploration of their sexuality.

The novel’s protagonist, Elio, is a 17-year-old boy who leads us through his summer in Italy through a dreamy internal monologue. The type of infatuation Elio experiences towards Oliver, a cocky yet ever so charming 24-year-old American student, is what we all envision when imagining the perfect summer fling.

Call Me By Your Name doesn’t follow any formula; there’s no violent struggle, no dramatic revelation. The book, in the most uncomplicated, wonderful way, allows us to watch the relationship between Elio and Oliver unfurl.

This brilliant novel – which has now been made into an equally brilliant film – will not only leave you wanting to travel to Aciman’s Northern Italy, it will also make you pine for the kind of relationship that Oliver and Elio have. I haven’t spoiled anything for you, and no words can describe the perfection of Aciman’s writing, so please give it a read and see for yourself. If reading isn’t quite your thing, the entire audiobook (narrated by Armie Hammer, who plays Oliver in the film) is available on YouTube.

by Hannah L. McHardy

FIRST, WE MAKE THE BEAST BEAUTIFUL Sarah Wilson

I have an intense, contradictory relationship with this book.

On one hand, I think it’s a steaming pile of red hot garbage and I’m angry I spent $20 on it. But on the other, I’m excited to see real stories about mental health sold at my local Big W in regional NSW amongst the Mills and Boon novels. I was drawn to this book because of its beautiful cover. The design is actually amazing - but enough about superficial looks, I’m here to tell you why this book sucks but at the same time it really doesn’t.

The book shifts from memoir to science-y stuff, but I use ‘science-y’ lightly because although the research was fact-checked by medical professionals, it’s full of vague statements, and who could forget the line “anxiety makes you fat”. This is problematic on many levels. For one, no one suffers anxiety in the same way. Anxiety can be linked to eating disorders as well, so for a sufferer to read this is counterintuitive to the overall premise of the book. When you’re trying to provide people with a relatable story about an illness it’s probably best not to generalise about the disorder. There are plenty of holes in the story, awful sentences and chapters that written from a place of privilege that almost come across as condescending to those of us who can’t just fuck off to Byron and live in the trees.

The book tries to be a new and candid portrayal of anxiety, and I give kudos to author Sarah Wilson for this. Most literature tells the same story of anxiety, one of fear and suffering. Wilson tries to show anxiety in a new light, by accepting how it affects one’s life and how we can find ways to cope with it. It’s not totally self-help bullshit, and despite its shortcomings there is actually some useful information in there about breathing exercises and other ways to calm down. As a long-time high functioning anxiety sufferer, it was refreshing at times to read. Although I could ramble on more about what’s wrong with it, I want to focus on what’s right. My whole life I have been searching for stories about anxiety that are real – anxiety affects people in different ways, and this book reflects one person’s journey with the inconsistency, pain and suffering that anxiety brings. The difference with this book is that although it highlights the pain, it also provides solutions. I can only hope that this is the start of a bigger trend, where real stories on anxiety make it into the mainstream. Despite my anger at parts, I couldn’t put this book down.

by Amanda Burgess

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MUSIC GUMBOOT SOUP

UTOPIA

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard When I first heard about this album launch, I laughed. All the commentary on King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard can be boiled down to two points: ‘All their songs sound the same’ and ‘How do they release so many albums in a year?’

Some say that’s because their songs all actually do sound the same, and because they have a bajillion band members they can easily produce albums; last year, they managed to release five.

Björk It was probably the toughest time of my life. I had done poorly in the HSC, I was stuck working at a fast food joint with an abusive boss, and I wasn’t going anywhere in life fast. The only escape I had was my music. During work breaks, I would listen to Björk. During class, I would have one earphone in and listen to her otherworldly melodies that helped me escape. She helped me find my utopia, and hopefully, her latest album will help you find yours.

I quite enjoy repetitive music. I can get behind drone metal like Earth, and a note that barely changes for forty-five minutes. But Gumboot Soup steers away from that traditional Gizzard sound where a song repeats itself for six or seven minutes (and the chorus is: “Rattlesnake, rattlesnake, rattlesnake, rattlesnake”), and into a creative stir fry of heavy metal, jamming, psychedelic rock and chilled out indie rock. Each song is a snippet of something different, and Gizzard flicks between heavy, mellow and head-bopping with ease. Tracks like ‘Barefoot Desert’ and ‘The Last Oasis’ are very easy to listen to for all listeners, and fans of Nonagon Infinity will find satisfying heavy songs like ‘The Great Chain of Being’ and ‘The Wheel’. But don’t worry if you’re not into metal - this album is soothing.

