Acknowledgement of Country
Honi Soit is produced, published and distributed on the stolen land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded. For over 235 years, First Nations peoples in so-called ‘Australia’ have continued to suffer under the destructive effects of invasion, genocide, and colonisation. As editors of this paper, we acknowledge that we are each living, writing, and working on stolen Gadigal, Wangal and Bidjigal land, and are beneficiaries of ongoing colonial dispossession.
Editors
Huw Bradshaw
Valerie Chidiac
Aidan Elwig Pollock
Victoria Gillespie
Ariana Haghighi
Sandra Kallarakkal
Zeina Khochaiche
Simone Maddison
Angus McGregor
Amelia Raines
Contributors
Aleina Konsam
Charlotte Saker
Edward Ellis
Gemma Hudson
Marlow Hurst
Grace Street
Holly Gerrard
Lotte Weber
Mehnaaz Hossain
Nessa Zhu
Purny Ahmed
Will Thorpe
Michael Smith
Students Against War
Artists/ Photographers
Friends of Callan Park
Holly Gerard
Mahima Singh
Natarina Ramdhana
Nessa Zhu
Ross Anicete
Cover Art
We acknowledge that the University of Sydney is an inherently colonial institution which is not only physically built on stolen land, but also ideologically upholds a devaluing of Indigenous systems of knowledge and systematically excludes First Nations peoples. We recognise our complicity in such systems. We strive to remain conscious of, and actively resist and unlearn, colonial ideologies and biases, both our own and those perpetuated by the University and other institutions like it.
Editorial
It gets dark much too early these days. It is hard to close the blinds at 5pm, when all I want to do is stretch out in the sun for a few hours more.
It’s funny, really. I have never been a big fan of summer, but I have found myself missing the heat. Similarly, I have never been a big fan of coming back to campus for a new semester, but this time round I have never been more ready to return. Perhaps it is the finality of it all. This is the last semester of my undergraduate degree. This is also my last semester of editing this paper. As we begin our countdown to the inevitable end, I am trying my best to savour everything from the 8am carpools to the 3pm bubble tea runs to the 8pm DOPA orders, so when I look back I can at least remember the joys of it all, too.
This issue is dedicated to remembering. It is dedicated to endings and beginnings. It is dedicated to ghosts, and spectres, and apparitions. To what appears when you are alone, what haunts you on Wednesday afternoons as you run for a train you know you will not make, and what you find yourself haunting, accidentally and on purpose. In these pages, you will learn how to search for these phantoms, how to fight them, and how to make peace with them too. It’s all a part of the process. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this edition for looking for your ghosts, I hope you have found such journeys fruitful.
And to all you readers of this old rag, I ask that you follow in such footsteps and go out and find your ghosts. Invite them in and wait for the kettle to whistle. And then listen. They have much to tell you.
us!
Got something you want to get off your chest? Have a bone to pick? Burning questions or hot takes? Submit your letters to us!
Email through your real thoughts and feelings to us: editors@honisoit.com
As a student newspaper, we pledge to stand in solidarity with both First Nations movements and all Indigenous struggles toward decolonisation worldwide, endeavouring to platform Indigenous voices. Honi is committed to countering the exclusion, censoring, and silencing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in mainstream media.
Always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
Digital IDs are here GIPA comes back CAP enforced incorrectly 4
July Council coverage USU bored meeting
Protesting Labor Bankstown and BDS 6
Analysis
Overhaul the (mental healthcare) system International student caps 7
Senator Payman and Labor
Feature
Pulling out the roots
All about the SGM
Explaining SGMs
What we are voting on
Student Against War’s op-ed
Throwback to Commemoration Day Graveyard ghosts
Manipuri food Callan park USyd and the Olympian Another magazine! Desk carvings Horror stories
I’m stumped.
Creative Budget airlines fall victim to IT outage
OB reports Case work! Puzzles
Huw does comedy
ISSN: 2207-5593. This edition was published on Wednesday 31 July 2024. Disclaimer: Honi Soit is published by the Students’ Representative Council, University of Sydney, Level 1 Wentworth Building, City Road, University of Sydney NSW 2006. The SRC’s operation costs, space and administrative support are financed by the University of Sydney. Honi Soit is printed under the auspices of the SRC’s Directors of Student Publications (DSP): Dustin Dao, Jasmine Donnelly, Lia Perkins, Tiger Perkins, Victor Zhang, Lucinda Zheng. All expressions are published on the basis that they are not to be regarded as the opinions of the SRC unless specifically stated. The Council accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of any of the opinions or information contained within this newspaper, nor does it endorse any of the advertisements and insertions.
Darshni Rajasekar
Sandra Kallarakkal News
Cartoon Caption Contest
Submit your best caption for the above to editors@honisoit. com for a chance to WIN and be published in the next edition! Winners receive a personalised limerick from Angus McGregor.
The Hage Award for First Nations Writers
In recognition of the 2024 NAIDOC Week celebrations, Sweatshop Literacy Movement announced The Hage Award for First Nations Writers. Founded and funded by Professor Ghassan Hage, this award will provide income, mentoring and residencies for two emerging writers from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds to each develop their debut manuscripts.
In addition to receiving $5,000 each, the successful applicants will be offered a 12-month mentorship with two of Australia’s most distinguished and iconic writers, Tony Birch and Melissa Lucashenko.
For more information, visit Sweatshop’s social media or application portal on its website. Applications close August 12.
Honi’s Culture Guide
Wednesday 31 July
SUDS’ Doghole (continues until 10 August) @ 7pm, cellar theatre. Tickets from $3, available through @sudsusyd.
Framework launch @ evelwight
SCASS Salad Days Art Exhibition (continues until 7 August) @ 11 am4pm, Backspace.
Thursday 1 August
SUDS x Fringe Festival launch party @ 7pm, Hermanns bar. Tickets free - $20, available through @sudsusyd.
”OPTING OUT” Exhibition Launch and Verge’s 15th Birthday Party @ 5.30-8pm, Verge Gallery, Camperdown. Tickets free.
Sunday 4 August
“Sam Cooke’s slightly bigger soiree @ 8pm, message @Cooke334 for addy”
Monday 5 August
Album fundraiser for The After Thoughts, @ 7pm, Petersham Bowling Club. Access student price tickets on Humanitix.
Thursday 8 August
Queer Beers @ 5:30-8:30pm, Flodge
Notices
Inner West Young Creatives Awards
Inner West Council Libraries are currently running the Young Creatives Awards, a writing, visual art and film competition open for people aged 12-24 who live, work or study in the Inner West.
USyd students are encouraged to submit their work for an opportunity to be published and win monetary prizes (up to $500 per entry with a prize pool of $8400).
Finalists will have their writing published in an anthology, their artwork hung at the Chrissie Cotter gallery, or their short film shown at the Marrickville Pavilion. A new People’s Choice category has also been introduced this year.
Entries close August 21. Visit the Inner West Council website for more information on how to enter.
USU Creative Awards
Submissions to the 2024 USU Creative Awards are now open! The USU Creative Awards is the University of Sydney’s largest annual student creative arts prize, highlighting the very best of visual arts, writing, music, and short film. Submissions to the Creative Awards are welcome from all students currently enrolled at USyd.
Honi’s statement on Bangladeshi student protests
Honi Soit extends support toward the Bangladeshi student protesters, in endeavouring for student freedom, dignity, and opportunity to thrive and exercise their education, while inheriting a precarious workforce from their predecessors.
Indefinite curfews imposed by the government have interrupted the livelihoods of all, with student protesters saying that the decrease in reserved job quotas from 30% to 5% does not mark an end to their advocacy.
Protestors have endured tear gas, batons, and bullets at the hands of riot police, with clashes causing hundreds of deaths, and thousands of injuries.
Students should be able to protest without fear, and enter into a workforce with fair and equal opportunities for all. Students should not feel as though their merits are quashed by bureaucracy, and that their dissent will be met with state violence.
Honi endorses the demands of student protesters, which push for an apology for the violence and justice for the lives lost.
Cartoon: Ariana Haghighi
University introduces digital ID cards for staff and students
Angus McGregor and Victoria Gillespie
The University of Sydney has announced new digital student and staff ID cards which can be used like the current physical cards to access student services.
The card can be used to borrow books from the library, access printers and copiers, as well as laundry services for students living in University accommodation, and gain access to rooms and buildings.
Students who want to get a digital ID card can do so by following the instructions here to link the card to their Apple or Google wallet.
The card can also be used as proof to Transport Officers of concession status. Once activated, most services should be available within 24 hours while using the card as proof of transport concession will take 2 days.
The rollout is an attempt by the University to provide a solution for students who lose their physical cards and don’t want to go through the tedious process of acquiring a new one. Replacement physical cards also cost students $25.
There is no indication, as of now, that the University is intending to phase out physical ID cards and students are
currently under no obligation to get or use the digital version.
The University said in a social media post that the policy would also reduce reliance on plastic.
The University of Sydney is one of the first universities to roll out a digital ID card. Monash University was the first university to ditch physical ID cards last year rolling out a similar system known as M-Pass ID.
Other large universities like ANU, UNSW, and the University of Melbourne still only have physical IDs.
SRC President Harrison Brennan, while not opposing the policy, told Honi Soit that it had to be considered in context of recent University crackdowns on students allegedly sharing their IDs with each other during protests.
During the recent Gaza Solidarity encampment, University security attempted to stop non-students from entering University buildings to use bathroom facilities.
“It was reactive and illogical,” Brennan told Honi. “I had to take a woman to the SRC with her children to go to the toilet.”
Newly released documents reveal University’s ties to Israel
Huw Bradshaw
A Freedom of Information request submitted by Education Officer Grace Street on behalf of USyd Education Action Group has seen the release of documents by the University of Sydney regarding their ties with Israeli companies and broader financial investments.
The request was initially made on May 13 following which the University stated it would release the requested documents on June 11. The information was officially released last Thursday (July 18).
The Freedom of Information application requested access to all investments “currently held in the University of Sydney’s Endowment Funds” and all reports made by Investment and Capital Management to the University’s Finance Committee and Investment Subcommittee from 2021 – 2023.
Finally, the application requested a list of all Israeli companies the University maintains ties with. Ties were defined as “providing services to, trading with, or holding investments in”.
This included the 97 companies listed by the Office of the UN Human Rights Commissioner as conducting business in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Items 1 – 14 of the released documents consist of a table labelling each of the University’s equity portfolio investments from the period of March 2021 through to March 2024, as well as their respective weight and asset class. Among the presently held investments
University security incorrectly enforce Campus Access Policy, calling students ‘terrorists’
Angus McGregor and Ariana Haghighi
On Wednesday July 24, two security officers confronted a group of students leafleting on behalf of Students Against War, and mistakenly cited them for violating the University’s new Campus Access Policy (CAP)
The incident, captured on video, shows the security staff asking the students if they have “been authorised to hand these things out.”
There is no rule in the CAP against leafleting to students but other forms of protest such as using megaphones, setting up temporary structures like stalls, and entering University buildings, now require 72 hours of notice and University approval.
Even after the students informed the security staff that they did not need authorisation, they continued to be harassed with a security officer saying they could leaflet “if you have authorisation but I don’t think you have that.”
The security staff also appeared confused about other parts of the policy asking “Have they?” when told the CAP bans banners without authorization.
“What did you do this time? You
guys are terrorists, mate,” the security officer can be heard saying.
Another staff member was also caught on video questioning if the activists were genuine Usyd students.
In a statement to Honi Soit, a University spokesperson confirmed that “two of our security officers incorrectly advised some students against handing out pamphlets on campus,” apologising “for any confusion this caused.”
The spokesperson said that the University was “engaging with our guards to ensure consistency in our approach.”
On the same day, likely prompted by this incident, Vice Chancellor Mark Scott sent out an email to all staff and students, clarifying the CAP’s operation.
Scott said that “students remain free to set up stalls, put up posters in designated areas, and run events that question and challenge the status quo as they always have done,” with the clarification that these events “don’t jeopardise the health and wellbeing of their peers or significantly disrupt the operations of the University.”
are fossil fuel industry giants Shell and BHP, gambling corporation Lottery Corp, and BDS listed companies such as Amazon and Disney.
Items 15 – 27 consist of the University’s Chief Invesment Officer (CIO) reports to the Finance Committee Investment Subcommittee (FC IS) made from February 2021 to March 2024. These reports include asset allocation, returns and losses, and sector exposure.
Despite giving a wide scope of reports, the lion’s share of this information is redacted, referring to considerations against disclosure set out in Section 14 of the Government Information (Public Access) Act. These considerations broadly concern an agency being disadvantaged or prejudiced in its business, commercial, professional or financial interests by the release of information.
Items 28 – 30 outline the University’s ties with Israeli companies. Items 28 and 29 list active suppliers located in Israel, as well as a list of transactions occurring over the period 2023 – 2024.
In the fial item of the documents, the CIO advises that while the University’s holdings “have no companies listed on the Israeli stock exchange”, $2.25m of exposure to Israeli companies in the private equity and venture capital funds has been identified.
The CIO claims that the University is unable to sell these stakes.
Regarding the applications specification of the 97 companies listed by the Office of the UN Human
Rights Commissioner as conducting business in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the CIO states that the University has no exposure to any companies listed.
Known ties to Israeli universities such as Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were also detailed. This included over $20,000 paid to the latter for consulting on a business course.
This comes almost two months after a similar freedom of information request by Students Against War ANU saw the release of information regarding the Australian National University’s ties with weapons manufacturers implicated in genocide, having invested over one million dollars in contracts with companies such as Thales SA, Dassault Systemes, IBM and Lockheed
Scott also said that the policy would be reviewed at the end of the semester in consultation with staff and students where it may be “fine-tune[d] as necessary, recognising our multiple commitments to free speech, academic freedom, safety and wellbeing.”
In a post on social media, Students Against War condemned the policy, “The CAP is a violation of our right to free speech on campus and Usyd management are clearly seeing what they can get away with.
“We need every student talking about the CAP, we need to organise and make it unenforceable,” the post says.
Multiple factions, clubs and societies, and unions are organising an ‘Unauthorised Stalls Day’ on 12pm July 31 to protest the new policy. The University spokesperson told Honi that they expected “a period of adjustment following the introduction of the new Campus Access Policy.”
Martin. Following the release of this information, along with mounting pressure from student protests, the University launched a review into it’s investment portfolio.
A University spokesperson did not comment on the specific findings of the GIPA request but told Honi that “we have committed to convening a working group to provide feedback on our investment policies to ensure they reflect our commitment to human rights, including consideration of the position of defence- and security-related industries in our Investment Policy and our Integrated ESG Framework.”
These investments are likely to take centre stage in the upcoming Student General Meeting, Wednesday 7 August, where students are expected to vote on complete divestment from Israel.
Photo: Students Against War
Back to semester, back to Council: Attacking CAP, TERFs and nuclear power
Ariana Haghighi, Aidan Elwig Pollock and Angus McGregor Rescheduled date, last minute room change. But same old antics. What else can we expect from your favourite student representatives?
First, SRC President Harrison Brennan (Grassroots) announced the resignations of Global Solidarity Officer Tamsyn Smith (SAlt) and Queer Officer Tim Duff (QuAC). The reasons for these resignations remain unknown.
Many-time Electoral Officer Riki Scanlan then addressed the Council about regulations pertaining to the upcoming SRC elections. They confirmed that there will be 39 representatives elected in the 2025 council, with the in-person polling booth system continued from last year. On August 8, Scanlan will hold a briefing about nominations and on September 4, one about the campaign process including rules surrounding campaigning and expenses.
Brennan then delivered his President’s Report, centering on the campaign against the recentlyannounced Campus Access Policy (CAP). He explained that it was an “attack on freedom of speech,” and that alongside students, “staff are also rightly pissed… it’s a completely shocking attack.” He noted that the first motion of the upcoming Student General Meeting will include a demand for the repeal of CAP.
Brennan also noted that the SRC should be concerned about the proposed international students cap being introduced by the Albanese government in January 2025. Not only did Harrison call the cap a “racist assumption,” but also claimed that it “signals an austerity budget” which may include cuts to SSAF. He also reminded
students that simple extensions were currently under review and may be under threat.
Deaglan Godwin (SAlt) and Jasmine Donnelly (NLS) then delivered the Vice Presidents’ report which focused on future campaigns against the new Campus Access Policy (CAP) and litigating the National Union of Students (NUS)’s involvement — “or lack thereof”, as Godwin explained — in the Gaza solidarity encampment.
Donnelly said fighting the CAP is the “main campaign” but also mentioned that there would be a tour of the Red Cross medical injecting centre in early September to continue the SRC’s support of drug reform in NSW.
Rose Donnelly (NLS) and Dan O’Shea (Unity) delivered their General Secretary report, telling the council that “nothing has changed on the budget since the last time we showed it.”
Some interesting expenses include $3,344 for Cold calling and $58,455 for an affiliation fee to the NUS, as well as $1,842 for a Video content creation/ development training course. It should also be noted that the upcoming SRC elections will cost $63,501.
The meeting then moved onto motions which began with our very own Huw Bradshaw being elected with no dissent as the 10th Honi editor. We could not agree with Jasmine Donnelly more when she said that “I think it’s a good idea to have a full 10 person Honi team.”
