Honi Soit: Week 1, Semester 1, 2025

1, Semester 1

HONI SOIT

City of Sydney Passes

“Historic” BDS Motion

Purny A. & Emilie GD. pg. 5

Monoculture, Memory, and the Myth of the Missing White Boy

William Winter pg. 6

The Exiled Author is Here and Nowhere Kuyili Karthik pg. 16

Acknowledgement of Country

Honi Soit operates and publishes on Gadigal land of the Eora nation. We work and produce this publication on stolen land where sovereignty was never ceded. The University of Sydney is a colonial institution. Honi Soit is a publication that prioritises the voices of those who challenge colonial rhetorics. We strive to continue its legacy as a radical left-wing newspaper providing students with a unique opportunity to express their diverse voices and counter the biases of mainstream media.

In This Edition...

Monoculture & Memory

The Sound of Arousal

Political Horseshoes

Code-Switching

The Farm

The Mother Tongue

The Exiled Author(s)

Ribena in a Wine Glass

SRC Casework

Puzzles

And just like that, another year of uni has landed on our doorstep.

Wrapped in the usual anxieties of whether we’re adequately prepared for our classes, I hold my breath for the exciting weeks that lay ahead. What memories will be made in these concrete walls across this hopefully glorious year?

Secret trysts on back-alley benches, societies crumbling under the weight of post-high-school gossip sessions, and essays formed in the hours before their midnight deadlines.

I’m entering my fifth year of study, so walking this campus feels more like living through the memories than making them. Thankfully, my memory is kind to me. Mostly.

My concept for this edition of Honi Soit was borne from many a discussion with friends and family in which I tried to explain a small corner of the Internet I was presently obsessed with, and they had… absolutely no clue it existed.

The world continues to expand, our knowledge of what it means to be human gets bigger and bigger, and yet our future still feels so out of reach. What do we do with all of our hope?

Here, you’ll find the latest news affecting campus life, political insights on horseshoe theory and protest movements, cultural consumption in Japan and monocultural farming in Lebanon respectively, and insights on celebrating Ramadan as a student on campus.

Companion Piece, Finnegan Lai

“My Boy” is everyone and he is no one.

Born out of the magic of online celebrity face mashers, he embodies everything that our culture drools over. Does My Boy remind you of someone, something, or an unattainable goal? Does he look at you with the eyes of familiarity?

Editor-in-Chief

William Winter

Editors

Purny Ahmed, Emilie Garcia-Dolnik, Mehnaaz Hossain, Annabel Li, Ellie Robertson, Imogen Sabey, Charlotte Saker, Lotte Weber, William Winter

This edition is glued together by incredible writers who’ve carved out tiny chunks of themselves and handed them to you on this paper platter. Cherish it, dear readers. Writing is an honour, and reading is a privilege.

I invite you to read this edition with your hands open like butterfly wings, ready to take it all in. Perhaps, somewhere in here, you’ll read something that makes you want to fly.

With all my heart, Will

Deliberately painted in a crude alla-prima oil style, my intentions were to render a human who seems to be not-quite solid, as if he were easy to smudge away. But no fear, he’s here to stay. My Boy is a phantom which we look on with heart-shaped sunglasses, dreaming of a reality we could make our own.

Arata, Sophie Bagster, Martha Barlow,

Purny Ahmed, Kushi Chevli, Emilie Garcia-Dolnik, Mehnaaz Hossain, Finnegan Lai, Ellie Robertson, William Winter

Eliza Crossley, Celina Di Veroli, Hamish Evans, Leanne Rook, Anu Khulan, and Norn Xiong.

or information contained within this newspaper, nor does it endorse any of the advertisements and insertions. Please direct all advertising inquiries to publications.manager@src.usyd.edu.au.

Chiara

Ethan Floyd, Lachlan Griffiths, Kuyili Karthik, Marc Paniza, Khanh Tran, Victor Zhang, Shayla Zreika

Dear Honey

Back in high school, I once fell in love with a guy who I never confessed my feelings towards, mostly because of the fact that I didn’t feel safe coming out at that time. After we both graduated, as fate would have it, we ended up getting into different unis, him into UNSW and me into USyd, and we eventually lost touch with each other. Ever since we lost touch, I’ve been trying to move on from him so that I can move forwards in life. However, I happened to meet him again by chance a while back before we yet again parted ways and I came to realise that in spite of everything that has happened, I still have feelings for him. What do you think I should do here?

From, First-year Student

To First-year Student,

Oh, to be young and hopeful for your first love. I hope you know that this life is long, unbearably so. Love often feels never-ending, even when it’s not. You’re in uni now, the playing ground is much larger than your former school grounds, and the world is vast. You will experience many special loves before you find someone who stands out from the rest.

You say its fate when you two were separated, but chance when you were reunited. It’s up to you now to decide which path to take — ironically, the choice is yours. I wonder which one has more sway over you, fate or pure chance?

I am usually the more cynical type, and a part of me does want to tell you to walk away and to move on (read below). I’m not going to do that this time (jokes!); if you feel safe to do so, ask him to coffee or whatever it is you young people do. Become friends again, mend the wounds that might still remain. I’m not guaranteeing anything, only saying that first loves are reckless and they are meant to be — do the things that bring butterflies to your tummy, and try not to regret it when it’s over.

Remember, love is never a waste.

That being said, if any of that made you queasy rather than excited, well… You have your answer. Walk away. You have given yourself…what? Three, maybe four, months to move on? If it’s love, like you say it is, it’ll take a little longer to move on. If that’s what you want/need, don’t give up on it just yet. Only allow people into your life who enrich it, rather than weigh upon you. Cut your losses while you can. Listen to fate, and start fresh.

Good luck,

Honey

So in the span of a year, I:

• Was working with somebody who expressed interest in me, and I fell, and then it turned out he never cared

• Got into my dream school (FAR away from Aus) and then realised I could not afford to go and was stuck here

• Moved interstate

• Battled with my health (mind and body) and despite it all, I still worry I’ll never be kissed. Sydney has not been too kind to me and I worry I’ll never feel at peace here. I certainly have not found my people.

From,

Hopelessromantic

Dear Hopelessromantic,

Everything sucks right now, but it won’t always. I won’t say that everything happens for a reason — it’s a stupid consolation that helps no one — but I will say that when the life you’ve been wanting finds you, you’ll feel it, and it will mean so much more.

I can’t make promises, I can’t work any magic here. I can only tell you from my own experiences that dreams shift, evolve, transform, and come true in their own ways. You might not have found your people or your peace here yet, but maybe one day you will. Or maybe, one day you find yourself far away from here, and it will all have been a bad dream. The point is, it will be okay… eventually.

Oh, and you will definitely be kissed! Stop thinking about it so much, it will happen exactly when it is meant to.

With love,

Honey

Art by Ellie Robertson

USyd Greens Politics in the Pub

Thursday, 27th February at 6pm Courtyard Cafe

SCASS ‘Monuments’ Exhibition Opening Night

Thursday, 27th February at 6:30pm

Backspace Gallery, Wentworth Building, Lvl. 3

Latin American Society Welcome Drinks

Thursday, 27th February (see society socials for time)

Kings Cross Hotel, 244-248 William St, Potts Point NSW 2011

Last Words

Every Saturday night from 9pm until late

Agincourt Hotel, 871 George St, Sydney, NSW 2000

PULP Issue 19 Launch Party

Thursday, 6th March at 7pm Manning Bar, Camperdown, NSW 2050

The death of NLS? NSW NLS formally separates from National NLS following mass purge of NSW factional

members Ellie Robertson and Emilie Garcia-Dolnik report.

On Monday, February 17th, a large number of NSW National Labor Students (NLS) formally disaffiliated from National NLS, emerging factionally reconstituted as NSW Labor Students.

This follows the alleged unconstitutional purge of 11 NSW faction members at a national level on Sunday, February 16th.

SRC President and former NLS member, Angus Fisher, confirmed that 11 members of NSW NLS were purged, notably targeting those “members who were consistently vocal against the Labor establishment.”

He verified that this led to many of the remaining members disaffiliating by choice, who have now emerged as NSW Labor Students. Fisher is included in those disaffiliated.

This follows the alleged unconstitutional removal of an NLS National Convener from the NSW NLS branch based on concerns from the NSW state members.

VIC NLS and ACT NLS reportedly orchestrated the national purge against NSW members by vote, leaving concerns as to the legitimacy of the re-

maining branches and their future political involvement.

On the reasoning behind the purge, Fisher stated that “the NUS President and both national convenors worked to purge 11 members of [the] national caucus that voiced serious concerns about the actions and behaviour of leadership and members within the national caucus.”

“It was done completely unconscionably, without reason, and was in complete violation of the national constitution,” Fisher concluded.

An anonymous source affiliated with the new faction further told Honi that the “NSW Labor [Students] remain committed to fighting for socialist, left-wing change inside and outside the student movement.”

The purge follows a year of onboarding a notable number of new members in NSW NLS, as well as an election win for the current USyd SRC President, Angus Fisher.

“It was done completely unconscionably, without reason, and was

in complete violation of the national constitution.”

NLS provided Honi with a statement: “National Labor Students (NLS) aims to foster a healthy, safe and inclusive environment for young activists to engage and participate in.

Unfortunately, the national caucus had to take immediate action to uphold the continued integrity of NLS and the national constitution.

A small minority of ex-members who directly breached the constitution, and no longer reflected our values had their memberships ceased.

An overwhelming majority of the national caucus cast their vote being in favour of the motion to remove the membership of these individuals.

USyd Senate Undergraduate Fellow position still suspended

In October 2024, the election results for the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Fellows of the University of Sydney Senate for 2025-26 were suspended. This followed allegations of irregularities in the ballot.

The Senate is the peak governance body of the University, with all policies decided by its membership.

It also elects the new Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors of the University, as well as nominating two members to the Board of the Union.

The suspension was communicated to candidates on 24 October 2024, the day voting closed.

There were eight candidates in the election for the Undergraduate Fellowship and four for the Postgraduate.

To be approved for nomination, all of the candidates were subjected to “Chancellor-level” background checks against police and ASIC records, requiring multiple forms of government ID and a headshot.

On 29 November 2024, candidates then received another email on behalf of Returning Officer and University Chief Governance Officer Michelle Stanhope.

Stanhope detailed that the suspension was lifted for the Postgraduate Fellow. Subsequently, Weihong Liang was declared elected to the Senate for 202425.

Candidates did not receive an explanation in this email as to why the Postgraduate Fellowship was announced, or what any of the allegations pertaining to either Fellow involved.

Liang is the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association’s (SUPRA) Education Officer, SUPRA President from 2022-24, and International Officer from 2021-22.

Liang is a former member of the Chinese Communist Party. Sources within the University have told Honi that, due to this, Liang’s candidacy may attract negative attention and be weaponised by politicians at a time when the University is under intense gov-

We respect the autonomy of other members who made the decision to leave the national caucus of their own accord and look forward to working with them respectfully and productively in the future.

NLS has a zero tolerance policy for bullying, intimidation, or harassment of any kind.”

Honi requested a copy of the NLS Constitution, but could not receive it as it is a private document. Therefore, all mentions of the constitution are alleged.

Honi has requested comments from members of VIC NLS and ACT NLS.

ernment scrutiny for its executive salaries and responses to antisemitism.

To be approved for nomination, all of the candidates were subjected to “Chancellor-level” background checks against police and ASIC records, requiring multiple forms of government ID and a headshot.

Alexander Poirier, a candidate for the Undergraduate Fellowship and a former member of Student Unity, expressed concern that “the roughly 40,000 undergraduate students have no representation to the Senate, which is a major concern given the large number of policy updates and other significant changes that are happening within the University.”

Imogen Sabey reports.

The first meeting of the Senate is on 22 March.

Stanhope confirmed in correspondence with Poirier that the University is “actively considering options to enable undergraduate student representation at the Senate meeting on 22 March 2025 should a Fellow not be elected by that date.”

Students must be enrolled in their degree the entirety of their term, meaning that those with only a fulltime year left of study must take their classes part-time, in order to prevent a by-election.

Given the term of a Senate student fellowship is only two years, and with terms starting on 1 January, this delay has meant that 1/12 of the Undergraduate Fellow’s term has been lost to administrative issues.

Art by Ellie Robertson

City of Sydney passes “Historic” BDS motion following investigation into human rights abuses

On February 17th, the City of Sydney council passed a motion confirming it does not and will not fund or invest in companies complicit in Israeli settlements. The motion follows a comprehensive investigation into all investments and contracts initiated in June 2024.

The council further voted to reaffirm its policies to avoid investments, suppliers, and companies that abuse human rights.

Investigations were launched in June 2024, after the Council passed a Greens motion in favour of a ‘review and report’ on suppliers and investors “to ensure that Council [was] not purchasing from companies involved in weapons or human rights abuses.”

The motion entailed that the council would both investigate and report on in-

vestments by companies complicit with human rights abuses, as well as recommend changes to avoid purchasing from associated companies in future.

Investments and contracts were reviewed against the UN database list of 97 countries with both direct and indirect profit from Israeli settlements. The list includes companies such as Airbnb, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor.

“This is a crucial first step in ensuring our community is not complicit in funding human rights abuses against Palestinians,” said Greens Councillor Matthew Thompson.

He continued, “This brings our practices in line with our values, ensuring we won’t use Council funds to pay corporations who profit from the horrors of the illegal settlements.”

Greens Councillor Sylvie Ellsmore said, “Boycotts are a powerful, peaceful tool to bring positive change because they stop funding going to those complicit in violence, oppression and other injustices.”

She continued, stating “Right now, there is a genocide underway in Gaza- the farright Israeli government is committing horrific war crimes against the Palestinian people.”