The Icelandic singer’s previous album, Vulnicura, was the embodiment of the pain she experienced during the separation from her partner, and now Utopia is about finding pleasure again after suffering such lows, and boy does it go high. Filled with flutes, harps and other instruments you would expect fairies to play, she constructs a lush soundscape of natural sounds, full of insect noises and bird chirping, that is sometimes even more intriguing than her expertly-crafted lyrics. Every time I take a train over the Hawkesbury River, Utopia is the perfect soundtrack for the peaceful and serene journey.

I love the album’s Aussie ideas, too. The title itself reeks of Australiana – who else in the world calls those waterproof shoes gumboots? The songs communicate so clearly the experience of Australian summer; ‘Greenhouse Heat Death’ and ‘Muddy Water’ remind me of burning my hands on everything in the car on a 40°C day – and you remember why your mate that’s wiser than you keeps a towel in the car.

But these songs also make me remember drinking chilled cocktails in the shade on my girlfriend’s verandah, and jumping unceremoniously in the pool at 9pm on New Year’s Eve when it’s still hot. ‘Muddy Water’ tells the story of a poor joe who covered up from the sun, got sunburnt anyway, and developed a layer of thick, leathery skin right before they fell victim to heatstroke. And who said Gizzard lyrics aren’t creative? (Rattlesnake...)

Long-time fans of Gizzard will be pleased to discover some new but typical catchy riffs that will get anyone bopping along, and new listeners will find a relaxed but engaging album to get in support of. And who doesn’t love a good Gumboot Soup?

by Jarred Noulton

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The album starts with Björk relishing in paradise, with songs such as ‘Arisen My Senses’ and ‘Blissing Me’, where she sings how a man she’s falling for “reminds me of the love in me”. She chronicles her journey of initially finding love from others, only to be reminded that true love, and therefore reaching utopia, comes from within.

One tiny issue I have with the album though is that, much as I love the flutes and bird chirping thematic, it plays a bit too heavily throughout most of the album, making several of the songs feel a bit too alike. The are so similar at times that if you played an excerpt from certain songs, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which track it was from.

Ultimately, Björk has created a phenomenal piece of art with Utopia. I’ve listened to it so many times now, and every time I feel as if I have been transported to another world, full of peace, and without the negativity of our world.

I’ve had Björk with me through the highs and lows of my life, and her latest album is a guiding light to the next destination on my own journey to utopia.

by Nathaniel Keesing

HOROSCOPES

PISCES

ARIES

TAURUS

You’ve been living a lie your whole life.

You’re actually an alien who used the DNA transforming tech from James Bond’s Die Another Day to look like a human. It’s time to complete the mission you were sent here to achieve.

Sleeper agent activate code: Moist.

This is your moment to shine! Opportunities will rain from the heavens like hail, make sure they don’t smash your skull and kill you. I recommend wearing a batting helmet at all times.

You’re a Pokémon! Luckily, as this is the only way someone will ever choose you.

GEMINI

CANCER

LEO

Same-sex marriage is finally legal in Australia! Unfortunately for you, the chances of you getting married are still zilch.

You’ll experience a spontaneous bout of piles this month. Perform anal at your own peril.

Fuck you look good this semester! I can’t believe you’ll bring assless chaps into vogue. Try it and see what I mean.

VIRGO

LIBRA

SCORPIO

You need to relax let go of past regrets.

You ate that whole tub of ice-cream, and now your poo is super sticky and won’t come out properly. You just need to relax and let it go.

Did you ever hear that urban myth where a guy put four starbursts up a girl’s vagina and out came five? Moral of the story is, you’ve got syphilis.

You will have a mental break mid-lecture screaming you are the Scorpion King.

You will only be able to watch Echo recordings from now on.

SAGITTARIUS

CAPRICORN

AQUARIUS

Calm down on the meth mate.

You’re perfect, you’re beautiful, you look like Linda Evangelista, you’re a model!

Welcome to YouTube honey! The video of you sharting after a big night out has gone viral! That monetization money will line your purse, maybe consider a career in public defecation?

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