Grapeshot Magazine | WORMS

ISSUE 6: WORMS

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ISSUE 6: WORMS

7 NEWS 8 NEWSFLASHES 12 JORDON-STEELE JOHN 14 SUE THE BASTARDS 16 GOATS 18 EVERY INCH 20 TREE-HUGGING TYCOON

21 REGULARS 22 MONTAIGNE INTERVIEW 24 IBISES OF MACQUARIE UNI 26 ILLUSTRATED 28 CHALLENGE 30 WORM SEX 32 UNSEALED SECTION 34 POP CULTURE REWIND

CONTENTS

37 FEATURES 38 MY BEST FRIEND’S A BUDGIE 40 JANE GOODALL’S 5 REASONS FOR HOPE

51 CREATIVES 52 SHORT STORY: SPRING GIRL 54 SHORT STORY: BESTIE 56 COLOURING IN PAGE BY GABRIELLE CHIDIAC

46 ARCHITECTURE & ACTIVISM

57 REPEAT OFFENDERS

48 WHALE WARS

58 SHIT LIT

50 RATTLING THE CAGE

59 TRAILER TRASH

42 SYDNEY’S ECO-WITCHES 44 PREPARING FOR THE END

60 FILM 61 BOOKS 62 MUSIC 63 HOROSCOPES

EDITOR’S LETTER If you’re ever walking from the university to the train station after sundown, don’t look up. It’s where the ibises roost for the night in ghostly white clusters, and it’s eerie as fuck.

However, after the Grapey team headed out on campus and chatted to a few of the resident ibises, I’m a little bit less repulsed by these avian wetland stalkers that look like the earthbound form of some malevolent Egyptian god.

It actually got me thinking that the birdlife here are basically the centrepoint of the community; I’ve never felt so connected to other students as when I’m standing around a newly-hatched cluster of ducklings at the end of winter.

This issue is basically an attempt to extend that sense of collective wonder at nature that we share, briefly, as we rush into class to chase degrees and get jobs and earn money and then die.

While worms are the thematic grounding for this ecothemed issue, there’s a bunch of other critters here, like budgies, flies, slaters, whales, dragons, crickets chomping on cocaine, goats climbing trees (and social hierarchies) and mealworms baked into cookies.

I also learned that the weird swollen ring around a worm is called the ‘clitellum’, and that’s where worm sperm wriggles into worm eggs and forms a cocoon.

I now think of the Grapeshot team as the clitellum, all our writers are the sperm, and this magazine is our newest cocoon ready to hatch ideas that wriggle into your brain like baby wormies. Yep, this is a gross metaphor that sounds like something out of Alien, but it’s all I got, sorry. (If this shit turns you on though, head straight to Freya Wadlow’s article on page 28).

Thanks a mil for reading, save the bees, Angus xx

EDITORIAL & CREATIVE PRODUCTION EDITOR IN CHIEF Angus Dalton

DEPUTY EDITOR Emma Harvey CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brittney Klein CAMPUS NEWS EDITOR Tess Connery NEWS EDITOR Madison Thorne REGULARS EDITOR Nikita Jones FEATURES EDITOR Max Lewis CREATIVES EDITOR Cameron Colwell ONLINE EDITOR Erin Christie COPY EDITOR Amelia van der Rijt COPY EDITOR ASSISTANT Yehuda Aharon DESIGN ASSISTANTS Daniel Lim & James Booth SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Amanda Burgess MARKETING DIRECTOR Shinae Taylor

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS + ILLUSTRATORS Ursula Huxtable, Maggie McGinley, Freya Wadlow, Mitchell Kirsch, Emma Rssx, Lachlan Marnoch, Rhiannon Williams, Tamsin McIntosh, Lydia Jupp, Gabrielle Chidiac, Tieri Cafe, Sabrina Kirby, Sonia Lal, Camilla Seldon, Nathaniel Keesing

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

PUBLISHER

COORDINATOR

Kim Guerin

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, PHOTOGRAPY + ART TO GRAPESHOT@MQ.EDU.AU

NEWS

NEWSFLASHES VANDALISM OF CARS MAY HAVE RACIAL MOTIVES

A 53-year-old bus driver has been charged after a series of vandalism attacks based around Macquarie University and the Macquarie Centre. A number of cars were vandalised using paint stripper or some other form of acid, with the earliest recorded attack happening in March 2017. Currently, around 40 cars have been targeted.

The man was identified after a victim took photographs of the attacker. A Macquarie University lecturer, Dr Jing Fang, had her car vandalised.

“At first glance it just looked like bird poo,” Dr Fang recounted. “But on a closer look, someone had sprayed chemicals on my car. The mechanic said it was some sort of paint stripper. I had to have the whole bonnet repainted.”

Disturbingly, a pattern seems to have emerged that leads some to believe that the attacks were racially motivated. All of the people whose cars have been vandalised come from a Chinese background, and some of the cars targeted had visible Chinese accessories or bumper stickers.

Despite this potential connection between the victims, Ryde Police have yet to confirm a motive, although race is being considered. The man is facing charges of malicious damage.

In a statement, the University said that, “Macquarie University can confirm that a number of cars parked in the University’s W4 carpark were vandalised earlier this year.

The security team regularly patrols all areas of the campus, including the carparks. Once advised of the vandalism these patrols were further increased. The university has a low rate of crime and takes incidences of this nature very seriously”.

This is not the first time that Macquarie University has been the setting for racially motivated attacks. In January this year, a video taken by an Islamic member of Macquarie’s student community went viral on Facebook, depicting another student verbally assaulting the victim for wearing a niqab, and damaging the victim’s car. The offending student has been banned from campus and fined $750 on top of the $817 to be paid to the couple for the damage to their car. The magistrate found: ‘The motive was prejudice against people of a particular faith.’

Another incident in April this year saw a person described by witnesses as “a tall, white male” chanting “Trump! Trump!

Trump!” and “Trump is our President” towards a bake sale stall held by the Macquarie University Muslim Students Association. The bake sale was a fundraiser for Somali Faces, a charity for the Somali famine.

By Tess Connery

SNOWY THE SUPPORT DOG PASSES AWAY

On Tuesday 18 July 2017, the passing of Snowy, the Campus Wellbeing support dog, was announced on social media. He was 10 years old.

For the last two years, Snowy worked in the Campus Wellbeing building on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, providing comfort and hugs to people visiting the centre.

Taleen Biberian, Snowy’s owner, spoke to Grapeshot about the legacy Snowy leaves.

“His presence has been greatly welcomed. Students and staff would come and spend time patting and cuddling him.

Visitors would describe a sense of calm and comfort that was provided by Snowy. During his time here, he also assisted the Psychology Clinic with exposure therapy for their clients. There is invaluable experiential evidence in Snowy’s role at Campus Wellbeing. It brings me so much joy that he was able to provide happiness to so many people.”

The reaction to Snowy’s passing has been immediate and heartfelt.

“In November of 2015, I went through a super shitty time in my life,” says student, Izzie. “Amazing Taleen began bringing her dog, Snowy, in as a emotional support dog in late 2015, and I could not have asked for a better support animal during that time... I was able to come to uni and have a dog there to hug and hold while I cried. Snowy was a happy, beautiful dog who brought so much love and happiness to everyone who came to see him. I am so completely devastated to hear of his death, for he was the goodest boy.”

Support dogs are known to provide a sense of calm and comfort, and Snowy was no exception. There have been many scientific studies on the impact that support dogs have in environments similar to Campus Wellbeing, and results consistently show that people experience lower blood pressure, a reduction in anxiety levels, and feel less lonely when they come into contact with a support dog. The reason behind these responses comes down to our biology.

Some scientists suggest that a dog’s face triggers a response in us that mimics the response when we see babies - called an ‘infant schema’. The result is that oxytocin, the hormone associated with happiness, is released in droves.

Snowy will be greatly missed, and our thoughts are with Taleen and her family.

By Tess Connery

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“TOUGH LUCK” S R C C O U N C I L R E P H O S P I T A L I SE D A F T E R INADEQUATE SUPPORT FROM MACQUARIE INTERNATIONAL & STUDENT CONNECT Cissy Shen, member of the Macquarie SRC and the student representative on Council, has faced hospitalisation for severe anxiety stomach pains after stress caused by the lack of support given to her by Macquarie International and Student Connect.

Shen was due to leave for Thailand as part of the New Colombo Plan Scholarship on the 31st of July, but had her plans delayed after a series of distressing incidents.

Shen told Grapeshot : “On Friday, I was informed that, firstly, [of] the 7 units I will be completing overseas, only 4 of them will count towards my degree at Macquarie. And I was due to depart on Monday.”

She was told that she wouldn’t receive her credits, and was not given an answer when she asked why she hadn’t been informed of this sooner. Shen became visibly upset, and says the staff member smiled and had to hold in laughter.

At this point, Shen suffered from a panic attack and left the building.

After approaching a university executive about her experiences, it was suggested to her that the Macquarie International staff member was uncomfortable with students, as he did not usually work in a role that involved meeting with students face-to-face.

Ultimately, Shen says was told that her situation was just “tough luck”.

“I went to Campus Wellbeing to try and speak with a student advocate. I was told that I do potentially have a case, but… the appointment would take weeks to get. When I asked about the formal complaint process and how long it would take, I was basically told that it’s a complex process, and who knows how long it’s going to take.”

As a result of stress caused, Shen went to the GP on the Friday night with complaints of stomach pains. Saturday afternoon she was rushed to ER, and remained there until Sunday morning. She was not able to leave for exchange on Monday.

While the situation was eventually resolved after Shen’s visit to ER and she was able to finally depart for Thailand, she admits that her position as a Student Representative played an important role.

“The first time I went to student advocacy, I went in as a normal student and I was told that it would take weeks to get an appointment. But when I complained using my role as University Council rep and as somebody on the SRC, I was immediately able to get an appointment.

And so that’s my question – where’s the support for the students, students who aren’t fortunate enough to be in my position?”

Shen believes her hospitalisation and the threat to the Macquarie brand is what spurred the university to finally provide her with support.

‘I think that the fact that I was hospitalised, and that I’m also a student representative, poses threats to the Macquarie brand, and that’s why there was such swift action ... it’s really disappointing that the university runs more like a business than it does an institution that supports the education of its students.’

When asked what student services struggle with, Shen - who has worked in student connect herself - replied, “lack of funding, lack of staff, lack of a good system that supports students”.

Shen has reassured students that she will remain an active SRC and Council member while on exchange, joining meetings via Skype and continuing to submit and vote on motions.

A Macquarie University spokesperson has said: ‘The University takes all grievances and complaints raised by students seriously in accordance with the complaint procedure. We are in communication with the student in regards to this matter.’

by Tess Connery

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‘DEVASTATING’ & ‘IRRESPONSIBLE’ MACQUARIE’S PLANS FOR PRIVATE MEDICAL SCHOOL S L A M M E D B Y T O P M E D I C A L B O D I ES

Macquarie University’s plans to open a private medical school for full fee-paying students, announced in early August, have come under fire from a number of top medical organisations including the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Medical Students Association.

Macquarie’s Vice-Chancellor, Bruce Dowton, said that the school would be modelled on US academic health centres such as John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

The University has 60 students enrolled to begin their studies in 2018. The four year medical degree, which launched on August 7th, will involve five months of clinical training in the Hyderabad Apollo Hospital, India, in the third year for clinical experience. This will be the only medical degree in Australia to include a mandatory period of international study.

By offering the medical degree as a private full-fee paying degree, Macquarie will also be the only public University that doesn’t receive government funding for medicine.

The most prominent concern is that the construction of private medical schools will exacerbate the shortage of medical internships, which is already a major concern for many people studying within the field.

After completing an undergraduate

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medical degree, graduates will have to undertake a year’s worth of work experience as either an intern or a Postgraduate Year 1 Doctor. This year of work experience is a prerequisite to receiving a general medical registration, and you cannot become a doctor without it. As a result, the limited internship places are highly competitive.

One particularly damaging side effect of this competition for placements is that it may push international students out of the industry. By adding private medical students into the pool of domestic students that the government has already promised to find places for, international students will find themselves with even less available placements.

Grapeshot spoke to Ashna Basu, Student Councillor for the Australian Medical Association and President of the New South Wales Medical Students’ Council.

“We don’t need more medical students.

It’s quite irresponsible in a workforce that’s already burdened with too many students and too many graduates to put more people into that system, because they will require more internship spots that we already really don’t have.”

The move will also place pressure on students from a lower socio-economic

background. By attending a private medical school, students will be paying in excess of $250,000 for their degree, without any HECS or HELP assistance.

For 2018 enrolments, domestic students will be charged $64,000 per year, and $70,000 per year for international students. In total, this degree will cost domestic students $256,000, and $280,000 for international students. This makes Macquarie’s medical degree the second most expensive medical degree in the country, seconded only by Bond University’s $361,872 course fee.

This is a price that is not feasible for most would-be students.

Rob Thomas, President of the Australian Medical Students’ Association, told Grapeshot: “With any proposed full fee spots, we think that’s really unbalanced and unfair in terms of admission to medical school – and particularly, it disenfranchises and encourages this unequal representation of different backgrounds in medical school, and makes it easier essentially to get into medical school if you’re from a higher socio-economic background, which we really don’t agree with,” said Thomas.

“If medical student numbers were to increase substantially, a lot of people would be paying a lot to go to medical school, and we’re talking in excess of two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars … Thinking that people could have these degrees and then essentially be told at the other end that they won’t be getting a job and that they won’t be contributing to the Australian health system, it’s pretty devastating and it’s really irresponsible of some of the universities,” he continued.

involved in travelling to interviews and sitting prerequisite tests such as the UMAT (Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test) or GAMSAT (Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test).

In 2008, the Australian Government banned universities from offering undergraduate full-fee places to domestic students enrolling in public universities.

Currently, the only universities exempt from this ban are the University of Melbourne, the University of Notre Dame Australia and Flinders University, who are each permitted to offer a capped number of full-fee places.

Postgraduate positions, however, are not covered by this ban. This has created a loophole, and increasingly, universities Australia-wide are replacing their undergraduate medical courses with Masters-level medical degrees.

Grapeshot originally contacted the university for comment on July 28th. A University spokesperson replied simply that: “Macquarie University does not currently offer a medical degree”.

While this was true at the time, the Macquarie medical degree was announced a few days later on Aug 7.

Grapeshot re-approached the University for comment, and was sent through a media release in place of an updated statement.

By Tess Connery

The medical workforce in Australia has historically tended to be made up of people from higher socio-economic backgrounds. There is a high cost

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NEXT IN LINE

J O R D O N S T EE L E - J O H N O N YOUTH POLITICS, OCCUPYING THE I N T E R SE C T I O N , A N D R E P L A C I N G SCOTT LUDLAM

When Deputy Greens leader, Scott Ludlam, resigned earlier this year over his dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship, he left rather large shoes to fill. Ludlam had served The Greens since his initial election in 2007, and was one of the most recognisable faces in the party. He’d worked tirelessly on numerous issues such as campaigning against uranium mining and nuclear weapons, support for Aboriginal land rights, recognition of climate change, and had a staunch opposition to internet censorship.

So who the hell is going to replace him?

Jordon Steele-John currently lives in Western Australia, and is studying politics via distance at Macquarie University. He first ran for the federal seat of Fremantle at eighteen years old, and now finds himself the most likely candidate to replace Ludlam.

Steele-John is 22, which means he’ll be the youngest senator Australia has ever had. He’s also a disability advocate, and uses a wheelchair due to mild cerebral palsy.

How did you get into politics to begin with?