The next motion demanded the SRC stand in solidarity with Bangladeshi students who are currently dying in the streets protesting unequal university entrance laws. Grace Street (Grassroots) listed the 9 demands of the
students in the motion and announced there would be a teach-in on the topic on August 7th.
Ishbel Dunsmore (Grassroots) noted there was currently a media blackout, but that the “last report we got from sources on the ground was that 160 students had been murdered” and that there were allegations of torture.
The next motion which called on the SRC to stand with Fatima Payman and protest the Labor Party’s support of genocide started a massive debate on how decisive her interactions with student encampments were to her positions changing, and how much support she should get.
SAlt speakers like Jasmine Al-Rawi and Lauren Finlayson argued that it was aggressive debates — allegedly led by SAlt, according to SAlt speakers — students had with Payman at Usyd and Curtin University that were crucial in her leaving the party. Al-Rawi said that her leaving “has been a real vindication
of the politics of opposing the Labor party” and Finlayson said that “we need to draw out our enemies from day one,” including the Labor party.
Grassroots speakers, on the other hand, such as Rand Khatib and Alistair Panzarino, argued that the hostility that Payman faced was unnecessary. Additionally, they criticised SAlt’s claim that their conversations with Payman were the decisive reason behind her crossing the floor. “Challenging someone’s politics is different to 20 people surrounding someone in a mob,” Khatib said.
Bridge (Queer Officer) then introduced the next motion which condemns the Philosophy Department for inviting transphobic philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith to speak as part of a seminar series. Bridge called her a “a transphobe and a bigot.” No dissent.
The meeting was closed at a very reasonable 9:08pm.
Read the full coverage online!
New Directors, same agenda: July’s USU Board Meeting
After a lonely forty-minute wait for the in-camera portion of the meeting to come to a close, Honi Soit was finally allowed into the Cullen Room for July’s USU Board meeting. Despite being the first formal gathering of firstyear Directors and the newly-elected Executive team, the meeting’s agenda remained the same as those earlier in the year.
Most Board Directors were present, with Georgia Zhang, Sargun Saluja, Floyd and Ben Hines joining from Zoom. Notably, it was President Bryson Constable’s first time chairing a session. Following a motion to make all minutes from June’s meeting public, Constable invited the Finance Committee to deliver this month’s Finance Report. Those speaking to this agenda item noted that the USU had witnessed a “forecasted deficit” across its food outlets, and that analysts are “unable to pinpoint a driver for why.” Alongside greater engagement with data around “average spend and weather variables” impacting sales at these outlets, speakers noted that cost-
savings in other areas across June have helped to offset this deficit.
The Board was also asked to approve the Finance Committee’s budgetary reassessment for the second half of the year (referred to throughout the meeting as the “Q2 Re-forecast”), emphasising that these are “milestones and targets we can work towards in the coming months for profit and revenue.”
The Q2 Re-forecast included capital expenditure plans across investments and asset purchases for the next six months, the most notable of which centred on requests for an additional $99,000 in spending. In an attempt to clarify the origins of this strikingly large number, Constable explained that this money “comes from a repurposing of funds from earlier in the year.”
Discussions of the Finance Report moved into broader debates over the long-term strategic management of the USU’s $30 million annual turnover, with Board Directors reaching the conclusion that the Union should “make profit for a purpose, not be a forprofit organisation.”
Constanble also promised that Honi would receive a copy of the USU’s recent impact reporting for Semester 1, detailing the use of SSAF grants and student access to food outlets.
A brief inlet into the work of Portfolio holders saw Georgia Zhang recap her commitment to providing free period products and combatting period poverty through a recent Women @ Sydney event, as well as Ethan Floyd mention their work with the University’s Pride Network for Queer Beers during Semester 2’s upcoming Welcome Week. Floyd also noted their engagements at a PULPxVerge Panel, as well as a separate panel featured in the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s exhibition on the history of student unionism.
At the end of the meeting, Honi was finally allowed to ask questions. In response to queries about the likelihood of extending interim CEO Michael Bromley’s tenure beyond its expiry in September, as well as how the recruitment process will function, Constable stated that Bromley’s performance “will be measured against the requirements set at the beginning of
March”, and that details will be provided publicly following “consideration of the timeline and project scope of the CEO.”ww
Additional questions centred around the USU’s position on the University’s recent implementation of the Campus Access Policy (CAP), as well as the Student General Meeting (SGM) to be held on August 7. Although Honi extended the opportunity for all Directors to respond, Constable instead stated that “there are 44,000 student [USU] members who encompass a broad range of views.” He went on to say that the CAP “deals with difficult matters”, but that the Board’s role should be in “making students feel safe and maintaining free speech.” Constable also stated he “looks forward to seeing what comes out of the two motions on notice” at the SGM, and that his discussions with the SRC President Harrison Brennan have been “productive.”
July’s meeting was officially closed at 3:17pm. The next USU Board session will be held on August 30.
Simone Maddison
Solidarity photo for students in Bangladesh
“Your melanin and second language won’t save you”: Protests overshadow NSW Labor Conference
Huw Bradshaw, Aidan Elwig Pollock, Zeina Khochaiche and Angus McGregor
Palestine Action Group Sydney protested the NSW Labor Conference held at Town Hall this Saturday, July 27.
The annual NSW Labor Conference brings together hundreds of Labor members including MPs, Union leaders, and branch presidents to vote on policy and elect members of the executive.
PAG’s demands include Boycott, Divest, Sanction regulations; ceasing of all military, economic, political and diplomatic ties with Israel; and support for Palestinian refugees to seek safety in Australia.
The protest, building from 11am this morning, saw approximately 2000 in attendance with heavy police presence barricading Town Hall and directing protestors.
The wet weather did not deter protestors as chants were heard throughout proceedings: “Labor party you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “Albanese your hands are red! 50,000 children dead!”
Labor delegates wearing keffiyehs were spotted leaving the hall at the Druitt St exit, and one union delegate member exiting the conference told Honi that there was “not a lot of noise inside but a lot of silent anger”.
An observer-member wearing a Palestinian flag pin echoed the sentiment that some people inside “were not happy” but said that people in the party “were focused on winning the election.”
Honi overheard one state MP dismiss the chants as they left the building, telling a staffer “they really think we are responsible for killing babies.”
During Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s speech a Palestinian flag was waved before his eyeline by conference attendees.
Some members of the Electrical Trades Union and allies of the CFMEU — which has recently been kicked out of the Labor party due to allegations of corruption — walked out during the speech and heckled.
Protestors stood at the front of the speeches and blindfolded themselves with keffiyehs, holding up signs that read “Gaza has the largest number of child amputees in the world.”
The protest was chaired by Palestine Action Group members Jana Fayaad and Josh Lees.
“We know that the global north leaders are racist,”
Canterbury-Bankstown Council passes a BDS motion to review its investments
Valerie Chidiac
The City of Canterbury-Bankstown Council has passed a motion to review council investments and suppliers in accordance with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement on Tuesday evening.
The motion was moved by Labor Councillor Christopher Cahill to “review of Council’s investments and links to companies, if any, that are complicit in human rights violations on the Palestinian people, including the illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian Territories and the supply of weapons”.
Cahill’s motion emphasised a review into “suppliers” as well as “investment and contractual obligations”, and that it is “in line with what other likeminded councils are doing and in line with the ideology of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).”
Organisers from City of CanterburyBankstown for Palestine, a group of local residents, also held a rally outside the council building.
Three members of the public spoke to the necessity of carrying this motion forward, including Hurlstone Park resident Zuzia Buszewicz who argued that “the Canterbury-Bankstown council wouldn’t enter into a contract with a supplier known to be reselling stolen goods”, therefore “it should review and reconsider the contracts it may have already entered into with entities operating on stolen Palestinian land.”
Despite attempts to make amendments to the motion, the motion
Fayaad said, “they see us as subhuman. This has become crystal clear with the West and their continued baking of Israel and the genocide.”
It’s been 294 days of horror and terrorism,it has been almost a year of the most devastating genocide in modern history.”
“We have learned how morally bankrupt the Australian Labor Party is,” Fayaad continued, “we have learnt how many war criminals are inside that building.”
Fayaad said chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were intended to be heard by “every Labor politician sitting comfortably in that room.”
“We need more than words,” Lees said, “we need actions, we need sanctions.”
“You can see what the Labor party really stands for by how they treat their members,for more than a hundred years the Labor party has been working against the working class.”
“They’re not made by us, they’re not made by you or their members, they represent the millionaires,” Lees continued. “What we need in this country is a real working class movement that will stand up against genocide.”
covering the protest and conference.
Speaking at the rally, First Nations activist Ethan Floyd claimed that the Labor party “will not be remembered for reconciliation or workers rights as they would like, but for their support of Israel, for the extinction of Palestinians.”
NTEU USyd Branch President Nick Reimer spoke to the “witch hunt” against the pro-Palestine support “by the Zionists in Australia”.
“The wind has changed, the support for Palestine significantly exceeds the support for Israel [in Australia],” Reimer said, “it couldn’t be clearer, there is no electoral logic preventing the people in that building from supporting Palestine.”
Australians have said “no to this nightmare, not to genocide, no to apartheid,” Reimer claimed, “no to the murder of over 180,000 ordinary Palestinians.”
“We’ve been saying that no for months, but what do we hear from Albo and Penny Wong?”, Reimer continued, “a few feeble half measures. There is an unwavering refusal to do even the slightest real thing to stop this genocide in Palestine.”
ultimately passed, 9-4.
Votes against the motion consisted of Liberal Councillors Charlie Ishac and Charbel Abouraad, Independent Councillor Barbara Coorey and Councillor Jessie Nguyen.
The timing of the motion is significant after the International Court of Justice ruled on 19 July that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestine Territory is unlawful” and should come to an end.
This advisory opinion came after a 2022 request by the UN General Assembly and also made it clear that all states must “consider the precise modalities and further action required” to bring an end to the occupation, and not “render aid or assistance in maintaining” it.
After the meeting, rally organisers welcomed the motion saying that “this is only the first step, and we are far from actual BDS implementation” but they will continue to apply pressure to ensure that “the results of the audit are made available to the public.”
In a statement to Honi Soit, City of Canterbury-Bankstown for Palestine said that “By taking this stance, the nine Labor Councillors did the right thing, reflecting the views of the overwhelming majority of their constituents.”
A BDS motion to review investments and suppliers will be presented at the next Inner West Council meeting on August 13, and a rally by Inner West for Palestine will be held outside the Ashfield Service Centre from 5:30pm.
There was a heavy police presence across the protest with officers stationed at every corner and entrance to the event.
At points during the protest, police moved on demonstrators who got too close to delegates leaving the conference including pushing back activists yelling “shame” at exiting members on Druitt St.
One of Honi’s reporters was confronted by police at one of the Town Hall exits and their bag was searched and ID ran through the system for any past interactions with the police. This was after they identified themselves as a journalist
Reimer singled out Federal Member for Sydney and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek as someone activists “shouldn’t forget,” claiming the Minister had escaped the condemnation placed on Albanese and Wong. “It’s so hard to worry about genocide when you’re too busy approving coal mines,” Reimer said.
Academic Randa Abdel-Fattah claimed that the conference represented a “crystal clear reminder that… western democracy depends on and is sustained by genocide, colonialism and brutal violence.”
Abdel-Fattah finished by saying that while ultimately “the Global South pays the price” the “tactics and methods [used in Gaza] will come back here as part of the imperial project.”
Photo: Huw Bradshaw
Can we bridge the gaps in Australia’s mental healthcare system or
does the entire system need an overhaul?
Take this first scenario: You are a university student who is responding in the most natural way to the stressful conditions around you and your mental health takes a dip in the not-so-sunny side. Your options? You can see a psychologist with obscenely expensive fees and an inane waiting list, attempt to find help online (“You’re not alone!” Which means we’re all suffering!”), or wait until the situation gets incredibly dire and you find yourself in an inpatient hospital setting. It is easier to just ignore this whole issue altogether, you say to yourself — there are more pressing concerns to deal with.
Now here is our second scenario: You wake up with a UTI, but your regular GP is all booked out for the day. Your next best options are to call around and try to find another GP who can see you ASAP, or you’re doomed to face the emergency department for the rest of the day when you know that all you need is that script for an antibiotic.
Of course, the Australian government is well aware of the gaps in treatment between these extremes in both scenarios. What was their response in the 2024-2025 financial budget? For your physical health concerns, they have invested $227 million to add 29 more bulk-billed urgent care clinics (free of cost if you have a Medicare card), with a rapid open date of July 15th in Belmore and Green Square so far.
For your mental health concerns, the new budget shows promise. Over the next four years, plans are being made for an early intervention service to connect all individuals with support before their distress escalates, free walkin mental health centres, and funding for Primary Health Networks allocated between allied health supports and general practices for improved team care coordination.
These are some significant steps forward — in particular, issues regarding accessibility and the importance of early intervention are being recognised and tackled — but the problems that Australians are facing are far larger than a simple walk-in can address. Anybody who has dabbled even the tiniest bit in Australia’s mental healthcare system knows that these initiatives are nowhere near the investment required to achieve long-term reform. The system is so overstretched in that it is mostly
only able to deal with crises through the public sector, essentially requiring patients to be actively suicidal in order to access care. Even at this point, care is hastily herded back to GPs and private psychologists. The most effective treatments exist in this private sphere, but the biggest barrier to such is undeniably the cost of those services.
The Australian Psychological Society currently suggests a 45-60 minute consultation to be priced around $311. This unsustainable cost leaves the next best option for most people is to visit their GP for a Mental Health Care Plan, and under the Better Access initiative you are able to receive 10 rebated sessions with a psychologist. However, the plan itself is costly with the Medicare rebate only covering $99.70, and the out-of-pocket fee running you around $100. The same goes for the session with the psychologist itself: the rebate covers roughly $93, and with 10 sessions the gap fee is sure to accumulate, at least, to a thousand dollars.
At the most basic level, there is simply not enough funding to allow the average Australian to see a psychologist regularly. Combined with increasing rent prices and the ever-present cost of living crisis, mental health is essentially what you could call a ‘rich man’s problem’. Not to mention, it is precisely those with lower income levels who need mental health services more, whereas it is the more well off that tend to access them easier. Such stems from the inequalities of low-income communities’ social, economic, and physical environments and their associated issues (e.g. limited resources, lack of housing, hunger etc.) that all contribute to compounded stressors that are less prevalent in higher socioeconomic groups.
Accessibility aside, there are further issues regarding availability – 10 sessions is nowhere near enough to treat any serious issues with the necessary depth, trapping those who are not in a financially secure enough position to continue to shell out on full private fees. While this may suggest that the short-term mental health care plans are better suited to those with more mild issues, an evaluation of the Better Access initiative revealed that brief psychotherapies may be ineffective for individuals with less severe mental
health issues, and in many cases, even cause deterioration. A large part of such is that mental health services are often fragmented, with inadequate integration and coordination. The Victorian mental health royal commission identified in 2021 that the current options are mostly focused on crisis management, and as reported by the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, this still hasn’t improved in 2024 – there is a profound lack of targets on long-term support, preventative care, and a necessary focus on social determinants of mental health that require larger systemic reform.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, most Australians consult a GP for mental health, rather than mental health professionals. This then begs the question — how beneficial is the Better Access scheme which itself hinges upon having a referral to a psychologist?
The new budget falls short in its attempts to bridge the gap in mental healthcare by alleviating some pressure off GPs — there is no point modernising the healthcare system if there are not enough mental health trained professionals to work in these new locations. The Australian Psychological Society reported that 25% of psychologists are 55 or older, the largest workforce shortfall of any mental health profession. However, there is no shortage in demand for a profession in psychology at all. Psychology is incredibly popular as an undergraduate course, but is subject to a high bottleneck across all Australian universities due to the extreme competitiveness of postgraduate degrees, a necessary qualification to become a practising psychologist.
Postgraduate psychology training is incredibly costly to run — firstly on account of the requirement for high
clinical supervision and secondly, due to placement costs, thereby limiting the number of spots available. As outlined by the Psychology Training and Public Health Workforce Alliance, universities have also resorted to reducing Commonwealth-supported places in favour of full-fee spots, running a student $35,000 a year. This affordability barrier itself greatly impacts student diversity, and does not measure up to expectations to continually develop a culturally representative sector that is able to respond and engage with the intricate and multifaceted needs of Australian society.
As for the individuals who do become qualified as psychologists, there is a massive (and understandable) preference to immediately go into higherpaying private practice. The alternatives of bulk-billing leave a meagre $15-20 of pay per hour, and public health roles are typically also bypassed for similar reasons. Such a lack of funding once again diminishes the general public’s access to community mental health services, which theoretically, should exist as the backbone of care.
The additions to Australia’s current mental health care system that will be delivered across the next four years are a positive step forward in reducing the gap in mental healthcare, but it is clear that more extensive foundations are required to ensure longevity and more meaningful change to the everyday Australian. Additional funding and evaluation of current systems in all aspects is prudent from the reachability of the Better Access scheme, to the increased training of psychology students. Besides, what use is there to have extra shiny rooms without the trained professionals to staff them?
Nessa Zhu investigates Australia’s mental healthcare system.