Sylvie spearheaded the initial motion in June 2024.

The BDS movement is a Palestinian-led campaign aimed at boycotting, divesting and sanctioning Israel, to rally an end to their occupation, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians.

21 Years and Still No Justice: Rally for TJ Hickey

Readers are warned that this article contains references to and images of deceased First Nations persons.

On Friday 14th February, family, community, and allies gathered in TJ Hickey Park in Waterloo to commemorate the death of Kamilaroi teenager TJ Hickey, and demand justice for his family.

This year marks 21 years since 17-year old TJ Hickey was killed from being impaled on a fence after police vehicles had pursued him on his push bike.

His death sparked widespread, highly publicised protests and, 21 years on, the Hickey family have still not received justice.

The coronial inquest failed to find the police guilty, and fresh calls for an independent inquiry in 2020 continue to be ignored by NSW Parliament.

Organised by the Hickey Family and Indigenous Social Justice Association, these yearly rallies continue to demand justice for TJ Hickey as well as a proper investigation into his death.

The rally began with an Acknowledgement of Country from Uncle David Bell, a Wiradjuri Elder.

He introduced Auntie Gail Hickey, TJ Hickey’s mother, and spoke to her tireless fight over the last 21 years to find

justice for her son. Muruwari and Budjiti man, Bruce Shillingsworth, echoed cries for accountability and called to “bring back the real lore of the land.”

He spoke to the failure of institutions to hold those responsible for First Nations deaths accountable, while calling out people within the legal system who fail to use their power to stand up for First Nations justice. He ended by repeating the powerful words, “the perpetrators of evil need to stop.”

Next speaker was UTS law professor, Thalia Anthony, who first recounted a story of Redfern police painting over a mural by Scott Marsh of a burning police car with the words “to Hickey” on the side during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

She proudly shared that it was UTS students who had donated the memorial plaque, but that the council still refuses to display it in Redfern Community Centre.

Similarly decrying the many failures of the legal system, she expressed the need to pursue justice from the ground up, and radically overhaul the current system.

She acknowledged her role within the legal system, noting that as an educator it is her job to make change by influencing

younger generations to resist these systems and stand up for First Nations people.

Kooma Murri activist Uncle Wayne ‘CoCo’ Whorton delivered a heartfelt plea to protect First Nations communities; to stand up to the institutions, governments and businesses that time and time again fail to deliver justice and equality, and end our complicity in the suffering.

Speaking to his family’s experiences of mistreatment by the legal and carceral system, he expressed that Aboriginal people are “still at war,” and there is not a single family whose lives have not been touched by the injustice of the system.

He continued the encouragement to stand against oppressive systems, proclaiming community as the antidote to the systemic injustices and violence perpetrated by the state.

As the march began, Greens MP Jenny Leong shared that she had had delivered a speech in parliament the previous day calling on the NSW government to acknowledge TJ Hick-

Martha Barlow

reports.

ey’s death and deliver justice for both the Hickey family and all First Nations families who have suffered at the hands of police and the so-called justice system.

Through the rain, the rally marched onwards through Redfern and towards the police station. Chants of “too many coppers, not enough justice” rang through the streets. As community and family marched down the road with posters and t-shirts bearing TJ’s face, it was clear that despite the immense barriers and refusal of the police and government to listen to First Nations communities, the fight for justice for TJ Hickey will never stop.

We echo Gail Hickey’s calls upon the NSW Government to reopen the inquiry into her son’s death, issue an apology and end all Indigenous deaths at the hands of police and the carceral system.

To this day, no one has been held accountable for TJ Hickey’s death.

USyd’s technology bootcamps taken down as 2U face financial uncertainty

Khanh Tran reports.

The University of Sydney’s technology bootcamps have been taken down following 2U’s bankruptcy in the United States.

2U is the parent company of private online education provider EdX who delivers the bootcamp programs. The website of the University’s technology bootcamps are no longer operational and 2U’s list of courses offered together with USyd only refer to its masters-level programs. Similar bootcamps at other Australian universities co-delivered with EdX, including at Adelaide University and the University of Western Australia are also gone.

However, the University confirms that four postgraduate degrees co-delivered with EdX will continue as normal.

The institution states that it has implemented “safeguards” in order to secure the future of four postgraduate masters-level programs: Masters of Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, Data Science, and Project and Program Management. Unlike the former 14-weeks technology bootcamps, these online courses are fully fledged degrees.

“We have a series of contingencies and safeguards to ensure that the teaching and learning of our students is not jeopardised and we remain confident in the quality and delivery of four postgraduate degree programs in partnership with 2U.” Last year, 2U filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States following a dramatic fall.

According to Harvard Crimson, 2U’s share prices crashed precipitously by 86 per cent in the years following its 2021 sales to the company from Harvard University and MIT.

The company went from a valuation of over US$5 billion in 2018 to a mere $35 million in May 2024.

Following its bankruptcy, the companyunderwent a dramatic restructuring with a new Governing Board appointed in September 2024. In a press release, the company says that it is now operating on a “significantly strengthened balance sheet”.

“With this transaction completed, 2U can continue to focus on its essential mission and accelerate into its next phase.”

Purny Ahmed and Emilie Garcia-Dolnik report.

Monoculture, Memory, and the Myth of the Missing White Boy

My father recently proclaimed “hawk tuah” at the dinner table. Like a fabled time-traveller from what feels like eons ago, my dad — a heavy-set teddy-bear bald man with a kind smile — felt a moment of silence linger at his birthday dinner, and promptly announced “spit on that thang”.

It felt like a verbal slap across the face. I thought the infamous Haliey Welch, viral from a short clip of her enthusiastically advising how best to please those with phallic appendages, had served her sentence as a viral sensation before being cast off into the digital abyss.

But no, here she appears, possessing the burly body of my middle-aged father, with his thick beard and thick Aussie accent and thick glasses, quoting a video he “saw this week”. My dad recounted her sage advice about intimate pleasures which, to be frank, I don’t think he fully grasped when he was sharing with us. He was merely tickled by the phrase, much like millions of other users who drove the 21 year old to skyrocketing fame.

Will Winter questions where our cultural coherency has gone.

2024. Even having Tiktok, my father did not.

When I was stepping off the Hawk Tuah train late last year, it was pulling up to my dad’s station. She was not on his radar until she fell off mine.

Virality has become much like ocean waves: you walk into the water, you feel it gush over you, the rising peaks of natural tides swelling in your ears, and then it slows, and the water hits the shore and the surge is over.

But then you get hit again when your father, the man who has held and loved you since birth, is a few whiskeys deep and resurrects this unexpectedly explicit soundbite. This time, the water is colder. It’s unexpected in the calm, then it pushes up into your nose and you have to expel the salty rush from the

Did you know I’m older than Haliey? I didn’t know until I was researching her for this piece. How does time even work on the internet?

My dad has a TikTok account, where he occasionally posts semi-viral BBQ videos, but I still refuse. I’m being drip-fed the latest trends on Instagram Reels, or from links I can’t open on Messenger without being redirected to a page bugging me to just download the damn app.

Clearly the timeline does not run linear regardless. We’ve witnessed the rise and fall of the Hawk Tuah girl and her anachronistic Southern slang since June 2024, yet that “we” clearly isn’t true. I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of the Hawk Tuah girl since June

One of my friends said to me recently, “I’m so glad ur [sic] on the same internet as me.”

But what does that even mean? How is it that we are all connected through the unending chasm that is the Internet, yet we are also held in these vast algorithmic pockets, like slightly unaligned venn diagrams, wrapped up in technological chain mail?

What is a monoculture when our “one” culture is made up of millions of overlapping For-You pages? Does it become a polyculture?

Monoculture was not an entirely untenable concept as little as a decade ago. There were fundamental truths to our cultural identities which were universal and unshakeable, likely due to the limited channels from which we consumed culture. There were set movies at the theatre, there were limited stories during the daily news broadcast, bookshops held less stock, politicians spoke on the same issues, and we had universal touchstones of history, science, the

Monoculture doesn’t mean everyone knows the same things. Rather, it is simply the pool of lingo and ideas that string us together like very thin glue.

“Mono”, as in one thing, applies to the Internet as much as “poly”, meaning many things. We hold these two truths in both of our hands. In the same way that something exists forever on the internet but can also be wiped away forever, it is a paradox that the internet is a singular home to all information and also forever segmented into each individual device or app or feed.

There are a multitude of conceptions of culture to unravel here. It’s an initially bold assumption that digital culture is the arbiter of our monoculture, yet it’s not entirely untrue. When we track the path of any artifacts created in our modern era, from creation to curation to

consumption, it is impossible for information (or art, or content, or whatever buzzword you wish) to trek through the world without stumbling across some seed of knowledge garnered from the digital world.

There’s popular culture, the web of media and celebrities and memes that underpin our ideas of who and what gets to be famous. There’s a national culture, something which gives us geographical and local identity.

Australian culture in of itself sometimes feels like a paradox, though: if we get too patriotic we fall into a radical nationalist trap or suffer from cultural cringe, but all of our “acceptable” points of strength are essentially subversive embarrassments. Knitted into the fabric of our ‘culture’ is a Prime Minister who eats raw onion, a winter Olympian who lucked his way into a gold medal, and our delicacy of choice being piss-flavoured beer drunk out of a shoe.

This doesn’t even begin to cover identity culture, the boiling point of all the multigenerational migration that stands as a so-called point of ‘strength’ for our national identity, yet is so flagrantly dismissed when we have these conversations of who we are as a people. It is undeniable that Australian culture, “our” culture, is composed of this untraceable hybrid of hundreds of countries, families, peoples displaced and peoples found. Who owns culture?

When do these cultures fuse, and when do they congeal, like oil and water, delineating the boundaries of who and what is acceptable?

Our Government is so willing to embrace tokenistic monoculturalism,

reaping the monetary benefits of our “diverse” and “accepting” national identity. And yet, we continue to flout these cultures when they no longer give us cultural currency, always going back to our brutal immigration policies and actively legislating “antiidentity politics” policies. We still remove the space that these cultures need to breathe and expand, we conform them to a greater Australian “pre-existing” monoculture, and we isolate them as distinct identities. We do not allow the boundaries we build to become permeable. We fragment

comfort, security, and to know that if there’s something right in the world, it’s that hot and goofy lil’ guy who turns up on our screens and makes us smile. Harry Styles, Robert Pattinson, Jacob Elordi; these questionably British boys are the lighthouse in the dark of the world. As long as they’re around, and as long as they’re okay, we know that the world keeps spinning, because nothing bad can happen to a pretty white boy.

But what

If there are so many fragmented ways we consume culture, then what is the utility of suggesting we have or should have a monoculture? Is it because monoculture actually speaks to something greater about humanity?

I worry what happens when we lose this safety net of conversation, if only because it has dictated the way we interact with the world, implicitly and explicitly, for so long. Like the canary in the coal mine, we can tell something has shifted in the monocultural world by turning towards society’s favourite archetype, white men, to foreshadow our current vibe.

The pinnacle of the identity pyramid, we turn to our pet white boys for

Since the early 2000s we have held certain white men on a pedestal of collective Internet thirst, rotating and reappearing through different ages like an overworked sushi train.

This is not a new phenomena — teenage girls have been unsuspectedly controlling culture for as long as you could hold up a sign saying “have my babies, Chris [last name]!” — but we have so many men to choose from now that we don’t have these thirst vacuums as easily as we used to.

Attractiveness has expanded, which is infinitely exciting for the type of man which we position on the pedestal of masculinity, but if we can’t even isolate our pretty boy of the moment, with his pearly whites and

pasty skin and unnaturally chiselled jawline, then what else are we meant to yearningly bond over?

At what point does culture begin to collapse in on itself enough to fold up into a new monoculture?

Perhaps culture is a nice king single quilt, spread neatly over a queen bed, never quite keeping all of the shape underneath it warm.

Or culture is a hand, individual fingers probing at the pulses of our times, intertwining yet spindly and isolated.

When does culture become capital, exchangeable for currency?

I’ve become the pop culture fiend at any trivia event I attend, and generally I consider that a ‘white person’ trait. The culture we get quizzed on is about American and Australian popular culture, and I have a legion of miscellaneous facts about music and movies and television which I’ve consumed like hand-me-downs from my chronically cultured family. Much like most topics at a trivia night, it’s simply a fun little niche I have in my arsenal of skills. Yet, my knowledge of the world becomes a viable route towards bar tabs, chocolates, or even the elusive cash prize of a single crisp $50.

How do we reckon with the fact that knowledge is no longer linear? I wonder what it means when our politicians legislate social media when they can’t comprehend what the internet even is. I wonder how our brains will cope over the next few decades as the expected cache of knowledge we are expected to keep expands greater and greater, politically and socially and yes, even culturally. I wonder what gets included, and what gets left behind, when we write the history books of our “now”.

it to those around you, enlightening them on what sparks the fires in your brain.

Please, tell me about the sprawling, complex, time-hopping narrative that discreetly upholds your favourite video game series. Indulge me, I want to know all about your morning routine. How do you brush your teeth? Where do you keep your toilet paper? How many generations in your family do you think kept their toilet paper like that? Who else in your family has your eye twitch? Why does that hint of an accent linger when you talk? Was it a movie you watched too much too often, or did you find another cultural home to immerse yourself in for a fleeting moment and never quite leave? What shows did you watch as a child? Which of those uncanny puppet characters haunted your dreams?

I plead: dive into my subconscious and burrow your culture inside of me. Tether me to the things that make you you, and perhaps in this great web of culture and memory we will find the love that beats underneath it all, and we will feel at home. Offer me your culture, and I will hold out my hands like a butterfly with open wings to take it all.

Hawk tuah your spirit inside of my mouth. I bet it tastes delicious.