My first political memory was when I was six years old, of the Tampa Crisis [where the Howard Government refused the entry of a Norweigan freighter carrying 433 refugees into Australian waters] in 2001 - so we’re going back a fair way there I guess. Although I was only six, so you don’t understand the kind of complex internal and external

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politics that surrounds it, I did kind of get that at the heart of the issue there were people asking for our help, and we were saying ‘no’. That made a big impact on me, even as a little kid, cause you’re always brought up to help people in need, you know what I mean? I’m not saying I was a kind of person who at six years old wanted to watch Question Time, but it stuck in the back of my mind as something that had an impact - and that combined with the fact that my family was definitely one that didn’t shy away from politics at the dinner table.

So once I’d done the regular ‘I wanna be an astronaut’, ‘I wanna be a paleontologist’ thought processes as a kid - I came out of that by my early teens - I understood that I wanted to make a positive difference in the world in some way. Being really inspired by current events of that time politically - Obama’s election in ‘08, Rudd’s election in ‘07 - seemed to be the kind of area where people were making significant changes to long-standing political orders through being involved. And that bundled up all together at the age of sixteen, when the Labor party proposed its Malaysia Solution, and refugees was something that I got a lot more passionate about. I just thought ‘no, I can’t be part of a party that would put its name to something like that, but I do think I want to get involved in the political process’, and I cast my mind out for a party that was talking about this issue I cared so much about with the kind of moral clarity that I thought

it deserved and warranted. I found The Greens and never really looked back.

You’re set to take over Scott Ludlam’s position now that he’s resigned. Up until now, what’s it been like working with Scott?

Oh, incredible. Scott is one of the most articulate and thoughtful contributors to the Australian political landscape, probably bar none in the last couple of decades. I’ve been a member for six years, and in that time he’s been a really great mentor, and example, and friend to me. So it’s been wonderful to work with him, and it’s a very sad time, a sad thing to have lost his contribution to politics. But whatever he does in the future, I know it’ll always be Greens tinted, and the work that he’s done lives beyond his political career. And he more than anybody would be at pains to ensure that we didn’t speak of him as though he died, because he’s still very much with us (laughs). But yeah. So he’s been an incredible person to get to know and to work with over the years.

You’re a huge advocate for disability rights, and for those who might not know, you’re a wheelchair user yourself. What sort of difference are you hoping to make in the Senate regarding disability rights?

I think that to be a young person and to be a person with a disability in contemporary Australia is really to occupy the intersection of some of our society’s most entrenched myths and most damaging preconceived ideas. It’s my experience, and I think it’s the experience of a lot of young people and folks with a disability, that these are so often the prisms through which our lives are viewed, and our rights are framed - particularly in political discourse.

And so one of the things I’m hoping - and excited - to do is to bring those lived experiences and those different perspectives into the institutions that are crafting such massive pieces of legislation and making such significant contributions to the discourse around those pieces of legislation. Because I think when we have diversity in that decision making process, we get good legislation.

Are there any other issues that you’re particularly passionate about, that you want to tackle once you get into the Senate?

Yeah, I come from the Lower-South Metropolitan Region of WA, and one of our long-term issues is youth unemployment. And I think that’s a challenge for young people across the board, living wherever you are in the country. You know, we’ve got a youth unemployment rate that is never less than double the national average, and that goes into the high twenties in many areas like where I come from.

so what I’m hoping to talk about in the weeks and months ahead is the way that we can tackle those kind of issues in concept. Because I think that we can do a lot, for instance, to address youth unemployment through a job-rich transition to the renewable economy. But I think it needs to be framed in a way that recognises and makes clear that these are policy shifts that need to be made so that our generation can enjoy the kind of lives and privileges that past generations have done.

So you’re going to be the youngest senator ever if you do go on to take Ludlam’s seat, is that daunting at all?

Yes! Yes it is. I think if I’m honest with you, Tess, if I answered that it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be the right person for the job. You’d want to be testing my head and finding somebody else to do it! A decision to take up a job like this is one that needs to be made after a period of careful internal reflection, because it is a massive responsibility - not just not just in the case of the day-to-day legislative aspects, and the necessarily hard nature of that kind of work. But also as somebody who will be, if you like, representative of such important communities. You have to kind of recognise that and consider whether you think you can do a job like that before you take it on. But I think that having worked in this space for six years, I’ve done a lot inside of politics, outside of politics, working in both of those fields, and I’m really looking forward to - as I said - to bringing that voice into the parliament.

And just finally, you’re studying politics at Macquarie via distance, how do you plan on balancing uni with parliament?

It’s an interesting question, I think never has a gap year been more warranted (laughs). I will definitely return to it, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time as a student at Macquarie. Particularly, if you know anybody who’s designed the online iLearn system for you guys, it is far superior to any of the online learning systems offered by various other universities that I’ve looked into - so good job there, guys. But yeah, I think I will balance that by maybe explaining to my tutors that I’m going to get a bit of on-the-ground experience now.

By Tess Connery

At the same time, other policy issues such as climate change is the one that is most on my radar, as well as housing affordability, really kind of rob us of our future. And

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SUE THE BASTARDS

M EE T T H E N I N E Y E A R O L D S U I N G H E R G O V E R N M E N T F O R C L I M A T E I N A C T I O N Ridhima Pandey is 9 years old.

She prefers pink over purple, probably dabbles in hopscotch, and is quite the stereotype of your everyday tween girl.

Oh and right, how remiss of me. She’s currently suing the Indian government for climate change inaction.

In an unprecedented move, the pint sized activist has staged an ecocentric war with big ticket bureaucracy, taking aim at the idea of ‘anthropocentricism’; the policy line that nature exists as a human resource reserved for our exploitation. In a move formidable enough to make us all collectively realise the comparative inadequacy of our clearly underachieving childhoods, the young girl filed a petition with the National Green Tribunal, saying the Indian government had failed to implement sufficient environment laws to combat the climate change issue.

The notion that young people are not merely compromised but endangered by climate change passivity is a timely one, as Trump’s official roll back of US policy cutting greenhouse gas emissions is accompanied by a withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. Whether its denialism or apathy, governments across the globe are inactive. Some, completely dormant. Others are trying to reverse previous climate change reform. Perhaps they are paralysed by a foreboding fear that conservative supporters will turn their back at voting booths, or perhaps they’re in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. But for Pandey, the reason is irrelevant. It’s the impact, that’s her concern: an impact she feels her generation will be most adversely affected by.

“My government has failed to take steps to regulate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing extreme climate conditions. This will impact both me and future generations,” the nine-year-old stated.

“My country has huge potential to reduce the use of fossil fuels and because of the government’s inaction, I approached the National Green Tribunal [to file the law suit].”

A court order for the government to prepare a carbon budget limiting carbon emissions was requested by the nine-year-old, as was the formulation of a national climate recovery plan. The reform agenda was composed with the

help of her green activist father. It severely aggravated the backlash over last January’s Greenpeace report, which estimated nearly 1.2 million Indians die each year due to high concentrations of airborne pollutants.

“That a young girl is doing so much to draw the government’s attention [to this issue] is something. We hope the case puts some pressure on the government to act,” said Rahul Choudhary, the lawyer representing Pandey.

Unsurprisingly, the Indian Environment Minister dismissed the Greenpeace report as ‘inconclusive’. Noting that there is “no data available to establish direct correlation-ship of death exclusively with air pollution,” the government’s invalidation of the issue here is thought to have incentivised Pandey to pursue her petition.

“As a young person [Pandey] is part of a class that amongst all Indians is most vulnerable to changes in climate, yet are not part of the decision making process.

This 52 page petition calls on the government to take effective, science-based action to reduce and minimise the adverse impacts of climate change,” the petition reads.

Though several laws do exist to protect India’s forests and improve air quality, it is thought that the implementation of environmental legislation is inadequate and fragmented, with economic growth often taking priority over environmental concerns.

Though a nine-year-old suing the government would seem a pretty singular occurrence, it seems this isn’t an isolated incident. Earlier this year, sixteen-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez sued the US government for climate change inaction, saying “I hope everything Trump stands for is going to push people to fight harder than ever to resist climate change inaction”.

An application to dismiss the case was turned down last year, with lawyers now intending to bring proceedings before the federal court in the coming months.

Though no clairvoyant or prophetic, I suspect that if government inaction doesn’t disappear, neither will these youth-driven lawsuits.

By Madison Thorne

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ACTING THE GOAT URSULA HUXTABLE ON THE COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL H I E R A R C H I ES O F G O A T S Over uni break I went on a road trip with my family to Broken Hill, and while the drive west was marked by stunning changing countryside, wild emus and plenty of roadkill, one thing that took us all by surprise was incredible number of goats, everywhere. My dad, who drives all over NSW as part of his job as a native grass expert, commented on the small groups and their foraging on dead-looking shrubs compared to the large groups of sheep he’d seen consuming grass. He applauded them on their hardiness, intelligence and general superiority to sheep (despite the detriment their existence in Australia has on native ecosystems, of course).

Dad’s opinion on the brain power of goats seems to be backed by recent research lead by Dr Ben Pitcher, Research Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie. With feral goats roaming red soil plains fresh in my mind, I was excited to learn that his team’s findings suggested that the cognitive abilities of goats were greater than previously thought. The study found that when a goat was presented with their stablemate and a less familiar herdmate and played a recording of one of their calls, it would look towards the individual who made the call significantly more often than when both of the goats were just herdmates. It’s basically the equivalent of someone locking you in a room with two other people, playing an audio recording of one of them and not letting you out until you said which one it was, without either of them speaking to you directly. Easy if one of them is your best friend, not so easy if they’re two people from class you never speak to.

“Goats and humans are probably using fundamentally similar methods to cross-modally recognise other individuals, that is a ‘mental image’ of an individual with pieces of information attached to it,” explains Dr Pitcher. “In goats we have shown that this image has both acoustic and visual information. It is likely that it has other information such as olfactory as well. Goats appear to be able to use these images to match information to known individuals and rapidly associate information about less

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well known individuals. This is probably similar but more basic than schemas in humans, although there is a growing body of evidence that certain species can understand concepts and apply them across situations.”

While goats evidently haven’t reached the point of giving each other names (that we know of!), being able to tell your best mate from individuals you see less regularly is advantageous, whether you can speak or not. “The goat ancestor at some stage evolved in an environment where living in a group and being able to recognise the members of that group made them more successful at raising young than individuals that couldn’t recognise group members as well. This may have made them more successful at finding food, avoiding predators or fighting less with conspecifics [members of the same species].”

So what happens when these capable goat-brains come together?

According to Dr Pitcher, “Wild goat societies are typically fission-fusion societies. The goats will usually form large herds overnight, potentially to reduce predation risk, and will disperse in smaller groups during the day to forage.

Herds also tend to have a hierarchy, with more and less dominant individuals. That means goats will have some individuals that they know well and tend to associate with most of the time, and others that they see less often and don’t know as well. Recognising who is a friend or ally versus who isn’t allows goats to avoid fights, seek refuge in an alliance, or hang out with a goat who knows where the tastiest trees are.”

This made a lot of sense to me after making the trek from the coast to Broken Hill; when we reached the arid country around lunchtime we mostly saw small groups foraging on the roadside, but as it got closer to evening we started spotting much larger groups further away.

The idea of this basic society brought to my mind, perhaps erroneously, the Machiavellian or Social Brain hypothesis which, as Dr Pitcher explains, “suggests that large brains,

particularly in primates, evolved to handle the cognitive demands of complex societies.”

This theory basically states that social species like humans need to have bigger, and therefore smarter, brains in order to keep tabs on other people we interact with in order to manipulate and move up the social hierarchy. As Dr Pitcher points out, “Our research doesn’t address the evolution of brain size directly, but what it does do is examine the cognitive abilities of species that aren’t traditionally considered to be brainy. What we are finding is that basic forms of many of the traits proposed as being important for complex sociality, such as complex recognition, long-term memory and the ability to recognise emotions, exist in a wider range of species than once thought.”

The increasing recognition of the mental capacity of non-human animals raises some interesting questions about the housing and treatment of domestic species. Nowadays many people are familiar with the importance of enclosure design at zoos to ensure exotic species can express their natural behaviours, but in general less care is taken when considering animals who may end up on our plates.

requirements of these species we can improve husbandry and housing methods so that we are providing animals with what they need. For example, through understanding the social structure in goats we could design yards and herd compositions that allow goats to express natural social dynamics and behaviours.”

The work of Dr Pitcher and his team is just another piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how our behaviour fit into the rest of the animal kingdom. “The aim of this research is really to understand how animals perceive and process information about the world around them. We hope to gain insights into how animals think and learn about other individuals, how this has evolved, and how it has influenced the evolution of other traits such as communication and sensory systems.”

For further information, check out Dr Pitcher’s paper ‘Cross-modal recognition of familiar conspecifics in goats’, co-authored with Elodie Briefer, Luigi Baciadonna, and Alan McElligott, published in Royal Society Open Science.

by Ursula Huxtable

When asked what effect these findings might have on animal welfare, Dr Pitcher states “Our research into cognition in livestock species can contribute to how we manage these species ethically to ensure good welfare outcomes. By better understanding the cognitive and social

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This was an article about sexual assault and harassment on campus.

It was blocked by the university.

Photo by Gabrielle Van Der Deijl.

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TREE-HUGGING TYCOON

O N T R Y I N G T O R E C O N C I L E Y O U R E C O N O M I C S D E G R EE W I T H P R O G R ESS I V E V A L U ES We all have this model version of our adult self. That proper ‘adult’, who will pay all their bills on time, use pegs when they hang their washing and go to the gym regularly.

We constantly update the age that classifies us as this adult. Maybe it’s 25, maybe it’s 30 – but guaranteed, we’re not there yet.

I hail from hippie country. I am an environmentalist, a vegetarian and a product of my white-collar, bohemian parents. I’m into scented candles and admire the yogi lifestyle.

I am also an economics and finance student, ripe and rearing to begin a career in the investment banking ballpark.

In my head, adult-Maggie lives on a self-sustaining farm, or is hopping from nomadically from country to country every other week. But this point in my life, it seems no age hurdle can reconcile my prefabricated ‘adult Maggie’ with my current self, pursuing a corporate, cash-laden career. So, am I hypocrite?

Don’t get me wrong, I put myself in this position. I actively made decisions that were the best for me at the time and this is where I have found myself. More importantly, I completely enjoy and have aptitude for what I’m doing.

Nevertheless, we’ve all seen Wolf of Wall Street, so there’s no need to explain why ‘adult Maggie’ does not fit here. It’s like a journalism student who appreciates censorship. Or a doctor who believes in homeopathy. Fundamentally, it’s just wrong.

This line seems not so fine to my immediate family. As previously mentioned, my parents are both white collar workers and bohemian beach-siders – typically mutually exclusive ways of life. But nonetheless, they have managed to reconcile the two lifestyles, and find happiness in our small community town. I think this is partly due to my mother, the obsessive-compulsive ‘fengshui-er’, who insists on the importance of having certain materials in certain life sectors. Keep your iron-fist in your office and your wooden shrine in your bedroom.

This simple analogy got me thinking about that classic work/personal life separation they talk about in movies.

Consider the typical vegan counter-argument: ‘You can never save all the animals’. Or the ‘my diet starts on Monday’ mentality – the idea that once you have eaten one Krispy Kreme you cannot possibly contribute positively to your health for the remainder of the day, so may as well

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gorge on chips. Imagine telling a fireman not to bother rushing into a burning building because they can never save everyone from the fire. Imagine telling Leo he couldn’t fit on your floating debris to save himself from freezing to death (goddammit, Rose) … these analogies are getting away with me. Basically: life doesn’t have to be ‘all or nothing.’

In the end, the important thing is happiness (gag, sorry).