Starving the future: International student caps and the increasing black hole faced by universities
After 40 years of building an international education sector that is now worth $36.4 billion, the government is embarking on a risky program to cut the number of international students who enter the country.
Since 2005, the number of students has grown consistently by about 6% a year, but growth has exploded post COVID. In the context of an upcoming election where Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is falsely blaming migration for the housing crisis and crime, the Labor government’s response is as much a political safeguard as it is a genuine attempt to fix a broken migration system.
The government’s plan puts universities in a dangerous bind. On the one hand, Liberal and Labor governments have slashed direct funding to the tertiary sector, which forced universities to rely on other revenue sources. On the other, they are now targeting the money universities have learned to rely on. SRC President Harrison Brennan summarised the problem, telling Honi Soit that “in Australia, the government spends under 1% of its GDP on direct funding for higher-ed institutions.”
Ministers have tried to frame the reforms as measured tweaks to the visa system. These reforms include small changes like banning tourists from also applying for student visas, to larger ones like a crackdown on vocational colleges that are largely a front to get people into the workforce. However, with the government not on track to meet its 2025 targets before the budget, the reforms became increasingly harsh. On 1 July, the Australian Government made an announcement that application fees for student visas will be increasing from $710 to $1600 effective immediately, representing a 125% increase. Australia already has one of the highest student visa application costs in the world. By comparison, New Zealand’s cost is $343, the USA, $277 and the UK, the highest before this announcement, at $900 (AUD).
In the budget speech, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced that a cap would be
placed on how many international students can enrol at each institution. The cap is expected to correspond with the size of the institution and would be limited to specific courses. While universities have cautiously supported other reforms, the backlash against a hard cap has been swift. Economic modelling commissioned by the University of Sydney suggests the cuts to the number of international students could cause a $4.1 billion hit to the Australian economy and cause 21,992 job losses in 2025. Victorian universities estimated the sector itself was bracing for a $1.1 billion deficit in 2025 with 63,500 fewer international students expected.
Higher education expert Andrew Norton believes that these estimates are conservative, but even if they forecasted a worst case scenario, the data should be concerning for students, as even a small reduction in revenue to universities could result in a higher student-teacher ratio, larger class sizes, and less funding for research grants. According to the University of Sydney’s submission to the government, “for every full-time Australian citizen who studies medicine or veterinary science, the University of Sydney needs to find more than $10,000 in additional funding each year — funding sourced largely from international student fees.” A University spokesperson stated they “appreciate the need to manage moderate growth of international students over time,” but noted that these policies “could harm the broader sector and Australia’s reputation internationally.”
The reliance Australian universities have on international student revenue cannot be underestimated. Last year, 975,229 international students enrolled and 46% of all USyd students came from overseas according to the last annual report. Over a billion dollars,—44% of the university’s total revenue last year — came from those fees. Despite these numbers, USyd is not the most dependent university in the tertiary sector, with over 72.5% of student income at the University
Spirited stunts
Marlow Hurst
of Queensland coming from international students in 2023, despite comprising 38.9% of the cohort. Despite substantial visa delays, and universities extending their Semester 2 enrolment deadlines, international student numbers are still growing. Spokespeople for USyd, UQ, and UNSW told Honi that Semester 2 enrolment was either remaining consistent or growing compared to last year.
The impact on international students is often lost in the debate and they bear the brunt of an increasingly transactional education. Their interests are not protected by politicians, and they don’t have large lobby groups supporting them. Studying in Australia is already challenging. Beyond the existing cost of living pressures, international students face an even higher bill. Ineligibility to receive student concession rates on public transport and temporary visa holders being unable to attain HELP/HECS loans and the requirement to pay large amounts upfront for courses, generally between $20,000 to $50,000 per year for undergraduate students, adds up fast. Student groups and universities have been foregrounding these problems for months. In its own submission, SUPRA argued “these changes mark a concerning shift in the perception of, and approach to, international students in Australia.” Vice Chancellor Mark Scott agreed, telling ABC Radio that “if you send a message to international students that they’re not welcome, they have many other options.”
Honi has spoken to dozens of international studies this year who have all reported a climate of increasing pressure. Just last week, Dutton appeared on popular radio show, 2GB, to claim that international students should not receive student services like FoodHub which should only be for “citizens.” The new visa restrictions also have targeted students from certain countries disproportionally. Indian and Pakistani students are having their visas refused at more than double the rate of Chinese students, often because their education agents are less established
The advent of the Campus Access Policy foretells a university barren of hijinks and animated antics.
With the university threatening to remove temporarily-deserted property, and detain megaphone-wielders, days of spontaneous student-run campus activities are relegated to the archive. But we can’t forget the veritable campus Saturnalia, Commemoration Day. Sometimes an intellectual display, more often a mess of “grown-ups” revisiting high-school “muck-up” traditions, Commemoration Day has likely influenced your campus experience more than you think, even if it’s a memory as distant and overused as fee-free university.
Like many traditions, the first Commemoration Day festivity was unrehearsed. At the annual conferring of degrees in 1888, students treated the Great Hall audience to an impromptu concert. For the next eight years students upheld the concert convention. A “special undergraduate Commemoration song committee” was established, its name leaving
and struggle to adapt to new regulations. Brennan called the policies “outrageously racist,” and argued the university sector treats international students “like cash cows”
The only way universities can increase their cap is by building more student accommodation. Almost all universities Honi spoke to said that this was in their plans. A UQ spokesperson told Honi they were planning on delivering 1,000 extra beds in the next few years, and a USyd spokesperson said they intend “to offer an extra 2000-3000 accommodation spots over the next five years.” However, whether universities will actually be able to deliver on these goals is unclear. Many universities have sold accommodation in droves over the last decade, and as a UNSW spokesperson noted, “opposition by local councils to these types of developments can make it difficult for universities.”
Canada and the UK have already undertaken similar reforms of imposing caps and maximising visa restrictions. The results from these reforms have been troubling. Mass redundancies across the tertiary sector in the UK have dominated headlines in recent months.
A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs defended the reforms telling Honi that visa fees have always been comparatively high in Australia and the changes “focused on strengthening the integrity of the Student visa program to ensure that visas are granted to genuine students who can contribute to Australia’s managed and sustainable economic growth.”
The University Accord report provided the mandate for governments to make an argument to the Australian people that funding universities was in the public interest. The government is yet to make that argument or grant what many student activists, like Brennan advocate for: a return to fee free education.
little of its function to the imagination. Such choral coterie published each presentation’s lyrics in a periodical.
However, in 1897, the atmosphere was thick with tension between undergraduates and students, and Commemoration Day dynamos realised it was time to take the tradition to the streets. 300 plucky adventurers led a procession from Sydney’s Town Hall down George Street, now the most central and remembered feature of Commemoration Day activities. Each year, a legion of weird and wacky floats coloured the city. Think: an actual hearse owned by college students, packed with 94 students, Trojan-horse style, and flanked by fake mourners filled with crocodile tears. Morbid, memorable. Its annual procession was faced with a fair dose of public opposition, occasionally navigating bans or ordinances to re-route. Police inevitably intervened, fining and occasionally arresting students for offences such as setting off fire-crackers, hitting an officer with a flour bomb, and puncturing police wagon tyres. Each
Edward Ellis and Angus McGregor investigate.
Ariana Haghighi and
archive-dive.
Photo:
Voter disillusionment: The consequences of Labor’s treatment of Fatima Payman
Mehnaaz Hossain analyses.
Labor’s treatment of Fatima Payman, combined with their handling of the genocide in Palestine, is driving away Muslim voters in droves, a demographic already disillusioned by the party’s milquetoast calls for a ceasefire and steadfast refusal to take important, material action. Labor has become complicit in this genocide by refusing to acknowledge Palestinian sovereignty and statehood, impose sanctions, or even readily accepting refugees from Gaza. Their immediate vilification of Payman both in political circles and in extensive, almost defamatory, media coverage alienates Muslim communities and electorates.
To understand Labor’s reaction to Payman, one must understand the political context and importance of “caucus solidarity” to the Party. Labor rules prevent its MPs from crossing the floor except on rare matters of conscience in order to adhere to caucus solidarity, which is viewed as an important political tool to ensure a unified front and reinforce the importance of collectivism to the workers movement.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has criticised Payman’s decision, remarking “I voted against same-sex marriage to maintain unity within the party”. Her restraint may have worked to maintain the status quo and party stability while Labor was in government but did not achieve anything important to voters or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Rather, it was the coalition in power, with a plebiscite in 2016, who legalised samesex marriage. Wong’s claims directly prioritise caucus solidarity over morality — a decision which has rewarded her with the role of Foreign Minister and political power.
In the context of Labor’s rules, individual senators do not represent the people, they only represent the
year saw charges in the tens, though these were typically dropped with the help of the SRC’s legal assistance and clear legal advice printed in Honi. The legislature was often the SRC’s adversary: in 1944, the SRC failed to apply to the University of Sydney Senate for permission and had to call the procession off, and in 1945 the Senate blocked the application for the procession to take place in the city. What unrepresentative swill!
Within this tradition emerged briefer, but equally cherished, customs. Each student was expected to take part in at least one “stunt”, registered with the SRC prior. Whether this involved dumping dry ice into Hyde Park’s Archibald Fountain, or an ominous “visit of Arab Party”, a student made a statement, and a need for clean-up. A 1965 Honi mentioned a Medical and Engineering students’ annual flour-and-water fight, which “got out of hand”, leading to property damage. It unfortunately comes as no surprise that such celebrations swelled with male entitlement. However,
party. Labor politicians may often be required to vote against the interests of their specific constituents in order to align with the broader caucus platform. What Wong forgets, however, is that her focus on power and party politics does not appeal to many as a legitimate alternative to Payman’s convictionminded decision. Many disillusioned Labor voters see caucus solidarity as unimportant in comparison to contentious, deeply personal topics such as genocide. The Muslim community sees Payman crossing the floor as an act of bravery in line with not only her personal convictions, but theirs as well.
Political vilification of Payman exceeded individual comments from politicians and extended towards substantial media coverage which promoted quasi-racist and Islamophobic tropes and ideals. Alongside typical media tactics such as clickbait headlines, several news outlets ran fear mongering stories about how Labor politicians expressed concern over claims her decision was “in God’s hands”. It is more likely than not that Payman uttered the simple Arabic phrase inshallah, and it is notable that many politicians before her have attributed their actions or beliefs to God — former Prime Minister Scott Morrison being one of them. Papers reported on the possibility of Payman platforming other “Islamic propositions” and portrayed Palestine as a uniquely Muslim issue despite the crux of Payman’s decision being on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. The media’s decision to blow up this simple, common phrase into a discussion worthy of multiple thinkpieces and questioning loyalties speaks to the deeply Islamophobic undercurrents of Australian politics, where any deviation from the JudeoChristian norm is heavily othered and
Commemoration Day was often a force for good; in the ‘60s, Commemoration Day organisers used the occasion to fundraise, or, in Honi’s words, “collect boodles” for various causes, such as the “Inala” Steiner School tucked away in West Pennant Hills. Such altruism caught the attention — and financial contribution — of banks, television programs and radio stations.
Due to “declining student interest”, the SRC of 1975 voted to strike Commemoration Day from the year’s calendar, cutting the octogenarian’s legs from under it.
Commemoration Day was much bigger than its tracks left on George St. It acted as an incubator and ignition for elements of student life and culture that we still enjoy today.
The USyd tradition of revue can be traced back to Commemoration Day celebrations, with a theatre party spinning off into a Commemoration Revue in 1930. This would firmly entrench a student revue, then composed of contributions from various colleges and student groups, in the campus culture.
scrutinised.
More articles, allegedly prompted by concerned Labor politicians, questioned Payman’s loyalty to Australia due to her dual citizenship, as an Afghan by birth; this is despite the fact that it is impossible to obtain the necessary cooperation from the Taliban to revoke her citizenship, and she was already vetted and cleared for Labor preselection to appear on the ballot. The trope of “disloyal immigrant” and the idea that Muslims must always have secret, traitorous loyalties to other nations, was amplified tenfold during the Payman incident, echoing in the minds of thousands of Muslims and immigrants throughout Australia.
Labor’s emphasis on caucus solidarity above all solidifies that their alleged “commitment to multiculturalism” is performative, leaving Muslims communities angry and cementing Labor’s difficulty in connecting with important electorates by punishing someone who reflects their values. Payman resonates with immigrants across the country who feel the pressure to be a perfect representation for their communities, and there is no doubt that this pressure was only exacerbated by being the first hijab-wearing Australia senator. Her experience is a familiar one to those with marginalised backgrounds: genuinely wishing to ‘change the system from within’ has once again proved impossible when the system wishes for you to be a diversity token without any substantial diversity in morals, identity, and actual politics. She summarises this best herself: “I was not elected as a token representative of diversity, I was elected to serve the people of Western Australia…”.
Payman has since left Labor to become an independant and sit on the crossbench. This has occurred recently
Even the publication you’re reading these very words in can be traced back to Commemoration Day. Honi Soit was founded to rebut and reframe media smears against USyd students after an alleged Commemoration Day incident at the Sydney Cenotaph. Finer details of the campus rag find their origins in Commemoration Day as well. For the last edition of each year, editorial teams will publish a ‘comedy edition’ usually ripping off a better known, mainstream publication. This tradition first began as a Commemoration Day supplement, and now is the highlight or bane of an Honi editor’s term, depending on who you ask.
In this time of an increasingly corporatised and commercialised university experience, ardent campus-life commemorators recall something like Commemoration Day as exactly what we need — an opportunity to make and engage with a student culture that is distinctly USyd in character.
As a largely commuter university with
in a similar incident of a woman of colour leaving a political party after disagreements on personal convictions, with the notable example of Lydia Thorpe resigning from the Greens after due to her opposing perspective on the Voice to Parliament referendum. Labor has claimed in the media that Payman only has the requisite votes to be a senator because of her place on the ALP ticket, noting that she has received more ‘above the line’ (voted in as a Labor MP) than ‘below the line’ (voted in as an individual candidate) votes and thus owes her seat in the Senate to the party.
However, it is worth noting that apart from this singular instance of Palestine, Payman has voted with the Labor caucus on every other issue and has explicit policy priorities which are Labor-aligned, including addressing “housing, the cost of living and the climate crisis, the high incarceration rates of Indigenous peoples…”, all of which remain within her ability and public convictions despite forfeiting her place within the Labor party itself. Thus, voters expecting a ‘Labor’ politician from Payman will largely receive this in terms of her voting record and commitments. More importantly, voters agitating for action on Palestine can be assured that there exists at least one politician who has, in crossing the floor and leaving Labor, exemplified her commitment to serving the people and standing her ground on this ongoing genocide our political establishment is complicit it.
Payman articulates this best herself, in her address to the media: “I walked with the West Australians, who stopped me in the streets and told me not to give up. I walked with the rank-and-file Labor Party members, who told me we must do more.”
a huge student population, the University of Sydney is particularly vulnerable to an evaporating student culture. What’s left is often only accessible through limited and unique opportunities like student politics and student journalism. Or, only available through cliques and atomised experiences like clubs and societies.
The closest thing we have to a celebration of student culture is Welcome Week (of former O-Week notoriety). But even that is a rigidly formatted and corporatised campus experience with a greater focus on introducing new students to the University than codifying any sort of student identity.
But with the SRC’s Unauthorised Stalls Day on July 31 rebelling against University policy by erecting informative tents, we are light-years estranged from the days of property damage, intellectual interference and political provocation. It seems to belong to another University entirely.
Pulling out
the roots
CW: This article discusses domestic violence.
Araised voice and one wrong move — that is how violence and I met the first time. I remember violence would always begin the same way; I would collect the patterns and piece them together like a puzzle. If I could understand the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of violence and abuse, then, perhaps, I would be able to see my world in its entirety. I believed that violence started from me and extended outwards, infiltrating my world, and breaking down its doors. It always looked the same, according to the evidence of experience, and only existed within the walls of my house. I imagined broken glass, shattered on the floor. Growing up, violence was both a normalcy and a unique tragedy. Growing a little older — understanding the world a little better and seeing that not all families were the same — I believed violence began with my dad. I believed in fairytales, and they all existed beyond my front door. Believing violence began and ended in my own home meant a security that were I to leave, it could not follow. Yet, violence was all I had known. I was unable to imagine a future for myself which diverged from the reality I knew.
When I was a teenager, the grasp that violence had on my life reached out and finally touched the fairytale, outside world. The first time I researched domestic violence, it was for a Year Seven school project. I felt I knew what it was before I had a name to put to it — the familiarity of the signs and symptoms was blatant; it felt like going home. Domestic and family violence usually refers to threatening, coercive, dominating, controlling or abusive behaviour, between intimate or familial relationships. I was less surprised by how closely I had related to it than I was to how ‘ordinary’ the violence was, how consistently it pervaded society. An estimated 20% of Australian adults — 3.8 million people — reported experiencing physical and/or sexual family and domestic violence since the age of 15, according to results from the 202122 Personal Safety Survey (PSS). The same research showed that about 1 in 8 children witnessed violence towards a parent by a partner before the age of 15. I did the maths on my fingers in the middle of class and of the 31 of us in the room, at least 3 of us experienced or witnessed abuse. Suddenly, I began to see it everywhere outside of my home —
Purny Ahmed disrupts the cycle.
the little boys pulling pigtails and the catcalls from out of cars, the falling in and out of love during a toxic high school relationship, the aunties that still bring cha to the husbands they can no longer share a room with. I stopped laughing along to jokes that are “not that deep”, because I had seen the end of that path. I knew, exactly, and in its entirety, how deep it truly ran. Violence was no longer merely physical but encompassed all harm — the catching onto a mocking laugh, a lingering insult, a condensation in tone that did as much harm as a tight fist.