Perhaps we must accept that there will never be a true “monoculture” again. The joy of living is offering a small token of knowledge and sharing

Art by Finnegan Lai, William Winter, & Mehnaaz Hossain

Listen To Her Words and You Will Hear Her Sound

Sophie Bagster urges you to listen.

I’m in the pub bathroom. A nondescript graffitied stall. Phone numbers. Declarations of love. Of fear. Of want, and need, and desire. Denouncements of ubiquitous male names. Who is a cheater? Who is a rapist? I’m imagining them melting down into one big entity: sixteen arms and legs asking ‘where’s my hug at?’ – when I overhear two women outside of my stall:

Two women stand by the public bathroom mirror. One re-applies lipstick, the other scrolls on her phone. (There is a third woman hiding in the stall beyond, with her ear pressed to the door like a mouse.)

WOMAN 1

I don’t know—

WOMAN 2

What? You just couldn’t-

WOMAN 1

Yeah.

WOMAN 2

But I thought you liked him?

WOMAN 1

I do—

WOMAN 2

You couldn’t get wet?

WOMAN 1

No. A beat.

Do you think it’s my fault?

Her fault? A small revolution occurred from behind the thin, wooden door that separated me from the scene. Somewhere between the flush of the toilet and the sudden lack of paper to dry my hands, I thought, is it really her fault she didn’t experience a bodily function that we are told we must?

I googled. A saturated, pink infographic ocean. “How to gauge if the amount of lubrication you are creating is OK.” As if our bodily function, however different from one another, can be labelled as somehow ‘Not OK.’ A Victorian-esque fear and distrust of the body; the broken body, the hyster of the ectomy, a descent of good old insanity.

There are potholes and minefields of self and bodily hatred derived from believing one is “not normal,” and therefore unhealthy, broken, or ‘worse’… undesirable. What are we when undesired? It seems like a pitfall: a gouge so deep we’ve never seen anyone claw their way out. No one wants to be undesired, and yet no one is born hating their bodies. When we are children it is innate for us to look at ourselves with awe. “Wow, this is my arm,” will typically lead to curiosities about the elbow, the hands, dexterous and complex fingers. The body is not yet broken, or sick, or unnatural. It is just a body. But like most things, this curiosity, especially of the female body, dissipates into a mythology more tangible. A sensual response that is learnt through a saturated media: one giant, flickering, semi-sadomasochistic billboard that protests “My Head’s Saying No, But My Body’s Saying Yes!”

Who said it first?

This dialogue of the taboo, the so-wrong-its-right kind of intimacy. Was it pornography? Perhaps cinema? High and low art, romance novels (from Wuthering Heights to Twilight to the “spicy” 2-ply toilet paper pages of Kmart Erotica)? Perhaps Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle, “my body’s saying let’s go, but my heart is saying no no.” Or the other 92.7% of Western lyricism about sex — So Bad It’s Good. À la “Body Talk,” a narrative that urges us to listen to the sexual response of the female body, and not the woman herself. And then? A dismemberment of the woman: mind and body cut smaller and smaller in easy-to-digest, and step-bystep narratives. A constant reinforcement that the idea of “getting wet” is not only a bodily function, but a necessity for arousal. And if the body doesn’t react how it is supposed to - according to said instructions, then what? As far as popular media is concerned, arousal and genital response are one of the same.

It’s a well-rehearsed and secretive cultural dilemma only to be mumbled in the decadent bathroom of the Courty, a phenomena by the name of arousal nonconcordance. It begins, at first, in the reward centre in your brain, which is divided into three areas of wanting, liking, and learning —all which combine together to tell us what feels good.

Nonconcordance, in its basic form, is a lack of predictivity between physiological response and the subjective experience of pleasure.

Genital arousal is a physical response to sex-related stimuli, unconnected to the subjective experience of wanting and liking: the actual overlap of this predictive relationship exists between 10 and 50%. Unbeknownst to monoculture arousal, you cannot really predict how a person feels about a certain sexrelated stimuli just by looking at genital blood flow. We can feel aroused without the overlap of genital response, and vice versa.

Did Pavlov’s dog salivate at the sound of the bell because he wanted to eat the bell? No. It was a learned response through means of association. The body simply responds to sexual stimuli, it is not an indicator of pleasure or consent. When we are told what we want, what we must desire based on the way our body reacts and ignore subjective experience, we ignore pleasure. Is it not degrading and dangerous to say you feel one way, and be unbelieved because your body may “prove” something else? Genital response does not necessarily mean sex of any kind is wanted, liked or most importantly consented to. Lubrication is not causation. Lubrication is not asking for it. Sexual arousal is not linear.

And so, how do we then measure arousal? How do we ask for consent? How do we know what we are doing is okay, and wanted, and enjoyable?

Words. Big words, small ones. Whole sentences. Monologues. Three-dimensional poetry birthed from the intersection between consent and arousal. Serenades. See how many times you can fit the word pleasure into a Haiku.

The antidote to this mythology is a verbal overwriting.

Pick up your pen, listen to her words.

A Censorship Crisis? In the Fisher Whitehouse?

Disclaimer: All information in this article is alleged.

The Students Representative Council (SRC) Executive, led by New South Wales Labor Students (NSWLS) President Angus Fisher, has withheld approval of funding for tote bags planned by the Enviro Officers for their Welcome Week Stall.

Lilah Thurbon, co-Enviro Officer for 2025, told Honi that when initially asked for the reasoning behind their refusal, Fisher told the Enviro Officers that the graphic on the tote bags “looked bad” and repeatedly emphasised that they were “pejorative”. It is worth noting that, given the SRC’s position as an activist student union, merchandise is often explicitly pejorative, political, and progressive.

Thurbon alleges that, when further pressed on his reasoning, Fisher pivoted to the position that the bags breached the terms of the SRC’s Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) funding. He referred to a clause which requires SSAF fees not to be put towards supporting the election campaigns of any political party. Fisher allegedly explained that by depicting the likeness of the Prime Minister, Minister for the Environment, and Leader of the Opposition, the graphic was campaigning, by implication, for the Australian Greens and Victorian Socialists. He also stated that the graphic equated the environmental policies of the Australian Labor and Liberal parties.

Whether the graphic equated these policies seems irrelevant to the technical question of SSAF funding. The graphic also attacks non-politicians such as billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and is clear of references to any alternative federal political parties. The Enviro Collective maintains

that the aim of the tote bags was to raise awareness against Australia’s ‘climate criminals’ and highlight the hypocritical treatment climate protestors receive.

Fisher provided Honi with a statement:

“The SRC Executive decided unilaterally — so, each person individually — to withhold approval. This is standard Executive pro-

From Kamikaze to Kawaii

Everywhere you turn, there is Japan: in restaurants and cafes, in bookshops, in music, on Netflix, on your friend’s Instagram, and probably on a poster in your bedroom. Of all of the countries to have experienced a complete cultural turnaround in the 20th century, Japan is one of the strangest stories, and Australia has in recent years become increasingly obsessed – our food, pop culture and fashion have soaked up Japan like a sponge, even as Japan straddles a line between hyper-Westernised and culturally insulated.

Japan’s unique culture is largely thanks to the extreme shifts between its period as a closed country, its forced opening to trade with America and the outside world, its brutal imperialistic period, as well as its social and cultural upheaval in the 1950s. Today, Japanese culture is a global brand. Everything from ramen to Ghibli plushies are ubiquitous around the world. Japan itself has a strange relationship with its culture, though. Despite its rich history stretching back millennia, the still-relevant events of the 20th century have been glossed over in Japanese society and education. Namely, the atrocities committed under Imperial Japan during the Second World War.

The forced demilitarisation of Japan in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s led to an unusually pacifist society, which today still faces strict restrictions on the use of military power. American figures like General Douglas Macarthur are credited with scrubbing away the culture of Imperial Japan – to the extent, it might be argued, that Japanese people today are oblivious to the brutality that Japan inflicted on hundreds of millions of people across Asia, and to specific atrocities such

cedure. It’s how funding approvals work. The majority of the Executive determined that spending $1400 on 125 of those tote bags was a poor use of students’ funding.”

It is worth noting that only Labor and Liberal aligned Executive members withheld funding approval. Executive members aligned with Grassroots, Penta, and Socialist Alternative voted to approve funding. Additionally, it is well-established that collectives are allowed to spend SSAF funding on merchandise; marketing is a standard allocation in organisational budgets.

By the Executive’s own logic, accepting this interpretation of the SSAF funding would also prohibit Fisher from condemning the Liberal party as implicit — almost explicit, given his alignment with NSWLS — support for the Labor Party’s federal election campaign. Additionally, activist factions within the SRC frequently produce resources critical of both major political parties, and yet their SSAF funding has not been called into question nor have their requests been denied. For example, the Women’s Collective have organised and received funding for merchandise promoting their ‘Abolish the Colleges’ campaign, which is explicitly supported by the New South Wales Greens and Jenny Leong MP.

Both 2025 Enviro Officers, Deaglan Godwin and Lilah Thurbon, also provided Honi with a statement:

Mehnaaz Hossain reports.

“This censorship is particularly worrying considering the repression student activists are facing from University Management, that we can’t even rely on the president of our student union to uplift voices that oppose the political establishment and its many shortcomings. We query the ability of the SRC to meaningfully advocate for the interests of students if its leadership will ultimately be beholden to the PR concerns of the Australian Labor Party.”

Honi understands that the Executive’s rationale sets the effective precedent that any SRC activism surrounding an issue that both parties are — regardless of their level of involvement — actively complicit in can be construed as campaigning for a third party and thus a breach of SSAF funding. Framing this decision within the rhetoric of ‘implicit campaigning’ obscures the underlying Labor-aligned anxieties that motivated this decision. Based on information provided by Thurbon and direct anonymous sources on the Executive, Fisher and other NSWLS members admitted themselves that the designs were rejected because they were critical of Labor and may cost them the federal election. The implications that this Executive decision and logical precedent sets for SRC activism is grave; it creates a mechanism for concerningly easy justification to withhold financial backing for activist collectives which oppose the two major parties, particularly the Australian Labor Party.

Imogen Sabey ponders her takoyaki.

as the Rape of Nanjing and the comfort women of South Korea. These histories, which have led to decades-long regional grudges, have not been given nearly enough attention in Japan’s curriculum, and are not discussed freely compared to similar atrocities committed under Nazi Germany within the same time period.

This may be from a collective trauma experienced in the direct aftermath of WWII. Those Japanese civilians who survived experienced an excruciating famine that lasted for much of the 1950s, as Macarthur and American authorities scrambled to regulate the food supply despite flourishing black markets. The extent of barbarity that Japan has experienced and inflicted is enough, surely, to make it steadfastly avoid conflict.

With recent incursions by China into the South China sea, and several instances of intruding upon foreign airspaces belonging to Japan and Taiwan, Japan’s militarisation – or lack thereof – has come into question. The Australian government has had an increase in China-Australia relations within the last week, after an incident where a Chinese J-16 fighter jet released flares close to an Australian aircraft flying over the South China sea. Taiwan, meanwhile, has faced outright threats on its sovereignty. Recently the spokesperson for the deparment of foreign affairs,Guo Jiakun, said that Taiwan was “an inalienable part of China’s territory.” Where, then, does this leave Japan?

The Japanese constitution, enacted in 1947 and written mainly by American officials, states in Article 9 that Japan is prohibited from using military force internationally. However, in 2015 Japan

reinterpreted this to legalise participation in foreign conflicts under the justification of “collective self-defence.” It straddles a perilous line as a nominally pacifist country in a region of increasing tensions, with a quarter of a million people registered as active members of the military.

However, Japanese influence is by no means limited to its military. Its soft power, including business and cultural phenomena including Kinokuniya, J-pop, Studio Ghibli and the soaring trend of Inner West Japanese-style cafes cropping up on Instagram, with $30 souffle pancakes to seal the deal. Japan is developing a reputation similar to France, wherein everything Japanese is automatically chic. Australians are flocking to Tokyo at an unprecedented level, with the numbers of Australians travelling to Japan soaring by 126% between 2023 and 2024. Before COVID, Japan’s 2019 tourism levels reached nearly 32 million visits, equivalent to a quarter of its population. The Japanese National Tourism Organisation recorded a bounce from 4 million visits in 2020 to 25 million in 2023, with numbers expected to increase substantially.

Japan straddles a perilous line as a nominally pacifist country in a region of increasing tensions, with a quarter of a million people registered as active members of the military.

With this sudden vogue status comes an increased spotlight on the less desirable parts of Japan. The country is developing a so-called ‘celibacy syndrome’, wherein a significant number of Japanese people identify as asexual, or choose not to enter relationships due to work commitments. Birth rates are falling, and Japan’s population is aging and shrinking at once. In addition, its gender equality situation is dire, as in 2024 Japan ranked 113th out of 146 countries. According to Japan’s Institute for Population and Social Security, 90% of women say that being single is “preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like”. It also has the unpleasant accreditation of being the country to invent a severe social phenomenon known as hikikomori, where people submit themselves to complete social withdrawal. The number of these such people is unclear, but may well be in the hundreds of thousands.

As much as there are upbeat, quirky scenes that make Japanese culture seem exotic and desirable – such as a recent viral sensation of Japanese mascots getting stuck at train stations – there are several phenomena which Japan’s government would be less eager to claim. Its extensive period of being closed off from the world, its astonishing brutality and its cultural upheaval have created a country like no other in the world, with an outreach that rivals major Western powers, and a strength demonstrated in its business and technological capacity that is wholly muzzled when it comes to its military. Japan, at once adorable and awe-inducing, must also reckon with its past as an occupying force. It is only through this act of reckoning that it can gain regional consciousness.