In my case, I know that putting my happiness before this two-dimensional vision of ‘adult Maggie’ is the only way to resolve this conflict. I will still abstain from animal agriculture, I will still vote politically according to my social and environmental values, and I will simultaneously enjoy the mathematics of an economics degree. Despite the social constructs telling me that a career defines a life, it’s important for my sanity that I let other things define it too.

I’ve had this conversation with people who know me and people who do not. I’ve had this conversation hypothetically and I’ve had it in tears. No matter the outcome of such discussions, this kind of inner debate can only be resolved through self-determination. How you reconcile your career, your choices and your idea of adulthood is – true to form – something you have to figure out as an adult.

by Maggie McGinley

REGULARS

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PLANT-POWERED POP Montaigne, the ARIA award-winning singer songwriter who once took to stage wearing an outfit made entirely of abandoned Groovin the Moo wristbands, shares her best vegan recipe and tells us about her musical and literary inspirations. She’s due to perform by the lake as a headliner for RE:Conception on Sept 15!

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How long have you been vegan, and what’s your motivation for ditching animal-derived foods?

I’ve been vegan for about four years now. Animal agriculture isn’t good for the planet, and consider myself opposed to violence of all kinds and don’t feel very good about partaking in the systematic slaughter and torture of animals for consumption. I understand that it had its place in the past, and still in some more isolated cultures, but it’s not necessary in the Western world.

In ‘Because I Love You’, the salad line is about being pressured out of your veganism for a while; how did that happen?

My ex-boyfriend regularly mocked me about being vegan with all the narrow “but where’s your protein bro”-esque slogans with which you can arm yourself. Towards the end of our relationship, I was at his place a lot. He’s Orthodox Jewish and lived with his grandmother and I couldn’t bring anything in because: 1. His grandmother didn’t know we were together (none of his family did, except for his younger, non-religious brother) 2. She didn’t know that I was staying there regularly and 3. Kosher law.

So I couldn’t bring anything into the house. What WAS available to me was peanut butter and jam sandwiches. The combination of limited options and pressure from him made me crack. At the time I think I used reasons of convenience (money, options etc.) but veganism can be very cheap and options abundant. Most of it was his bullying. I imagine it would be very hard to maintain around people who aren’t supportive - fortunately the people in my life are, or are at least neutral about it. I like to consider myself as being steadfast in my convictions, but my ex-boyfriend was a bit of a manipulative sociopath, and there were many things I did that I now never will because…well who really knows why?

Any advice for people seeking to go fully plant-powered?

Start slow, start simple. Don’t go cold turkey immediately, you’ll burnout real quickly. Figure out how to get all the nutrients you need first. You don’t want to be getting sick.

There are heaps of resources online, groups on Facebook, fora elsewhere. Once you’ve figured out how to cook stuff that’s nutritious and delicious (and easy), then start to get a little fancy. There are HEAPS of vegan substitute products out there, not all are good, but it’s great fun trying them all out and figuring out which are for you. And I think what KEEPS you vegan is educating yourself on the impact of animal agriculture. Watching all the documentaries out there is real great. Watching Cowspiracy is what returned me to veganism. I can’t handle violence so I haven’t watched Earthlings or any of those really graphic ones, but there are a bunch of great docos that are really surprising and informative without the intense violence.

And finally, involve yourself in the community! Memes are really fun! Not all of them are good (you’ll find that there are some pretty unhip to it vegans out there), but when you find your peeps, you’ll wanna stay with your peeps. I’m not

particularly entrenched in any online group but I do like some vegan food and meme pages and it helps you feel normal, if that’s what you need.

TL;DR get vegucated and take baby steps.

What’s the first quote from your namesake, Michel de Montaigne, that springs to mind?

A few spring at once, but I’ll just give one: “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.”

You’ve been reading Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – what do you think? Are there any literary influences that had an effect on the writing of your album?

I love it! It’s scary and dark and harrowing and weird and I love it. I really like surrealism/magical realism. I loved Kafka On The Shore for the same reason. I like that it intimates purpose and meaning, rather than spelling it out. Makes it possible to project your own proclivities and personal experiences upon the scene painted for you.

Yeats is alluded to in Glorious Heights (‘Easter, 1916’). I reference video games a lot, namely Kingdom Hearts.

Last year when you spoke at Women of Letters, why did you choose to write on Arcade Fire’s ‘No Cars Go’?

It never fails to fill me with a sense of cosmic significance.

It imbues some spiritual sort of beauty into my reality whenever I hear it. It’s a stirring expression of the liminal space between dichotomies like life and death, light and dark, dreams and reality, and it’s that space that is my life’s mission to access and float in for the fleeting moments in which they necessarily appear. And the time in my life I first heard it, and the format in which it was heard, was probably very pivotal to my connection to it.

Best Aussie songs spinning on your playlists right now?

D.D.Dumbo’s whole record Utopia Defeated, the new Gang of Youths tracks, ‘We Used To’ by Vera Blue. I’m not very up to date on new releases at the moment because I don’t think I’ve listened to anything else but Arcade Fire for quite a while…

Best vegan eats in Sydney?

Golden Lotus Vegan in Newtown, The Green Lion in Rozelle, MAKER in Petersham, Bodhi at the Park in Sydney CBD, Yulli’s in Surry Hills, and the best açai bowl I’ve had yet is from Açai Brothers which have franchises around Sydney.

Can you share with us one of your fave crowd-pleasing (or just self-pleasing) recipes?

Mushrooms, chickpeas, baby spinach and cherry tomatoes sautéed in a mix of smoked paprika, ground cumin, salt, pepper, a touch of turmeric, dressed with watered down hummus + lemon juice, dill, alongside some roasted sweet potato wedges and guacamole.

A party in your mouth.

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THE REAL IBISES OF MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY T H E G R A P ES H O T T EA M I N T E R V I E W S M E M B E R S O F T H E M O S T M I SU N D E R S T O O D A N D S T A N K Y B I R D S P E C I ES O N C A M P US

IAN

Ian divides his days between strutting the main courtyard and digging through the JR Richards bins out the back of the hub to make ends meet. “It’s hard you know,” he said, inexplicably speaking from that hooked bill of his.

“Occasionally I’ll get like, a half watermelon from Boost, or an abandoned Crunch platter, and those are the days that really remind me why I’m doing this.”

Ian’s stalking ground was once limited to the main courtyard out the front of the hub. He says his main tactic was to hang around people slightly too close and slightly too long, encouraging them to move on from their food before finishing it. “It was a tough life, but if I kept the honking down, people mostly left me alone. That was before I found this sweet little spot, though.”

Ian’s ‘sweet spot’ is the low-foot-traffic alleyway populated solely by the industrial waste bins for the university hub. “I was starting to get old, I’m in my teens now, you know, and I figured I ought to settle down somewhere. See that – ?” He nods over the other side of a carpark to a weirdly pungent swampy area this interviewer had never noticed before, “that right there is where I’m going to raise my family.”

“My grandma used to tell me about the days we ate nothing but live crayfish and mussels from the muddy, pungent banks of the Macquarie Marshes.” Ian says looking off into the middle-distance with his terrifyingly deep, beady eyes. “The way she described it was like some kind of paradise.”

Ian ruffles his feathers lightly, pushing the scent of rotting garbage towards me in an almost unbearable wave. When asked why he chooses to raise his kids on a University campus as opposed to, say, a wetland, Ian becomes irritated, “What wetlands? You seen a bloody wetland lately, lady?”

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IRENE

Irene was just two years old when she was kicked out of home. “Things just weren’t working out, you know,” she says. “I had to leave.” Displaced, hungry and confused, Irene headed east, approximately 700 kilometers, finding refuge in a Bunnings carpark in Blacktown, Sydney. There, she scavenged for dropped sausages and sodden bread crusts leftover from Saturday sausage-sizzles. Life was tough for the pubescent bird (ibises reach sexual maturity at the age of three).

“You grow up fast,” says Irene pensively. “It definitely leaves its mark on you.”

Now 21, Irene spends most of her time on the lakeside of the Macquarie University campus. Given that the uni was built directly on top of the Mars Creek wetland, it feels somewhat close to home. A key difference, Irene insists, is the food. “I was on a protein-rich paleo diet in the marshes,” she says, shaking her bill.

“But now all I’ve got is cold chips and the occasional bit of brioche.

So carb-y.”

“I guess, I just feel misunderstood,” she muses, staring at her reflection in the muddy waters of the lake. “Nobody really gets me.”

Her beady eyes are black, soulless.

Despite her grievances with the location, and the ongoing resonances of childhood trauma, Irene does admit to taking grim pleasure in pooing on students from the trees hanging over the pedestrian crossing on University Avenue.

“Yeah, I’d say I’m a pretty good aim by now.”

IRVING

“Ibis?” Irving the ubar Ibis takes a drag from a crumpled and slightly damp cigarette, and exhales. “I haven’t heard that in a dog’s age.

It’s ‘bin chicken’ now. Or trash rat. Bin-juice guzzling shit. Take your bloody pick. I had a life, you know. Wife. Kids. Job as a fisherman.

You people took it all away.” His beak snaps for emphasis, rupturing his already weakened cigarette. “Shitting fuck!” he yells, drawing attention from students enjoying a break from class. Irving is two and a half schooners down from drinks left on tables, and he’s getting aggressive.

A few more schooners and a cold burger later, Irving calms down. “My wife left me not long after the Apocalypse. She didn’t like who I’d become. Said it wasn’t the man she’d married.” He turns to the table behind him and yanks a sandwich out of a girl’s hand, swallowing it in two bites.

Ignoring the commotion behind him, he returns to me and says, “what you humans don’t get is that you do what it takes to survive. Peck a baby in the face for its juice box. Don’t ever wash so people won’t come near you. ‘I don’t know who you are anymore’ she said. I’d become a survivor.”

Irving has a determined look in his beady eyes. “I haven’t seen her since. Maybe she and Irving Jr died. Maybe they’re still going.

Sometimes I wake up and think I’m still next to her. I can smell her, feel her warmth, her love. Then the fog fades and I’m in a dumpster with a used condom over my eyes. Reality hits me like a hangover and all I know is the truth: she’s gone, and I’m not.”

A fork flies from nowhere and hits Irving in the head. “Fuck off, bin chicken!” taunts a student. Irving doesn’t appear to react, but from the corner of his beady eye, a tear begins to form.

Art by James Booth

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ILLUSTRATED: WILDLIFE ON CAMPUS RED FROG

Species: Allenius Lollius Habitat: Squished into the concrete at a Ubar party.

Age: Months past the wholesale used-by date.

Diet: It’s a little-known fact that these critters literally eat the alcohol right out of your bloodstream. Miraculous.

Temperament: Way too enthusiastic.

COKED-UP CRICKETS

Species: A coke-head variety of the Gryllidae family Habitat: Trapped in the science department, being subjected to mind-altering drug torture at regular intervals for the purpose of scientific study.

Age: A very trippy ninety days Diet: Lethal amounts of cocaine, some grains, more cocaine.

Temperament: Fucking party insects.

D U C K Z I LLA

Species: Not-so-distant relative of the Bullockornis Planei, a massive two-and-half meter duck dinosaur that once roamed Australia, also known as the Demon-Duck Of Doom or Thunderbird to his mates.

Habitat: The lawn near the lake, but also not actually in this realm. He appears when summoned by the sounds of peaceful picnicking.

Age: His species dates back to the Middle Miocene period.

None have been able to prove that he was born any more recent than this.

Diet: The souls of those who drunkenly run into the lake after a Ubar night.

Temperament: Omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

All hail our benevolent duck overlord.

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F R A N K T H E B EA R

Species: Inexplicably taxidermied Kodiak bear, dead of natural causes.

Habitat: E7B Age: 28 (alive), 39 (dead) Diet: Primarily feasts on the startled fear of new students who weren’t prepared for the presence of a bear in a classroom building. Their muffled screams are converted into an energy source a la Monsters Inc. Temperament: Largely docile on account of being dead.

BRUCE THE SHARK

Species: Port Jackson shark (don’t freak out, he’s not like, shark-shark sized. Your current boat size is adequate) Habitat: The MQ bio science building.

Age: like, 12.

Diet: YOU! WATCH OUT! Just kidding, they feed him lil fishies.

Temperament: Actually, one of the most recent scientific studies conducted at MQU involved understanding the individual personalities of sharks. This particular dude is a Virgo ENFP with turbulent tendencies, and he thinks he’s a Samantha but his friends will tell you he’s a Carrie.

Art by Daniel Lim

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C H ALLE N GE :

EATING A CAN OF WORMS “Slimy yet satisfying” – Simba I don’t consider myself a squeamish person. When I think about it, nothing phases me, needles are fine, gore is all well and good, and I even watched that scene from 127 Hours without feeling a thing. And I like bugs, in theory. In The Lion King, grubs looked like lolly snakes and if you cracked open a beetle, the guts looked like that sugary goo inside Gummy Bursts. In reality, crickets are a bitch to work with and mealworms are slimy in the least satisfying sense.

When I set out on this challenge, I had my eye on this little company in Sydney that sells edible insects in the form of like, ant salt, and chocolate crickets, and mealworm flour. This would have been so much easier.

They’re crushed into powders, stirred through chocolate and baked into cookies and so while the jar may say ‘ants’, it truly does not logically seem like the jar would be full of ants – and so, functionally, it would not be

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full of ants. I’m rather adept at this kind of delusional reasoning, it’s what has gotten me through most of my challenges thus far. However, this plan fell through. And that’s how I found myself paying for two containers of live crickets and a box of mealworms from my local pet shop.

While waiting for my card to process, the pet shop lady asked me ‘what do you have?’

I, having forgotten to google ‘what eats crickets?’ before walking into the store said, ‘what?’

She said, ‘what pet do you have?’

I said ‘yes.’ and walked out with my bugs.

Thus began the cringe that would last me through this whole challenge.

Working off a Vice article (and only a Vice article) I killed the crickets by putting them in the freezer. Solid,

cold, and dead, I pulled them out after an hour and was about to set out pulling off their legs when I discovered I could not physically touch them. I would bring my fingers close to their little dead bodies and then a spasm of revulsion would stop my hand before I could get closer than an inch. This was not a good sign, so early in the game.

My solution to this problem was to hold out my cupped hands, close my eyes, and ask a friend to drop a few into my palm. The ‘ripping off the band-aid’ approach. Though both of us were concerned I would simply throw the bugs right back in my friend’s face, I held back. After a few deep breaths I was able to stabilise myself before working quickly to divest the buggies of their legs before the horror kicked back in.

The next step was to boil them for a few minutes, I guess for sanitary purposes. Another bad sign arose when I, and ultimately the rest of my building, discovered that boiling crickets creates an overwhelmingly fishy smell. After this, I chucked them in the oven at like 250 degrees to burn to a fucking unrecognisable crisp, which calmed my nerves somewhat. For those following along at home, this takes anywhere from forty-five minutes to three hours depending on how much you hate bugs.

As it turns out, I found that it’s much easier to eat bugs than to touch them. I had a few worms and crickets fresh out of the oven for the snapchat story, but the rest I stirred into melted chocolate and baked into some biscuits. And although, like, I would have preferred to just eat normal, bug-less chocolate and cookies, they just kinda tasted like almonds.

Given more time, I would have done something more extravagant with the bugs, made them into a meal that really showcased their flavour or something. Over 3000 ethnic groups all over the world practice entomophagy (a term I’m glad I didn’t know before eating bugs because it somehow makes everything worse). Western culture is one of the very few cultures on earth that wants nothing to do with bugs, which is one of the weirder things you can fault Western culture with.

Despite this, Westerners actually eat a whole bunch more insects than they think they do. If you ever feel like a mildly horrifying read, look up ‘Australian Pulse Standards 2015’ and you can peruse how many insects are allowed for Australian grain produce to still be considered ‘food grade’.