No one believes anyone is capable of hurting the ones they supposedly love, no one believes it will get worse, not until someone is murdered.
In Australia we have seen a sharp spike in domestic violence murders against women by nearly 30% in 2022-23 compared to previous years. Violence against women and children has always been prevalent, existing behind closed doors and in silence, but there can be no more ‘looking the other way’ when so far in 2024, 64 women and children have been killed by violence in Australia, according to data collated by The Red Heart Campaign. I have watched the community around me — I knew which aunties suffered, which children were unwilling to go home; I was raised hearing their stories scattered in the wind — and no one ever wanted to step in. These stories were always told, not as warning signs to protect oneself from violence, but rather reassurance that violence was a normal, yet strictly a private, family matter. Fears of what would happen to the family unit, whether that be the removal of children or the changes to the reputation of the woman and her children in the wider community, ensured that no one asked for help, and therefore, no one would offer it. No one believes anyone is capable of hurting the ones they supposedly love, no one believes it will get worse, not until someone is murdered. When a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner we ask, “why did their friends, their family, their neighbours not do anything to
stop it?” Victims themselves exist in a bubble of shame, fear and isolation, which prevents them from asking for support or guidance, and ignoring the issue of domestic violence as a society only further pushes this narrative. It took a lot of growing up to see that violence was a tree that we have allowed to take root within our communities, our households and ourselves. Much of it is rooted in gender biases and stereotypes which do not exclusively harm women, but all people, allowing for cycles of abuse to continue seamlessly within our communities. Mothers who were once little girls who were taught to be obedient, to laugh along with inappropriate jokes, to take a backhand with a tightly shut mouth. Fathers who were once little boys who were taught to “be a man”, to meet every feeling of sadness with a closed heart and tight fist. We have all been watering the seeds of violence and parting the clouds for it to grow for generations. Where does violence start if not the root?
Generational trauma refers to the passing down of traumatic experiences and its subsequent effects through generations. Without realising, we take on the pain of our ancestors, and hold it close to us, like an heirloom or some kind proof that the blood that flows within us is made of the same suffering. We continue cycles of abuse, because we don’t know better, because we are unsure how to do better, and the hardest to admit, because we don’t believe we can be better.
Where
does violence start if not the root?
Generational trauma is a life sentence of fears and behaviours you did not ask for, a responsibility on your head to ensure that the suffering ends with you; two contradictory forces at play, begging for your attention. The tightrope between dysfunctionality and healing sways in the heavy wind and you are miles above ground. I trace back my family tree. I follow the trails to reach the root of the anger that sits within me, inherited from my father, to see who he inherited his anger from. I lay his history out in front of me and hold it in my hands, and I see glimpses of the child my father once was. A war-torn land and an inaccessibility to safety and resources are bound to harden a man. Now, the
anger that was necessary to survive lays uselessly on the floors of our home, with nowhere else to go. In his behaviours, I see his past life, his need for control, a mechanism to heal from how little control he once had, his emotions a sudden boil over of what he has always tried to repress. Understanding him does not make love or forgiveness come any easier — nor does it make it necessary — but it does save me the self-blame and shows me how to grow and heal differently than he did so not to make his mistakes.
There is a common saying: the abused becomes the abuser. Children that are raised in or have witnessed domestic violence are more likely to find themselves repeating the relationships of their parents, with studies from the late 1980s “[indicating] that about one-third of people who are abused in childhood will become abusers themselves.” The familiarity of abuser/ victim dynamics and chaos, a lack of belief that they are deserving of healthy and happy relationships, and an inbuilt inability to trust are all fostered in a violent household. Continuing to exist within the cycle will always feel more familiar. However, the statement is too black and white, and much too vilifying of victims to accurately represent the nuances that exist in cycles of abuse — it takes a lifetime to unlearn the behaviours used to survive, to learn you are deserving of healthier love and relationships, to even realise that what was done to you was wrong and understand, truely, how to not repeat the same mistakes.
There is a misconception that once a child leaves their dysfunctional household, they are free and safe from its violence. The truth is that abuse makes a home of your body. The truth is that you allow it. Catherine Lacey said “If you are raised with an angry man in your house / there will always be an angry man in your house.”
Even after leaving, the path to healing is difficult, tumultuous and near inaccessible.
Violence permeates your life when you survive a household of violence. Living, and growing, within an environment where violence is blatant, with its broken doors and broken glass and broken family — it’s no wonder if that ‘brokenness’ infiltrates into you and settles. A person who survives such violence finds themselves in a constant state of survival mode for much of, if not the rest of, their lives — even with
the assistance of support and therapy. The option of leaving abuse feels near improbable for many victims and children of abuse. The fairytale always feels just slightly out of reach.
Beyond the mental and emotional incapacity hindering victims, primarily female victims, from leaving abusive situations, our society tends to place the onus, and the blame, of all forms of violence on women. Outside of domestic violence situations we see it in the questions of what we were wearing when catcalled or sexually assaulted, in the slutshaming remarks and constant circulation of gossip for the same acts men are celebrated for, in the lessons we teach little girls about how a boy who is mean to you is a boy who likes you.
And within domestic violence situations, the constant question remains: “well, why didn’t she just leave?” In 2021, 25% of National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey respondents believed that “women who do not leave their abusive partners are partly responsible for violence continuing”. 40% of respondents born in non-main English-speaking countries shared this attitude. However, this does not account for factors such as the safety of the victim and their children, cultural and societal attitudes, risks of isolation from community, and the complexity of emotions and attachments regarding the abuser or the relationship itself.
In the community I am a part of, divorce for many aunties is not a viable option, as it risks isolation from the community, whilst the same excommunication would not be practised on the uncles who perpetrate violence or harm. To no longer have a community in a country where your only family and support is your husband and the community you have built together — and to be mercilessly neglected and ridiculed by said community — is the risk many women who have immigrated to Australia with their partners must endure to leave abuse. It is not a fair or easy ultimatum to ask of them, even in exchange for their freedom or safety. This is especially considering many of their mindsets and values ingrained in committing to their vows to be the ‘good, sensible wife’, the kind who would not leave their husband in any of their lives, in the afterlife, or until death do them part. The accountability that we try to hold women to regarding their own safety isn’t reflected in our attitudes towards the men in our society, who are excused for their violence against other people, reflected in the same data which states that 19% of respondents believed that “sometimes a woman can make a man so angry he hits her without meaning to.”
Even after leaving, the path to healing is difficult, tumultuous and near inaccessible. A person who survives such violence often only knows how to
survive in violence. Psychologically, to live ‘normally’ is a greater obstacle than to live in abuse. This is because your body and mind become so accustomed to the chaos that the unfamiliarity of peace can often be jarring. Our fears and flaws are brought to the surface when there is no longer any need to ‘survive’, and we begin a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of someone else’s mistakes. The first few weeks of moving out of my family home saw me experience a peace that would send me spiralling. I would lay static in my bed in a quiet home, unsure of what to do with such newfound safety. I did not think I could survive the peace the way I survived the violence. You still live with an angry man in your home. His existence may not be palpable anymore, but he’s punching in all the walls of the life you are building for yourself from within you.
When you are born into a house of violence, abuse begins to feel like a birthright.
I think back in hindsight at my fears throughout the years: closed spaces and loud bangs of doors when I was younger, and then, more recently, the inability to leave toxic cycles of abuse. The fear felt almost irrational — it was not as easily explainable as claustrophobia, for example — however, I knew that it takes victims of abusive relationships, on average, seven attempts before they finally leave. My fear was that my love would overpower my regard for my safety, wellbeing, and my happiness, and I would not leave the abuse that has always felt inevitable. Exposure to violence in the home “increases the risk of [individuals entering] an abusive relationship in adulthood, as either a perpetrator or victim” as we “model the behaviours and attitudes” we have been exposed to. I felt that the anger I inherited from my father, or the faith I inherited from my mother, sealed me to my fate. The fear was, if I loved too closely, I would one day allow into my home an angry man the way my mother let in my father.
You remember before, when you were a child, the mornings after a fight, when the quiet early hours of the day were used for grieving. The quiet always followed the storm — surreal how loud silence sounded when compared to screaming. Grievances for the night before, of the words that shouldn’t have
been said, of actions that could not be taken back. Grievances for the family that could have been if they all learned to heal their traumas and live up to the potential of their love. There are no more ‘morning afters’, but you are still grieving. This is the loudest silence. You sit with your un-broken mug, stare out of your un-broken window, and life does move forward around you with some sort of fragile peace. You wait for the other shoe to drop — but you need to let yourself believe that this time, it won’t.
The path to healing is difficult, tumultuous, and ultimately, terrifying. With your future ahead of you, you lay out your history in front of you and hold it in your hands. All the statistics suggest that abuse is the destiny for any of us raised in it, that there is no space without violence. But understanding violence, and its roots, is the only way to stop it. Learning how to be better than those who came before us, and those who came before them. Letting go of the legacy of suffering. Letting the cycle end with you. Allowing yourself healthy love, without anger, without fear. When you are born into a house of violence, abuse begins to feel like a birthright. Sacrifice is your rite of passage.
I’m telling you it doesn’t have to be.
SO WHAT’S UP WITH THE STUDENT GENERAL MEETING?
The upcoming Student General Meeting (SGM) will be held at 5pm on August 7th to demand the University of Sydney cuts ties with the genocide in Gaza. Students will vote on two motions: one calling on the University to disclose and divest from its partnerships with weapons manufacturers and higher education institutions in Israel, and the other affirming one Palestinian state and Palestinians’ Right to Resist.
What is an SGM?
An SGM is an in-person gathering of the undergraduate student body to discuss and vote on the aforementioned motions. It was triggered by an SRC constitutional provision following a petition with over 200 signatures from students demanding the University’s disclosure and divestment. This SGM is one of five in the University’s history, including condemnations of apartheid South Africa’s Springbok rugby tour, the Vietnam War, Voluntary Student Unionism, and climate inaction.
Our University will join the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide and the University of Queensland in holding SGMs pursuing the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement.
Why are we holding one now?
In April, Students for Palestine launched the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in peaceful protest against the University’s complicity in genocide. It demanded the
University terminate its research and development partnerships with Thales, Lockheed Martin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University and Technion. It also advocated for the replacement of OLES2155: Experience Israel with an Experience Palestine counterpart.
In response, student protestors and campers were met with empty promises and repression under the new Campus Access Policy. This SGM is a way to continue campaigning for the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement in the face of academic disciplinary measures.
What happens when the motions are passed?
This SGM represents a unique moment in the University’s history because, unlike previous meetings’ requests for support from staff and students, it demands material change and action from Management. The University can no longer hide from student unionism.
If these motions-on-notice are passed, the SRC will continue to win their listed demands, defy the Campus Access Policy in support of Palestine, as well as disrupt “business-as-usual” at the University through walk-offs, sit-ins, mass rallies and strikes. The SRC will also release a statement endorsing a single, secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine and affirm Palestinians’ Right to Resist.
All undergraduate students enrolled at the University are eligible and encouraged to vote.
SGM: A forum for students to
Since 1971, the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC) has hosted four Student General Meetings (SGMs), with the fifth to be held on Wednesday 7 August at 5pm. This makes SGMs somewhat rare, but there has been an uptick in the last three years as students have sought ways to come together and show collective dissent to the never-ending attacks of neoliberal universities and governments.
The 1971 SGM sought to condemn the Springbok Tour; the 2007 SGM to condemn conservative attacks on student unionism from the Howard government; the April 2021 SGM to endorse student and staff participation in a Strike 4 Climate’s Global Climate Strike; and the October 2021 SGM to support the No USyd Cuts campaign. SGMs bring students together to debate, vote, and present a formal position using the University’s own language of “bureaucracy” and “democracy” (supposedly).
This SGM will be an exciting one. Going beyond the 2021 SGMs to endorse the global climate strike and to condemn course cuts, this year we are demanding that USyd cuts ties with the apartheid state of Israel and the genocide in Gaza, endorsing a singular democratic and secular state in historic Palestine, and affirming the right to resist.
To pass these motions would put us on the right side of history, heed the calls of Palestinian civil society, and uphold international law.
The first SGM held by the SRC in 1971 was called in response to the
Springbok rugby tour, the national team of then-apartheid South Africa. While South African apartheid and the Springbok tour is now widely condemned and socially unacceptable, it was once less clear cut. Anti-apartheid rallies were often met with violence from Nazi counter-protestors.
In the same way, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel still faces misconceptions centred on false conflations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and a largely apathetic international community. Just as we found that the students were right about the Vietnam War, about South African apartheid, and about the Freedom Rides, we know that one day history will celebrate the fight for a free Palestine.
Motion 1: Demand USyd cut ties with the genocide in Gaza
This motion was put forward by Students for Palestine Sydney Uni in line with the BDS movement and strategy, consisting of three main parts related to disclosure, divestment and protecting protest.
Firstly, it calls for USyd to cut ties with Thales and Israeli academic institutions. USyd has a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with Thales, the multinational weapons company which produces the Watchkeeper 35 drones used to surveil and kill Palestinians in Gaza, as well as other weapons used around the world. The Thales
Globalise the intifada! One Palestinian state! Support the Students Against War
At the upcoming Student General Meeting, the student body will be demanding the University of Sydney divests, discloses and cuts ties with Israeli institutions and weapons companies. Students Against War (SAW) are also putting forward a motion calling on students to affirm the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, and to endorse the demand for one, secular, democratic state across all of Palestine as this is the only solution that can bring peace. If successful, these motions will be the first of their kind in Australia to be passed by any official body.
Prime Minister Albanese and Usyd Vice Chancellor Mark Scott know that through their ties to Israel they are complicit in genocide, yet Albanese continues to supply crucial parts of the F35 fighter jets to Israel, which rain one tonne bombs on Gaza civilians. Further, Usyd continues to partner with weapons companies that profit from the genocide such as Lockheed Martin and Thales, and
refuses to end exchange programs with Israeli universities that aid in maintaining apartheid in Palestine.
The more outrageous and indefensible Israel’s behaviour becomes, the more desperately those with blood on their hands will try and find ways to demonise and divide the movement.
USyd’s new draconian Campus Access Policy must be seen as an attempt to quash the right of students to fight for Palestine and to hide their ties to genocide, as well as any other issue deemed too controversial by University management — effectively claiming that speaking up about Israel’s genocide is a danger to students’ safety.
SAW’s motion to the SGM seeks to smash the idea that supporting a onestate solution and Palestinians’ right to armed resistance is antisemitic. A movement that attempts to avoid these questions will not win, and our opponents know it. We must confront these racist smears head-on and
unequivocally stand with the right of Palestinian’s to armed resistance and support full liberation from the river to the sea.
On the Right to Armed Resistance
We have witnessed in Western media a resurgence of colonial narratives, which on the one hand proclaim colonisers only utilise violence as a means of preserving peace, yet on the other condemn an oppressed people who turn to armed resistance by insinuating they do so out of a vicious nature. Such racist and Islamophobic prejudice excuses Israeli massacres as defence, and equates calls for Palestinian liberation as antisemitism or advocating for genocide.
However Israel’s colonialism is, as per Frantz Fanon, “violence in its natural state,” and as such begets a violent resistance. For Israel is a society founded on, governed, and
maintained by military brutality, organised force and apartheid. When faced with land annexations and ethnic cleansing at the hands of a billion dollar army with advanced weaponry; when Gaza has been subjected to a land, air and sea blockade since 2007; when throwing stones has long since been rendered more barbaric and more savage than invading tanks and bombs — how is it reasonable to liken the violence of the oppressed with that of the oppressor? How can we condemn Palestine, yet defend and place Israel above the law, when even peaceful acts of protest are deemed threatening? When, for example, during the Great March of Return in 2018 peaceful demonstrators were met with IDF gunfire, murdering 266, and injuring thousands?
Palestine deserves the same legitimacy and support afforded to other armed revolutionaries such as Algeria and South Africa for their acts in defence against dehumanisation,
Grace Street (SRC Education Officer)
fight injustice, apartheid and neoliberalism since 1971
off Campus campaign was started by the Education Action Group in 2023, seeking to expose the deep ties of this war-mongering company to our University. You don’t have to look too far for this. USyd’s most recent Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, who served from 2013 to 2024, sits on the board of Thales Australia, and there are numerous PhD scholarships funded by Thales for research to advance their products.
As for the Israeli academic institutions, USyd is partnered with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Technion Institute of Technology, and Bezalel Academy — each with deep ties and contributions to Israeli ‘defence’, the surveilling of Palestinians, and the war on Gaza. The academic boycott of Israeli institutions has long been a goal of the BDS movement and of our ‘Cut Ties’ campaign at USyd, for these companies are at the heart of Israel’s militarysecurity-surveillance complex.