The Convergence of Australia’s Political Spectrum

Marc Paniza looks at our bipartisan (or partisan?) system. Over the past decade, we’ve watched the Liberals steadily reshape Australian politics towards the right; with privatised services, corporate tax cuts, and scaled-back public programs. Labor’s only response, however, seems to be “Liberal-lite,” offering adjustments rather than alternatives. Can we finally acknowledge what’s happening to our party system?

Let this be clear: This isn’t about partisan finger-pointing or yearning for some idealised past. It’s about recognising how our political choices have narrowed — where what were once fierce policy debates have become mere bureaucratic tweaks.

I’m tired of commentators insisting we’re witnessing some great battle of ideas, while both parties, in practice, read from increasingly similar scripts. The Liberals charge ahead with their agenda, while Labor follows cautiously behind. We’ve reached a point where election campaigns feel less like choices between different futures, and more like choosing between different management styles for the same vision.

The Liberal Legacy

The Coalition’s defining success isn’t found in their nine-year tenure from Abbott to Morrison (2013-2022) - it’s in how thoroughly they’ve rewritten the rules of what’s politically palatable in Australia. What started as a controversial policy shift under the Coalition has become remarkably mainstream - evidenced by Labor’s stark transformation from Anthony Albanese’s vocal opposition to thetax cuts in 2019 to his government’s decision to keep the 25% rate for businesses turning over up to $50 million when taking power in 2022.

This reversal, from condemning the cuts in opposition to preserving them in government, perfectly illustrates how thoroughly the Liberals have redefined Australia’s economic playbook.

The Liberals’ real masterclass in political transformation goes beyond tax policy. Consider how they’ve methodically reimagined

public services. The NDIS, originally conceived as a comprehensive public program, now operates through a web of private providers. Aged care has been quietly transformed into a market-driven system. Even Centrelink services are increasingly delivered through private contractors. Each change was presented as a simple efficiency measure, making opposition seem unreasonable or outdated.

Perhaps most remarkably, they’ve succeeded in shifting the burden of proof. It’s now Labor that must constantly justify why any service should remain fully public, rather than the Liberals needing to justify privatisation. When Labor does push back, they’re immediately branded as stuck in the past, fighting yesterday’s battles.

The result?

Even when Labor wins government, they find themselves operating within parameters set by their opponents.

This influence extends into areas where Labor traditionally held the high ground. Take climate policy: the Liberals’ genius wasn’t in winning the argument outright, but in reframing it entirely. They’ve managed to shift the debate from “how do we address climate change?” to “how do we balance climate action with economic interests?” or even “does climate change exist at all?” Labor now finds itself trapped in this framework, trying to thread an increasingly narrow needle between environmental action and economic orthodoxy.

Security and Climate: The Narrowing Gap

The convergence between our major parties becomes startlingly clear in national security and climate policy.

The 2015 metadata retention laws— which required telcos and ISPs to store Australians’ metadata (such as call logs, location data, and email headers) for two years—ignited fierce debate. Civil liberties groups condemned it as mass surveillance, while industry raised concerns about implementation costs, estimated by the government at $188.8 million but feared to be much higher. Law enforcement argued it was crucial for fighting serious crime and terrorism, with most agencies able to access the data without a warrant, except for journalist metadata, which required additional oversight.

Despite vocal opposition from the Greens and digital rights advocates, both major parties ultimately backed the legislation, with Labor supporting it after negotiating limited safeguards, including protections for journalists. When the Coalition pushed through expanded ASIO powers in 2023, Labor’s criticism focused on implementation details rather than underlying principles.

The pattern repeats: the Liberals propose expansive security measures, Labor initially objects, then ultimately accepts them with minor amendments.

Climate policy tells a similarly frustrating story. Both parties champion net-zero emissions targets while carefully avoiding any meaningful disruption to Australia’s resource industry. The Carmichael coal mine saga perfectly illustrates this dance. Labor loudly opposed it in opposition, then quietly accepted its inevitability in government.

Even when the parties appear to disagree, they often end up at surprisingly similar policy positions.

This narrowing gap isn’t necessarily about either party betraying their principles. Rather, it reflects a broader shift in Australian politics where the space for genuine policy alternatives has gradually shrunk. The Liberals set the direction on national security, and Labor, whether from conviction or pragmatism, follows.

The New Political Reality

The COVID-19 protests revealed something fascinating about Australia’s changing political landscape. Traditional political divisions began to blur in unexpected ways, as groups from vastly different backgrounds found themselves sharing similar concerns about institutional authority and government overreach.

This realignment continues to surface in surprising places. Media distrust manifests differently across the political spectrum - right-wing critics decry perceived bias while progressives worry about ownership concentration, yet both camps share a growing skepticism of mainstream news sources. Even debates about tech regulation reveal unlikely alliances, with privacy advocates from the left finding common cause with traditional conservatives worried about Big Tech overreach.

This shifting political landscape is already reshaping Australia’s electoral dynamics. The Greens’ growing support base - particularly among young, educated voters disillusioned with the major parties - signals more than just nvironmental concerns.

It reflects a broader appetite for political alternatives, with increasingly willing to direct their preferences away from the traditional Labor-Liberal duopoly. The upcoming federal election could see this trend accelerate, with preference flows potentially deciding key contests. Minor parties and independents are capitalising on this momentum, positioning themselves as authentic voices for local communities and specific issues rather than broad ideological camps. What’s emerging isn’t just protest voting - it’s a sophisticated use of our preferential system to demand more nuanced policy responses.

Voters seem less concerned with historical party loyalties and more focused on specific issues that affect their communities, suggesting Australia’s political future may be more fluid and issue-driven than ever before.

A Choice of Degrees

What we’re witnessing isn’t just political convergence - it’s a fundamental narrowing of Australia’s political imagination. When Labor and Liberal debate policy now, they’re usually arguing about degrees rather than fundamental directions. Should corporate tax cuts be this big or that big? Should private sector involvement in public services be extensive or moderate?

The result is a political system where major parties differ more in style than substance. This doesn’t mean they’re identical. It does, however, suggest that our traditional understanding of left-right politics may need updating. The real question isn’t whether Labor has compromised too much or the Liberals have won too completely. It’s whether our current political framework can still deliver the robust debate and genuine choices that democracy requires.

“These

fragments I have shored against my ruins”: On teaching Modernism

Lachlan Griffiths wants a Modernist comeback.

The English department hasn’t run a course on modernism since 2020, when ‘ENGL2762: Postcolonial Modernisms’ was last run. Since then, apart from the occasional modernist novel in a reading list, USyd undergraduates have missed out on a forty-year period of incredible writing. This is a fundamental disservice to those students who want to study the central literary movement of the 20th century. Writers like Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Crane, are all essentially overlooked. The university ought to reconsider this decision.

Cuts in English courses indicate the severity of course cuts in the humanities. It is a part of Australian tertiary education corrupted by the expediency of budget constraints.

Classes like Australian literature, modernism, and modern Irish Literature, have fallen victim to the purse strings. To remove a central literary movement from the English offerings at a major university is not only indicative of this moribund state of play but a significant setback to the quality of literary education that students deserve.

Similarly, ANU has not offered its ‘Literature and Modernity’ class since 2023, and UNSW has not run a similar one. It is a rather poor reflection on the state of what is valued, when a university that reported a 351 million dollar surplus in 2023 cannot find the money to teach a whole period of writing.

Academics are now placed, by outside circumstance, in the unenviable position of deciding which flowerings of the human spirit can be saved from the chopping block. Time and the bell have buried the day; the decision not to continue a course on modernism illustrates the magnitude of these cuts.

Losing this course is intrinsically detrimental for those who enjoy studying literature. Complexity is often a byword for modernist literature. The diaphanous references, the assumed level of classical knowledge, and the obscure vernacular jokes, all mean that many modernists texts flourish most when interpreted in an academic context. Indeed, Joyce hoped “to keep the professors busy for centuries.”

The close reading and discussion that a university context provides allows these works to be fully understood and enjoyed by their readers. This is not to say that modernist writing can only be understood inside an academic echo chamber, rather that the mutual enjoyment of these texts in a class would be obviously beneficial to both teacher and student. To teach modernism is to allow it to be fully appreciated and understood.

The removal of modernist studies is detrimental to all students regardless of the area they study. FR Leavis was correct that it was not until Eliot that critics could be “fully conscious” of Victorian verse. With this and similar observations in mind, omitting a large swathe of 20th century literature damages the critical ability of many students interested in both earlier writing and contemporary fiction. To understand and appreciate all areas of literature can only engender positive outcomes for all students.

This decision leaves a

dangerous critical gap in the general literary comprehension of undergraduates in the English faculty, and limits the scope of their interpretation and critical analysis in their study.

To deny this context is to deny students the chance for true critical analysis and appreciation. How could any self-respecting Dante scholar not mention Four Quartets, or any lover of Hamlet not at least passingly consider the influence of Stephen Daedalus and the purring Quaker librarian?

The ending of a modernist undergrad unit is also more broadly detrimental. Many HSC students study Eliot’s verse in school, and to risk having English teachers who haven’t taken any classes on modernism is a hindrance to secondary students’ grasp and appreciation of his writing. They cannot provide a full explanation of his context without a knowledge of the other literary currents flourishing in that period; no author writes in a vacuum.

Moreover, we need to ensure future teachers (and indeed literary scholars) are well-versed in as many types of writing as possible. This is an essential

opportunity that we lose if students don’t have the chance to engage in deep study of this incredibly influential period of writing.

The reintroduction of modernist studies would be a success for everyone involved in university life. It would also be an impetus to academics in other faculties that it’s worth fighting for the reintroduction of courses that have been slashed. Anything that increases the availability of course content is a net positive for students, and decisions that allow these wonderful works to flourish ought to be encouraged and celebrated. It would mean a reversal of this depressing trend of course reduction. The English faculty should consider running another class on modernist writing. It would certainly be beneficial and very popular.

Take up your ashplant, English, and reintroduce the course!

Helping people new to renting in NSW

Speaking Your Language

Imogen Sabey code-switches. When a language does not feel like your own, speaking it is a mortifying and wildly uncomfortable experience. Having a group of people with similar linguistic skills alleviates this tension, because a communal pidgin language naturally forms from a shared basic knowledge. But in circles where everyone else speaks a language perfectly except you, there is a sense of helplessness that emerges. It is an unspoken awareness that those who are fluent in that language carry a certain power over those who aren’t; that language is, thus, imbued with authority and respect, and all others are diminished in its wake.

“As an international student, there’s always a sense of estrangement when you’re living so far from home...” - Bohao Zhang

English is the default language through which every USyd student is taught and is expected to communicate in. But it isn’t necessarily the language that’s spoken by the student community. This is a lingua franca, a language used to bridge barriers between people who don’t share a mother tongue. Thus, people may choose a language for the sake of convenience, or switch to whichever language has the highest mutual proficiency. In other countries these can be languages that are widely spoken within a region, such as Spanish, French, Arabic, or Mandarin.

However, if English is the most widespread lingua franca in the world, that gives native English speakers a subtextual power in every conversation. And at USyd, all non-

language classes are taught in English, and, more often than not, speaking English is enforced, such as in exams and elections.

Bohao Zhang, SRC Vice-President and an international student, said that “In SRC elections, campaigners are forced to speak in English – failure to comply results in serious consequences. This is an example of English being literally imposed upon students. Even when both parties are more comfortable in speaking another language, they are not allowed to. This is fundamentally problematic. One might perhaps argue there are colonial characteristics here. It makes international students less willing to interact and speak up on campus.”

He added that “As an international student, there’s always a sense of estrangement when you’re living so far from home. As such, speaking a shared first language counters this isolation, bringing a sense of solidarity and community.”

While studying in Japan over the summer, I experienced for the first time a university environment where English was not the default language, and how that transformed the linguistic power dynamic. Coming from USyd, where as a domestic student every additional language learned is considered a ‘bonus’, it was jarring, to say the least, when English was reduced to irrelevance. I found that where I would be loquacious in English, I was nearly mute in Japanese, giving the impression that I had nothing to say rather than that I lacked the tools to say it.

Although having a monolinguistic society largely works in countries like Japan where the population is almost entirely native Japanese speakers, in Australia there are some complications. Firstly, English is the language of a colonising country that has left a centuries-old bloody trail across the world, the language officialised by a government that has yet to cede First Nations lands. Secondly, Australia is one of the most immigrant-rich nations in the

world. Of our 27 million people, around 8.2 million were born overseas, nearly a third of the total population.

Furthermore, we are isolated in our use of language as a result of our geography. With no neighbouring countries speaking other languages, we don’t have any obvious language to study. USyd’s language department has around a dozen languages on offer, but there’s no immediate answer to what an Australian student ought to study. Unless that student had a linguistic background inherited from their family, there is nothing to unify language students, and everything to disincentivise Australians from eschewing the global language of business.

USyd’s population is unique in that it has the highest proportion of international students in the country. Of these, Chinese students make up the majority, which means that amongst international students Mandarin becomes a quasilingua franca. But it also means that the tension between native and non-native English speakers is higher, because there is an incredibly diverse student community who are restricted to a single language. Bohao commented that we should “acknowledge the significant role which language plays in defining our multiculturalism and enriching campus life. It becomes problematic when English is enforced on students. This harms our inclusiveness and stifles our diversity.”

I found that where I would be loquacious in English, I was nearly mute in Japanese, giving the impression that I had nothing to say rather than that I lacked the tools to say it.

Judy Zhang, a Kiwi student who studied at USyd in 2024, said that “In terms of social mobility and navigating schooling, having English as my native language in the USyd/UoA [University of Auckland] environment where it is the lingua franca certainly makes things so frictionless that I sometimes forget linguistic friction can be possible. I’ve seen a student sitting in class running a live interpreting tool on their laptop so they could better comprehend the lecture. It’s also no surprise or rarity for students with language barriers

[to] breach academic integrity and use generative AI… in their assignments.”