Harvested chickpeas, for example are allowed a maximum of 15 whole or fragmented field insects and 2 grasshoppers or locusts per 200g of produce. Think about that with your hummus.

Don’t freak out though, if anything that extra grasshopper is doing a whole lot more to improve the nutritional value of your hummus than the corn chip you’re dipping into it.

Grasshoppers, mealworms, crickets, and locusts are all excellent sources of protein. Many see them as the future

of food for an increasingly overpopulated planet. Pound for pound, crickets have more protein than chicken, and they certainly don’t take up as much space. In fact, bugs provide enough nutrition that it is actually possible Simba, as a growing lion, could survive on Timon and Pumbaa’s diet of brightly coloured grubs through his cub-years without eating any stray meerkats. He’d have to eat a minimum of six every minute, though, so Timon’s not totally in the clear.

Aside from the nutritional benefits, a quick google will find you article upon article about the economic and environmental sustainability of bugs. Pest harvesting has long been used as an alternative option to pesticide for farmers in Mexico. When Western researchers discovered the irony in using purchased chemicals to destroy ‘pests’ rich in 75% animal protein to save crops which contained no more than 14% plant protein, they began a study to test just what the rest of the world was missing out on. While some of the research was oversimplified, not taking into account, for instance, the economic value of the crops over the pests, the farmers who participated in the study were able to significantly increase their income through the dual source of produce.

Bugs are lucrative. I payed a total of $15 for probably somewhere in the realm of 200g of bugs. Of course, this was pet store prices, but even wholesale, insects are similar in price to beef. Apparently locusts in particular are priced like caviar, which, as someone who has distinct memories of sprinting through a paddock during a locust plague, seems just bizarre. When prices are this high, and demand is this low, is bug farming really where the future is headed?

As it turns out, the insect industry’s reputation for being highly environmentally and economically efficient is, in actual fact, a little bit too optimistic. The current methods for raising and harvesting bugs actually require more manual labour and food resources than, say, poultry. While the bugs I ate had been raised on sawdust, the ones used for the kinds of tests that spit back stats like ‘35% protein conversion rate’ require a diet of corn, soy, and grain-based feed. Essentially the stuff you could just cook and eat for yourself instead of feeding it to crickets for a couple of weeks.

Of course, these are issues that are probably easily solved by the streamlined innovation of capitalist production in the free market, and so I have no doubt that we’ll be downing cricket caviar and worm wine in our futuristic sky-bars.

But, at the moment, bugs aren’t quite the perfect answer everyone seems to think they are. And it’s not just because they’re all slimy and squirmy. Though it is, I can now assure you, a definite factor.

by Nikita Jones

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WORM SEX IT’S WEIRDER THAN YOU THINK

Content warning: may contain the literal word ‘moist’.

USE YOUR HEAD

Not to kinkshame Mother Nature, but reproduction in the animal kingdom is WILD. From the corkscrew-shaped penis of male ducks to the honey bee’s exploding genitals; the dynamic evolution of life on earth has seen the rise of copulation that is both creative and terrifying. However, none take on this challenge of freakily producing offspring more vivaciously than the humble worm.

Some flatworms decide to skip the whole process altogether and in an act of horrifying self love, literally have sex with their own head. The transparent flatworm, Macrostomum hystrix has female organs towards their cephalic (head) region, and male sperm-producing organs towards the tail. In a study from the University of Basel, researchers found that isolated flatworms, after a period of time, would end up with more sperm in their head, compared to those kept in groups. This placement suggests the worms had used their penis to puncture their own head and inject sperm. While some hermaphrodites are known to be able to self-fertilize, this convoluted mechanism is thought to have occurred as there is no internal linkage between the flatworms’ male and female sex organs. Super effective. Super incestuous.

Worms are a complex grouping of many distantly related animals that typically have a long cylindrical body without limbs and are found in marine and terrestrial environments.

They vary in size: from microscopic, to over 50 metres (Lineus longissimus). Worms reproduce asexually and sexually, and are often hermaphroditic (presenting both male and female associated sex characteristics). Asexual reproduction largely takes the form of fragmentation and budding, where a genetically identical clone is regenerated from a part of the body that has been split off. Scientists are currently studying planarian (a type of flatworm) regeneration with the aim of uncovering how to regenerate human tissues and cells, such as insulin-producing or nerve cells!

YOU GOTTA FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT Flatworms are part of the phylum Platyhelminthes, which includes parasitic tapeworms and flukes. Being hermaphroditic, flatworms face the difficult question of which parental role to undertake. And let’s be honest – being a mum is tough. Propagating the species is a much larger investment for females than males in most species. Whilst males have a large quantity of gametes in store to spread their genes to one or multiple partners, females must create and incubate eggs and, depending on the species, spend a significantly longer time caring for offspring. Flatworms deal with this sensitive and delicate issue by trying to stab the other with their needle-like penis spicule, with the first to inseminate winning. Known as traumatic insemination, or ‘penis fencing’, this duel of the fates can last up to one hour, with flatworms often stabbed multiple times from the double-headed penis of its opponent. The ‘loser’ then immediately begins to search for food to make up the resources required for their new maternal position.

DOWN TO EARTH The phylum ‘Annelida’ includes segmented worms and leeches, and have a higher number of structures for locomotion compared to flatworms. For example, earthworms have five hearts - probably because they need to calm down with their reproductive strategy.

Two adults will align in opposite directions just like those two fabled numbers, and latch onto each other using hair-like setae for three whole hours. Each worm produces sperm and eggs and secretes them through their respective pores (seminal vessels and receptacles). The ‘collar’ around an earthworm (the clitellum) produces a mucus ring which travels up the length of the worm, picks up the eggs then the sperm like the worst Uber ride of your life. This mucus collar passes over the worm’s head and forms a hardened cocoon where tiny adults will emerge as earthworms lack a larval stage. It’s like if you took off your sweater, left it for a few weeks, and tiny adults came out - fully equipped with an opal card and a tax return. That’s how the earthworm does it.

Take from this what you will, and be careful when next walking in the rain - you now have an idea as to the absolute ordeal that your friendly neighborhood worms, slugs and snails have gone through.

by Freya Wadlow

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IT’S EASY BEING GREEN

M A C Q UA R I E U N I ’ S SUS T A I N A B I L I T Y S Q UA D S H A R E T H E I R T O P 5 T I P S O N R E D U C I N G Y O U R E C O L O G I C AL F O O T P R I N T O N C A M P US

BYOC CAMPAIGN Launching this semester is the Bring Your Own Cup (BYOC) Campaign, encouraging students to opt for reusable coffee cups instead of single use cups. Australians alone use approximately 1 billion disposable coffee cups each year, estimated to be the second largest contributor to litter waste after plastic bottles. So, let’s ditch this bad habit and grab your own Keep Cup to receive a 30 cent discount on your coffee at all Campus Life coffee shops.

Also, if you take a selfie with your Keep Cup and hashtag #MyMQ and #Muglife, you enter the chance to win a DOZEN CUPCAKES, with 10 winners throughout semester.

Looking for a Keep Cup or have your own already?

Macquarie University Sustainability Squad is having three SustainabiliTEA events this semester, where free tea and coffee will be given out if you bring your own cup. There will be discounted Keep Cups for sale as well if you don’t already own one.

TRANSPORT Sick of struggling to find a parking spot on campus, worrying about how you will ever make it to your 9am lecture on time? Are you worried about the upcoming train station closure? Well transport gods be praised, there is an alternative. Jump onto Co-Hop, a ride sharing app linking you to people in your area. This provides an alternative, more sustainable way to get to and from campus, and once signed up, the app can help you find people in and around your area who have similar routes to uni where you can link up with them for a rideshare.

HARVEST HUB We all know that $2 ramen noodles are basically gods gift to students. But if we trace back the environmental km’s on those styrofoam cups of high sodium goodness we’re not just overlooking our own physical health, but the health of Australia’s fresh produce industry. Harvest Hub is a social enterprise providing fresh, seasonal produce & groceries to local communities across Sydney, with most of the produce grown or manufactured in the Sydney area. The Sustainability Squad, along with Harvest Hub, is working on creating a $10 student bag filled with a week’s worth of

fruit and veg, starting in the next few weeks. $10! That’s only five ramen noodle cups, or two bottles of wine. If you’re interested in fresh, in-season, local produce that supports local farmers, and will stave off scurvy, contact the Sustainability Squad through Facebook or Macsync to register your interest: harvesthub.com.au.

SAY NO TO PLASTIC This tip is probably the easiest to implement in your daily life, as well as on campus. If we continue to consume plastic at our current rate there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050, which will make for a pretty depressing Nemo reboot. You can protect vulnerable ecosystems in a few simple ways; grab yourself a reusable cotton tote bag from MUSS, some beeswax eco wraps and your own cutlery from home and you will eliminate the need for single use, and even “biodegradable” plastic bags (technically, they aren’t biodegradable - they just disintegrate into tiny particles called nurdles which infiltrate their way into ecosystems and food chains), cling wrap and disposable cutlery.

GET IN THE KNOW There are a number of ways to get educated on environmental and sustainable issues, but during university it can be hard to stay informed on things outside of your studies. Luckily, there a number of apps tailored towards making environmental decisions and sustainable living easier. These range from ethical shopping (ShopEthical) and supporting brands that enforce sustainable palm oil initiatives (POI Scanner), to tips for recycling products (RecycleSmart) and reducing food waste (LoveYourLeftovers). Check out the following websites, and search your provider’s app store for more info: •

ethical.org.au/3.4.2

•

recyclesmart.com

•

carbontrack.com.au

•

oroeco.com

•

loveyourleftovers.nsw.gov.au

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

DRAGONS! The basic dichotomy in depictions of dragons is between the West and the East. Known as wyrms in Germany and Scandinavia, Western dragons tend to be fire-breathing, six-legged beasts who burn down villages, eat livestock, and generally ruin the life of whatever medieval peasantry has the bad luck to be situated near one. They’re maybe best-typified in the story of St. George and the Dragon — where a saint fights and kills a monstrous, fire-breathing beast after it is regularly given cows, and then children, and then the virginal daughter of the king, as tribute. In order to stop the death of the virginal princess, George slays the dragon after prayer, giving us one of our culture’s

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basic narrative archetypes, and the AFL’s St. George Illawarra team their mascot.

Rather than having wings and six legs, Eastern dragons tend to be four-legged, wingless but flying nature spirits who are often benevolent. The Chinese Dragon King for instance, Sìhǎi Lóngwáng, is actually made up of four dragons who watch over the seas, and the yellow dragon, Huánglóng, represents the source of the universe. Eastern dragons also slightly vary in terms of anatomy from region to region — in Korea, specifically, there’s quite a bit of mythical emphasis on the amount of toes that should be had.

Pop culture since World War II has usually combined the two depictions, but there is a tendency to depict lizard-shaped dragons as evil, beastly, and hellish, while serpentine dragons are wise, good, and of nature. Dragons are unusual, in that they’re so recurrent in our collective consciousness despite the complete lack of consensus as to what a dragon should look like. Let’s explore why certain pop culture dragons are depicted the way they are.

Slipping Into Something Scalier (Sleeping Beauty, 1959) “Now you shall deal with me, O prince, and all the powers of Hell!”

Sleeping Beauty’s dragon appears at the climax, where the witch Maleficent faces off with Prince Philip, over Aurora, the sleeping beauty — you understand how well it fits the mould of the tale of St. George. As the climactic battle plays out, Maleficent invokes hell and morphs into an enormous black dragon, breathing green fire. She and Philip try to kill one another for a while, before the dragon leads Philip to a cliff and, with some divine assistance in the form of fairies, Philip’s sword is enchanted before he throws it, killing Maleficent and allowing him to go off to wake the titular character.

There’s a lot going on here. The dragon is depicted as demonic, and a threat to a virgin bride. Also interesting is that the witch needs to transform at all. Perhaps it was ill-advised to depict a woman being physically fought - it’s interesting that there’s no dragon transformation in 2014’s Maleficent. Instead, Angelina Jolie transforms her crow familiar Diaval (references to Satan: check) into a dragon.

Maybe the classic Sleeping Beauty needed a bestial symbol of evil, impossible to sympathise with and receptive only to masculine violence, whereas Maleficent needed to keep her human - and therefore more sympathetic - appearance, perhaps in order to be more ‘complex’ and ‘edgy’.

Everyone’s Favourite Puppy-Lion-Dragon-Thing (The Neverending Story, 1984) “Never give up, and good luck will find you.”

Oh man, even writing down his name and watching clips of Falkor made me wanna nostalgia-watch The Neverending Story. The Neverending Story is based on one of those books that I always reread in the many sick days of my frail little childhood, and it’s about a bullied kid called Bastian who escapes his troubled life through reading books. He eventually comes to enter a fantasy world he’s reading about, where he meets Atreyu, a kid adventurer on a quest to stop the world from being enveloped by the Nothing, a mysterious, fog-shaped entity. Falkor is an example of a very Eastern dragon appearing in a Western movie — Falkor is a long, puppy-faced ‘luck dragon’ who is very wise. Lacking much fighting ability, Falkor has the power to bring good fortune to whoever meets him, including Atreyu, who has almost lost all hope of completing his quest before he comes across Falkor.

It’s hard to place Falkor mythologically: no amount of narrative theory will explain why he looks a bit like a dachshund. Anyone who’s read the book or seen the movie will recall The Neverending Story being unusually dark for a children’s story: scientists say that anyone who can watch the scene where Atreyu’s horse dies in the Swamp of Sadness without descending into tears is empirically dead inside. Falkor, though, is always good, always pure.

My guess is that he’s a representation of what troubled kids come to fantasy for: he’s a miraculous escape, a friend who is always there to help, and a being who is like a dream you can hold on to. More than that, though, he’s hope — what’s more important than that to a lonely child?

You Can’t Hug Your Children With Draconian Arms (Game Of Thrones, 2011-Present) (SPOILERS EVERYWHERE) “When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!”

As if I wasn’t going to mention the children of my Game Of Thrones problematic fave, Daenerys Targaryen. The dragons who return to the Known Worlds in the season one finale could tempt the analysis that they’re exactly as they seem: medieval monsters designed to allow the Khaleesi to very eventually conquer the Seven Kingdoms.

They’re certainly bestial, but also, there’s interesting gender politics here: Daenerys is often allowed to transgress the strictures of her gender because of her dragons, but at the apparent cost of her own fertility.

They’re also what starts to bring the magic back into the world — only once they appear do most of the more fantastical elements of the show, like the murderous shadow baby that kills Renly, start showing up.

While George R.R. Martin loves to subvert fantasy tropes, his dragons are fairly standard, except in the sheer complexity of their depiction. The dragons of Game Of Thrones allow us to have deep insights into their mother’s character: the two-sided coin of madness and glory the show often presents power as being given a form in the three beasts of the show, yet, at the same time, some of the most intimate moments of the series involve Dany and her dragons. There’s also the appeal of their modern parallel, which is generally agreed to be tactical nuclear armaments: Fitting with their deadly strength and history of being associated with enormous disasters like Summerhall and the long-ruined, once-glorious city of Valyria, it’ll be interesting to see how well the parallel holds in the short time the show has left.

by Cameron Colwell

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FEATURES

Opposite page: ‘How Humans wiped away the Great Barrier Reef’ by Emma Rssx, @rssx.

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MY BEST FRIEND’S A BUDGIE, BUT AM I HIS? I was eating my breakfast when Tingle scrambled down my arm and started stealing Coco-Pops. I chased him off with my fingers, but Tingle is a budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulatus, and a more cheekily persistent species I have never encountered. When he finally jumped in the bowl to evade me, splashing chocolatey milk on the table, I gave up and put him in his cage.