Secondly, Motion 1 demands that USyd disclose and divest from any financial investment in Israel. This was a major (unanswered) demand of our Gaza Solidarity Encampment, but our recent findings from a Freedom of Information Request under the Government Information (Public Access) Act (GIPA) revealed more details of the University’s economic ties to and support for Israel and genocide. We now know for certain that USyd syphons large funds into Israeli institutions and companies for vague services, travel costs, and honorarium payments, and that it has a whopping $2.25m of
exposure to Israeli companies in private equity funds that they claim to be ‘unable to sell’.
Thirdly, Motion 1 calls for USyd to rescind academic disciplinary measures against pro-Palestine student activists, and to scrap the Campus Access Policy (CAP). Students are facing repression for Palestine advocacy on campus in Semester 1, even for making lecture announcements about upcoming protests. We can only anticipate that the repressive measures will increase in the face of the new draconian CAP.
Motion 2: One Palestinian State, affirm the Right to Resist
This motion was put forward by Students Against War (SAW), endorsing a singular secular and democratic state in historic Palestine. It also affirms the international law definition of the right to resist in circumstances of seeking self-determination amongst colonial domination, foreign occupation, and racist regimes.
We know a two-state solution is dead, despite the attempts of politicians to endorse a mythical solution of Israel and Palestine as equal neighbouring countries. Israel is a deeply flawed country built on dispossession, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing that ignores international law, and will never respect Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. This is epitomised
right to resist! Cut ties now!
discrimination, and slaughter. Indeed, the Palestinian liberation movement has never stooped to the atrocities to which the Israeli occupation has. Further, a UN General Assembly resolution (Resolution 35/35) from 1980 affirmed Palestine’s legal right to armed struggle, as they seek liberation against foreign domination.
Yet this right has been specifically ignored by the University of Sydney in attempts to justify their ongoing partnerships with Israeli institutions and weapons companies. Therefore it falls to we the students to unequivocally stand with Palestine in resisting a brutal occupation, and force our university to acknowledge their complicity in genocide.
On the One-State Solution
The demand for one secular, democratic state can be traced to 1969, when the Palestinian Liberation Organisation declared their objective “to establish a free and democratic
by the continuous settler expansion and violence in the West Bank. The commonly proposed plan of a twostate solution gives crumbs to Palestine — a divided state between Gaza and the West Bank, and only 22% of their historic lands — which are practically the same amount as following the 1948 Nakba. Students Against War call for a single state where Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all faiths and backgrounds live in freedom and equality.
By recognising Israel’s occupation and violent rule over Palestinians, Motion 2 also recognises the right to armed resistance Palestinians have under international law as an occupied people — “the violence of the oppressed is never equivalent to the violence of the oppressor.” The right to resist is not such a new or radical idea — it appears in the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the 2004 Arab Charter on Human Rights. The recent International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful, their ongoing investigation into allegations of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, and their order to halt the offensive on Rafah provides the basis to these rights of Palestinians to resist.
It is a disgrace for the University to laud its history of radical student movements and social justice when it refuses to respond to the core demands of the global student and public
movement for Palestine. 53 years after USyd students voted to condemn the Springbok Tour and apartheid South Africa, we find ourselves in a sinister repetition of history by fighting against the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel. Just as we find ourselves preparing for our fifth Student General Meeting since 1971, we know that this is not the end of the road for fighting against the neoliberal corporate university, and its complicity in a system of Western imperialism and capitalism.
As we fight against a University complicit in genocide and cracking down on protest as it continually imposes course cuts and staff casualisation, we need everyone to unite and speak out — through the SGM, through our defiance against the CAP; through protests for Palestine and all oppressed peoples; through talking to your classmates and teachers. Change will only come if enough pressure is placed on our neoliberal universities and governments, who respond to public opinion and money rather than ethics and morality.
We need you to come to the SGM and vote ‘yes’ to divestment and Palestinian liberation. Bring your student IDs, your friends, and your loudest voices on Wednesday August 7 at 5pm.
The University’s Media Office responded to questions about the SGM, CAP and Palestinian activism for both of these articles. See online for its comments.
society in Palestine for all Palestinians whether they are Muslims, Christians or Jews”.
The PLO would later betray the Palestinian cause and take part in the Oslo Accords in 1993, where they supported the call for a “twostate solution,” an act denounced by Palestinian academic Edward Said as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender.”
The two state solution is an impossibility
The Israeli parliament voted in July for a resolution (68-9) that declared “Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state” even if part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.
Albanese condemned former Labor senator Fatima Payman for using the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in a speech where she called for Australia to cut ties with Israel as it allegedly
undermines a “two-state solution.”
In an interview with former Liberal treasurer Josh Freydenburg - who wrongly equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism - Albanese agreed that the chant is an “extremely violent act.”
When Albanese, President Biden, and other leaders claim they support a two-state solution, they are simply sanitising their support for Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing, genocide and settler-colonialism.
A Gallup poll published last October revealed that the percentage of Palestinians who supported a two-state solution had fallen from 59% in 2012 to 24%. As Palestinian Australian Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah said, “I want one state where every human being is treated equally. What’s so radical about that?”
Jewish people have every right to continue to live in Palestine. But there is no justification for maintaining a Jewish supremacist state that
systematically discriminates against Palestinians. A single democratic state — along with the right of Palestinians to return — would be consistent with indigenous Palestinians’ right to self-determination and would mean Muslims, Jews and Christians could live side by side, as they did before the Zionist settler-colonial project.
Build the Student Intifada
We need at least 200 students to join us at the SGM on August 7 if we are to make our motions the official policy of the SRC.
A mass meeting of students in and of itself will not force Usyd, or our government, to cut ties with Israel —- but it will be a powerful tool for projecting voices and building the power that can force change. Do not let your absence to the SGM be the vote we need to ensure our demands are met.
Fucking with ghosts and respecting the dead
Daylight in a cemetery is never as haunting as when its decaying gravestones retreat into the silent hours of night. Of course, for some, this is enticing — so addicting you’d be forgiven for thinking that the mist rising from the graves tastes like blackberry ice.
If you’re familiar with intimate Inner West escapades, you’ll know that
that we pay respect to the dark history of the place, particularly the countless Indigenous people and paupers buried in unmarked graves there.
So, how do we balance fucking with ghosts and respecting the dead? We figure out who can get fucked.
But before we delve into the vile and virtuous buried in Camperdown Cemetery, we have to understand its past,
there’s nothing that gets an Inner West eccentric going like the thrill of hooking up in Camperdown cemetery (especially when it makes its annual reappearance on a newtown.affirmations bingo card). During the daytime, you’ll find an assortment of oddities amongst the gravestones: dog walkers, discarded lighters, tour groups, empty nangs, dead vapes. However, when night pulls itself from its tomb, so do the ghosts, and the laboured breathing or soft moans you’ll hear may not be emanating from those trapped between worlds.
Camperdown Cemetery and its surrounding areas are infested with ghost stories, supernatural apparitions and quirky-ly dressed people looking to fuck. Perhaps some might turn their noses up at this past-time, but which two subject matters are more taboo than ghosts and sex, and why not consummate that marriage? This is not to say that Camperdown Cemetery should become a spectre of sexual debauchery. It’s vital
was, well, more set in stone. But, as we know too well, having funds in the early years of the colony of so-called Australia often came at the price of others. Some frankly heinous, as well as morally dubious people are buried in Camperdown Cemetery, but this list includes some impressive ones too. Therefore, consider this map a sexual smoker’s area — a sort of ‘well, if you’re going to do it you may as well do it here’ zone, and a guide to getting to know some of the other bodies you’ll be intimately close to.
LEGEND
Scan the QR codes for ghost stories from the park’s periphery
1. Thomas Mitchell (1792 – 1855) — in 1837, Mitchell was on an expedition when he encountered a large group of Aboriginal people preparing for the Dreamtime ceremony known as a caribberie. Mitchell killed several warriors that day, before returning three days later to kill another ten Aboriginal warriors.
2. William John Dumaresq (1793 – 1868) — Dumaresq was a magistrate of the Hyde Park Barracks Court, in charge of sentencing and punishment. Dumaresq was considered the harshest magistrate (and that’s a tough title to achieve) with the punishments he handed down so severe that, following his death, the position was removed and new legislation protecting prisoners was passed. Dumaresq and his brother, William, were also responsible for forcibly removing local Aboriginal people from squatting runs.
3. Isaac Nathan (1792 – 1864) — considered by many as the “Father of Australian music”, Nathan was the first coloniser to study and appreciate the value of Aboriginal Australian music, though he would later misappropriate it. Nathan was an abusive father, and his violence would see his 13-year-old son (Charles Nathan (1816-1872), also buried in Camperdown Cemetery) run away from home. After years of cruelty towards his family, Isaac Nathan became Australia’s first ever tram fatality.
4. Bathsheba Ghost (1809 – 1866) — Batsheba was an ex-convict, forced to move to Australia and leave behind her husband and three-year-old son, and would later become the Matron of Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary. Her memorial stone in the cemetery is a round bollard taken from the present local hospital. Her son followed her with his own family, and she died a wealthy and admired woman. Many continue to report seeing Bathsheba in her matron uniform tending to her patients inside Cemetery Lodge and around the graves.
5. Thomas Watson (1795 – 1859) — the harbourmaster of Port Jackson is a focal character in one of the attached ghost stories (look for the one marked by the Dunbar shipwreck, as he has an eerie and awful connection to one of the many victims buried there). Watson was also responsible for the commission of two statues of Cook (boo), including the one in Hyde Park.
and why only 2,000 gravestones remain of the estimated 18,000 people buried there. The decision to resume the area as a public space is a horror story in many ways. To begin, the decision was made as a consequence of the 1946 discovery of the body of 11-year-old Joan Norma Ginn in the long, overgrown grass that covered the area.
Even before this tragic incident, stories had been circulating about “bad air” rising from Camperdown Cemetery for decades before. So, after the girl’s death, half of the gravestones were removed — many of which now line the concrete boundary wall of the remaining cemetery — and a foot of soil was placed on top of the area now known as Camperdown Memorial Rest Park (yes, that does mean that every picnic you’ve ever had at Campo has been on top of the bodies still buried there).
As for the remaining graves? Those buried closest to the church often had the funds to afford a resting place that
6. Eliza Donnithorne (1821 – 1866) — Donnithorne is rumoured to be the inspiration for Dickens’ famous jilted Miss Havisham. On Eliza’s wedding day, the guests were assembled, the wedding breakfast was ready, and Eliza was dressed in her gown, but her groom would never come. She spent the next 30 years shut inside her home, and when she eventually died, those who found her described the scene in a fantastical phantasmagorical way: dust and grime caked the building, the wedding breakfast had been uneaten and mouldered into dust, and Eliza was still wearing her bridal gown.
Camperdown Cemetery has many secrets lurking with the horny teenagers and 20-somethings amongst the headstones. Some have made efforts to reveal these secrets, though many attempts have been underwhelming, like with the one memorial vaguely dedicated to ‘every Aboriginal person’, which cannot begin to represent the countless persons buried there without markers. However, there is one memorial close to the gates that stands out to those visiting the area, whether that be to learn a little more about history, or simply just to fuck.
It reads: “In memory of the many humble, undistinguished, unknown, unremembered folk buried in this cemetery, whose names are not written in the book of history, but are written in the book of life.”
So, next time you feel like getting freaky, consider taking a minute to understanding which ghosts don’t deserve to be fucked with, and which of history’s truly horrifying individuals can get fucked.
Holly Gerrard charts old haunts and ghost stories.
Art: Holly Gerard
From pungent to comfort: The politics of smelly Manipuri food
Aleina Konsam takes a bite.
Distant clutterings from the kitchen echo through our walls as Mama begins the weekly meal prep for the family. It’s a usual Sunday night sensory onslaught: freshly washed leafy greens from the garden stacked high in colanders beside the sink, potatoes and beans in the pressure cooker lightly hissing away, and on top of the counter, a stainless steel plate of ngari and dried ghost chillies releasing a pungent aroma that stings our noses. On the stove, another pot simmers away, bubbling with a chicken curry for me and my sisters who usually wince at the piquant smells of Manipuri cooking, burying our noses under our collars.
Manipur is one of India’s seven ‘sister states’ in the Northeast; it is geographically quite isolated from mainland India, only narrowly connected by a strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor or Chicken’s Neck. Bounded by neighbouring countries of Nepal, Myanmar, China and Bangladesh, the region exists at a crossroad of South, South-East and East Asian influences. As a former princely state during the British Raj, Manipur was described as the ‘Switzerland of India’ by the then Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin. Even its name which means ‘Land of Jewels’ reckons the same timeless beauty its valleys, hills and lakes embody. Its people, language and cuisines are a reflection of India’s vast ethnic diversity that many are ignorant towards.
It should be noted that there are many ethnic groups in Manipur but the Meiteis are the largest and most dominant group and which my family belongs to. Growing up in Australia, I often had to defend my Indian identity as people in disbelief would typically retort “What? I thought you were like Chinese or something” towards my racial ambiguity. And it wouldn’t help my defence when (1) I had forgotten how to speak Hindi and (2) Manipuri culture was so distinct from what most people associated Indian culture with.
As an agrarian state, its culinary traditions are unique and influenced by its valleys and lakes. A typical Meitei meal consists of a mound of chak (rice) alongside several side dishes of lots of vegetables, fish and chillies that are either steamed, boiled, mashed or fermented. Fish in particular is a quintessential staple in Manipuri cuisines, largely due to its abundance from surrounding lakes. In order to preserve the produce for the dry season and continue its consumption throughout the year, traditional methods of fermentation, salting, drying and smoking were developed. A popular fermented fish product, ngari, claimed by my Papa as something that lasts forever, is the backbone ingredient of most Manipuri dishes — it’s boiled in kangshoi (a vegetable stew) for flavour, mashed with boiled vegetables and
chillies to make eromba, and roasted and put in singju (a type of salad). It’s stinky but as Mama says, ‘delicious and essential’. Other staples include hawaijar (fermented soybeans) which is quite similar to the Japanese natto and a suitable replacement of ngari for vegetarians, and soibum (fermented bamboo shoot), another important ingredient. These staples infuse Meitei kitchens with a rich, savoury aroma and adds a necessary depth of umami flavour to every dish.
Its appreciation, however, is quiet and nestled to the Manipuri community as its pungent smells and foreignness is frequently met with disdain outside the thresholds of our region. Northeastern people migrating to mainland India for better education and work opportunities is highly common, however, just as common is the discrimination and marginalisation they face particularly for the ‘non-Indianness’ of their physical appearances and culinary traditions. Our features seamlessly align with one’s imagination of an East Asian person and as a result, mainstream India subjects us to an overwhelming othering experience within our very own country.
In 2014, Nido Taniam, a 20-yearold student from the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh, was brutally attacked and murdered in Delhi for his East Asian appearance which highlighted the severity of casual racism Northeast migrants especially in India’s metropolitan cities, continuously experience. Moreover, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there were increased acts of xenophobia that exacerbated the existing discrimination, violence, and othering. Northeast Indians were blamed for bringing and spreading the virus with several accounts of them being spat on by random bike riders. Other manifestations of racial otherings can be seen in how authorities respond to this climate: in 2007, the Delhi Police published a booklet titled Security Tips for Northeast Students/ Visitors in Delhi which advised to avoid cooking fermented foods in their homes so neighbours and landlords wouldn’t get upset at unfamiliar smells. Regardless of any interpretation of good intentions, such an issue of law and order perpetuates beliefs of superiority and inferiority of racial castes and cultures. By a superior upper caste authoritarian power condoning fermented foods as a civic nuisance to protect the social order further devalues the northeast Indian heritage and identity.
The human sense of smell plays a significant role in food preparation and cooking — olfactory food cues subconsciously trigger specific appetites and subsequent food intakes. In a wider global context however, we often negatively categorise food based on unfamiliar odours, quickly labelling it as ‘smelly’ or ‘stinky’. The reality is, such perceptions are reinforced by a dominant
system of dietary order and taste — a group at the top of the sociocultural hierarchy would not believe the food that they consumed was ‘stinky’ instead, the consumption of ‘stinky’ food is heavily racialized as ‘other’. Indian cuisines, from all regions, have strong smells from ingredients like masala, however, conflicts of ‘smelly’ foods are pinned on minority groups like Northeast migrants. The alienation of the northeast is clear and pervasive through the systems of culture in mainland India.
In truth, our food preferences, more times than not, are shaped by deeper, underlying biases rooted in some hierarchical view of cuisines, with our own cuisine at the top. But who are we to dictate what food is acceptable and not especially when one’s tastes are generally beyond their control instead, being influenced by their own cultural and environmental contexts? Diversity will forever be incomplete, if we cannot see beyond our comfortability to respect and foster appreciation of different food cultures.
The pressure cooker lets out a highpitched whistle, its white steam rising. Mama transfers the potato and beans in a large stainless steel bowl and with the ngari and dried chillies begins to mash everything with the end of a stainless steel cup. The leafy greens, now boiled in the kangshoi, were poured on our plates of chak.
She beckons us for dinner.