“As an overseas-born Chinese, I’m often subconsciously scoping out where I fit on ‘the spectrum’ between ‘white-washed’ and ‘fresh-off-the-boat’ in transnational and diasporic contexts… I’ve noticed it’s easier for me to bond with other overseasborn Asians who share a native proficiency in English but a more watery mother tongue, compared to pākeha [non-Maori] and Chinese international students.”

“I’m often subconsciously scoping out where I fit on ‘the spectrum’ between ‘whitewashed’ and ‘fresh-offthe-boat’ in transnational and diasporic contexts…” - Judy Zhang

Claudia Gatica Barra, a Chilean student who likewise studied at USyd in 2024, commented that “For me, speaking and writing in English felt more freeing than doing it in Spanish (my mother tongue) since there is less of an emotional connection, more space between myself and the words… I had Modern Family’s Gloria echoing in my head: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?” And while I felt a spark of joy every time I heard someone talking in Spanish, I do believe that USyd having such a big international community gives some kind of relief, as you can see many others in a similar position as you, we’re all in this together.”

This is not to say that you ought to hang your head in shame and bash against Duolingo every day before class until you shake off the odious label of ‘monolingual’. The point here is to share the experience of feeling lost in a language, and acknowledging the power of those who use it as a mother tongue. When we leave the borders of our home we also leave our cozy linguistic bubble, and all the privileges that our language affords. It is a monumental effort to sound remotely coherent in any non-native language, and a few simple sentences masks years of effort. But the words we speak are not to be taken for granted. In every interaction across lands and languages, there is a small sense of triumph.

Art by Kushi Chevli

Monoculture and Mismanagement in Lebanon

Lebanon is a land of ancient beauty, where the Mediterranean meets towering mountains and cedar forests. It is also home to a people known for their unwavering generosity and lust for life. Yet it has now entered its sixth year of severe economic, political, and social crises, while also hosting the largest number of refugees per capita in the world.

Among the most devastating consequences of this collapse has been food insecurity, “a crisis that has only deepened with the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah,” according to the World Bank.

Lebanon’s Economic Collapse

Lebanon’s grave economic crisis is the inevitable result of decades of financial mismanagement, described by the World Bank as a “deliberate Ponzi finance scheme.”

For years, Banque du Liban artificially stabilised the Lebanese pound by offering high-interest rates to attract deposits, mainly from expatriates. Consequently, these funds were used to service old debts, creating a cycle that depended on continuous inflows, which expectantly collapsed.

By 2019, Lebanon’s debt-to-GDP ratio had exceeded 170%, and dwindling foreign reserves made the currency peg unsustainable. Banks ran out of cash, imposed capital controls, and prevented depositors from withdrawing their savings. In desperation, the government introduced new taxes, including the infamous WhatsApp tax, sparking mass protests.

The October 17 revolution of 2019 saw Lebanese people unite despite religious and social division, exposing decades of corruption. But the damage was already done; by then, the Lebanese pound had lost over 90% of its value, triggering hyperinflation and pushing millions into poverty. The banking sector, once a pillar of stability, became a symbol of national betrayal, as citizens watched their life savings vanish.

The Crisis in Lebanon’s Food System

The collapse of Lebanon’s economy was a key factor in its food crisis, but structural failures in its food system, including exploitative agricultural labor and unsustainable farming practice also played a major role.

Once a cornerstone of local food security, Lebanon’s agricultural sector has increasingly relied on

Charlotte Saker digs deep into monoculture.

monoculture farming, a large-scale commercial model that prioritises single-crop cultivation over diverse food production. While promoted as a high-yield system, monoculture farming has worsened food insecurity, degraded the environment, and weakened economic resilience.

One-culture, Two-tolls: The Environmental and Economic Toll of Monoculture

Monoculture farming depletes soil nutrients, reducing its fertility and long-term productivity. Without crop rotation, the land is left exhausted and dependent on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, which contaminate water sources and accelerate soil degradation. This reliance on chemical inputs not only depletes the land further but also poses serious public health risks.

Lebanon has experienced the consequences of monoculture before — historically, in the 19th century, mulberry trees covered 80% of Mount Lebanon’s agricultural land, fuelling the silk industry at the time. However, when the silk market collapsed, the region suffered an economic and agricultural downturn, leaving land barren and farmers destitute. The modern emphasis on single-crop farming risks a similar collapse, leaving Lebanon’s agriculture fragile and overly dependent on external markets.

This shift toward cash crops for export has also reduced local food production, making Lebanon overly dependent on costly imports. Resultantly,

“by December 2022, one-third of Lebanon’s resident population and 700,000 Syrian refugees faced severe food insecurity.”

The crisis has been especially severe in Tripoli in northern Lebanon, Baabda in Mount Lebanon, and the Bekaa Valley, where soaring food prices have made basic necessities unaffordable.

Collapse of Farmland

Lebanon is also facing a looming desertification crisis, with over 60% of

its land at risk. The Bekaa Valley, once the heart of Lebanon’s agricultural productivity, has seen significant portions of its land degraded due to monoculture and deforestation. The loss of farmland to desertification further reduces domestic food production, exacerbating reliance on imports and deepening food insecurity.

Hyperinflation

The economic collapse sent shockwaves across all sectors, with food prices disproportionately affected. According to the Lebanese Central Administration of Statistics, food prices rose twentyfold between December 2018 and October 2021. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reported that:

“the price of essential staples like wheat and chicken surged by more than twenty-seven times between December 2019 and December 2022.”

In 2023, Lebanon recorded the highest food price inflation in the world, making everyday goods unaffordable for the majority of its population.

The Current Conflict

According to the World Bank, “the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which erupted in late 2023, has dealt a heavy blow to Lebanon’s agricultural sector,” particularly in Southern Lebanon, the heart of the country’s farming industry. ‘Artillery shelling’ has destroyed 40,000 olive trees, while 790 hectares of farmland and 340,000 farm animals have been lost—amounting to $3 billion in agricultural damages.

Beyond the destruction of farmland, “the conflict has worsened Lebanon’s already fragile economy.” The Institute of International Finance warns that Lebanon’s GDP could shrink by 30% in 2024 if hostilities continue, pushing the country deeper into economic turmoil. The resulting downturn has driven food prices even higher, making essential goods increasingly inaccessible to the population.

As of early 2025, 1.65 million people — 30% of Lebanon’s population — are

facing acute food insecurity, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). This marks a sharp increase from previous years, showcasing the compounded impact of war, economic collapse, and agricultural devastation

What can they do?

Lebanon’s food crisis stems from decades of economic mismanagement, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. With one-third of the population facing food insecurity, Lebanon should shift toward food sovereignty, prioritising local production, fair labor rights, and sustainable farming over dependency on imports and volatile global markets.

Since the civil war in 1975, the displacement of farmers created chronic labor shortages, later filled by migrant and refugee workers, often under exploitative conditions. Farm workers lack legal protections, fair wages, and social security, making agriculture an unsustainable sector. Investing in small-scale farming, formal labor protections, and local food networks can help stabilise domestic food production and reduce import reliance.

Lebanon’s dependence on monoculture farming has exhausted the soil leading to 60% of Lebanon’s land facing degradation, while 90% of urban water is contaminated due to untreated sewage. Transitioning to crop diversity and water conservation can restore long-term agricultural productivity.

Despite widespread food shortages, cash crops for export remain prioritised, leaving Lebanon vulnerable to global market fluctuations. The country should support small farmers, regulate land monopolies, and produce for local consumption to regain control of its food system.

Lebanon is trying its best, and slowly they are creating reform for its people, like building a food system built on sustainability and sovereignty.

Art by Ellie Robertson

The climate movement used to be militant. School strikes shut down cities. Extinction Rebellion blocked roads. Activists sabotaged coal infrastructure. Now? Climate activism has been reduced to letter-writing and lobbying — appeals to power rather than direct challenges to it. How did we go from mass mobilisation to this kind of passive, almost ritualistic protest?

Like so many in my generation, I cut my teeth as an organiser with School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C), at a time when the movement felt like it had real political weight. There was a sense of urgency, a demand for systemic change, and a willingness to disrupt business as usual. But without a cohesive escalation strategy or clear political grounding, the movement burned out. People lost motivation or turned to electoral politics, reinforcing the illusion that market-driven policies — like carbon capture or emissions trading — could solve the crisis.

The reality is starker: Australia’s net zero targets are objectively utopian without a complete upheaval of Australian capitalism. Yet the mainstream climate movement remains confined to demands for an end to new coal and gas, unable to organise beyond reactive campaigns.

How to Tame a Protest Movement

Ethan Floyd explores how the climate movement lost its teeth.

A major part of the problem is that Australia ostensibly imported its climate protest movement from Europe without reckoning with its own political and economic conditions. Unlike Europe — where climate activism emerged from labour militancy and economic crisis — Australia’s movement grew in a nation shielded by the resources boom. Even amid wage stagnation and rising debt, relative economic stability softened the conditions for radical climate politics, making it easier for governments to downplay the urgency of climate action.

In Germany, Ende Gelände has physically blocked coal mines, linking climate activism to anti-capitalist struggle. In France, the Yellow Vests forced the government to retreat on carbon taxes that disproportionately affected workers. These movements didn’t rely on appeals to power; they forced change through disruption. By contrast, Australian climate activists have been pushed toward polite, symbolic action that poses no real threat to power.

This process of pacification isn’t new. Social movements throughout history have been neutralised through co-option and suppression.

Governments and corporations selectively engage with activists willing to play by the rules, while sidelining those who demand real systemic change. We’ve seen the mainstream climate movement fall into this trap. By accepting the terms of engagement set by the state and the amorphous market, it has sacrificed its ability to force change.

The climate movement wasn’t necessarily defeated — it was defanged. Climate stunts and school strikes have been so easily ignored and repressed, and legislative reform efforts are co-opted by politicians to greenwash the status quo.

Yet, the infrastructure for mass mobilisation still exists. It has only been disoriented by an unfocused escalation strategy and political retreat. If the mainstream climate movement is to regain its power, it has to revive the tactics that made it a serious political force in the first place.

Firstly, activists must reject the idea that politically mainstream solutions alone will solve the crisis. The issue isn’t a lack of policy proposals but the unwillingness of those in power to act against fossil fuel interests. The movement must shift from appealing to politicians to making inaction

Praise thy Lord and His Kindness

Ellie Robertson wants you to be kind.

“Treat people how you want to be treated. You never know what they might be going through”, my Mum told me at five-years-old.

Apparently, this is a common phrase for parents to tell their developing children to teach them to behave nicely. As an adult, I have realised that if this was the case, then most people these days are masochists. There was a time when people would help strangers with directions, and give up their seat for pregnant women, and help each other lift things when struggling. Helping others was an instinct, not just a flourishing act that allows you to preach how “nice” you are.

The “unwavering” culture of kindness has become a fallacy. We’ve seen it everywhere. From Youtubers giving to the homeless whilst notably having it all, to simply noticing the people around us in public, there has been a shift from being kind to each other to “keeping our peace”.

I started noticing this, particularly, after the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the lockdowns, everyone was forced to combat many mental and emotional barriers. Instead of these times of hardship creating spaces to mourn and be kind to each other, it became an elongated trend to “take care of yourself”. While self care is important, we saw a rapid decline in the use of self care and an increase in selfishness. There’s a very thin line that sits between your own peace and a lack of empathy for others.

The line between the two is not as confusing as it

may seem. By definition, ‘Self care’ is the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one’s own health. ‘Selfishness’ is the quality or state of being selfish; lack of consideration of other people. Though many believe that these two are inherently intertwined (and while, yes, they are not entirely mutually exclusive), there is a very distinct separation.

Empathy.

politically untenable through escalation — stronger student and union strikes, blockades, and disruption.

Secondly, the movement must rebuild collective structures for sustained resistance. Its retreat into smaller, localised mobilisations has weakened its effectiveness. Without a shared strategy, the climate movement remains fragmented and easy to ignore. To confront global capital, activists must mobilise and coordinate with unions, workers, students, and communities directly affected by climate disaster.

Lastly, the movement must embrace radicalism without apology. Our media establishment will never endorse genuine systemic change. Waiting for mainstream approval is a dead end. Activists should learn from past movements that succeeded through escalation — not just symbolic protest, but disruption that forces power to respond.

Climate action will not succeed through politeness. The past five years have proven that appealing to the system does not work. If the climate movement is to have a future, it must become dangerous again.

‘therapy language’ has increasingly made its way to the language we use in everyday life.

Examples of “therapy language”:

- “You don’t owe anyone anything”

- “Protecting my peace”

- “I’m at full capacity”

- “I’m setting my boundaries”

Concern for others has been declining since the late-70s, with a study on American students finding that empathy had declined by 48% between 1979 and 2009. It has declined so much so that these statistics have often been used as a form of evidence to show an “empathy gap” in our social environment. A more specific study into the impact of the pandemic found that between October 2019 and February 2020,t various parts of empathy were affected at different levels. General empathetic social skills were badly affected, while the emotional empathy and the ability to look at different perspectives was more broadly understood and impacted positively.

- “You’re trauma-dumping”

- “Too much emotional labour”

In a lot of cases, these things – in principle – are very valid feelings to have. However, the line gets crossed when it is used to cover up an act of selfishness. There have been countless moments in my life where people have used this type of language as a means to excuse nasty and selfish behaviour. I was glad to find when talking to the people around me that I was not the only one experiencing this new-found environment of a lack of accountability.