Budgerigars are small parrots native to the Australian desert, their persistence born from dodging around raptors to get to water. In the wild they live on seeds from grass and spinifex, and live in flocks starting at a few dozen. They work together to find food and water, and as resources grow scarce they band together in larger groups, sometimes over a million, in search of watering holes.

How can interacting with a family of five humans, cut to three when Uni is on, possibly compare? The thought troubles me. Tingle must be bored out of his mind when no-one’s home. He sings to his reflection and occasionally feeds it with regurgitated seeds, but I find it hard to believe he thinks it’s a real bird. Starved of the company of budgerigars, could he be comforting himself with the pretence of social interaction?

The most likely origin of ‘budgerigar’ is as a corruption of the Gamilaraay word ‘gijirrigaa’, but another stance is that ‘budgerigar’ translates to ‘good food’ or even ‘tasty treat’.

Did Indigenous people munch on budgies like popcorn?

Their scant meat hardly seems worth the effort of picking the bony birds apart. It’s more likely that ‘good food’ refers to the fact that Aboriginal groups would follow these great, shimmering mega-flocks to water, and hence to good food.

So budgies and humans go back a long way.

In recent centuries this relationship has expanded. They are the most popular pet birds in the world, and the third most popular pet overall. They’re inexpensive to keep and are possessed of charming charisma, and thus have been

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spread across the world in artificial migration. They have been selectively bred into a diverse array of colours and sizes. British ‘show budgies’, for example, are monstrous creations with twice the size and half the lifespan of their wild cousins.

Although normal in size, Tingle is not, in appearance, your typical budgie. Undulatus is Latin for ‘undulated’, that is, wave-patterned. The black scalloping this refers to, running down the back and wings of the wild morph, is present on Tingle only in erratic chunks, replaced across most of his wings by pale, almost fluoro yellow. His tail feathers, supposed to be a deep indigo-green, are the same yellow.

Mottled and asymmetric, where wild-types have a solid green chest he has light blue interrupted with patches of yellow and white. His face is the normal sunflower yellow, but his black throat spots are scattered randomly.

As a crossbreed of several different colour morphs, Tingle could never have existed in the outback. Such mutations can occur there, but they are rejected by the flock as a dangerous violation of camouflage.

Melopsittacus, derived from Greek, is ‘melodious parrot’, but this seems a misnomer. Tingle can chatter incessantly, scrambling together bird noises, dogs barking, ringing phones, my sister’s message tone, and fragments of human speech (spoken in a raspy, inhuman, yet strangely childlike voice). “Whatcha doin’” is a new favourite. Although charming and highly entertaining, this prattle bears little resemblance to coherent melody.

like on the Moon. Miserable caged cockatoos, half-plucked from stress, still sing a song that sounds cheery. Perhaps the idea that Tingle reciprocates my emotions is, too, an anthropomorphising delusion.

Synapsids (our distant ancestors) and sauropsids (his) diverged 320 million years ago. For the intervening evolution to have produced two minds even remotely similar would be no less than a miracle of convergence. He could have an avian Stockholm Syndrome for all I know, or an alien mental illness undiagnosed by human science.

I can’t really convince myself of that. The evidence presented by my anthropo-chauvinistic brain is of a cheerful creature who adores my family. Maybe, I tell myself, convergent evolution is the thing; like the independent development of the similar body plans of dolphins and sharks. That’s an idea I can live with.

Maybe the selective pressures of living in social groups, as both our species do, begets emotional needs that are compatible between birds and humans.

But maybe not.

Maybe the thought, that I and bird-lovers across the globe might have been long subjecting the animals we love to torments unknown, is just too awful to face.

by Lachlan Marnoch

Other names include ‘flight bird’ (a redundant designation, if ever one existed), ‘scallop parrot’ (which refers again to their appearance, but, in my New South Welshman vernacular, identifies them only with fried potato cakes), or ‘lovebird’.

Although the last strikes a chord, none of these names properly express the bird’s adventurous, playful, affectionate nature. Tingle is sitting on my shoulder as I write this, and occasionally ventures down my arm to investigate the keyboard or his reflection on the screen.

I could write a separate essay describing his quirks. If I raise him to face-level he either climbs onto my glasses or nibbles my lips as though kissing. This is probably a product of the species’ strange impulse to pick at anything that stands out from its surroundings. This compulsion extends to loose threads, letters on keyboards, moles and freckles.

Tingle’s home is his cage. He takes himself there when he’s tired or hungry. Perpetually caged birds have been found to suffer from something like PTSD, with high levels of anxiety and depression. I think my family is better than that, treating our birds with care and respect. But it might be the height of arrogance to assume we know how Tingle feels.

Humans are talented at seeing patterns where none exist,

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JANE GOODALL’S FIVE REASONS FOR HOPE It was my mother who first introduced me, quite literally, to Jane Goodall in 2006. I was in year five and The Roots & Shoots group Mum had started at my primary school in Newcastle had been given the opportunity to see Goodall speak at Taronga Zoo. We sat in front of the chimp enclosure and listened as she addressed the media and praised the zoo’s use of two-way glass which not only allowed us tourists to see the chimps, but also let them get a good look at us, allowing our two species to experience connection and enrichment from each other’s company.

After the media had packed up, our tiny group was ushered towards her. She asked us if we could name all the apes (hint: they don’t have tails), and we all clamoured to answer – chimps of course, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos. As the group pondered over the identity of the fifth great ape, I, being the smartass I’ve apparently always been, smugly said “Us.” Goodall smiled and patted my shoulder in congratulations. Later that night, over dinner, I vowed that I would never wash that shoulder again.

Skip forward more than 10 years, and I’m battling traffic on the way from work to Macquarie University to hear Dr Goodall speak. I’m wearing a shirt I bought online from the Jane Goodall Institute – an image of Goodall surrounded by animals and the slogan: Girls Just Want to Do Science. I’ve worked myself nearly into a panic with nervous excitement.

The night begins with a few words from Deputy-Vice Chancellor Professor Sakkie Pretorius. It’s hard to focus on his introduction because the woman herself is just a few rows in front of me, in a lecture theatre I’ve been in a hundred times, and I’m making a mental note to sit in that exact seat next time I have a class here.

When Goodall finally gets up to speak, she begins by thanking her mother, who always nurtured her love of nature and supported her dream of going to Africa to study animals, despite her family’s lack of money, the aftermath of the war, and the fact that she was a

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young woman aspiring to enter a field dominated by men.

I pull out the lecture desk and begin to demonstrate the most enthusiastic note-taking ever to grace the Macquarie theatre. I’ve heard her tell many of the stories before, but hearing them again is like returning to a beloved childhood storybook. She also provided her top reasons for staying optmimistic despite the direness of the world, and here they are, summarised and numerated for your perusal.

Goodall notes the importance of working with the people and using their knowledge of their own land to create change, not waltzing in with a white saviour complex and dictating solutions. The JGI formed in response to habitat loss and the bushmeat trade threatening her beloved Tanzanian chimps, and she quickly learned that when you help the people, you help the chimps.

Jane Goodall’s Five Reasons For Hope:

Goodall believes that there is a window of time still open to fixing the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Maybe we’re not going to reach the climate targets we’ve set, but we’re not completely screwed either. The thing about nature and living things is that they like to grow – they will grow wherever they can, whenever they can, because they can.

Even if an ecosystem doesn’t regenerate the same as it was before, you can count on something coming back to live in it.

1. Young People In the 90s, Goodall visited a disadvantaged school in the US to give a lecture on chimp behaviour. When she returned a year later, one little boy who had barely spoken before, got up and gave a presentation about how he had written to a cereal company about the smiling chimp in their advertisement. He had learned from Goodall’s lecture that when chimps smile they’re scared, not happy. He proudly told everyone that the company had since removed the ad. He wasn’t the only one who had written to them, but that wasn’t the point – the feeling of having been listened to and having his actions matter was all it took to change his demeanour.

Children who are engaged and empowered take their enthusiasm back to their households, which changes their habits, and this exposes their parents and even grandparents to the power of collective action, which changes their habits too. When many individuals are empowered to recycle more, plant trees, use less plastics, and make ethical decisions when shopping, it all adds up.

Through programs like Roots & Shoots and work from the National Leadership Council, young people all around the world are learning that their actions matter, and when they they band together, great things get done.

2. Human Intellect Goodall speaks of the human brain with both disappointment and reverence. We are capable of great things, but so often we squander it. How can a species that is so smart participate in the destruction of its only home? How can a population so keen on knowledge cast off the ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures which cared for our planet for thousands of years? But when we try, we can develop sustainable technologies which allow us to maintain our current lifestyles and look after the planet.

Smart technologies are currently being used by the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in villages in Tanzania surrounding Gombe National Park. Local people are using smart devices to record sightings of animals and report poachers.

The data is being collected in the cloud so that anyone with a device can see what is happening in the area, allowing the local people to participate in the conservation of their own land.

3. Nature’s Resilience

Many species have recovered from the brink of extinction thanks to conservation efforts. One example is the giant panda, who is no longer listed as endangered due to China’s efforts to restore and protect its habitat.

4. Social Media There is a chuckle at this point. An octogenarian who’s lived in the rainforest likes social media? I hope the dark corners of Facebook that I’ve witnessed never crawl onto her feed, or this might be knocked off her list. While Goodall admits that social media can be used for evil, it can be an incredible force for good. Social media allows us to find people who care about the same things we do, and through that we can take action, sometimes with people all over the globe who we would otherwise never have met.

She tells us to believe in the unification of so many voices, and that if there are enough people talking, eventually big business and governments will listen. At the very least, people can find comfort in knowing that other people are taking the same small actions that they are, so that together the impact is large.

5. The Indomitable Human Spirit Goodall tells us that we are all capable of overcoming incredible odds because we all have this spirit inside us, even if we don’t know it. And that we can push forward in the face of adversity because we must.

As young people, it’s so hard to feel like we have any control over the world we are living in when, as a demographic, we have less political sway (thanks ageing population/voting age laws), and a planet that seems doomed to die in our lifetime. I am a far cry from the 11 year old with enough inspiration and courage to save the world, but hearing Jane Goodall speak may just have brought her back again.

by Ursula Huxtable

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SOMETHING WICCAN THIS WAY COMES N ATURE , G E N D ER A N D R I TUA L A M O N G S Y D N E Y ’ S E C O - W I T C H ES

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The first thing I notice about Veronica’s house is the sizeable collection of cauldrons in the corner. Veronica guides me to the kitchen and offers me a cup of tea while we wait for the others. By 7pm, all of the women have arrived, and we make our way out into the bitter cold evening swaddled in blankets.

specifically concerning Satanic practices and naked sacrifices. “We don’t go around slaughtering children or sacrificing goats or doing bizarre sex acts in the forest,” says Veronica. “Well… some of us do.” Rather, pagans are mostly ordinary people – they work ordinary jobs, pay their taxes, and go grocery shopping.

Holding hands, we form a circle around a flickering fire, and one by one the women begin to sway, and then sing.

The lyrics centre around the four elements; ‘earth, water, breath and light.’ The opening song is followed by a welcome to country, and ‘Circle’ begins.

Veronica has an eclectic style of witchcraft, and a specific patron deity to whom she attributes her success: Sekhmet, depicted as a nude woman with a lion’s head. The most impressive aspect of her life attributed to Sekhmet is her husband of eleven years, Alan, who she met after asking for a life partner. The two met on Yahoo chat while Veronica was writing Harry Potter fanfiction about Professor Snape.

His name is Alan, like Alan Rickman. He is an organic chemist (potions master?), and his birthday is January 9th, 1961 – the same day as Professor Snape, just one year apart (Snape was 1960). Now, you can be as sceptical as you like, but in my opinion that’s pretty wild.

The focus of this evening is the archetype of the ‘Queen’.

Stories are told, both fictitious and real, about strong and intelligent women in all realms of life who rose to power on their own merit. It is an inclusive place where all female-identifying individuals are welcome, and femininity is considered powerful.

Afterwards, we head back inside, drink wine, and share a hot Lebanese meal. Veronica is wearing a Hogwarts alumni t-shirt.

Veronica Scoot is the treasurer, web manager and publications officer for the Pagan Awareness Network (PAN), an Australian-based collective that strives to dispel misconceptions regarding pagan subculture and to help it become an ordinary and accepted facet of everyday life.

Growing up in a Catholic family, Veronica attended Sunday mass every week and was heavily involved in youth group.

She recalls having had a very close relationship with Jesus, but this began to weaken with the more questions she asked. In her early twenties, she read a book by Barbara Thiering which un-deified Jesus and set Veronica on a different spiritual path. One Christmas, when looking for bath-bomb recipes online, she came across dozens of Wiccan sites. The more she read, the more she realised that pagan beliefs suited her best.

Paganism is a nature-based belief system, focusing on the importance of the planet and the importance of self.

There is a specific focus on the qualities of the elements and how they affect everyday life. Many pagans believe that we have become distanced from nature in the modern age. This is not the result of unkindness, but rather a level of unparalleled ignorance. People don’t know where food comes from or where our waste goes; Pagans therefore stress the importance of recycling and being environmentally conscious.

One of the key focuses of PAN is assault education and self-care, informing newcomers on how to stay safe and make informed decisions. There is heavy emphasis on the establishment of ground rules for yourself and the importance of empowerment; if you’re uncomfortable in a situation, you can leave. It’s continuously emphasised that you must be responsible for your own safety and comfort as well as that of others, which is a pretty cool religious attitude.

Today, many people’s perceptions of witchcraft revolve around the New Age trends of crystals and incense. According to Veronica, this is more or less a commercialisation of the traditional pagan witchcraft, and while there’s nothing wrong with people wanting ‘good vibes’ from these things, it leads to a lot of misunderstandings about the religion. Indeed, when this is accepted instead of actual pagans and witches who are perceived as the weird Satan-loving cousin at the BBQ, it’s a bit unfair.

That’s why PAN exists, acting as moderator and educator for the wider community, helping change perceptions about paganism and its core values – environmentalism, inclusiveness and self-care.

by Rhiannon Williams

Objectively speaking, or as objective as seems to be possible, paganism ideals seem to be mostly level-headed and sensible. Wiccans do not understand the world through a moral binary, placing deeds into firm categories of virtue and sin. Pagans, however, walk a grey path – one of balance. Sometimes you do good, and sometimes you do bad, says Veronica, all you need to do is to make amends and try your hardest to maintain balance in your life. Despite a belief system founded in respect and compassion, misconceptions remain regarding paganism,

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BUNKER DOWN

M A X L E W I S O N T H E AUSS I E P U N TERS P RE P AR I N G F O R T H E A P O C A L Y P SE

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As a person with anxiety, I understand the need to prepare.

It’s a natural part of human nature to want to be ready for something. If you’ve got guests over, you’ll want to prepare the house so they don’t judge you; you’ll want to prepare a nice meal so they don’t think you haven’t been surviving on McDonald’s deliveries every day since they opened in your suburb. If you’re hitting the town you’ll prepare your look so you’ll fit in with all the cool people in the club. If you’re like me, you’ll prepare for anything happening ever in your life by being overwhelmingly pessimistic – that way, if you’re wrong you get a pleasant surprise, and if you’re right, well, you saw it coming.

notice. First aid, cooking supplies, rations, weapons, you name it. Some even had different bags for different scenarios. Other means include a secret location, like a bunker or a small shelter away from your property, to filled to the brim with supplies to act as your new home.

There are some people that take preparation a little too far. We all know that the world is going to end one day, whether by the sun taking us out in a murder-suicide, nuclear devastation turning the world into Mad Max, complete with marauders and Tina Turner, or conservatives sapping the world of all its resources and refusing to support renewables, leaving later generations to dry out and crumble like a tiramisu in the sun. It’s likely those reading this (hi!) won’t even see the beginnings of armageddon in their lifetime. That doesn’t stop a certain group of Australians from getting ready for imminent devastation.