The once pungent smell had subsided, now an earthy, comforting aroma hugs the dining table. I carry fragments of my Manipuri identity in broken language and food. Sometimes I find myself craving the food I used to block my nose to — every bite a reconciliation of my heritage. The soupy rice of kangshoi with the side of the spicy tangy eromba envelops my taste buds as I begin to finally identify with that ‘smell’.
Art: Natarina Ramdhana & Ross Anicete
Plastic may last forever… but so do trees!
Charlotte Saker digs through the weeds.
Tree stumps are very much alive. Not only do they make for great outdoor seating — minus the chafing and fresh dirt staining your jeans — they can regenerate and grow into a brandnew tree. If you thoroughly enjoy breathing oxygen, savouring what’s left of the Earth, or feel like picking up a new hobby, here are some tips on how to regrow that sad stump sitting in your backyard.
The Right Conditions
Regrowing your stump requires you to become a tree connoisseur. You should first identify the tree stump to tailor how you will cultivate it. Slow growing trees such as oak, maple, and most conifers (the boring ones), don’t sprout well from stumps and cannot regrow. Hopefully your tree is more perseverent.
You’ve won the tree lottery if you have a willow, cottonwood, or elm stump! They grow rapidly, and are most likely to grow shoots that can transform into a smaller, but still-respectable tree. I’d advise you to download apps like ‘PlantSnap’ or ‘Planto,’ where you can take pictures of your trees, and discover if you’ve been endowed with an eligible, tree-growing stump.
The Best Way to Grow your Tree
If your tree stump resides in the shadiest corner of your backyard, chances are, it’s probably dead. To
revive your tree, you need to provide it with the nutrients it needs. When you step out for some Vitamin D, check that your stump is also receiving its much-needed sunlight and rain. Enrich the soil with organic materials like weeds, paper or even hair, and lay wood chips as mulch to protect the outlying roots whilst the canopy forms.
The next step to growing your tree is patience. Sprouts will form on their own, and there are some cool ways they do it. My favourite is a lovely process called ‘root sucking.’ If you have an Elm Tree, they will produce ‘root suckers’ or small shoots that emerge from the roots, which will grow into a new tree if left undisturbed. If your tree isn’t into root sucking, they may have epicormic shoots instead, which are dormant buds located beneath the bark of the tree trunk. When the tree is cut down, these buds are stimulated to grow, resulting in epicormic shoots that sprout from the stump. These tend to appear following exposure to increased light levels, or even fire. If you really want to embrace your inner tree-hugger, coppicing is another traditional forestry technique, practised to produce more sustainable wood. Trees are cut close to the ground to encourage growth of new shoots from the roots. So, if your stump is a bit short, this technique may work for your tree.
Why do we care?
We live in a world where our phones, clothes and morals dwindle
every year. Voracious consumerism insists that we are starving despite being egregiously full, and suddenly one can find themselves anticipating yet another parcel, containing two pairs of jeans, three shirts and five necklaces wrapped neatly in a glossy Shein plastic bag. Now, we live amongst 20 million metric tonnes of plastic that’s accumulated into mountains of landfill or the digestive tracts of precious marine life.
But capitalism not only contaminates our minds, it takes over our forests. In the perpetual quest for maximising profits, over 10 million hectares of trees are being cut down each year. Normally, Earth’s complex natural systems can rejuvenate itself to maintain a state of equilibrium, but when it absorbs excessive stress, it falls into a new state of equilibrium that cannot be reversed.
It is incumbent on us to be sustainable however and whenever we can, and to embrace unconventional practices. Growing a tree from a stump you assumed to be dead and useless harnesses nature’s abilities to regenerate itself, and allows forests to be managed in a more sustainable manner. Through coppicing and selective cutting, we can maintain the integrity of our lands, support diverse plant and animal species, and continue to sequester carbon to mitigate the effects of climate change.
So, leave your stump in the shining sun, regrow your tree and breathe easy!
Art: Mahima Singh
The ghosts of Callan Park’s past — and how they might haunt the future
Simone Maddison goes for a walk.
Callan Park has long been recognised as Rozelle’s finest landmark. On my regular walks along the Bay Run over the past few years, I have been welcomed by the Park’s grassy fields scattered with soccer players and the occasional pelican mounted on a shabby wooden chair; I became familiar with its abandoned buildings and overgrown forestry. These motifs — charming, if not a little frayed at the edges — were frozen in time and etched into my memory.
But when I trailed along this path just a few weeks ago, I was struck by how much had changed. The shoreline remains the same, but the orange tape lining its perimeter reminds us it might not stay this way for long.
Half of Callan Park is a pristine community hub, while the other is neglected and in urgent need of repair. It appears, at least on the surface, to be an instance of conflict between the state and local government — where the latter prevails insofar as it upholds the wishes of its residents. Yet from clues in the physical landscapes to the Inner West Council’s latest murmurings, one thing remains clear: there is still a lot of work to be done, with significant obstacles at play.
Through the broken glass
As a result of its medical, social and environmental histories, Callan Park’s management is complicated by a variety of overlapping interests. Located on the traditional land of the Wangal people, Callan Park is bordered by the Parramatta River and Balmain Road. Spanning 61 hectares across Lilyfield, Rozelle and Leichhardt, the Park has been heritagelisted since 2008. Today, it is home to Writing NSW and the New South Wales Ambulance Headquarters. Until 2020, it also housed the Sydney College of the Arts. Under the Callan Park (Special Provisions Act) 2002, any commercial or profit-making activity is prohibited in the area.
The Park’s history is one of settler-colonial dispossession. Initially composed of 300 acres operated under the combined land grants of just four elite colonial businessmen, the Park was a hub for Balmain social life during the 1840s. When major shareholder and Police Magistrate Ryan Brenan declared bankruptcy in 1864, the estate’s two main residences Garry Owen House and Broughton Hall became the focus of an auction to subdivide the Park into a new waterfront suburb by 1873.
It was only through this subdivision that the Colonial Government of New South Wales purchased the Callan Park site and initiated plans to build an asylum for the mentally unwell on its grounds. Broughton Hall, alongside twenty other
neoclassical buildings, were repurposed in 1885 as part of the Kirkbride Complex. Additional facilities were built during World War I, and the entire block continued to provide care, treatment and housing for patients until 1994.
Consequently, attempts to ‘redevelop’ Callan Park have long centred on delicately balancing its recreational uses with its official capacities. Indeed, the latest round of restoration blueprints were initiated almost 15 years ago. In 2011, the Leichhardt Council (since amalgamated to the Inner West Council) approved the Callan Park Master Plan to delegate the site’s management to an independent Trust, preserve “open space and heritage”, provide “active and passive recreation space”, and develop “health, community and education facilities.”
Crucially, the Plan also stipulated the demolition of thirty-nine intrusive buildings and structures. There was no timeline established for these changes.
Hands on — and off — Callan Park
At first, the Master Plan seemed to be an efficient and palatable route for redevelopment. In 2015, it was approved by the New South Wales Parliament targets to establish a specialised trust and delegate longer-term funding to the project. But six years later, the NSW Government endorsed changes to the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act 2002 through the Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill 2021. The Bill, impacting other locations including Centennial Park, aimed to codify a single “super trust” to manage all parkland estates across the state.
Given that Callan Park is owned and managed by the NSW Government, the Bill placed the Inner West Council and its residents in direct opposition to state orders.
In response, the Inner West Council submitted a Draft Exposure Bill at the end of October 2021. Following extensive community consultation and a grassroots Hands Off Callan Park campaign, the Draft Exposure Bill successfully implored the NSW Government to “make no changes to the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act 2002, commit to no future commercial uses, oppose 50-year leases, and establish the Callan Park and Broughton Hall Trust.”
Polemics in the Park
On the one hand, disagreement between the state and local government meant that the Bill was passed with amendments made by national Greens MP for Balmain Jamie Parker to protect greenspace, establish a separate Trust and keep leases down to ten years. However, the effects of this conflict are continuously felt within the redevelopment’s lethargy and incapacity to withstand smaller disputes.
Shortly after the Council’s submission of the Master Plan, Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne went on the record to state that Callan Park was “still facing demolition by neglect.” When I reached out to the office of state Greens MP for Balmain Kobi Shetty, her team pointed me towards a recent press statement she had made in June concerning a new
Callan Park Plan of Management. In particular, Shetty pointed out the need for “clear identification of which buildings will or will not be restored, the likely costs and timeframes involved, and what community uses they might then be put to.”
Of course, these issues have not completely stifled smaller redevelopment projects. In the middle of this year, Darcy Byrne confirmed that the Inner West Council had approved proposals to build Tidal Baths on the Iron Cove side of Callan Park. Upgrades to the Waterfront Green also began in January of 2021, and Building 497 will soon be open to the public as a new sports clubhouse and community space.
However, the latest controversy revolves around plans from Labor councillors to install synthetic turf on two of Callan Park’s largest fields. With an anticipated cost of $8 million and significant community concern that these materials can reach temperatures twice as hot as grass during summer months, Shetty recently stated that using “synthetic playing fields as a solution to the poor management of natural playing surfaces in our area is not a decision we should rush to.” While the Council is not due to vote on the matter until its August meeting, community groups such as Friends of Callan Park have already become key campaigners against this decision.
When I spoke to this community organisation about their broader concerns over the current and future phases of redevelopment, they told me that “proper parkland funding” is necessary to “resolve some of the rapidly increasing traffic issues and long overdue maintenance of buildings in Callan Park.” They noted that “funding for a proper traffic management plan and car park”, more “picnic tables, shade and benches”, as well as “public access and care for Kirkbride” are of a higher priority than “five or six toilets in a million plus dollar structure.”
Above all, the work completed by Friends of Callan Park highlights the enduring drive and success of community engagement within local heritage and land projects. Its members pointed out their capacity to deploy “150 corflutes” and “15,000 leaflets” during the Hands Off Callan Park campaign, as well as its ongoing attention to residents’ calls for “modern mental health services” across the Park’s buildings. As the organisation itself puts it: “Without community energy, focus and time Callan Park would not exist as it does as a place for all. The community and Friends of Callan Park have had a huge impact on how Callan Park is today.”
Conclusion
Callan Park’s redevelopment undoubtedly needs an overhaul — not only within its vision for the physical landscape, but in the way it handles, adapts and harnesses community interests. Nonetheless, I would be lying if I pretended not to love exploring its vandalised sandstone mazes across from spectacular waterside views. The Park’s character, alongside the meanings each person who works, plays and exercises upon its paths makes for themselves, must
be held at the forefront of any new proposals approved by the NSW Government. Otherwise, we risk letting the ghosts of the past haunt our future.
interspersed with changing paths
Some abandoned buildings are overgrown and fenced
Others overlook waterside views
All
Students’ Representative Council, University of
NOTICE: General Meeting of the Student Body
WHEN: 5pm Wednesday 7th of August 2024
WHERE: Eastern Avenue Auditorium (TBC)
PLEASE ARRIVE BY 4:30pm to register your attendance
MOTIONS:
1. Demand USYD cut ties with genocide in Gaza.
Preamble:
On April 22nd Students for Palestine Sydney Uni established a peaceful protest encampment as part of our ongoing campaign to stand with the people of Gaza against the bombings, invasion and occupation by Israeli forces. Our struggle is for them, and our encampments are for them. We are horrified at the brutality that is being brought down upon Palestinians. We cannot sit by while it unfolds. To do so would be a moral travesty. We believe in the possibility of a world without war, but that belief demands action.
Even though the camp has ended, the struggle continues. We continue to campaign and protest for Gaza.
Our demands are simple. We call on our university to disclose all of their ties with Israel, divest from those ties, and sign on to the international Boycott Divestment & Sanctions statement. In particular, we are deeply disturbed by the partnerships our university holds with weapons companies known to be part of the Israeli military’s supply chain, including Thales and Lockheed Martin. We are peace activists. We firmly believe that universities should be institutions of education and learning and should not have any connection to the weapons industry that brings death and destruction to our world.
We are aware that people in Gaza know about our movement. We have seen photos with the names of Australian universities written on tents and held up on signs in the war zone. Internationally, governments and institutions have attempted to isolate the Palestinians. Our campaign strives to show those in Gaza that they do not walk alone. We want to show that young
people in this country are with our brothers and sisters in Gaza. We stand with them, we breathe with them, we share their sorrows, we raise their flag.
We reject all forms of racism and discrimination including Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism and homophobia. Opposition to the state of Israel and to Zionism as an ideology is not antisemitism. Many of the student leaders of our protests are Jewish. We stand alongside Jewish people against discrimination, and we see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of a long line of Jewish pro-Palestine and anti-war activists.
In an attempt to silence our activism, the Sydney University Senate adopted a new draconian Campus Access Policy which attacks the right to free speech on campus. It mandates that all students and staff must now seek 72-hour approval from the university to protest, set up a stall or even put up a poster. This is a massive affront to student free speech which allows Sydney University to give itself the right to shut down activism on campus and make itself immune to staff and student opposition.
We call for university management to answer our demands. We have learnt that negotiations are a dead end, with nothing but hollow PR gestures offered from Mark Scott. We have launched this campaign for a Student General Meeting to demonstrate the profound depth of support for the Palestinian cause that exists on our campuses, and to strengthen our demand that Mark Scott and his executives respond to our campaign in a public forum where their answers can be subject to the scrutiny of the student body and the community.
We are part of a global movement for an end to genocide and apartheid in Gaza, for peace and against racism and imperialism. It’s time for USyd to listen to our calls and take a stand on the right side of history.
Platform:
1. The SRC demands that USYD cut ties with Thales and all weapons companies conducting research at USYD.
2. The SRC demands USYD cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, such as Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and abolish the OLES2155: Experience Israel.
3. The SRC demands USYD disclose and divest from any financial investment in Israel.
4. The SRC demands USYD rescind academic discipline measures against pro-Palestine student activists.
5. The SRC demands USYD drops the “Campus Access Policy” immediately as a denial of free speech and the right to organise and protest on campus.
Actions:
1. The SRC will post this motion on its social media.
2. The SRC will continue to campaign to win these demands through protests and activism.
3. The SRC will defy the “Campus Access Policy 2024” in order to continue campaigning around Palestine with activities such as protests, stalls and putting up posters.
Mover: Shovan Bhattarai
Seconder: Grace Street
2. One Palestinian State, affirm the right to resist.
Preamble:
Students’ Against War is initiating this motion because if the campaign for Palestine at USYD is going to win, then student activists must commit themselves to building a mass, militant student movement on campus that uses strategies such as strikes and sit-ins, and also affirm the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, and backs the call for a single, democratic, secular state from the river to the sea.
As our University represses and disciplines students for supporting Palestine, it is critical to take an assertive and confident political stance. The expulsion of pro-Palestine activist Beatrice Tucker was justified by ANU on the grounds that their support for the right of occupied peoples to armed resistance constituted an endorsement of terrorism. Similarly, USYD students Angus and Maeve have been suspended for making lecture announcements for Palestine, because
USYD claims that their outspoken support for Palestine would endanger Jewish students on campus. We must be prepared to defend activists from these right-wing smear campaigns, and we must consistently defend the legitimacy of armed resistance in the face of genocide in accordance with international law. The real terrorism is that of the Apartheid state of Israel.
By clearly supporting a single secular Palestinian state where Muslims, Jews, and people of all faiths and backgrounds have equal rights, we can argue against the smears of antisemitism which are used to delegitimise the movement. By refusing to back down in the face of the repression of student activists and the smears of antisemitism, we can continue to build and strengthen the movement, spreading it into every classroom and lecture hall. Only a mass student movement can win our demands.
Platform:
1. This SGM recognises that demanding Sydney University cut ties with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s genocide is part a wider struggle for Palestinian liberation.
2. As part of this we call for a single, secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. This would be a single state where Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all faiths and backgrounds live in freedom and equality.
3. We recognise the right to armed resistance Palestinians have under international law as an occupied people. All the violence in Palestine and Israel is a result of the Israeli state, its occupation of Palestine, and the apartheid system inflicted on Palestinians. The violence of the oppressed is never equivalent to the violence of the oppressor.
4. Resistance to the apartheid state of Israel and opposition to Zionism as an ideology is not antisemitism.
Actions:
1. We pledge to disrupt business as usual at USYD whilst our university is complicit in genocide and has not agreed to our demands to cut ties with Israel.
2. We commit to using actions like walk-offs, sit-ins, mass rallies, and strikes to force our university to cut ties with Israel.
3. The SRC will release a statement endorsing the call for a single, secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine, and affirms the right of Palestinians to armed resistance as an occupied people under international law.
Moved: Jacob Starling
Seconded: Salma Mardawie PLEASE ARRIVE BY 4:30pm
“No regrets” USyd graduate balances Olympic games with full-time medical career
It takes a certain kind of focus to throw everything you’ve got toward a chance at success. As the world casts its eyes to Paris for the 2024 Olympic season, I turned my attention to our athletes’ roots to try to understand the resilience and discipline it takes to get onto the world stage. This year, 34 athletes from the University of Sydney’s sports community qualified for the Games. Long days and longer nights make the rigorous, and often solitary , training regiments of most pre-Game Olympians — and then there are some who throw in full-time medical training, just for the extra challenge.