The reality of it is that you do owe people kindness, just as you expect it from them. You owe your friends trust, honesty, and respect. If you see someone on the street struggling, I urge you to help them (within reason, of course). If you’re able to, stand up to give a child a seat on the train.

A lack of social skills has been a topic that has been discussed relatively consistently amongst academics. With this epidemic of lack of social skills, there has been a notable change in the way people interact with people around them, whether they know them or not. The use of

And, for goodness sake, stop ruining the peace of others to protect your own.

Broken Bangla

Purny Ahmed translates.

“Purny, tumi amake tumar lekha ta poira dao na kan?”

My ammu asks me this question frequently. After every Honi I bring home to show off and every late night spent editing, she asks: ‘Purny, why do you never read your writing out to me’? It’s a tired question, one that I have asked myself, again, and again. It feels too weighted with complexity and sentiment for me to find a viable solution, if there even is one.

I have been meaning to write translated versions of my pieces, a way to express myself to my ammu in her language, my mother tongue, and to express myself as freely as I do in English. I don’t struggle to weave the words together in English; I easily twist them into prose, fast-paced and fervent, my thoughts running across the page. The way I can make something so simple sound important in English, the way I can make words mean something; I’ve mastered linguistic manipulation.

My Bangla, however, stutters over itself. It comes out much slower; I cannot capture a metaphor for the life of me, let alone emulate the gravity of my writing through my very limited vocabulary. My restricted fluency does not carry the sweetness of the language, so I don’t read my work out, I don’t translate it into a fragmented version of itself, and, therefore, my ammu does not ‘read’ my writing.

Conversely, my ammu doesn’t understand the language I write in. Her intelligence is wasted on my English — the words, the metaphors, and the context present in my work do not belong to her community. There is a disconnect that draws a line between the two of us. English prose is nothing compared to that of the Bengali writers, poets, and songwriters, and my weakly translated attempts fall flat. It’s a grotesque, violent act; the butchering of language in its purest form, for the purest reason — a daughter simply trying to talk to her mother.

It begs the question, do I belong to my mother’s community? If all we can share are broken sentences, syntax that is made up of em dashes and hyphens, ellipses and misplaced periods, loan words and stuttering, how else do we understand one another? Does she belong to my community, if the form my identity takes up is so intrinsically

represented by the words she does not understand? What makes community if not mutual understanding? What makes a shared culture if not words and language?

I find myself heartbroken overthinking about how easily conversation might have flowed if we were a monolingual family, or if I had grown up in Bangladesh. If my parents and I existed within a shared monoculture, rather than awkwardly straddling either sides of our identities, what would change? If I had painstakingly learnt how to write beautifully in Bangla, would my ammu understand who I am better than she does now?

There is a lost culture in the words that we do not understand, the message that goes missing in between the lines. Our relationship is a constant learning curve, much like my Bangla — there is always something new we do not know, something we do not understand, something incomprehensible.

I’m not sure that is such a thing as a monoculture as a child of an immigrant. Other families, those born and brought up in their home country or, at the very least, the same culture as their parents, do not need to cross cultural and linguistic barriers to simply reach each other. Linguistics is a metaphor of the greater divide — the values, the beliefs, the worldview that sets us apart.

However, cultural disconnect does not stop at linguistics. Brown kids spend their entire lives curating their identities — every part of ourselves is carefully selected, presented, and the rest is tucked away, saved for an alter-ego outside of the borders of our homes.

We hide mini-skirts and corsets at the back of our closets and wear them under oversized trackies when leaving the house; we sneak away with our friends and cross interstate and international borders; we flirt and date and fall in love, all without our parents knowledge, and when we marry our partners of ten years, our parents believe that we had only met the year before. At home, we are perfectly curated personalities.

Even the things that don’t need to be hidden are never truly disclosed. The books we are reading, the songs

we’re listening to, the intricacies of our innerselves, the inconsequential matters of our day to day. We discuss university at great lengths, but never the nature of our essays, never what we have learned, never the conversations we’ve had. We can never find the words.

Yet, my mother knows me like she knows the curves, crevices, and the creases of her palms. I know I’ve made it sound as though my ammu and I don’t speak, but that is not the case. Our unique language is familiar, made up of stutters, stumbling speech, and broken syntax of both Bangla and English fragments. We speak, for hours at times. I ramble off in my broken Bangla, and she teaches me the pronunciation of words I do not yet understand the meaning of. We make daal together and I ask her the names of the ingredients in her own tongue. I sit down with her and show her how to type out her Facebook caption, I fix up her commas and her capital letters. I sat her down, once, with a copy of Honi and my butchered mother tongue. I struggled through the piece to find the words in Bangla, to find metaphors applicable to her culture, carefully explaining the intentions behind every little detail. I couldn’t manipulate the message through fancy prose when speaking in Bangla, like I did with English. But she cried anyway, a mixture between understanding and appreciating, connection and yearning. She keeps the copy folded up next to her Quran. We have become fluent in understanding one another, or at the very least, trying to.

“It’s a grotesque, violent act; the butchering of language in its purest form, for the purest reason — a daughter simply trying to talk to her mother.”

Art by Mehnaaz Hossain

The exiled author is here and nowhere

In an interview, Sylvia Plath was once referred to as a “poet and person who straddled the Atlantic.” With a laugh breaking through her words, she said: “That’s a rather awkward position, but I’ll accept it!” Over drinks, my friend, a brown immigrant like myself, confessed that she felt a gulf between herself and overwhelmingly ‘rooted’ Western authors. She feels more connected to Toni Morrison than Joan Didion, a literary giant as rooted in California as the thousand-year-old redwoods surrounding her. I sympathised completely with her sentiment. I realised I sought in poetry and literature experiences of ‘uprooting’. Though I grew up in India, my conception of ‘literature’ was narrow– beginning with an introduction to nationalistic voices like Tagore, or the canonical Charles Dickens in an Anglophile English-medium school. It was only through reading migrating authors like Plath, Joseph Conrad, Michael Ondaatje, and Jean Rhys that I discovered the possibility of my voice.

Plath was American, born in chilly Boston, but went on to study at Cambridge. After marrying English poet Ted Hughes, Plath felt attracted to the austere old-world charm of England and continued to live there. However, she felt English poetry to be stuck “in a straight-jacket;” an apt metaphor from the author of The Bell Jar. She found the suffocating stranglehold of English gentility and tidiness to be dangerous. Interviewer Peter Orr once asked Plath her opinion of the weighty and oppressive tradition of English literature. Plath was quick to spring to agreement. Young women would ask Plath how she dared to write: as an American, as a woman, as a pioneer in the face of criticism, to which she responded, “I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne, but not quite finishing like John Donne, and I felt the weight of English literature on me at that point… almost paralysing.”

Poet-author Michael Ondaatje, who resides in Canada, echoes a similar trauma regarding John Donne. Born in Colombo, then the capital of the British colony of Ceylon, Ondaatje immigrated to London at the age of eleven. Though his school, Dulwich College, was a ‘haven for young writers’ like Raymond Chandler and PG Wodehouse, Ondaatje only felt free to write upon moving to Montreal, Canada, at nineteen: “I wouldn’t have been a writer if I’d stayed in England… where you feel, what right do you have to do this because of John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney.” With the rise of immigrant literature, have we finally broken past the need to follow canonical tradition? The development of postmodern

immigrant literature has its seminal forefathers, such as Joseph Conrad. His masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, is a lucid portrait of the experience of being Othered: on a ship in the Thames, Charles Marlow narrates to his listeners his tale of being a captain of a colonial Belgian company vessel, deep in the heart of Africa. Conrad penetrates the story through layers of voices that narrate the experience of outsidership;as he writes of Marlow, “to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.” Marlow the Englishman is too confronted with the cold indifference of a foreign landscape, unknowable and treacherous.

Polish-born Conrad was born to a proudly nationalistic family exiled to Volgoda, Russia, before he chose a sea-faring life at the age of sixteen, working on merchant ships. He seemed to espouse, in his constant voyages, Simone Weil’s command: “We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.” Like Weil, Conrad recognises that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” and the experience of ‘uprooting’ finds voice in his works. Conrad doesn’t see indigeneity and rootedness as givens. His recurring character Marlow, captain of a Belgian steamer in Heart of Darkness, views the indigeneity of the black bodies in the heart of Africa with some envy and awe: they appear as “natural and true as the surf along their coast… they wanted no excuse for being there.” Rootedness may provide a pre-ordained justification for our existence – something the ‘stranger’ feels the burden of creating.

Only through hearing snatches and fragments of English from his fellow sailors did Conrad learn his third language, after French. Conrad was keenly aware that the lack of a common cultural background with Anglophone literature meant he would write about the Asiatic, Oceanic, and African settings to which he travelled, with stories set on stateless ships granting him a freedom as wide as the expanse of sea he sailed. Freed from the gauntlet of English literary tradition, Conrad knew he had redefined English literature: “I am something else, and perhaps something more, than a writer of the sea—or even of the tropics.” Conrad’s influence as a master of fiction is palpable in both ‘rooted’ writers known for their connection to home like Irishman James Joyce as well as travellers like T.S. Eliot, Jean Rhys, and Ondaatje himself.

Kuyili Karthik crosses textual oceans.

Lion, I could feel Conrad’s indelible traces. Ondaatje’s novel is an intricate weaving of several stories pieced together by Patrick Lewis, a ‘searcher’ or investigator. Though Patrick has lived in Canada all his life, his childhood encounters with immigrants flip the experience of being Othered. In a scene that neither Patrick nor I have forgotten, Patrick is inside his house, looking out a window at the immigrant labourers skating on homemade blades, navigating his homeland in a manner unbeknownst to him:

“Skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, his shore, his river… To the boy growing into his twelfth year, having lived all his life on that farm… nothing would be the same.”

estranged for being a woman, a white Creole, and ‘mad’ in Rhys’ narrative. I must reproduce the madwoman’s bluntest words: “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why I was ever born at all.” À la Conrad, Rhys shifts perspective to Antoinette’s English husband Mr. Rochester, who is equally driven mad on their honeymoon in Dominica, confessing: “The feeling of something unknown and hostile was very strong.”

I myself am the granddaughter of a Tamil ship engineer who has travelled to corners of the world, possibly on the same routes as Conrad. I have always wondered why I could not fathom writing from the vantage of ‘rooted’ characters like Alice Munro’s, until I discovered an affinity with Conrad, Ondaatje, and Rhys’ multiple existences. My life, like theirs, is an artery that has split into red threads that all thrum with blood.

Patrick thereafter slides through life anonymously, traversing other people’s landscapes, reversing the immigrant/rooted experience. Ondaatje captures in the other migrating characters, Alice and Nicholas, the nascent moment of ‘choosing oneself’ in a foreign world that is pre-formed, choosing to learn the language and the arteries of the streets in order to not be lost, changing the masks of their uncertain identity. Oondatje jokes about his own mélange of Tamil, Sinhalese, and Dutch origins: “My background is a real salad, so it’s difficult to know who I am.”

From when I read the very first pages Ondaatje’s masterpiece In the Skin of A

Another migrant writer who is enshrined within the English literary canon is Jean Rhys, Dominican-born to a Welsh father and White Creole mother. In her oeuvre Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys grabs at canonical source material – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – and writes something so unique and truthful about being Othered. Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, Antoinette Cosway, is both granted subjectivity and

Art by Emilie Garcia-Dolnik

Upon the Ninth Crescent Moon

Shayla Zreika breaks her fast.

As if their souls are in tune with the lunar cycle, 1.9 billion Muslims around the world welcome the holy month of Ramadan at the sighting of a crescent moon. Just as the night is beloved for its stillness, this month of fasting and worship exceeds a mere shift in routine — it is a period of solitude, reflection, and spiritual nourishment. At the beginning of this semester, many Muslim students will be observing the month of Ramadan. But what exactly is Ramadan; what does a month of fasting look like as a student, and how can you show respect and support to your Muslim mates this month?

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, officially commencing upon the sighting of the crescent moon on the 29th day of the previous lunar month, Sha’ban. In 2025, Ramadan is expected to begin on March 1st, and to end around March 29, depending on the crescent moon sighting.

Fasting is a critical feature of Ramadan, where Muslims abstain from all intake of food and water from sunrise to sunset, and make a concentrated effort to refrain from sinful behaviors. There are many people who are exempted from fasting, including people who are ill, travelling, menstruating, or pregnant. Whether it is being able to attain adequate sleep, take medication or nourish their bodies, Islam teaches us to nurture our minds and bodies by fostering good health. Women’s health is substantially prioritised in Islam due to the strenuous implications of menstruation or pregnancy. This not only allows Muslim women to nourish their bodies physically, but also mentally, by attaining extra rest and relaxation.

However, Ramadan goes far beyond the act of fasting.

Rich in history, community worship, and individual solitude, Ramadan is referred to as the ‘Month of the Quran’. Its significance comes from the miracle of the first Divine revelation, where the

beloved Prophet Muhammad received the first verses of the Islamic Scripture. “Iqra”, he was told. “Read.” The miracle of the Quranic revelation lives on today, where Muslims devote their time to reciting authentic Islamic scripture and stand shoulder to shoulder for extended night prayers, Taraweeh, at mosques. It is believed a person’s good deeds are multiplied by 70, our righteous acts are most rewarding during Ramadan compared to any other month of the year.

The warmest memories come from the most challenging Ramadan routines.

Kitchen windows illuminating the stillness of the pre-sunrise morning, where Muslim families share Suhoor in loud whispers and tired eyes in order to sustain the day of fasting ahead. And those very same windows capture the rush to beat the setting sun, setting the dinner table, and the gathering around a wholesome meal at the end of the day. The sweetness of breaking your fast with a prayer and a Medjool date. Hearing the rhythmic hum of your mother reciting the Quran from her embroidery prayer mat during the night. In Ramadan, not only do families feel most bonded, or communities feel most synchronised, but the inner self feels most tethered to God and the trinkets of worship we often overlook in the busyness of everyday life.