Yikes. This isn’t to say that female preppers don’t exist: both ozprepperforum.com and ausprep.com have sections dedicated to female preppers with topics like ‘Lady Luxuries?’ and ‘Self defence for ladies’ which, to their credit, are useful topics. Oddly enough, ausprep.com’s Ladies section had a subforum for ‘Prepping with Children’, insinuating that, come apocolypse time, daddies will cast aside their children like the plastic straw wrapping from a Just Juice box.

They’re called preppers, and they’re a subsection of conspiracy theorists that believe the shit is going to hit the fan at any moment. And would you believe that colourful analogy is official terminology? Australia has a surprisingly large community of preppers, which makes sense. We’re far away from other countries, have large areas of land that are completely empty, and an abundance of wildlife to snack upon. The two most popular forums I saw were the ozprepper.com and Ausprep.com, and despite the hive of activity going on in these forums, absolutely nobody wanted to speak to me. I was either brushed off with a simple “Sorry, we don’t do interviews”, or was subjected to a tirade about how the media have tarnished their reputation before, so why am I any different? This was pretty par for the course on the ozprepper.com forum, where any attempts by the media to get the prepper perspective was met with hostility. On one hand I don’t blame them for being wary, but on the other they aren’t doing themselves any favours by shutting themselves off.

I was left to come to my own conclusions based on the discussions found on the forums.

Firstly there was some confusion within their own ranks as to what exactly a prepper was. Some contend that keeping tools in your car or a condom in your wallet makes you a prepper. These were the examples given to prospective media looking for interviews, yet none of the members qualify as that. They all talk of secret emergency locations and supplies that could be compromised if shown to the media, and believe that media interest is a government conspiracy to reveal the locations of preppers so when push comes to shove they can steal supplies for themselves. From what I could see, there were some common features. A bug-out bag is a bag of supplies prepared ahead of time so it can be grabbed at a moments

The average prepper on these forums were men in their 40-50s. The ‘Single Preppers’ subsection on ozprepper. com showed that some of them were single and ready to mingle as well. As typical old white men they also love to be racist and sexist, like one prominent user suggesting Yassmin Abdel-Magied should be “[sent] to manus island”, which was followed by sexually violent remarks.

Reading through these forums is entertaining as well as disturbing. Users interact with each other the same way that technologically-inept baby boomers do on Facebook, complete with an inappropriate use of emojis. Picture it now; the tiny thumbnail of a badly angled selfie next to a comment like ‘whY don’t these young people get off their phones and get a job!!!!!11! Mary.’ What’s interesting is that this community of oldies find themselves in the same pitfalls as a youth-oriented website like, say, Tumblr. You’ve got your cliques, weird urban legends that circulate without any evidence, constant bickering, hostility to anyone outside of their bubble, and the rare person with a swastika avatar that people still engage with for some reason.

While it’s nice that these folks have something to do with their post-retirement time that isn’t yelling at Muslims on the street, I can’t help but feel this kind of community is unhealthy for their thinking. The ‘us-against-them’ mentality created by echo chambers such as this do nothing but reinforce negativity and prejudice. The doomsday scenarios that these groups perpetrate, like nuclear devastation, financial collapse, famine or natural disasters, are all in one way or another caused by the exact type of people that are prepping for them - old conservatives. It’s really the ultimate form of baby boomer apathy. Screw addressing the problems we have right now, I’m just going to prepare for the inevitable devastation caused by my ilk, because fuck you. That’s why I have no doubt that, when the time comes, the preppers will die out just like the rest of us normies.

I’m not doing any prepping for doomsday because I know my life will last the length of a bee’s dick when the shit hits the fan. I’m a writer with no practical skills, I’m unfit, afraid of conflict and get upset when I have to kill an animal in a videogame. I’m not suited for the next life, and frankly I don’t think any of these preppers are either.

by Max Lewis

FEATURES || 45

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BUILDING TENSION

T H E RE L AT I O N S H I P B ET W EE N AR C H I TE C TURE A N D A C T I V I S M AT M A C Q UAR I E No joke, there is a secret network of tunnels underneath our campus. Originally built to carry services between buildings, they’re located below Wally’s Walk and are still accessible today. It is alleged that, in July 1974, the tunnels were used by students to gain access to Vice Chancellor Alex Mitchell’s office, which was being guarded during a student protest against administration-imposed changes to the union’s constitution.

Almost as cool was when, in 1969, Macquarie students set up a tent embassy in the Central Courtyard to protest the lack of student housing available. The protest swelled from 30 to 300 and the University administrators soon yielded to their demands.

It is not widely known that Macquarie University has such a badass radical history. Indeed, it’s not really in the interests of the administration to pay homage a time when students refused to tolerate the alienating, commercial nature of the University.

But there’s a character in these stories that is even more overlooked than the protests themselves: the architecture.

Macquarie is well known for its brutalist design – imposing, cubic structures of reinforced concrete looming over you as you walk between tutorials. The layout of the campus itself is tricky – with names like ‘E5B’ and ‘W6A’, and no clear pattern to any of it, we’ve all stumbled in late to the first tute of the semester after wandering through gum trees and carparks for half an hour. There are Hogwarts-esque ‘steps to nowhere’ at W6A, and a ‘ramp to nowhere’ at C10A, as well as a good number of shortcuts and secret passageways.

But the campus isn’t just confusing, it’s becoming increasingly decentralised.

The main Arts building, Y3A, is stationed just under a kilometre from the main campus – it even has its own bus stop (though no longer its own cafe…?) The starry-eyed Arts student, a university’s most dependable activist, is no doubt too worn-out from walking to class (and malnourished from the lack of available eateries) to stage a mass protest about Student Amenities Fees.

Furthermore, while the Chancellery was once located inside the Campus Hub building, directly accessible to all students, it is now tucked away behind some trees, safe from students, and with a really great view of the lake. The

library, traditionally the intellectual heart of a university, was originally in the Central Courtyard, but has since been been moved to the car-park periphery of campus. Of recent importance is the impending demolition of the Campus Hub this year, which will see the construction of a Temporary Dining Hub near the library, spreading out the campus even more.

Research shows that the very structure and architectural flow of a space, directly affects the way in which people are able to stage successful group protests. In some cases, cities and public spaces have been specifically designed to prevent the collective dissent. For example, when Australia’s cities were being constructed, they were modelled off European urban design, but with the deliberate omission of a key feature – the public square.

The public square is one of the most significant ways for protest to pick up steam – it is a highly visible, easily accessible rallying point. Given Australia was a young, convict nation, Governor Richard Bourke specifically instructed to surveyors to leave it out of the designs for NSW cities, lest it promote rebellion.

Though it may be presumptuous to consider that all campus planning at Macquarie has been in the interests of preventing protest, there is no denying that further decentralisation will directly affect the ability for students to gather, coordinate, and maintain visible solidarity.

This has very clear ramifications for the future of student activism, and also, simply, for the cohesion of Macquarie’s student community.

Infrastructure is, of course, not the only reason for the successes and failures of student activism, but it is an important one. And its role in shaping – or inhibiting – activism, shouldn’t be underestimated.

If the university is seen as a microcosm of national trends, as it often is, then Macquarie’s Central Courtyard is our ‘public square,’ an accessible, moveable space in which activism can gain legitimacy and visibility.

Fittingly, the 120 lemon-scented gums that stand in the courtyard were deliberately planted in a formation of the phalanx – a unit of the Roman army lined up for battle.

It is quite literally our battleground.

by Emma Harvey | Photos by Lauren Parkin

FEATURES || 47

ON THE FRONT LINE

M EET T H E M A C Q UAR I E STU D E N T W H O R I D ES W I T H W H A L E C O N SER V AT I O N V I G I L A N TES , SEA S H E P H ER D

Modern Japanese whaling was an American idea. After Japan’s surrender at the close of World War II, the country’s infrastructure was badly damaged and its people were starving. General Douglas MacArthur – the Chief of Staff of the US Army who oversaw the occupation of Japan in the years after the war – suggested that the Japan revive the whaling industry as a way of providing cheap meat to its people. It also, conveniently, would afford the US millions of dollars’ worth of whale oil.

In 1946 General MacArthur commissioned a US oil tanker constructed during World War II to become a whaling factory vessel. It was named the Nisshin Maru. Almost every year since, the Japanese whaling fleet – comprised of the factory vessel, three harpoon boats, and security ships – has sailed for the Antarctic to harvest minke whales, despite a global ban on commercial whaling that was implemented in 1982 by the International Whaling Commission.

Japan’s insistence on continuing the illegal practice is somewhat bizarre, given that demand for whale meat in Japan is low. In the northern town of Ayukawa, which holds a century-old whaling tradition, whale meat is hacked into nuggets, stewed in ketchup to mask its intense flavour (like venison, but more gamey, most people who have tasted whale meat agree), and snuck into school lunches, ostensibly in an effort to preserve cultural tradition.

In 2007, when anti-whaling attitudes began to peak, the Rudd government scrambled to decide whether they’d send a warship, a patrol plane from the RAAF, or a civilian vessel fitted with machine guns to monitor the Japanese in Antarctic waters. While the government was weighing up its decision, anxious about provoking conflict, another fleet was already sailing to greet the Japanese whaling vessels: The Sea Shepherd, a vigilante conservation society who have been disrupting and documenting the harvest of whales since 1977. Flying their flag of a skull snarling above a spiked trident and a shepherd’s crook, the organisation’s so-called ‘Neptune’s Navy’ take controversial – yet ultimately successful – direct action against the whalers.

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The moratorium of 1982 that banned whaling allowed for some exceptions, one being scientific research, and it is under this guise that Japan continues to hunt whales and process them into meat on a factory ship that bears the same name as the original American vessel commissioned

by MacArthur.

“The factory vessel is where they transfer all the whales to once they’re harpooned,” explains Sam Edmonds, a biology student at Macquarie who has sailed with Sea Shepherd on two of their major campaigns. “It’s this big, hulking, ominous, blood-stained vessel. It’s such a symbol within Sea Shepherd, it’s the apex of the issue. They actually process all the meat on board while they’re at sea, so by the time they return to Japan, they’ve got a product ready to be taken straight off the ship.”

We’ve met at The Hold, a nautical-themed bar in Manly. But with burnished wood and freshly cooked vegan burgers, it’s a hell of a lot homelier than the months-long stint Sam spent in the Antarctic seas aboard the Steve Irwin for the Sea Shepherd’s latest campaign.

“We left Melbourne and didn’t see land for 83 days,” says Sam. “The further south you get the more frequently you see whales. It gets to a point usually about halfway through the campaign where we’re seeing whales every hour.

Mainly humpbacks. We’re seeing whales frequently and it’s this constant reminder of why we’re down there.”

Sam says his ecologically-based worldview comes from growing up in the Northern Beaches in close proximity to the ocean, often surfing in the company of sharks.

Photography was a hobby throughout high school, and at the University of Queensland he combined his two interests to study photojournalism.

The course was geared towards the humanitarian side of documentary and photojournalism, so it was always an uphill battle to convince his lecturers that ecology and conservation-based assignments were valid. But for his third year, Sam put together a series exploring Australia’s relationship with sharks.

“It just seemed like such an interesting and tenuous relationship we have with this one other species – when it boils down to it, we’ve got tiger sharks and great whites and maybe bull sharks, but great whites always end up on the front page of the newspaper.”

Sam photographed shark bite scars, the serene locations of fatal attacks, and the family members of people who had been killed by sharks for the series.

“There’s a funny little community just north of Newcastle, and there’s all these shacks made out of corrugated iron on the back of a sand dune on this beach that happens to be one of the most prominent shark breeding grounds on the east coast,” he says. “A lot of the locals there have strung up these sharks on their walls, shark jaws and things like that. They almost become these little shrines to this species that we’re at once so afraid of but have such reverence for … the photo series spoke to that way that Australians hold sharks in our psyche and our culture, this strange relationship we have with this other species.”

Over the course of his photojournalism degree, Sam started volunteering at Sea Shepherd market stalls, selling merchandise and raising funds. A day after his graduation ceremony, he got a call.

“As soon as I graduated, Sea Shepherd were looking for camera operators for Whale Wars, which they shoot during every Southern Oceans campaign. They were like, ‘hey, we need a camera operator for the Southern Ocean campaign, are you available?’ And I was like yes. Definitely.”

The reality show based around Sea Shepherd’s campaigns, Whale Wars, has a cult following and has provided the iconic imagery of bloodied whales being dragged up ramps onto whaling ships. It also captured the moment when the organisation’s former captain, Paul Watson, was shot by whalers.

“I’d watched a lot of Whale Wars before I’d been on one of these campaigns, and you always wonder whether how much things have been sensationalised,” says Sam. But on the stroke of midnight midway through his first campaign, the volatility of the situation became clear.

“All the harpoon vessels of the whaling fleet came for an assault on us. It was really highly coordinated, in really rough weather, and they were towing prop-fouling lines across our bow – basically they were towing a steel cable with a buoy on the end slightly longer than the length of our ship – and they would cross our bow in the hope that that cable would get caught in our propeller and render us useless.”

Sam and the crew were frantic for eight hours straight as they struggled to out-manoeuvre the attacks. After surviving the assault, interviewing crew, and shaking out the adrenaline, they didn’t return to bed for 24 hours.

things can go wrong and how far you are from help.”

Crew of the Sea Shepherd in the past have used techniques such as shining laser lights in the eyes of whalers, hurling bottles of butyric acid onto the decks of the whaling ships, and forcefully boarding Japanese vessels to frustrate, delay or prevent them from killing whales.

But Sam’s task of documenting the operations of the Sea Shepherd and the actions of the whalers – not to mention the Antarctic landscapes surrounding them – is arguably even more critical to conservation efforts.

Footage and images captured by Sea Shepherd have been used countless times to garner support for conservation and prove the illegality of Japan’s whaling operations. As recently as June this year, Sea Shepherd captured and published images of a slain minke whale on the deck of the Nisshin Maru in Australian waters.

A tentative victory came for Sea Shepherd in 2014 when a court case fronted by Australia agreed on what everyone already knew: the Japanese quota of over a thousand whales was clearly a commercial, rather than scientific, operation. In 2013 the Japanese had aimed to pull 855 minke whales, 50 humpback whales and 10 fin whales out of the water (this goal was thwarted thanks to the efforts of Sea Shepherd) but since 2014 their quota has been reduced to 333 whales.

However, given that in June this year the Japanese government considered a bill that would express the government’s wish to resume commercial whaling, the Sea Shepherd’s work is far from over. Sam intends to continue using visual communication in the movement towards a more ecologically focused society – at the moment he’s assisting researchers at Macquarie to photograph the mandibles of alpine grasshoppers – and it’s a movement he says is gaining momentum every day. Even his stunning photos of sweeping pack ice, Adelie penguins huddling on small icebergs called ‘growlers’ and Weddell seals staring straight into the camera can’t be viewed in isolation from the fact that the landscapes of both the North and South poles are under threat.

“People are used to seeing wildlife images, but it’s only in the last couple of years where they have become so much more politicised in that we’ve collectively started to create an image of what our species is doing to this planet,” says Sam. “All of a sudden we’re releasing the very imminent implications for our species. I hope that on top of that we can take less of an anthropocentric view and consider the implications of our actions for other species as well.”

by Angus Dalton | Photo Sam Edmonds

“It’s when things happen like that you realise how quickly

FEATURES || 49

RATTLING THE CAGE

ER I N C H R I ST I E O N T H E ET H I C A L E V O L UT I O N O F T H E Z O O We’re all familiar with the 2016 Cincinnati Zoo controversy, which saw 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla, Harambe, shot and killed when a small child fell into his enclosure.