I spoke with Olympic javelin star, Mackenzie Little, who is a 2023 graduate from USyd’s Doctorate of Medicine. Now representing Australia in Track and Field, Little is also facing the grueling demands of working fulltime as a first-year doctor. Despite being advised to step back, Little has juggled intensive training in the lead up to the games with her lengthy hours at the Royal North Shore Hospital. Prior to setting off for Europe, her final weeks in Sydney were spent working the night shift. In past interviews, Little has gone so far as to point to this medicinesports juggling act as being mutually beneficial. The javelin star will enter the Olympic Village on August 1 with the second half of the Australian Athletics team and prepare for her qualifying round on August 7.
The twenty-seven year old has already represented Australia at multiple stages, making her Olympic debut in 2021 while in the second-year of her medical studies at USyd. In 2022, Little won silver at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and took home bronze at the World Championships in Budapest last year. After completing her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, Little was proud to join the Sydney Uni Sports Elite Athlete Program, something she cites as integral in making her dreams possible by advocating for accommodations for high achievers. Little feels it’s not unlikely for her to take home more medals this year.
“It never occurred to me to take time off work before the Olympics,” Little said. “I spoke to the incredible Jana Pittman (who qualified as a doctor in 2020 after her career as an Olympic athlete) and she recommended I take the year off or work part-time. However, I didn’t feel that was the best approach for me. In medicine, it takes a long time to get into specialist training and you can lose momentum. If I was compromising myself academically, I think it would weigh upon me and put undue pressure on my athletic performance.”
Grit and determination were key in Little’s training period earlier this year. While some of us struggled to shuffle up Eastern Avenue to more than one lecture, she was a powerhouse. Typically arriving at the hospital at 7.30am, Little would attend a full day of patient consultations as part of the medical internship. After clocking off, she would drive to Homebush for two hours of javelin training, then home for a night of study, as she is also preparing to sit the surgical training entrance exam in 2025. Frequently, she had to remind herself to eat and drink. Long days on her feet in the hospital had a significant impact on her legs, with ankles swollen and her knees hyperextended. Little said training was adapted to compensate for the changes in her legs, as well as the timing and power of her throw.
On how she first began javelin
“I’ve played sports all my life and come from a generally sporty family. My mum was a hurdler from country NSW as a kid and I tried athletics for the first time when I was five at Northern Suburbs Little Athletics. Initially, I liked hurdles but tried javelin in Year 7 and quickly showed some promise, leading to a World Youth Championship win in Year 11. My family have always had a really balanced approach and so sport was always just one part of my life, I never expected to compete professionally but just made the most of all the opportunities provided. It was only during my time at Stanford University that I really started imagining one day making the Olympics.”
On the connection between sports and medicine
“I’ve found that having a balanced life and multiple aspects to my identity has been the strongest sports psychology technique for me. It’s clear that when I feel most happy and confident in my professional life that my athletics is strongest too. I also feel strongly that the lessons and exercise, and training for sport makes me a more well-rounded, relaxed, and resilient doctor too.” Little said, “I’m so motivated and fulfilled at work. When I started my medical career, one of the junior medical officers told me that internship is like the Olympics of medicine in terms of the hours and expectations of the job. There’s also an adrenaline rush that comes with the work that’s a bit like the adrenaline of training.”
Little went on to say that “I was a little surprised by how fatigued I’d sometimes feel at training after a day of work. It can be a really physically and emotionally draining job but … I’ve got no regrets about the choice this year to keep working.”
On her university experience
“My university experience doing postgrad medicine at USyd was tumultuous at first, starting in 2020 with COVID lockdowns, and just after moving back to Australia after college in the US. I almost quit athletics due to the rigors of first-year med but COVID gave me a bit of breathing room when classes went online. I made my first Olympic team for Tokyo in 2021 and felt such immense support from the uni who made it possible for me to travel to the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, World Championships during the degree while ensuring I met all the med requirements and for that I’m so grateful. The Sydney Uni Athletics Club was also pivotal in their support throughout and there’s some iconic memories from Uni Games.”
On beating challenges and finding motivation
“(The) biggest challenge is the uncertainty and compromise that is necessary training for an Olympics. So much time and energy is invested, sometimes at the expense of time with family or friends, or doing other things — all for a chance at success that isn’t guaranteed. That’s why it’s so important to me to set up my life in a way that feels balanced and to curate my environment to focus on the journey and seeing the value in athletics for all the opportunities I’ve already received and for the people I’ve met.”
“My parents have always been so incredibly supportive and have always encouraged me to take on as much as I can while only expecting that I do my best and have fun. My dad often texts me before a big comp to say, ‘just try not to hurt yourself and have fun!’ I think I also look to them as motivation for my career in medicine and have a lot of admiration for my mum, in particular, who shares my tendency to take on one thousand things at once.”
On the Paris Games
“The goal is to qualify safely through to the Olympic final on August 10th — the final night of the Games.”
“I’ve got a few technical things to straighten out and I’m feeling really excited! Of course, it’s easy to feel nervous, especially as all my friends and family prepare to come over to watch me, but I’ll be trying to use that nervous energy for good. I’d like to throw a personal best in the final in Paris. If I’m at my best, there’s no reason I can’t be up there in the medals with the best, so I’ll be working on just controlling my own performance and making sure to enjoy every moment. I can’t wait to soak up the Olympic atmosphere and cheer on my Aussie teammates! It’s going to be incredible!”
Lotte Weber goes for gold with Mackenzie Little.
You can keep up to date with the 34 Olympic qualifying athletes from the USyd community via the Sydney Uni Sport’s Paris Athlete Tracker.
Journals of Love and Literature joins the magazine milieu
Victoria Gillespie goes to a magazine launch.
Eora’s small-run, small-scale, print publication world is blossoming, starring zines (RAG, Diptych) and magazines (Fling, Booker, PUSH, River Theory, Soft Stir, Killdeers, Hag, Wanderer). The revived use of this tactile medium begs our understanding – why are we returning to the analogue?
This trend is redolent of obvious zeitgeist shifts; nostalgia, and a desire to combat fast-paced data and technological isolation. But causal reasoning doesn’t suffice. It ignores the importance of process. Such publications revel in their temporality; they are born over dinner parties, inveigle themselves out of on-shift conversations, laboured over by friends, and are brought into the world at launch parties adorned by art and music. These discursive negotiations become physical in the glossy, small-print-run, photoworthy magazines. While some are plagued by short-termism or morph into production houses, these magazines don’t subscribe to consumerist logics, their importance lies within their physicality and relationality.
Journals of Love and Literature joins this burgeoning scene, explicitly with the goal of connection. Established by University of Sydney student Melanie McDacy, Love and Literature promises to platform new art and literary voices. Unlike the aforementioned periodicals comprising chapbooks or librettos, this magazine is closer to a tome, reaching almost 200 pages in length. Informed by quirky magazines and English university studies, Love and Literature acts as a subversive literary and artistic anthology. Honi Soit sat down with litterateur-in-chief McDacy to understand all things love and literature.
It was within the tertiary clime wherein McDacy first conceived of her own magazine. Initially studying fashion design, McDacy realised she was not connected to the subject matter but industry-adjacent publications. Through her studies at USyd in English and Sociology, McDacy developed experience and writing skills. But it was last year when the project grew from insuperable to achievable — a shift only attributable to an inspirational
community, passion and skillset. And hence, Journals of Love and Literature grew out of a combined goal: to encourage community and platform creatives around her, and bypass print media’s strict rules of engagement.
McDacy frames the project as analgesic to three issues; general, technological-induced alienation, the inaccessibility of traditional print media, and its inability to serve young people. This alienation is particularly prevalent in creative worlds. Oxygenating concerns about the ‘scene’, McDacy regards the cliques as ironically detrimental to local creatives. Love and Literature will be an interlocutor between artist/writer and audience.
The theme ‘connection’ confronts these issues. McDacy speaks of her experience with a kind of unspoken but all-consuming loneliness, and the related idealisation of hyper-independence, “humans just aren’t built like that”. The theme ‘connection’ remained flexible and broad, but surfaces in the magazine through the repeated ‘Project 01’. ‘Project 01’ – “a project wherein I wrote a piece of poetry to be used as a prompt” – begins, punctuates and ends the publication. This acts as a kind of circular colophon, connecting “different mediums, translating the language of art for different readers”.
While for the first edition McDacy reached out to her existing circles,
This year, ragtag bunches of scrappy student journalists from all corners of the country are coming together to inaugurate the Student Media Conference (or StuJo, as its beloveds call it) on 27–29 September at the University of Sydney. The first of its kind, StuJo is run and organised by students, aiming to put the student back in student
she is now expanding accessibility with a public callout. Throughout the interview, McDacy underscored the collective, relational process of magazine-making. McDacy attributes Sascha Zenari as “another director/ senior editor”, and notes other editors Caleb ‘Drayco’ Forson, Lili Ramunda, Hanna Arain, and Oscar Melder. These friends emerged from “various walks of life”, including drudgerous retail work. As McDacy astutely acknowledges, “you can’t really do these things alone”.
But why print form? McDacy proselytises the beauty of print’s physicality: “it’s a solid, formal and sophisticated record of emotion, stacked with scribbles and stories from all different minds.” Moreso, the physical medium develops its own life, its patina recording all its readers, notetakers and admirers. McDacy compares this palimpsest-like act to life cycles, “physical books have their own soul and life cycle, much like us”. Printed material is also just more romantic, “something you can touch and hold whether you’re by candlelight on a rainy night in a blackout, or by the beach phone-free sipping martinis”.
The appellation – Journals of Love and Literature – embodies its status as “a quirky take on a traditional literary journal”. ‘Love’ announces McDacy’s aim to “foster a positive, clear space and create a platform for
journalism. The conference is an exciting opportunity to meet and connect with different student publications, hear from industry trailblazers and immerse yourself in the multi-medium world of student journalism.
Fan of magazine workshops? Career pipelines? Writing workshops? Drinks and giggles with friends? Find all this and more at the 2024
Issue 1 launched 26 July. Follow @ loveandliterature__ for the latest
other like-minded spirits” unlike the commercial industries that tend to be “contaminated with greed and ego”. The plurality “journals”, emphasises its status as a non-authoritarian, extrainstitutional publication. Through visual design, Love and Literature parses the interstices of the design magazine and literary journal. The front cover announces its playfulness; against an orange background, bold sans-serif text announces the title, alloyed with James Durran’s black and white drawing. Inside, curlicue headings join with sans-serif body text. In other pieces, art and text merge; Zenari’s ‘Commutes’ arranges drawings and a short story, to retell the classic snow queen fairytale. In the midst of all these new publications, is this ‘scene’ homologous? What makes Love and Literature different, and necessary? I guess this criticism ignores the essence of these publications; they are not about ‘necessity’ and ‘difference’ but creativity, process and materiality. The collaborative process is a palliative to alienation, and the product is a panoply of creators. Perhaps it is a truism, but any new publication that encourages new voices is a good thing. Love and Literature will emerge into physicality and join this melee, reminding us that its communal creation and celebration is its raison d’être.
Student Media Conference. We’ve done the thinking and the planning. Now we want YOU to do the attending and the enjoying!
As the events and panellists are released, you will want to stay in the loop. Follow @ studentmedia.au on Instagram and fill out our Expression of Interest form (linked below) to attend to the conference.
The engravings on the desks
Not only do we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, we sit on their pews and scribble on their desks. Like all humanity, we are the ultimate vagrants. When we stare at the scratchings, let’s look the scribes, and ourselves, in the eye.
In the Old Lecture Theatre beside the main entrance of the John Woolley Building, the rows of desks offer a story of university students weaving through Australia’s post-federation history.
I have been fascinated by the etchings of students from decades past. There are a number of engravings from the years of the First World War. Students must’ve felt at a loss two decades later when they surveyed those engravings, then looked up to see their campus hushed once more by distant guns.
K. Smith and J. Hoets from 1907 have finely carved themselves into one of the desks, and into the physical being of the University. They pushed deep into the wood driven by a desire to leave an indelible mark. I like to think they did it together.
An article last year discussed the affirming messages found on bathroom walls at the University (bathroom graffiti is termed ‘latrinalia’), a broadly similar instance of campus culture and one that shows the best of humanity: needless to say, women. While researching for this article, I found a piece by John Grindal for The Badger Herald of the University of Wisconsin. Writing about that university’s often-political carvings and graffiti, Grindal calls it “more or less a diary written by UW’s student body.” Grindal notes how this wealth of writing may be overlooked, before recounting his own developing interest
in it, explaining that he was about to sit his first chemistry exam and saw the words “Chem sucks.”
The engravings in John Woolley, however, are different. They are not political, being little more than names and dates, with some embellishment besides. Still, a comparison can be made. The article references a scientific study into vandalism which finds that graffitists — by extension our engravers — commit acts of vandalism “to relieve boredom and stress, and gain recognition for their artistic talents.”
A-ha! There is not anything more human than that desire for recognition which binds us to the auld scholars of our university. The innate desire for a kind of immortality is perhaps best related by the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who is indeed immortalised on campus. It may also be seen by the succession of other memorialised historical figures, on campus and not, who sought a legacy for themselves or that we sought for them. When we seek to memorialise others, it is in recognition of an injustice in letting our fellow person be forgotten. When we record our own presence, as University of Sydney students have long done, this sense of doing justice must play a part in it too.
One night when a friend and I were sitting curbside next to the National Art School, someone told us about the convict markings on that institution’s sandstone exterior. These engravings were the most apt comparison point
for those at our University — which I’ve been informed also exist elsewhere on campus — that I could think of. I took these engravings to be the work of people seeking to be remembered, like Gilgamesh and our students of the First World War, but I was sadly mistaken. The markings were simply a way convicts kept track of their quotas: it’s amazing that the very simplicity of this medium opens it up to misinterpretation. I’m not sure whether that provides a lesson applicable to the engravings in John Woolley, lest students in the early 20th century lived under a form of penal servitude.
A stroll over to the Wentworth Building offers a similar throwback. Notice boards are layered with obsolete posters for society events. Somewhere, behind the years of sheets, there might be a flyer seeking writers for an upstart student newspaper, and one behind it advertising the formation of the Sydney University Women’s Union.
Not only do we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, we sit on their pews and scribble on their desks. Like all humanity, we are the ultimate vagrants. When we stare at the scratchings, let’s look the scribes, and ourselves, in the eye.
The thing about budget airlines is that when something goes terribly wrong, one tends to jump to the conclusion that it’s because of the airline and it’s inherently parsimonious methods, rather than a broader malaise that equally afflicts one’s fellow passengers in the hateful Business Class. Such was the situation when I attempted to fly with Scoot, the budget arm of Singapore Airlines, on the fateful afternoon of Friday the 19th of July.
Five minutes after arriving at Penang Airport and parking in the queue with my family, the sluggish stream of passengers halted. For the first hour I blamed it on the airline. The workers behind the desks seemed to be having an unreasonably good time, and
several IT staff climbed over stationary conveyor belts only to shake their heads at the computer, climb back over and vanish from sight. I comforted myself with fantasies in which I had booked with a luxury airline, imagining a lounge and complimentary champagne. Deprived of books with which I could distract myself, I stared at the ceiling and tried not to throttle the teenager next to me, who was scrolling through TikTok and watching each loud video exactly four times before moving onto the next.
My murderous reverie was interrupted when my mother declared, frowning at the Sydney Morning Herald on her mobile, that there was an international Microsoft outage. I
Will Thorpe traces some graffiti.
Imogen Sabey tries to catch a flight.
Viewing disability in the horror genre
Gemma Hudson watches some movies.
Unlike a lot of horror fans, my love for the genre does not come from movies, but rather from books. From the bloody animal transmogrification of Mona Awad’s Bunny to the bony, fleshy body horror of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb novels, horror-informed works pop up everywhere in my reading lists.
With most of these books published in the last ten years, it’s easy for me to see myself in them. In The Locked Tomb, for example, many characters are queer women with sick bodies, something I can relate to completely.
My very first foray into horror movies was almost ten years ago. In 2016, I was in Year 8, and I was at my best friend’s house for a sleepover. We had decided we were properly grown up, and as such, we were going to watch a horror movie — and be scared to death.
The movie we watched was Hush (2016). In Hush, a d/Deaf woman alone in a cabin in the woods must save herself from a killer, without being able to hear him or herself. The movie spins many traditional horror situations through the lens of deafness as its primary method of creating fear. Are you breathing too loudly in your hiding place and you don’t know it? Can you not hear the killer’s footsteps behind you? Arguably, the movie ends in an empowering way, with the protagonist saving herself from the killer. At the very least, she is not aggressively butchered or demonised, a rarity for disabled characters (or in the case of Hush, a character perceived as disabled, given many d/Deaf people do not consider themselves disabled due to their specific culture).
Despite my relatively positive experiences with the genre, horror is historically not the greatest place for disabled people like myself. Many horror villains and monsters are portrayed as disabled in some way; from mental disabilities to facial differences to a “mysterious sickness”, disability is used as a shorthand for “scary”, for “wrong”, for perhaps lazy writers to make their
must admit some schadenfreude at the knowledge that millions of other people had been affected too: reading that Berlin Airport had cancelled all of their flights made me feel positively grateful for dear old Scoot in comparison. I had never heard of the “blue screen of death,” and considered my own Microsoft laptop solid & reliable. Theoretically, the computers behind the desk showed identical blue screens with a sad face saying that they wouldn’t work; I felt the irrational urge to clamber over the desks to the computers and clobber them until they started functioning.