A day on campus looks and feels a little different for a fasting friend. Because the reality is that observing Ramadan in a Western country is difficult to navigate — it is commonly misunderstood and often unaccommodated for. A student’s energy levels are lower than usual due to the absence of a latte from Taste Cafe, or broken sleep due to Suhoor and pre-dawn prayers. Yet Muslim students remain pressured to maintain their academic

performance at a non-fasting level. They may be compelled to limit their socialising and decline invitations to society events or join study groups after class. Muslim students may also gravitate towards the comfortable company of their families or Islamic spaces to foster a nourishing sense of belonging.

With empathy and understanding, we can be better mates towards Muslims on- and off-campus in several simple gestures. You can offer support with studying or class work through gentle encouragement, or changing your regular morning coffee meetings at Courtyard to a night-time Zoom call over a warm cup of tea.

Another means of enhancing our empathy is by asking questions about Ramadan! Every individual experience differs, and so respectfully engage in enlightening conversations about this blessed month. Beyond this, you can best explore the authenticity of Ramadan by observing it alongside your Muslim mates! It could be attending a Friday khutbah at a local mosque, joining a friends’ family Iftaar or simply feeling the solitude in the stillness of the night.

This Ramadan, we can collectively create a more accommodating space for our fasting friends. And as we anticipate the sighting of an iridescent crescent moon, may the month of Ramadan bring us peace and blessings.

The Debacles of Ribena and Being Twenty

Chiara Arata

turns into an adult.

When I was little, I always drank Ribena out of a wine glass. It made me feel proper, adult-like, classy. As if I had a certain sense of maturity to show for my seven yearold self. I’d hold the stem of the glass in between my fingers, and my palm would cup the glass, like those ladies that I had seen in the movies. They knew what they were doing, with their life, with their being. You could tell by the way they held their wine so elegantly, as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Adulthood, ha! I couldn’t wait for it. I realised I was an adult around two weeks ago. I had gone to a restaurant with my friend, and we had gazed over the wine list before going with our trusty friend, Rosè. Ready for my wine to be poured into my glass, the waiter paused, before asking me if I’d like to try the wine. Now, of course I will try your wine, however, to have both my friend and the waiter watch me as I sip my wine, taste it, like it, and tell him to proceed pouring, felt slightly awkward. That moment right there was the switch that clicked. I was finally an adult. I understood that my Ribena days were over, and, for a minute, I couldn’t really remember when I had made the transition from that sweet juice to the slightly more sophisticated version.

In fact, the more I came to think of it, I couldn’t really remember any of the transition. There I was, drinking wine and talking about what I was planning on doing once I went back to university. In reality, I hadn’t even thought about school, let alone enrolled for the new semester. My transition into adulthood had been almost unnoticeable. There were those smaller moments: missing the bus to uni, walking home from a house party with the girls, deciding between a skirt or jeans, biting my nails before an exam, my Dad gifting me a guitar, my Mum telling me to study theatre, painting my nails on a Thursday afternoon (without smudging it), climbing mountains somewhere in Italy, plaiting my hair, buying apple pie in the Blue Mountains, falling in love with a live orchestra, crying because of an assignment deadline, crying again listening to Gregory Alan Isakov, forgetting to spin the washing, and catching the train back to my hometown. Truthfully, there had been no plan this whole time. Actually, I hadn’t been able to make up my mind since I was about five. At six, I wanted to become a singer. At ten, I wanted to be a teacher. At twelve, I thought about being a vet Then, at fifteen, a lawyer, and at eighteen an actress. Now, here I am, at twenty, a Theatre and English major, with a passion for writing and journalism.

Your twenties are a confusing time. Some of your friends might be traveling the world, whilst others are trying to get by with their jobs and university. To you, however, it may feel like everyone is somehow one step ahead of you. You’ve made some mistakes perhaps, or at least you think you have, whether it was taking a gap year or choosing the wrong major (I’ve definitely had that debacle), and now you can’t help but think that you should’ve made a different choice. Some people say there’s no formula to solving this equation, whilst others tell me to plan plan plan.

How am I supposed to feel like a true adult? My Grandma still refers to me as her “little girl,” but my parents think of me as an official adult. Do you see how contradictory this is? And yes, I might be an adult, but shouldn’t adults be confident in their choices, or at least know whether they want weet-bix or a yogurt bowl for breakfast? Maybe, at the end of the day, we’re all just children living inside of adult bodies. I still see the inner child of my Mum when she’s excited about that game of tennis we’re about to watch, or my Dad’s inner child when he’s in the kitchen making another loaf of bread.

I still love to drink Ribena out of a wine glass. Mum thinks I’m childish for doing so, and maybe it is, but I’m a girl who enjoys writing about my Ribena obsessions whilst also contemplating the major crisis of your twenties. I love to sit outside and watch the wind wrestle with our lavender, and draw flowers on a random piece of paper that’s been lying around the house. I’ve always loved to do it, only now I’m just a bit older. There’s something weirdly metaphorical but equally comforting in knowing that a part of us will

Laneway 2025: A Thumping,

No one warns you that when you wear a spaghetti strap dress outside the house for the first time that you’ll end up with very thin tan lines on your shoulders for several weeks afterwards. Still, there was no other way for me to rock up to Laneway, Sydney’s first (and potentially only) big music festival of the year, decked out in my Brat green Dangerfield digs with an overprepared bag and a full commitment to the monochromatic aesthetic.

My Laneway started in a very Sydney way: waking up at my boyfriend’s share house in Dulwich Hill, stopping in at my work friend/now-real-friend’s share house in Marrickville to discuss outfits and bitch about our managers, then running into five different acquaintances and USyd glitterati on the bus to Centennial Park.

A short walk from the Entertainment Quarter bus stop, I got through the gates quickly and followed the curve of the entrance to the great green landscape of Laneway awaiting me. I arrived in time to catch Eyedress’s thumping live set, and Olivia Dean’s sultry and giddy performance full of songs I didn’t realise I knew. The

Welcome to Country from Auntie Maxine Ryan was a spirited musing on the hope that lays ahead for our generation.

“You are our future, you are our leaders, you will be running my country one day, so keep on the good stuff you do caring for Country. If you look after Country, Country will look after you.”

The park was split into two performance areas, with food trucks, bars, and medical personnel lining the amorphous shape.

I took a wander over to the EDM heavy Everything Ecstatic stage, and returned several times throughout the day (if only to check out the selection of food nestled behind).

Here I encountered Rona., Fcukers, Joey Valence & Brae, and 2Hollis, and every single performer had an incredibly hyped-up crowd that jumped and screamed with every song. I was personally obsessed with Ninajirachi, the hype DJ between each set, whose flaming orange hair and jumpy demeanour kept the energy up in the tent for the whole festival.

My media pass entitled me to enter the

VIP area, which was filled with hammocks and had a separate bar and bathroom facilities. Having a safe place to return to made the ten hour day much easier to process. My one complaint was that the VIP area DJ was very clearly drowning out the live music that people wanted to hear, regardless of how enthralling the continually shifting sets could be.

I had a pineapple cosmopolitan and found myself lounging on a surprisingly comfy deck chair. I then blurrily remember drifting to sleep for a nanny nap, and in my dream state being awoken by Remi Wolf’s full-throated cover of Walking on a Dream. I only caught the end of her set, but it was so impassioned and hyper that I felt whipped up in Wolf’s world, if only for the three minutes of Photo ID I managed to catch in the crowd.

At this point I nestled in at the front of the Never Let it Rest stage. Djo sang some unreleased ditties about the kinds of girls he likes (mysterious, unbasic, gap-toothed) and prowled around the stage like an American musical goblin. His 360-stage camera, frenetic energy,

and jumpy little bursts of sing-speak were beautifully counterbalanced by the sombre, whimpering peak of End of Beginning.

It was noticeable that the crowd immediately sparked to life at the start of this TikTok viral sound. Something I didn’t quite realise until everyone whipped out their phones was that the audience was very… dead? Dead. For most of the day. No one was dancing, no one was feeling the energy until the songs came on that they knew. I don’t know if this was symptomatic of crowd-hogging for the later (bigger) artists, or if the spread of social media has rendered music useless without the tinge of recognising a small snippet of song, but it feels like the magic of live music is being lost.

This wasn’t as much of an issue for Clairo, the first artist brave enough to leave gaps in her songs for the audience to sing, and boy did they sing. Clairo and her band walked on stage and just chilled out to some classic music before they started digging through the gem which was her 2024 album Charm. It was an effortless

Will Winter attends laneway.

Art by Ellie Robertson

In 2011, Egypt was held tightly in the grip of revolution. Protestors took to the streets and swarmed public spaces, demanding an end to the Mubarak Presidency, as well as the violence associated with the Egyptian state. Within the optics of the uprising, according to Hafez, eyewitness accounts attribute at least half the protestors in Tahrir Square to be women. Yet, their accounts, contributions and corporeal resistance are denied and excluded from the histories of the Revolution, mitigated by the revelations of mass sexual assault in public spaces. Yasmin ElRifae’s debut work ‘Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution’ (2022) traverses the politics of political participation, both illustrating the work of Opantish—Operation AntiSexual Harassment—and itself negotiating room for the voices and needs of marginalised genders at the table (and it does so with gripping pace and style!) The book is ultimately both distressing and haunting, yet it unfailingly demands to be heard as an important work of modern Feminist literature.

‘Radius’ is self-described as a ‘gripping, intimate account of women and men who built a feminist revolution.’ ElRifae’s work penetrates to the depths a slew of important themes from justice to public space, Women’s resistance to violent sociocultural

Radius, Reimaginations, and Resistance

patriarchal systems and state control, meticulously interweaving these together in a narrative of solidarity and resistance. Spanning the immediate years following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a non-linear patchwork of interviews, self-reflection, and recounts; Radius narrates the establishment and collective organisation of Opantish, a volunteer-led group dedicated to the prevention of sexual assault and harassment (SASH) and to the cause of increasing Women’s participation in protests.

At the beating core of the book is the re-imagination of public space, with El-Rifae and Opantish carving space for Women’s collective resistance. Women’s bodies in masculinist spaces innately occupy and embody a reconstitution of public politics, where disruptions of androcentric place and feminine domesticity are integral to social revolution and the dismantling of panoptic state control. The book, however, negotiates the line between these utopian and radical visions, and the manifest reality of danger for Women and othered bodies that participate in political action and organisation, denoting the specifically high prevalence of genderbased violence and sexual assault and harassment for those gender-diverse protestors. Readers must approach the book knowing the depicted violence is

Bratty, Neon-Green Spectacle

showcase of her angelic voice and indie sensibilities, and singing along to Bags was not something I knew I needed until I heard that sweet sweet guitar. She was definitely Sexy to Someone: the girl behind me who moaned “oh my God I love her capris” the second she walked on stage.

After the intense round of crowd pushes, I went and sought comfort in expectedly overpriced food. Madiba’s Kitchen had banging African spiced chicken and fried plantain, and with this burst of energy (while double-fisting Malibu Pina Coladas) I charged through the crowd for Charli XCX.

This was always going to be the peak. With brat summer finally landing in Australia, there was a litter of angsty neon green coating the parklands (including myself) eagerly awaiting the arrival of our cool-girl pop princess.

I wriggled my way to the midsection of the crowd but decided I’d rather have room to move than a mildly okay view, so I found myself dancing and sing-screaming with

these two very cool siblings at the back of the audience who were also incredibly hyped for Charli.

Charli XCX, my top artist on Spotify every year for almost the past decade, was everything I wanted, no, needed her to be, and more. Every song was kinetic: I felt my throat being torn to shreds singing along to Lorde’s verse in girl, so confusing, I threw my arms out and relinquished myself to the electronic catharsis of her masterpiece Track 10, and I jumped and screamed and hurled my body around for her renderings of 360/365/365 remix.

Centennial Park became the coolest club in the world that night, for one bright and fizzy hour.

Emilie Garcia-Dolnik reviews.

vicious and confronting, however, ElRifae addresses these issues from a thoughtful and necessary standpoint that tables important and innately gendered issues that are seldom tabled by states across the globe because their willful ignorance enables the strict policing of Women’s bodies.

The book’s structure is non-linear, frequently fluctuating between 20112016, and thus represents the internal fluctuations of El-Rifae as she revisits her time on the front line, organising Opantish. The work too oscillates between personal reflections on ElRifae’s perspective as well as past and present experiences, while at the same time providing interviews and recollections on the cases and experiences of impacted others. The result is a comprehensive and holistic work that comments on the non-linear experience of memory, especially relating to traumatic events, while refusing to sacrifice a broader exploration of the context that makes the work accessible to all readers. At long last, we come to the title of the book itself; a meaning readers will find themselves questioning. The title, Radius, evokes circular images, and indeed the book centres around these. From the organisation and protection of female protestors, often requiring the breakage and penetration of a circle of men, to the connected circle of volunteers dedicated to the

Then began the long, squishy trek home…

Overall, I think Laneway was exactly what I expected it to be. Cozy but chaotic, I saw one boob slip, one whole ass out (thanks to a guy in a velvet green unitard), and one girl who got off someone’s shoulders at the front of Clairo’s set after someone threw a bottle at her.

During her set, Charli spoke about her special connection to Laneway. The last

protection of these same protestors. The work ultimately gives power to those same people violenced by the revolution, and carves out its own feminist revolution that demands its spot in the public realm.