The event became an internet sensation, spurring a think piece from almost everyone with an opinion, and a million inappropriate memes springing up online. With this came a resurgence of cynicism towards zoos and wildlife parks, regarding their treatment of animals in captivity. While I doubt those who donkey-voted ‘Harambe’ in the 2017 election were really concerned with the ethics of zoos, it was impossible to ignore the dilemma that had come forward – do zoos treat their animals fairly?

A lot of internet pages and discussion I found while researching argued ‘no’. Many promoted the cruelty of zoos, citing ‘zoochosis’ as their central argument. Zoochosis is a term to describe stereotypic behaviour in animals – a repetitive behaviour pattern with no obvious function. This might include pacing, swaying, head-bobbing, circling or bar-biting, which many argue are signs of mental illness the animal expresses after being locked up without proper enrichment. However, the sources I discovered didn’t inspire much trust, with recommended articles alongside boasting titles like ‘Illegal Indonesian Owl Trade Might be Harry Potter’s Fault’. It seemed these authors were looking for anyone to attack for possible mistreatment of animals, and further digging shows this might be a common trend within the animal activism community.

The most I could find written on zoochosis was published

by PETA – the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

A large American organisation, PETA are notorious for their controversial tactics and lack of success when it comes to their initiatives to have domestic animals adopted and taken care of. They educate children with bloody images of cartoon parents slaughtering terrified-looking rabbits with the captions ‘Your Mommy Kills Animals’. PETA’s definition of ethical treatment seemed somewhat blurred to me after learning about all the various scare tactics, odd statements and controversies. Was any of their information on zoochosis to be trusted?

Lisa Christie is the President of the Fauna and Marine Parks Association NSW, a group consisting of all the zoos and wildlife parks in the state. She states that “instances of zoochosis are getting less and less as zoos get better at a focusing on enrichment and making sure those animals get lots of different changes in their day and their routine”.

She says that keepers are now often using “training as an enrichment tool” but are also “looking at ways to create excitement and even a little bit of dilemma for the animals, so that they’re able to provide different levels [of enrichment] and different things throughout their day”.

As President, Lisa is highly involved with the work of the zoos around her, and knows about their beneficial work.

She spoke of insurance populations from Devil Ark and the

Bilby Fund - two similar initiatives. These organisations, with the support of associated zoos, have been able to fence off square kilometres of land at Currawinya in Queensland and Scone in NSW, eradicate the feral animals within the fence line, and release a number of Greater Bilbies and Tasmanian Devils into the spaces so that they can breed while free from predation. General Manager of Australian Reptile Park in Gosford, Tim Faulkner, is the face of Devil Ark. This support from Australian zoos is incredibly important to continue to keep Australian species thriving.

Not only is Lisa the President of the FMPA and an avid animal activist, she’s also my mother. I interviewed her on my bed with our two dogs spread across the remaining space as we begged them to keep quiet so as to not ruin the recording. Hanging out at her work as a child often meant a sugar glider grabbing onto my eyebrows, or a kangaroo leaning back on its tail to kick me in the face.

We saw Dr. Jane Goodall speak last month, and stories of the chimpanzees brought us both to tears. I have never met someone with more love or respect for animals. She says “everyone I’ve ever met that works in the zoo industry doesn’t do it for the money. They do it because they absolutely love animals and they want to see the animals treated with the highest regard and the best care possible”.

From a bureaucratic standpoint, the extent of regulation makes it extremely difficult for any zoo animal to suffer at the hands of the zoo that keeps it. The Exhibited Animals Protection Act has a number of standards, under which zoos must submit all kinds of information before building an enclosure. The Department of Primary Industries must be supplied with “plans, information on diet, animal enrichment … where the animal will come from, how we will look after them, and if something happens to the zoo, who will take over their care on our behalf”. Everything must be considered first by the zoo in relation to the law.

It’s clear that zoos have had a hard time distancing themselves from an early history of being circus-like venues for human entertainment. But they’re due for a rebranding.

According to Lisa, the role of the modern zoo is “to advocate on behalf of the animals, advertise their plight, assist wherever they can and to raise funds and awareness for the animals”. She stresses that not only is the suspicion around zoos fairly unfounded, it could be more damaging than we realise. Without the help of the public, zoos can’t do much by way of conservation and charity, threatening their longevity.

In light of mass destruction and deforestation of natural habitats around the world, arguments like ‘just leave the animals in the wild’ don’t really hold up when there’s no longer any ‘wild’ to leave them in. It’s about time we got on board with the fact that the majority of zoos that are safe, regulated places, that play a vital role in the protection and conservation of wildlife.

by Erin Christie

CREATIVES

SPRING GIRL Ruth is a child of the spring.

“You live next door, don’t you?” She asked.

I saw her halfway through July when her family moved in next door. Half of her face was wrapped in an indigo scarf, so all I could see from my window was her mane of dark curls, which bounced with every step she took. I couldn’t hear her laugh, but watching her throw her head back at something her sister said, I knew then that she was embedded in me.

“Yeah, I do,” I shrugged apologetically. “Probably should have introduced myself sooner. I’m Sky.”

She is so full of life and movement, this girl.

2

We caught the same bus to different schools. She always wore bright colours with her uniform and my brown tunic looked even more brown when we sat next to each other.

On a particularly rainy day when the bus was late, when it was just the two of us at the graffiti-slicked bench, she offered me an earbud.

As winter began to melt, our friendship grew. We shared dinners and picnics and fell asleep listening to podcasts.

Her eyes would crinkle when she concentrated, the timbre of her voice when she laughed tinted my dreams. My days with her were a fantasy, whispering secrets under blankets.

“Wanna listen?”

I nodded, and slipped the bud into my ear. Some slow, soft song floated through the wires.

52 || CREATIVES

“Don’t worry about it. I’m Ruth.”

She stuck her hand out for me to shake. I took it and, as her fingers wrapped around the back of my hand, she smiled, tongue just behind her teeth.

One clear night when her parents went out to dinner, we scrambled up onto the roof armed with blankets and a handful of mandarins and watched the stars.

“Do you know any constellations?” She had asked.

I shook my head no, popping a mandarin segment in my mouth. “I don’t know any constellations, but I think I can see the Milky Way.” “Show me?”

“See that band of stars there?” I pointed above us and Ruth craned her head towards me.

“There?” She asked, pointing.

“No, no, here.” I took her hand and pointed it in the right direction.

“Oh,” she said in a long, drawn out kind of way, interlacing her fingers with mine and letting them fall back towards us. Ruth nestled her head on my shoulder as we looked at the infinity above. “I’m so lucky I have you living next door.

Do you ever think about how we could meet anyone in the entire world, but somehow we still ended up together?”

“The universe works in mysterious ways,” I said around my heart, which was positioned somewhere around my throat.

3 Then, she met James.

James, with his stupid dyed black hair and acoustic guitar he always happened to have with him at parties. But for some reason Ruth liked him.

I didn’t see so much of her then. Sometimes I would hear them when they fought. She didn’t sound the same, she sounded like too many late nights and bad dreams.

They would sleep together after they argued, always. I could see their silhouettes against her curtain from my bedroom. I would never touch her the way he did, all sharp edges and want. I would never touch her like that, I realised, point blank. I closed my blinds, turned my back to the window and downloaded a dating app.

He drove her to school, and I didn’t see her at the bus stop again until one Friday weeks after they started dating, cigarette balanced between her fingers.

“That’s new,” I commented.

Ruth jumped. “Don’t sneak up on me like that,”

4 The next time I saw her she was on the curb outside of our houses. Rain had dampened the grass and darkened the pavement, but she didn’t seem to mind the water. Her feet were bare, as though she hadn’t had the time to put on shoes before leaving. Her eyes were blank, tired. Lipstick was smudged down her chin.

“I’m leaving properly this time,” she said when I approached, without looking up. “He always apologises but I don’t care anymore. I’m going to talk to Mum about it.”

I picked up a leaf from the ground and tore it into tiny strips. She sounded like she was talking about the weather.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she repeated, nodding as if to convince herself. “I should get a restraining order or something. That’s a thing people do.”

Ruth looked behind me, before standing up and walking to the middle of the pavement. I followed her gaze and saw worms sprinkling the cement, wriggling about helplessly.

Gently, gently, she picked one up and put it under a nearby bush.

“Why are you picking up worms?” I asked.

Ruth shrugged. “I feel bad for them.”

One by one, she scooped up the worms and placed them out of harm’s way in the damp soil.

“You know worms are pretty much vital for every single plant to grow,” she spoke as if to no one. “People think they’re pretty worthless but we’d have a much harder time without them.”

The worms on my side of the path had been cleared so I turned to her. She was making a little hole in the dirt and placing her rescued worms in it, giving them a head start.

“Are you saying you like worms?”

“I don’t dislike them. I think they’ve been overlooked.” She gave a little smile and then stood up. “They like, regenerate the soil and give plants a better chance at growing.”

“I’ve missed you.” I said.

Wordlessly, she walked over and put her arms around my shoulders, collapsing into me. I held her back just as fiercely. We hadn’t touched each other like this in months.

It felt alien. Also completely the same. The feel of her hair, the freckles on her cheeks, the way her breath puffed on my temples. Our hearts beat in tandem as her eyes fluttered shut and she rested her forehead against mine.

“I’ve missed you, too,” she murmured, eyes downcast. “I’m sorry, things have been a bit intense with James and-“

“Stay with me until I fall asleep tonight?” She murmured, eyes still closed.

Ruth’s phone rang and she answered it immediately. I could see all thought of me leave her eyes as she walked around the corner for privacy.

“Of course,” I replied.

The bus came and left without Ruth coming back.

by Lydia Jupp

“I didn’t, you just weren’t paying attention.” I wrinkled my nose at the smoke and she at least had the decency to blush a little. “You seem out of it.”

She brushed off my comment with a simple “long week”, and had one last drag of her cigarette before putting it out.

I would stay as long as she let me.

CREATIVES || 53

BESTIE You meet her in kindergarten when she visits from another school, pink straps bound around her knees beneath her drab uniform. You remember her platinum hair from day one. Her mother’s twig-like fingers rake through her hair and plump lips weave a boastful tale of selling locks of it at the price of fine silk.

You don’t see her again for the next five years.

At ten, she fills a spot on your hockey team and slides around the field, a camo-print helmet sitting over her bob haircut. She has bad knees, you take bad shots. Together, you play more seats than you do games and you slip down frosty grass slopes trying your best to ignore the boys who snicker at her haircut. The rising sun makes the walls of your soul sweat, the frost melting into the soles of your cheap shoes. The runners on the field have earned the sweat which widens their shoes and wears down their hockey sticks, leaving you, you poor thing, to shrivel unused in your uniform.

You invite her over to your house, once, and then every weekend thereafter. A lonely garden fills with the entangled laughter of two friends.

On the trampoline, you stand opposite sides to each other, and jump across to meet where the other’s feet were once, careful not to hit each other on the way. Polypropylene

54 || CREATIVES

propels you, airless laughter jumping out of your lungs.

One time you land on the edge, your foot catching in the springs and toppling the whole trampoline over. Your outspread hands protect you, palms holding you up, side by side. An infestation of slaters, uprooted from the disrupted soil, swarm together beneath the tip of your nose. But she is not so lucky. Her knees pop out. Her wails twist through the gaps of open windows upstairs, as loud as rubber tyres screeching on slick asphalt, your mother’s worried feet scampering down creaky stairs.

By the time your mother dashes into the garden, practiced hands have popped her own knees back in, and you’re both cowering over the spectacle in front of your nose.

At fifteen your bestie is still your bestie, but you have other friends. She boasts about her recent hockey win to each and every one of them before you sit them all down in a circle. You’re opposite her, a giddiness in her eyes encompassing the blue bruising her lids. You whisper a secret to pass on, unleashing the first whisper with lips close to lobe. A new friend flashes you an excited grin as she leans over to whisper the news to your best friend, who whitens as pale as her hair when she hears that you’re moving to the country.

For years after you move away, you isolate yourself from the people you once knew. You are fond of some people

here, but few like you back, and you’re too far from your old friends anyway. You observe a different kind of wealth, in vast paddocks and horses and cattle and homes that go on and on rather than up and up.

Your mother nabs you away from isolation to holiday with you at the centre of hell. She reads the weather report wrong. You both roll up tracksuit pants in 40 degree heat, dry twigs and ants suffocating under your feet. Cheap runners, economy hotel. The family in the hotel down the street pays for their driver to drop them off at the foot of the ascent, the red of the rock grating hard against the black frame of the limo, and you wonder what it must be like to not see invisible price tags wrapped around anything and everything, like your best friend.

You sweat through the summer, reach out to nobody, long for the water, until your wishes are granted in the form of a pink paper invitation in the last week of the break. A long train ride gets you to her coastal holiday home, where she shows you around her house made of monochrome marble, and carpets untouched by sand or dirt. Glass cabinets encase her grandmother’s china, her mother’s dolls, her brother’s trophies, and her father’s collectibles. Pink wallpaper encases a zoo of toys stuffed in her room. Only two of them have names, the only two out of their plastic wrap.

Another day.

Seas replace land to divide you again, she’s off on an around-the-world holiday you’ll never be able to afford.

She returns unstable, moves back home as a therapeutic move at the expense of a depressive collapse. She had been alone, in her room, unable to sleep or wake with the screams of the ocean at full volume in her mind. Her knees weak with heartbreak and her breath drowning, unable to keep up. All from pushing and asking for everything but help. You would have helped, if you were there, but you barely know her now anyway.

You return and return to the source. Same city, same suburb, side by side. She still falls into the same trap. A need preoccupying the mind. You work less, she works more. You see her two hours at a time, two days in a row and though she does not demand anything of you, you’re jumping on opposite ends of the trampoline. Two gears just scraping by, an occasional click that doesn’t fit or fixate, every few years, until you admit to a level of degradation, and cycle back to how you once were.

By Tamsin McIntosh

You wake up early each morning to the aeroplanes growling through the sky, and wait until she’s awake to play video games together. You play with her until she’s sick of winning. She makes sure not to teach you properly.

When you’re twenty you chase her man. His torn out second storey looms over your bed, hollow as your heart for not telling your friend who you’re with. He rips out the backyard to a dusty ruin and keeps hundreds of lizards in the deep pits of a pool shell. You scatter their food pellets and watch their teeth gnash against dirt. Orange curls between your thighs sell you sour lies about the ends of plans for this and that, but you dump him when it never happens and you think she knows.

You choose to join her again, midway between country and city, the capital nobody remembers. Prestige is on her side and affordability is not on yours. You barely see her. You work too much. She pushes herself too hard. When you do meet, she reminisces, memories you can only visualise through her retelling. You run out of topics to talk about, and out of time.

CREATIVES || 55

ART BY GABRIELLE CHIDIAC, @GABBIE.JO.DRAWS

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SHIT LIT:

LORD OF THE FLIES William Golding “We are suffering from the terrible disease of being human.” Welcome to William Golding’s twisted mind.

You may remember Lord Of The Flies from high school. A plane full of private school boys (one of whom is named Piggy, for cruel and obvious reasons) crash lands on a deserted island and there’s a conch shell at some point, and then everything descends into predictable chaos. All in all, the book is a deep, introspective comment on the ultimate nature of humanity and our will for power and anarchy.

In an era of political hot takes drawn from classic dystopian novels (cough doublespeak cough) Lord Of The Flies has weaselled its way out of public high-school and into public discourse. Well here’s my hot take: it’s kinda… dumb.

I mean, the symbolism is a little ham-fisted at times, and the moral binary that Golding creates isn’t really a mark of well-drawn characters, but I guess all that just makes it a really good book to teach high-schoolers. No, what really gets my conch-shell about this book is how often people like to point at it and say shit like ‘universal truths’ and ‘human condition’.