The SMH’s live updates were just enough to tide me over for the next hour while bloated queues clogged the airport. The Scoot staff, whom I had
characters “monstrous” without having to find them more complex motivations.
However, though we weren’t seeing flattering portrayals, they were portrayals, in a world where disabled people are often excluded from both media and public life — it is, in many ways, a Catch 22. Would you rather be a monstrous horror you can maybe reimagine into something you resonate with, or not be seen at all?
Furthermore, the disabled horror in some ways is a potent counter-narrative to equally frustrating “positive” narratives surrounding disability. These are the narratives where disabled people are infantalised, for the inspiration of abled people, or desperately waiting for a cure, a change, an opportunity to ‘overcome’ their disability.
I find myself tired of these saccharine portrayals of disabled bodies, and find myself wondering: maybe the horror movies I’ve read so many articles about, but not yet watched, can provide a different way to see stories about my community, even if we are going to be seen as monstrous. Maybe there is some comfort to be found in the monstrousness.
With this in mind, I decided to watch Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
I’ve read a lot of articles about this movie, many of them in reference to the way it resonates with disabled people. Though the film depicts a young girl possessed by demons, it’s fundamentally about a young girl with a sick body, surrounded by doctors who cannot help her.
From the ages of 14-20, I was a young girl navigating the world with a sick body, with doctors who didn’t know how to help her.
I watch the movie on my tiny phone screen, in broad daylight. While I love the themes of horror, I don’t exactly love to be scared. It’s funny, though, the movie didn’t really scare me like I thought it would. At times, it felt like looking in a mirror.
now decided were saints, scrupulously wrote each passenger’s boarding pass by hand, so that after two and a half hours of stagnant suffering we finally escaped the queue.
Salvation came in the unexpected form of an airport café, where cosy leather chairs and familiarly bland food eased our woes. Reassured by the vast crowds still waiting to check in, we presumed that our flight to Singapore was a distant concern, which would surely be delayed by hours. Alas! It was not to be. When we meandered towards the international terminal, we were rudely shocked by the declaration that our flight was in fact boarding already. To compound our aggrieved wait to get through customs, the green ‘Boarding’
Regan’s sickness in The Exorcist felt like one of the more honest and relatable portrayals I’ve seen of what it is like to be sick.
As I watched the film’s protagonist Reagan grin and bear it as she was poked with needles, it felt hard to believe that she was going to be a monster. I remember being poked with needles. Blood test after blood test. Cannulas in freezing hospital rooms. The injections I have once a month to enable me to get out of bed.
Though she was meant to be possessed by a demon, Regan’s sickness in The Exorcist felt like one of the more honest and relatable portrayals I’ve seen of what it is like to be sick.
Sometimes being sick does feel like demonic possession. Sometimes you want to scream, and swear, and yell, and act out when doctors just don’t know what’s wrong, when help seems to not exist.
In watching Reagan, I found more empathy for myself.
Maybe it is wrong that horror movies show sickness as demonic, and evil, and wrong.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s okay that I watch it and feel seen.
sign slid into the much more ominous ‘FINAL CALL’ sign. The customs staff had hardly returned my passport when I was tearing through the terminal like a cheetah.
Being the sort of person who would call it a ‘bitter blow’ to miss a train, the thought of missing a plane — and for a coffee, at that! — was horror beyond imagination. At the gate scribbled on my boarding pass I arrived like a tornado in Wellington: unexpected, alarming and not in the right location. I was informed by a flight attendant with considerably more composure than I that the gate had been changed, and that the plane would not depart until every passenger had boarded.
From within my haze of panic and adrenaline his words gradually sank in, and I found myself gently escorted to the correct gate, where my flight status was displayed as ‘GATE CLOSED’. A bolt of terror struck my heart, but I was quickly reassured that the sign was automatic, and that the plane I would be departing on had not yet landed at the airport. Deflating like a puncture-riddled tire, I sank with a tremulous sigh into the nearest chair and fixed my gaze on the tarmac to verify myself that the plane was not there. A vast expanse of cement greeted me. Time sank into a delirious fugue, and on the plane to Singapore I dreamed of blue screens and nefarious software updates.
President’s Report
Harrison Brennan
Come and vote at the SGM for Palestine Wednesday 7th of August starting at 4:30pm
Join the campaign against the Campus Access Policy and the University of Sydney’s outrageous attack on Free Speech by joining the Education Action Group!
Education Officers’ Report
Shovan Bhattarai & Grace Street
SRC Reports
collectives, as well as preparing for the upcoming unauthorised stalls day. We also fully support the NTEU staff rally this coming Thursday! It is crucial to demand that Sydney University sever ties with weapons manufacturers and Apartheid Israel, particularly following the recent ICJ hearing which affirms what Palestinians have been saying for decades: the occupation of the West Bank is illegal, and Israel enforces a system of Apartheid against Palestinians. Furthermore, we must protest the new campus access, antiprotest policy which amounts to draconian suppression of free speech. We are appalled that our right to protest is under attack, and this affects everyone!
encampment was taken down, though there are new regulations against the right to protest on unceded Indigenous land, we should not take this as a sign to stop fighting for First Nations people in so-called Australia and across the globe.
During the break, we celebrated NAIDOC Week, an annual tribute to the history, culture, and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Originating from the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, NAIDOC Week highlights the ongoing journey of advocacy and recognition for First Nations Australians.
Upcoming Initiatives:
- Planning the orientation week to help international students to familiarize with the study journey in the USYD
Challenges:
- Some students have reported difficulties with housing and accommodation. We are working with the housing office to find solutions.
- There is a need for more mental health support specifically tailored to international students. We are in discussions with the counseling center to address this issue.
Conclusion:
Amidst our ongoing campaign for the University to cut ties with and divest from Israeli apartheid and genocide, the last few weeks have had a major focus on building a base of resistance against the new Campus Access Policy. Instated with notifying students or staff, the C.A.P is an offensive to activism, free speech and both student and staff unionism at USyd.
We have had three Education Action Group meetings thus far to break down the C.A.P and discuss the fight back against it. With a media release, posts on social media, and contacting different groups we have received a strong response from the community and civil bodies about this outrageous policy that is a gateway to a full crackdown on activism and all activities on campus.
Coming up is our Unauthorised Stalls Day (12pm Wednesday 31 July) and Staff & Student rally (1pm Thursday 1 August) this week, and our Student General Meeting (5pm Wednesday 7 August) next week. We need all groups to join us – touch one, touch all – for a united and strong fightback for our rights to protest on campus and for the liberation of Palestine.
Currently, we are also working through analysis of the information coming back from our Freedom of Information request to the University about its financial ties to Israel. So far, we can see lots of equities in companies on the BDS list, as well as many mining and gambling companies, that show the true nature of the modern corporate university. Stay tuned for the full report!
Women Officers’ Report
Eliza & Rand
No feminist liberation without Palestinian liberation.
Over the past month, we have been preparing for the Student General Meeting by getting as many students we know to get on board, designing and ordering stickers for each of the
Last month, the Lancet medical journal conservatively estimated that over 186,000 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s genocide. Last week alone was one of the deadliest days, with Israeli airstrikes on schools and a designated humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinians. The situation deteriorates and our government and institutions remain deeply complicit.
Following the recent ICJ ruling on the occupation of the West Bank, where the UN court ordered Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, it is imperative that we call on our government and institutions to stand up for justice, freedom, and solidarity with Palestine. We reaffirm the BDS movement’s demands: Immediately impose a comprehensive military embargo on Israel; Impose lawful targeted sanctions against Israel; Immediately end all other forms of complicity with Israel’s illegal military occupation; Re-activate the UN Special Committee against Apartheid; Suspend Israel from the United Nations.
Moving into the next semester,WoCo is so excited to launch a collaboration with ACAR: FALL: Feminist, Antiracist Liberation Library. This space will feature collaborative multi-modal learning sessions reading groups, film screenings, writing workshops and more. Our first FALL event will be a screening of Concerning Violence by Göran Olsson. Additionally, we are planning a Tatreez & Cheese workshop, so stay tuned for that!
Finally, we are excited to announce Reclaim & Resist Week from October 8-11th. This week will celebrate feminist and decolonial resistance. Let us know if you want to get involved and join us at WoCo!
First Nations Officers’ Report
Taylah Cooper & Cianna Walker
Hey you mob! With a new semester approaching, it is imperative that we stick together and keep the fire burning. Though the
This year’s theme, “Keep the Fire Burning! Blak, Loud and Proud,” symbolizes community resilience and unity while reclaiming silenced voices. The metaphor of fire represents the enduring vitality of Indigenous cultures, rooted in deep connections to Country and community. It encourages all Australians to embrace and amplify First Nations identities confidently. The theme emphasizes the importance of meaningful dialogue, truth-telling, and advocacy in acknowledging and respecting the wisdom and contributions of First Nations peoples. NAIDOC Week invites reflection on reconciliation and the celebration of diversity, ensuring that Indigenous perspectives play a pivotal role in shaping Australia’s future. It reaffirms that First Nations peoples are integral to the past, present, and future of this nation.
Some highlights of last semester included a teach-in at the encampment with staunch First Nations matriarch Lizzie Jarrett and student contingents at rallies. We hope for this semester to have more events, both social and political to let everyone know that the Indigenous presence at USYD won’t back down, and that we will continue to fight for sovereignty and self-determination, from Gadigal, to Gaza, to Congo, to West Papua, to Bangladesh. Follow our Instagram to keep up to date with new events and potential collaborations with other staunch societies and groups in the future. Allies and mob are welcome.
Your Officers, Taylah and Cianna
International Student Officers’ Report
Kejun Liu, Zhongxuan Jiang, Fengxuan Liu & Astrid Xue
This month, our efforts as the International Student Office have focused on enhancing the support and integration of international students through a variety of initiatives Orientation event
We are going to help freshmen to familiarize our campus and life in the Australia
This month has been productive and impactful for our international student community. We are committed to continuing our efforts to support and enhance the international students.
Global Solidarity Officers’ Report
Nabilah Chowdhury, Gabriel Crowe & Lia Perkins
The Global Solidarity Officers did not submit a report this week.
Pay Day Loans and why they suck!
Do you remember that bit on The Tinder Swindler, where Simon encourages Cecile to take out some quick-loans to help him escape his enemies? That didn’t work out well for her, and chances are that it won’t for you.
Payday loans feed off your desperation. They try to block your access to better ways of accessing financial help. The lure of getting cash as quickly as an hour after you apply should be considered in the sobering light of the interest rates or charges. Different loans have different conditions. Some promote that they have no charges but charge an interest rate of up to 48%. Others do not charge interest, but instead charge an account management fee that is equivalent to at least 48%. Debt consolidation loans are almost as bad. There are many fees and charges that are imposed, with little opportunity for your repayments to actually reduce your loan. Debt consolidation companies have been known to sign people into an act of bankruptcy, which can have profound effects on your financial health for many years.
Buy Now Pay Later doesn’t quite cut it either.
It is great to have interest free periods on loans, and partial payment schemes such as Afterpay, and Ezipay, but the penalties for late repayments can be very high. If you are going to use one of these services, calculate when you will be able to complete the payment, and how much this will actually cost you.
Ask Abe
SRC
Caseworker Help Q&A
Show Cause - What to do if you are late
Hi Abe,
I only just noticed that I was asked to Show Good Cause. It’s just that I don’t check my emails often, and I have been overwhelmed. Can I still submit a response?
Late
Hi Late,
Show Good Cause is an opportunity for you to explain how you will pass all your future subject. If you’ve missed the deadline for your Show Good
Cause letter, unfortunately the Faculty may have excluded you. You should still contact the Faculty and ask them if you are still able to submit a late Show Good Cause letter. If they have already excluded you, you can submit an exclusion appeal instead. You should start your letter by explaining why you did not submit your show good cause letter, then follow the suggestions in the SRC’s Exclusion Appeal leaflet (link below)
If you need help from an SRC Caseworker start an enquiry. Scan QR or go to: bit.ly/3YxvDUf Exclusion
An SRC caseworker can help you with your Show Good Cause letter or your exclusion appeal. Abe Payday loans feed off your desperation. They try to block your access to better ways of accessing financial help. The lure of getting cash as quickly as an hour after you apply should be considered in the sobering light of the interest rates or charges.
There are better alternatives.
Your energy provider (electricity and gas) is part of the Energy Accounts Payment Assistance (EAPA) scheme which gives $50 vouchers to people in need. You could also ask your telephone and internet companies if they have a similar voucher scheme, or if they can put you on a payment plan. You might be able to get a bursary or an interest free loan through the University’s Financial Assistance Unit. If you are on a Centrelink payment you might be able to get an advance payment. There may also be ways to spend less money each week. For example, there are many services around the University that provides cheap or free food, medical services, and other similar types of services.
The SRC has a Guide to Living on Little Money (link below) that has lots of helpful cost-saving tips, that might be helpful or contact an SRC caseworker.
Weekly quiz
1. What suffix connects Ash, Strath, Fair, and Glen?
2. Herbivorous burrowing ground squirrels native to North America are known as ______ dogs
3. What verb is used officially to describe the abandonment of military service?
4. A forced retirement is sometimes referred to as being put out to ______
5. The Eurasian nomads inhabited the Eurasian _____
6. In which song can Creedence Clearwater Revival “still hear my old hound dog barking?”
7. What preserved The Tollund Man?
8. The Big Mouth Billy Bass toy featured in The Sopranos sings which Al Green song?
9. Who was the 41st President of the United States?
10. What do all these answers have in common?
instagram page, or email us at editors@honisoit.com!
Crossword
Dusting off the cobwebs
SRC second-hand communism book swap held at Holme Building, Honi Soit. March 8, 1981
Crossword: Michael Smith. Constructor’s Warning: This puzzle is haunted.
DOWN
1 Buy into 2 Miner’s haul 3 Australian band whose album “Kick” is certified six times platinum 4 Mend, as an antique book, say 5 Completely stuffed
Uber competitor
“Leave this in”, to an editor
Zig-zag pattern 9 Visionary directors
Domain of certain investors
Publisher of “30 under 30” lists of young entrepeneurs
Hole-making woodworking tools
“Hit the ___!”
20 Impales
21 Legendary blues singer James 23 Ruckus 27 Outhouse
28 Nerf product
29 Died down, as a light
35 Quick nap
37 Hypothetical threat used to justify the Iraq War, in brief
38 Teenager’s quest, often
39 Emergency passport issuer
Has-___
Accommodates, as a joining poker
ACROSS
1 Big ___, one half of Outkast 4 Counterparts to cones 8 Word before park or pool
Andrew Lloyd Webber musical set in
Greek letter which is in lowercase
___ and the Will of the Wisps, 2020 platform-adventure game
Toolshed item that contains liquid 22 ___ Nadir, study group member on “Community” 24 Having one flat, as a piece of music
25 Walk cockily
26 Spiced item on an hors d’oeuvres platter
30 One of 251 who lost their seat in this year’s UK general election
31
56
One percenters
66 Australian candle chain
67 Absolute mess
68 Mumford & ___, British folk-rock
Answers: 1. Field 2. Prairie 3. Desert 4. Pasture 5. Steppe 6. Born on the Bayou 7. Bog 8. Take Me to
the River 9. George H. Bush 10. Natural Phenomena Honi Soit
Always Balanced Coverage
HOW’S THE SERENITY: Mark Scott Takes Vow Of Silence, Begs Protesters Do The Same
“I just have a really bad headache. And some of them are particularly shrill,” he mouthed to Always Balanced Coverage.
Scott sat down with us to share new protest methods that meet his “standard of civility.”
With his hands clasped around a watery chai, legs curled, and knit sweater pulled up to his palms à la Drew Barrymore, he suggested sitting down and telepathically talking things out as a viable alternative.
“It’ll be like red table talk, except where discourse and Disagreeing Well occurs entirely through meaningful eye-contact.”
“The chants echo in my head. They were catchy at first but now I pace to the rhythm of “Mark Scott get out...” It is now the metronome to which I walk and breathe, and sign off my illicit love letters with Thales” he confided, we think — our reporter struggled to lipread.
“Simon and Garfunkel are the only ones who really get me,” he mouthed, with the instrumental version of the Sound of Silence spinning in the distance.
Eat at Happyfield. Get the $25 haloumi side. Have a cold $25 martini at an almost empty Bar Planet. Go to Dendy. Order the choc top rare. Have a Negroni ($25). Have two. Be open to the world. Talk to the Townie regular. Get glassed by the Townie regular. Don’t tip your server. Enjoy the ride.
—Sydney Bourdain
BREAKTHROUGH: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SCHOLAR DISCOVERS ROUND PEG GOES IN ROUND HOLE, SQUARE PEG GOES IN SQUARE HOLE
LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT: FORMER UNION BOSS JOHN SETKA UNWINDS WITH NEW THERAPIST
MOTION 1. USYD cut ties with genocide in Gaza*
MOTION 2. One Palestinian State, affirm the right to resist*
Student General
5pm WEDNESDAY 7th August Eastern Avenue Auditorium
ARRIVE at 4:30pm to register your attendance *For full motion text and preamble, see inside this edition of Honi Soit or at srcusyd.net.au