Reading El-Rifae’s work bearing witness to Women’s corporeal resistance, attests to the power of solidarity, and disrupts the masculinist and violent conceptualisations of resistance that purposefully render public spaces as dangerous for women. The book is, by all accounts, a work that necessarily documents an innately gendered account of the Egyptian Revolution, ensuring an important counter-perspective is not lost to the vestiges of time. Demanding its place in the sphere of Feminist works, it occupies a space that subverts the dominant re-imaginings of the state and the cultural apparatus that supports these innately masculinist visions. El-Rifae, and the Opantish organisers, are activists to be admired, to be remembered, and to be copied when we find ourselves and others around us to be at risk of arbitrary violence.

Full Review Available Online

time she was here was when she first felt sparks with her husband George, and now she’s returned and “put a fucking ring on it bitch”. It’s all full circle.

Centennial Parklands was my high school sporting field, and one of the first places I felt the pressure to shrink who I was to survive. Now I’ve returned in a neon strappy dress, surrounded by beautiful acquaintances and friends, on assignment at my cool ass job, and living my gay ass life.

I could never have hoped for this life without that music. It’s all full circle.

Credit: Henry Redcliffe

President

Angus Fisher

Welcome to the University of Sydney in 2025! My name is Angus Fisher, and I’m honoured to serve as your Students’ Representative Council (SRC) President. Whether you’re a new or returning student, the SRC is here to support you in every way we can—through casework and legal services, student-focused campaigns, or simply being a familiar face on campus. As an independent, student-run union, we’re your go-to for any issues with the university or challenges related to student life. Part of your Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) helps fund our important work. Many ask, “What does the SRC President actually do?” My role has three key responsibilities:

1. Executive Director: I oversee SRC staff and ensure the organisation runs smoothly, always putting student interests first.

2. Undergraduate Representative: I attend heaps of meetings and communicate with the university, government, and media to advocate for the needs of over 40,000 undergraduates.

3. Union Organiser: I support campaigns led by SRC office bearers and work to engage students in collective action. Students are stronger together, and your involvement is crucial.

SRC REPORTS

The SRC has a rich history of activism dating back to 1929. We’ve fought for student rights, social justice, and broader societal issues, from educational reform and anti-war protests to LGBTQIA+ rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and climate action. Notably, we opposed the Vietnam War and campaigned for free education during the 1980s reforms. Today, we continue to champion intersectional justice, workers’ rights, and climate action, staying true to our legacy of progressive activism. Recent wins, such as securing an independent student ombudsman and partially paid placements, show that student unionism works.

I encourage you to get involved with the SRC this year. Join our collectives, visit our fortnightly stall/BBQ on Eastern Avenue, or follow us on Instagram @src_usyd to stay updated or feel free to reach out to me directly @angusfisherr—I’d love to hear from you. Together, we can make a difference.

In solidarity, Angus Fisher

Enviro Officers

Deaglan Godwin, Lilah Thurbon

The summer break has been red hot, and not just environmentally speaking. In December, reports revealed that 2024 was the first year to top 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, surpassing the target limit for emissions.

The Albanese government approved four new coal mine extensions, and in January, wildfires ravaged Los Angeles, leaving tens of thousands without homes.

There was no break for activism over the holidays. We attended rallies for Palestine, trans rights and Invasion Day. We were part of the SRC collectives’ stall at Invasion Day that provided free water, shaded seating and other resources to attendees and organisers.

We attended a Rising Tide organising meeting, where we heard an update on the 2024 people’s blockade of the Port of Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port. 138 protesters were charged with the criminal offence ‘disrupting a major facility’ and face harsh penalties of fines up to $22,000, 2 years’ imprisonment or both. We condemn these attacks on peaceful climate activists and the criminalisation of protest by the Minns government.

We also would have had tote bags available for collection at our stall for welcome week, but for the first time in recent memory, our expenditure request was denied by the SRC executive. Labor and liberal members of the executive teamed up to block approval of a design that called out the similarities between both major parties’ environmental policies. The Labor students were particularly troubled by this comparison, finding it an inconvenient truth they’d rather abuse their power to suppress since it’s an election year. We hope the irony isn’t lost on them!

Going into semester 1, we’re both committed to organising against the repressive new policies that USyd has introduced. We’ve already made a submission urging the university not to enact these policies. We can’t allow the university to rob us of our ability to call out management’s crimes and to mobilise students around the issues that concern them.

Your 2025 enviro officers, Lilah and Deaglan

Vice President Education Officers

Bhattari, Bohao Zhang

International students have long been unaware of the SRC and the services we provide.

Having been elected into the Vice-Presidency thanks to the vote of international students, I will be working collaboratively with the International Students Collective throughout my term, expanding the outreach and recognition of the SRC to all international students. To this end, work has already begun. Over the break, we renovated the International Student Collective brand, with new logos, social media platforms, and Welcome Week merchandise. Furthermore, we have multiple events in the works! Students should follow us

on Instagram (@usyd_international) to stay up to date.

Outside of USyd, the Collective and I will be working on the Fair Fares campaign, bringing Opal concession cards to all international and part time students. It’s honestly insane that it has taken the government this long to act, and it’s a disgrace that New South Wales remains the only State or Territory where there is no transport concession program whatsoever for international students.

I look forward to the work we will be doing in this 97th Council!!

Bohao

Women’s Officers

WoCo has had a busy start to the year!

Over December and January we were hard at work putting Growing Strong, our annual magazine together. We are incredibly proud of the magazine - huge thank you to all of our editors and contributors! We will be hosting a launch picnic for this on Friday 28th February at midday - snacks and copies of the magazine provided. We also attended the Invasion Day rally a few weeks ago and helped host the cool-down station, handing out water, juice, sunscreen and snacks to attendees. We were honoured to continue this project which was spearheaded by the SRC last year, and we hope to continue being able to materially support Invasion Day in this way every year. We have begun holding regular meetings, which many new people have attended. We are really keen to grow the collective this year and thrilled to see so much interest.

Welcome Week was a huge success, although completely exhausting. We handed out hundreds of tote bags, t-shirts, magazines and

stickers, and made connections with some incredible new students who are keen to get involved.

However, throughout Welcome Fest we noticed that the SRC stalls were being continuously watched by security, especially those with visible Palestinian flags. We also unfortunately had to cancel our snap rally as the University (we suspect deliberately) crowded the space we usually use with nightclub stalls blasting music. We deeply, deeply condemn the new repression tactics being employed by the university, and will continue to fight these. We are incredibly frustrated that much of what we plan on doing this year will be focused on fighting these rules, but nevertheless plan to keep up the pressure!

Last week we hosted our first FALL reading group with ACAR, discussing bell hooks’ “All About Love.” This event was a huge success, and we’re excited for our next session on the 27th, which will be a community organising

Jasmine Al Rawi, Luke Mesterovic

It’s been a busy summer for the Education Action Group! As look ahead into semester 1, we are keen to carry on fostering a fighting student movement capable of holding management to account.

We have completed Countercourse, the annual publication of the EAG. This year, we have articles from students young and old and across the student left. From debates over the federal election and the Campus Access Policy, to a look at the Argentine student movement, we hope that you picked up a copy at the SRC’s Welcome Week stall. A special thank you to Bipasha Chakraborty, whose fantastic front cover art pays homage to the prominent role that woodcut printmaking holds in the history of activism and protest.

We also helped build for Invasion Day, leafleting at Central Station, Broadway shopping centre and Glebe Markets. Conservative forces have been emboldened following the failure of the Voice referendum and the re-election of Donald Trump, and this has led to a renewed attack on the commemoration of Invasion Day and First

workshop.

Our biggest project currently is our forum in Sydney Town Hall on Thursday 6th March on the topic of sexual violence and abolishing the colleges. We have Jenny Leong, Priyanka Bromhead and Sarah Williams speaking, and will be reading some testimonies from college students. We are so excited for this event and encourage everyone to come along.

In the next couple of weeks we will be launching a campaign to increase period products on campus. The USU was planning to do this and has now frustratingly withdrawn that plan, citing a lack of complaints. In that case, we will give them some complaints!

Nations rights at large. Anthony Albanese’s support for “Australia Day,” combined with Peter Dutton’s flagrant dog-whistling and outright racism has allowed Australian bigotry to (further) mutate, culminating in a neo-Nazi march in Adelaide. The Education Officers attended the Invasion Day rally and will always support the cause of First Nations justice and liberation.

The EAG will have a stall at Welcome Week and we encourage everyone to come along. We will host our first meeting of the year at 1pm on Thursday 27 February in Carslaw Seminar Room 355. We’ll discuss our plans for the year ahead, as well as strategy regarding how to best fight against attacks on students through the CAP and course cuts. We hope to see you there!

As always, we stand with Palestine. We condemn the escalating violence in the West Bank, the continuous ceasefire violations, and the dangerous calls from Trump to ethnically cleanse Gaza even further. Fuck Trump, and free Palestine.

Always was, always will be.

In love and rage,

Martha and Ellie

Shovan

Martha Barlow, Ellie Robertson

What is Contract Cheating?

What is contract cheating?

The University defines contract cheating as getting someone to complete part or all of your assessment (hand in or exam). This includes:

• buying an assignment from a tutoring company;

• having a friend complete some of your assessment;

• having someone coach you through an assessment;

• using a model answer from a tutoring website or social media (e.g., facebook or wechat);

• uploading or downloading lecture notes, assignments or exams to an information sharing site, e.g., CourseHero, Github, CHEGG;

• getting someone to do your exam; or

• submitting an assessment which has been generated in whole or part by artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT. Is it serious?

The University considers contract cheating very seriously. It puts your integrity and the integrity of your course at risk. It also leaves you vulnerable to blackmail in the future, where we have seen some students being threatened with being exposed to the University, family, or future employers, if they did not pay an ongoing “fee”. The likely penalty for contract cheating is a suspension from the Uni for a semester or two. How can you get help for your assessments?

If you need help with your assessments the best place to start is with your tutor. Ask them to clarify information you do not fully understand. If you are not satisfied

with the help you are getting from your tutor, talk to your lecturer or subject coordinator about getting extra help. Tell them the websites or tutoring supports that you would like to use and ask them if it is ok. If you are in any facebook or wechat groups for your subjects, do not use any answers to assessment questions that are published, nor should you share any answers or course notes. Be aware that most of those groups have members who are contract cheaters who are there to try to make money. It is extremely likely that anytime you use sites like CHEGG, Github or CourseHero that you will be accused of contract cheating, so it is best to completely avoid these sites. If you are working with another student on an assignment only talk generally about the concepts, rather than specifically discussing the structure or content of your assignment. Do not make notes while you talk. Do not give them a copy of your assignment or take a copy of theirs.

If you have any doubts at all, explain your situation to your tutor to check if they think you are legitimately cooperating or if you would be considered academically dishonest.

What if you are accused of academic dishonesty?

SRC Caseworkers can help you to respond to allegations of academic dishonesty or student misconduct. Start by reading our online information on Academic Honesty & Integrity (see link below) to get a better understanding of your situation, then contact an SRC caseworker (bit. ly/SRCcaseworker) and send them the relevant documents to get advice specific to your situation. The SRC is independent of the University and caseworkers will give you free, confidential advice.

Ask Abe SRC Caseworker Help Q&A

Dear Abe, What paperwork do I need to get when I’m renting a house? What do I need to keep a copy of?

Thanks, JM

(BSci)

Thanks, Abe Tenancy receipts/bonds

Dear JM, You should keep a copy of your lease/contract; your condition report (as well as any photos you took of things that were dirty or

damaged when you moved in); and receipts for all money paid (bond, rent, etc). Email these documents and photos to yourself, so you always have a copy, which is timestamped. When you move out of that home, you will be able to refer to your lease/contract and condition report with photos, to make sure you get your bond returned.

2. Boat propeller

5. Common undergraduate degree

6. Union representing casino workes

7. Having throbbing temples, maybe 9. “Bravo ____!”; conductor

representing

1. Cartoon character and transit system

2. Like the clues in all the words in this puzzle

3. Impress and then some

4. Top Level Domain for large Eastern European country

5. Religious chess piece

8. USU equivalent at UNSW; Rainbow’s shape

12. Undeserving of positions; nephews, maybe

14.

Crossword

2025 STUDENT YEAR PLANNER

Honi in the ‘70s: Tony Abbott Invades SRC Womens’ Room with Channel Ten

Lotte Weber delves into the archives.

Tony Abbott’s USyd days are a murky haze of delinquent legends. Stories include Abbott cutting Liberal-hostile pages out of Fisher Library’s Honi archives, assaulting fellow student politicians, and of course, inviting a Channel Ten media crew into autonomous spaces in the SRC offices. In a 1979 edition, Honi writes, “He invaded level one of the Wentworth building on Thursday the 19th bringing with him a camera crew from Channel Ten… Tony locked himself and the camera crew in the womens’ room, breaking the SRC regulation that this room only be used by women… When people wishing to use the room attempted to get in they were told by Tony to leave, and that ‘this is a man’s room for the moment’. The article continues, “his response was to tell us that as president of the SRC, he has the ability to enter any room in the SRC he pleases… Many would question that the SRC presidency elevated its holder to such god-like authority as this… although obviously Tony thinks it does”.

Credit: Victor Zhang

Special Buys Bad. Same.

Token White Ginger Boy

Great for editing your local student newspaper or magazine.

Will sing Ed Sheeran at your kids 7th birthday. See PULP for more information.

Drake’s Orange Slipper

Fits a size 16 (years old)

Slightly dented from fall damage. Smells like a lawsuit.

The Name NLS

Great title for your... faction? Very unique. No political (tote) baggage here!

Honi Soit’s Dignity

After sending this email

2025 Honi Soit

Writing Competition

• All Sydney Uni students are invited to enter a fiction or non-fiction piece on the 2025 theme ‘artificial’

• WIN cash prizes - $6000 prize pool!

• Get published and kick start a career!