This is neither the first nor last book written about the dynamics of a stranded group of kids. Golding wrote LOTF in direct response to a much earlier novel called The Coral Beach. He kept the names. Kind of like, early 20th century fanfiction – but I digress. The Coral Beach is hideous, plot-wise. It’s full of racism, imperialism, and basically lots of pats on the back to the superiority of the British Empire.

But in it, the kids all persevere, enforcing and sticking to social hierarchies, they even convert a few ‘natives’ to Christianity along the way. Golding, who was looking at the tail end of World War Two and the advent of nuclear weaponry, took a look at this 60 year old book about kids getting along on an island and went ‘bullshit’.

All this, although a little over the top, is basically understandable. Authors can be forgiven for some degree of cynicism following the most deadly war in known history.

However, when students study this book in high school they don’t learn about the Second World War. They learn about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a disastrous moment

in the history of research ethics, is the one standard piece of evidence that everyone likes to draw on when they’re being all pessimistic about the nature of humanity. In the ’70s, our capacity for inhumane violence and oppression was once and for all proven in scientific terms.

Ignoring how compromised the Stanford research became, there was something a little off about it right from the start. The war, the experiment, the book: all proof of the terrible capabilities of mankind. What else do they have in common?

There’s an acronym currently being thrown around in psych research, you may have seen or heard of people calling studies “WEIRD”. WEIRD refers to the overwhelming phenomenon of Western, Educated people from Industrialised, Rich, Democratic countries being chosen as participants in psychological studies. Yes, it does read a little like someone was trying to force the acronym, but the fact is that selection bias of this kind has had a huge effect on Western sociology up until the early 2000s.

This phenomenon means that most of what we consider to be universal human behaviour, is actually limited to white, educated, dudes. Like, you know, the ones we consider to be the default for everything despite making up like 10 per cent of the population. Like, the ones we consistently elect into parliament to speak on everyone’s behalf. Those ones.

So in reality, the Prison experiment, much like Lord Of The Flies, is less about the state of humanity, and more about what happens when the sense of accountability standing between a group of entitled private-school boys and total chaos, crumbles.

So, here’s my final hot take: Golding’s commentary is so cripplingly limited to the default rich, white, male experience that there’s barely any place for it in modern discussion. Unless you’re calling Donald Trump ‘Piggy’, ’cause that’s a little bit funny.

Disclaimer: If, after reading this, I’ve left you wondering ‘hmm I wonder what would happen if it were a group of girls stranded on the island, and also the book was far more satirical, and also it kind of felt like the plot of Dead Gorgeous had been superimposed onto Lord Of The Flies?’, then do I have the book for you! It’s called Beauty Queens by Libba Bray.

by Nikita Jones

58 || Repeat Offenders

TRAILER TRASH:

SQUIRM (1976) I want you to go to YouTube and type in ‘Squirm 1976’.

Click the first video you see.

Got it? Great.

Now I want you to report it for offensive content because this movie is an insult to the genre of horror.

The ‘70s was a prolific decade for film. Movies like The Godfather and Star Wars took silver screen entertainment to a whole new level. But Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976), somehow singlehandedly set cinema back 100 years.

‘How?’ you may ask. Well, let me brief you on the plot. Set in Fly Rock, Georgia, a family with bad southern accents discovers that a storm has knocked over the powerlines sending electric surges underground. To this town’s dismay, all worms have become flesh-eating parasites.

I guess the casting director was only looking for people with absolutely zero talent. Instead, he gave the role to a sweet yet amateurish redhead named Patricia Pearcy who has done literally nothing since the end of the 70s.

The scariest thing about this film is the editing. An abrupt close-up of regular-sized worms is a very poor attempt at tricking the audience into believing that townspeople are being terrorized by limbless creatures.

By Tieri Cafe

Killer worms, why? Who let Lieberman think that this was a good premise for a film?

The conventions of horror all turned up to the party; the small-town setting is only missing the tumbleweeds, the man-made threat is bizarre and novel, and the average joe saves the day. Unfortunately, the level absurdity in the concept of killer worms is cinematic poison.

The Blob, released almost 20 years before Squirm, had people screaming and running out of theatres in utter fear.

The Fly and Godzilla still remain the most universally loved films of the sci-fi horror genre. It’s easy to see this was what Squirm was aiming for. Unfortunately it missed by quite a few Rotten Tomatoes percentage points.

This film had a budget of almost half a million dollars.

Obviously, this would have been a fraction of what high profile films received yet Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) became one of the most recognised horror films in history based on a budget of $300,000 USD. So that raises only one question: what gives? I read a little trivia on the film, and it was interesting to learn that Kim Basinger auditioned for the female lead. I’m not sure what fell through there but

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S C R EEN :

DUNKIRK Christopher Nolan I went into Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Dunkirk, with somewhat low expectations, preparing myself for an emotionally underwhelming vanity project with a gimmick - the use of 70mm analogue film instead of digital. But instead I ended up crying, softly, in a slowly lighting theatre.

Dunkirk defied my expectations both in terms of genre and technicality, and showed itself to be a stunning piece of cinema not to be played off as another war movie.

The central hype around Dunkirk is that it was filmed on 70mm film, instead of the cheaper and far more common digital recording. 70mm film is bigger, and therefore has a higher resolution than old 35mm you may have watched back in the early 2000s, but it also has that grainy, flickering feel that digital film lacks. In some ways, using 70mm film is like playing a vinyl record - you don’t get the clarity or perfection of a digital recording, but what you do often get is an almost tangible sense of intimacy.

Intimacy is exactly what Dunkirk gains from the use of 70mm. There is very little dialogue in the movie itself.

There is no trading of names, or backstories, or Nolan’s trademarked long, expositional monologues: we know nothing about what the characters are thinking or feeling, except from what is stated at the beginning of the film - that these characters want to go home.

Wide sweeping shots of Dunkirk beach, filled with lines of patient soldiers and awash in cool-toned yellow, blue and grey, pop and waver before our eyes, as if we have just stepped out into the sun from too long in the shade, eyes adjusting to the white light and broad sky. This is how our main character must feel, thrust from the shade of the town onto the harsh waterfront.

emotion. The score and sound design are almost impossible to untangle, as the music switches from deep, unresolved string chords to ships sinking to dive bombers rattling overhead, to what must be the sound of these boys’ hearts breaking as they are once again unable to escape back home.

The actual story of Dunkirk is simple and sparse - it doesn’t hit any of the beats usually seen in war movies. There is no quiet reflection time for the boys to share personal stories, nor is there a transformative, emotional journey, or games and jokes to break up the tension. Such typical story arcs and structures are foregone in three interconnecting stories of differing perspectives and time frames: the first is a week-long trek of soldiers trying to evacuate Dunkirk; the second is a day in which the small, citizen-captained pleasure boats leave England to help move soldiers from the shallow beach to larger naval ships further off the coast; and the third is an hour in the cockpits of two fighter pilots trying to stop the bombers.

Switching between the three stories gives the film the brevity it needs, but also allows different perspectives on the evacuation, preventing the audience from dehumanising the unknown people seen from afar. While soldiers paddling The same evocative filming happens deep in the bowels of a away from a torpedoed ship from the eyes of a pilot may ship leaving Dunkirk - greeny-blues and browns of soldiers in seem far away, you soon realise that your other main the ship’s cold lighting blur together in a haze of exhaustion characters are in that ship, and immediately your perspective and relief, as both the audience and the characters settle changes. While at times it can be confusing matching up down in the belief that they are safe at last. Everything three different - yet linked - timelines, in the end it provides a feels authentic - without the precise crispness of digital viewing experience that forces empathy on the audience, not film, you can feel as if you are really there, in Dunkirk, the allowing the audience to be distant and uncaring about the imperfections in the film matching the bleariness of your people they can’t immediately see. eyes. This is how war really looks - grainy.

Dunkirk is not an easy movie to watch, but it’s not intended The score, by long-time Nolan collaborator Hanz Zimmer, to be. It intends to be a movie that makes you look at war in also greatly helps the audience identify with and invest in a new way, not through the eyes of a bystander, but through characters that don’t speak or even show any real array of those of the soldiers on the ground.

By Sabrina Kirby

60 || Repeat Offenders

BOOKS:

THE BIG BLACK THING: CHAPTER 1 Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Winnie Dunn, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing edited by Ellen van Neerven When we read a book we want to escape into another world. We want to meet new people, be transported to far off realms, and be consumed by dazzling spells and cool spaceships. Sometimes, however, we read to remind us of who we are, where we come from, and what we are made of. Being a migrant myself, The Big Black Thing: Chapter 1 resonated with me on so many levels. The anthology is a collection of prose and poetry by both emerging and established writers from refugee, Indigenous and migrant backgrounds.

you to view a display of the funny, sad, lost, and unique shades of the human rainbow.

Sometimes it can be difficult, fiction or not, to delve into issues such as race, religion, and sex. Pieces like Winnie Dunn’s, which depicts the riots in Tonga, deal with confronting tales of violence, war and its casualties, and being caught in the crossfire of a rebellion during a school day. The rawness of the language used to depict these incidents makes this enable the book, and each writer that has contributed to it to, make the topics they have covered very relatable and real.

by Sonia Lal

The main strength of Chapter 1 is that it achieves the purpose it sets out in the foreword: to deliver stories centred on the identities of people from different backgrounds. But these stories also navigate and explore the trials and tribulations of growing up, of interacting with the opposite sex, of fighting with siblings, and of Instagrams gone horribly wrong. Transitions between poetry and prose, and the combination of a variety of writing styles and forms, as well as the diverse perspectives presented in each piece, keeps the anthology entertaining throughout.

Even though the pieces are fiction, each writer is able to capture and maintain a concrete sense of authenticity.

Contributing to this authenticity is the deliberate misuse of the English language within a number of the stories, such as those written by the high school students from Joseph Banks High School and Lurnea High School. Many of the students are from Asian, Arab, and Pasifika backgrounds, and the broken speech reflects the use of English around them, conveying an innocence and veracity that truly enables the stories to represent events that could happen in real life, and in a voice that has often been excluded from Sydney’s literary scene.

There are, however, times when the anthology begins to lag. Thankfully, ‘#commutorama’ comes at a perfect time.

15 pages of photos depicting what one might initially think to be mundane shots of commuters on Sydney trains invite

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MUSIC:

SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

LUST FOR LIFE

HAIM Ending a musical hiatus that followed their vibrant debut album Days Are Gone (2013), LA girl-band HAIM have come back with their long awaited second album, Something To Tell You. The three sisters, Danielle, Alana and Este, strong in their camaraderie and tight-knit collaboration, have packed a punch with their retro-reminiscent tracks and ability to seamlessly combine different rhythms and genres. The album begins with the catchy, upbeat track ‘Want You Back’, a perfect example of not only their sheer talent but also their ability to create music that sits faultlessly in the overlap of pop, R&B and rock, with straightforward lyrics that simply tell it how it is.

Lana Del Rey I approached Lust For Life with apprehension. Lana Del Rey smiling on the album cover? Did she finally manage to find the perfect sugar daddy? It’s a new era, and I was scared. Yet, thanks to her beautiful poetic lyrics, Del Rey still manages to keep to a chilly disaffected aesthetic, just with a tasty sugar coating of fun this time around.

The uniquely structured track ‘Right Now’ evokes a sense of melancholia and the frustration that accompanies a relationship gone wrong through its rise and fall of passion and sound. ‘You Never Knew’ sounds like dancing under a disco ball in flare jeans and a tasseled shawl resembling that of Stevie Nicks, it’s groovy and arguably the hidden peak of the album, nestled among louder tracks such as ‘Little Of Your Love’. HAIM are known for their collaborative nature and percussion-heavy sound with many vocal layers and conversational lyrics; their newest release has provided a continuation of this brand. ‘Something To Tell You’ is a diverse display of sound and rhythm. Each of the sisters contribute their own strong influence to every aspect of the album to tell stories of heartbreak, moving on, personal discoveries, and messages to ex-lovers.

On tour for their new album, the girls have well and truly swept into Australia’s hearts. Their gorgeous Like a Version cover went viral within hours, and by most accounts their Splendour set showcased the best of their endearing stage presence. Almost two weeks after the release of Something To Tell You, at their one off show in Newtown, the sisters admitted to the Sydney crowd just how emotional this album had been for them. Out the back of the venue long after the show had ended, two of three sisters emerged and pulled waiting fans into them with smiles and open arms as if they were all old friends, thanking their fans for the overwhelming support for this album.

HAIM know how to play to their strengths and the girls have produced a beautifully crafted record that will easily become the soundtrack to your summer.

by Camilla Seldon

62 || Repeat Offenders

Lust For Life opens with the bangers ‘Love’ and ‘Lust for Life’, both reminiscent of the anthemic sound of the Paradise era. Almost every song - besides ‘White Mustang’, which sounds like a sponsored promo - has a massive orchestral/electronic sound that begs to be listened to with high quality headphones. It’s all very sexy and sensual; the typical Del Rey sound we’re all familiar with.

The second half of the album evokes memories of Del Rey’s last album, Honeymoon; the instruments are stripped back, with a focus on the lyrics, but this time round Del Rey takes a stab at tackling this post-Trump world. Del Rey manages to give her own takes on both feminism and gun violence in ‘God Bless America’, and later on, in ‘When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing’, debates whether we’re approaching the end of the American era. Del Rey has made the ‘purposeful pop’ album Katy Perry thought she was making.

There’s a number of featured artists on Lust For Life. The Weeknd features on the title track, his smooth silky voice and jaded aesthetic blending incredibly well with Del Rey’s breathy, haunted tone. I would sell an organ for a collab album. A$AP Rocky rocks (I went there) on ‘Summer Bummer’, but feels a little out of place on ‘Groupie Love’, as he doesn’t really add much to the song. But all is forgiven when friggen Goddess of all that is music, Stevie Nicks, appears and manages to make one of the blander songs, ‘Beautiful People Beautiful Problems’ one of the most memorable. Sean Lennon (son of John and Yoko) also appears towards the end, sounding like Empire of the Sun, and I’m here for that.

Lana Del Rey is as cool as ever on Lust For Life, yet her personal growth is demonstrated by her talent for turning politics into pop music without turning pop music into politics.

by Nathaniel Keesing

HOROSCOPES GEMINI

CANCER

TAURUS

LEO

You need to work on developing relationships beyond tagging people in doggo memes.

Leo season’s over: It’s time to rebuild bridges, heal the wounded, and bask in the afterglow.

ARIES

SCORPIO

Restrain all urges to hit someone this month, Aries. Unless they’re an Aquarius.

Fuck Aquarians.

It’s denim season, baby: now you can pretend that your black jeans and denim jacket combo is a fashion statement and not just the thing you’ve been wearing for three weeks straight.

AQUARIUS

LIBRA

The weight of your sins will continue to burden you for evermore.

Huffing nangs every night for a week won’t literally kill you, but it won’t stop your self-loathing, either.

PISCES

SAGGITARIUS

Strategically taking free samples from Mad Mex at the Mac Centre for an hour does not count as breakfast.

It may surprise you to learn that you’ve never been able to read, Sagittarius.

These words aren’t really written on this page, you’re actually making them up in your head.

VIRGO

CAPRICORN

Just because not everyone yells “Why are you like this?” for five minutes at their reflection before leaving the house doesn’t mean it’s not okay.

Take a break from your tutorial and scream at clouds for an hour. The clouds deserve it, they’ve been talking shit about you behind your back.

We get that you’re a student, Cancer, but the pickings from your floordrobe are mustier than ever.

You will take a journey over water this month but do not be afraid, you are unlikely to die. (Disclaimer: only valid for students who live south of the Parramatta River or Sydney Harbour and those who practice safety consciousness in everyday life).

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