Myriad — Bildungsroman by UMSU communications

EDITION 5 - 2021

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY Myriad Magazine acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which this magazine was created. We pay respect to their Elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to Indigenous people reading and contributing to this magazine. We acknowledge that the lands on which this magazine was created and published are stolen. This magazine will be shared and read across many different lands that have their own culture, language, and history. Sovereignty was never ceded and this land always was, and always will be the land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Written by Jo Guelas 2

It's 2012 again and you've just come out of the cinema watching The Avengers for the first time. Afterwards, mum takes you grocery shopping and when you get home, you put the plastic bags into the drawer filled with more plastic bags from Safeway and $2 shops. You are better than Sharkboy and Lavagirl now. You're hoping you don't forget to pre-record Scooby Doo on Cartoon Network. Thank God for Foxtel. It's 2021 and you fell asleep to The Avengers again. Why do we keep coming back to things that we know are safe? Where is your nostalgia coming from? Is it yearning? Is it fear? Let's walk that street one last time before we move on to the next. Leave the 'burbs behind, trade in your high school uniform for your big boots, and head for the city lights before the border closes. Lorde will drop an album soon. What else are you waiting for? Looking forward to? Who will you be in a week's time? Think nostalgia and home. Think new beginnings and growing up.

Bildungsroman a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age 3

Contents

Acknowledgement of Country

Bildungsroman: A kaleidoscopic coming-of-age

Letters From The Office Bearers

Editors' Notes

Meet The Team

Bloodline by Dilini Jawawickrema (Painting)

Grandma Nancy's Chicken Kurma by Chelsea Rozario

Mama, I Fell In Love With My Coloniser by Nidhi Rao

Swimming Days by Ruth Jarra

Katara by Cathy La

With Love by Anindya Meiv

Fairy Floss by Ilundi Tinga

Untitled (2021) by Sunarith Lim (Digital Illustration)

Review: Over The Moon (2020) by Tharidi Walimunige

Kuhu, Do You Remember? by Anushka Singh

Digital Illustration by Anushka Singh

Initiate's Vow by Isi Ogwu

羅彩梨 (Painting)

Contents 33

家 (Home) by Carmen Chin (Photography)

Names Mirror: My Love-Hate Self by Vanessa Chan

Identity Resistance by Lauren Scott

Please, Give Me Your Hand by Xiaole Zhan

I Liked To Watch Him by Purnima Padmanabhan

Findings [

‫ سميتك هبة هللا‬by Hiba

Self Portrait by Frankey Chung (Digital)

Portrait of a Manor House: Wiradjuri Country by Patrick Mercer

Streisand In The Suburbs by Yasmin G Brock

Photography Series by Tharidi Walimunige

How To Make A Brown Girl Hates Herself by Pavani Athukorala

To All The Sites I've Loved Before by Crystal Koa

To Fathom Femininity by Eman K.

Untitled 2 by Shuyan (Lynne) Bian (Digital Illustration)

Tides of Fire by Vaishnavi Ravikrishna

First Person by Srishti Chatterjee

我们在找什么呢] by Kitman Yeung (Drawing)

Contents 63

Untitled 1 by Shuyan (Lynne) Bian (Digital Illustration)

A Critical Race Reading List by Caroline Wang

Digital Illustrations by GENTLECODA

When The Lights Turn On by Katha Villanueva

Raw by Kim Phan

Blurry Spaces, Boundaries Boundaries, A Love Letter To Old Devices by TD

Letter To My Baby Sister by Gemma Truong

perahera by Tharidi Walimunige

Humanity by Iza Munir Hamdani

Photography Pieces by Klesa Wilson

Paintings by Oluwadinimimu Olayanju

e h t m o r f Letters

Hello! I'm Mohamed and my story with the POC department began at a collective event in 2019. Walking in, I can't describe the rush and happiness that it gave me to find a space for BIPOC, a space for people with shared experiences and one that I felt at ease in. I'm beyond grateful and happy that I have been your officer this year, and created that space for other students. Dear Reader, Welcome to the fifth edition of Myriad. Historically, art has existed to appease a white audience. I don’t have to tell you that, I’m sure. You already know that because, even now, it’s almost always the case. Myriad’s establishment set out to carve a space for creatives of colour. It’s still a long way from the much needed transformation of creative spaces to account for and respect voices of colour, but through Myriad, we exist unapologetically. Our community hosts people of different backgrounds, identities, cultures. Our community is a celebration of our individuality. So, as you flip through these pages, allow yourself to connect to each piece. Every pixel of every page is an ode to the intersectionality of who we are. To our editorial team, thank you for your diligence. In these pages I find your mindfulness; in these same pages, you let me find a story. With great care, you’ve preserved the experiences and intentions of the submitted pieces and made it look effortless. To our authors, our poets, our artists, thank you for your vulnerability. In these pages I find your story; in these same pages, you let me find myself. I only hope that your art is treated with the care and respect it so deserves. To our reader, thank you for joining us. In these pages, I found myself; in these same pages, I hope you find the same sense of belonging. Half a decade’s worth of existence has brought us to you, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. La lecture c'est se connaître à travers l'autre. – Christian Bobin Love, Emily AlRamadhan

Leading a department during this year has been quite tough, being in and out lockdowns, and being overseas for the first half of the year! This year was so packed, we’ve held many social events, parties, and games nights, we’ve also increased opportunities for students to get involved, through anti-racism workshops, and being part of the Myriad dream team! Myriad is one of my favorite initiatives the department has, reading people’s stories, BIPOC narrative, connects me to its authors. It gives me joy and pride seeing our stories, our voices, in Myriad. This year, We’ve broken barriers, by implementing a Halal food policy within UMSU, developing a Diversity and Inclusion module for incoming students, holding the first-ever Indigenous Sovereignty and Bla(c)k liberation week, and hopefully conducting a university-wide survey of on-campus racism. With each project, I fell in love with the department again, it’s the promises and the people that kept me driven. On a personal note, becoming the first Black POC officer has meant a lot given the department's history with Bla(c)k exclusion. I’m ending my term with my mind at ease knowing I won’t be the last. To my successors, aim for the stars & shatter ceilings, I have faith in you. I want to give special thanks to Sepsi Munalula & Yar Majak, to my friends and fellow UMSU officers, whose support made all of this possible. I'll forever be grateful for making my dream a reality. Love, Mohamed Hadi

Dear reader, What a wonderful space to meet you in! We’ve all grown up in different places, in different ways, to become different people, but we all find ourselves here today sharing our words. There’s this line in the diaries of Katherine Mansfield that goes: Dear Friend, from my life I write to you in your life. We thought this would be a nice way to welcome you to our Bildungsroman edition of Myriad magazine: Dear friends, from our lives we write to you in your lives. Myriad’s a special space. In a world of media still trying to reconcile itself with its living history of whiteness and erasure, Myriad is a place where the voices and lives of communities of colour — ours— will always be heard, celebrated, and remembered.

a word from eac h of I remember coming across these photos of myself as a little kid with a favourite hat of mine: a rainbow-striped beanie with two brown curls of pigtail-ed faux hair included. I spent a good deal of my pre-sentient toddler life bald because my popo thought my hair would grow back stronger and healthier each time she shaved it. It was a minor quirk that separated my childhood from my white friends, but one that foreshadowed larger differences to come. Later, I remember coming across a book that described an Asian mother clipping a baby character’s eyelashes in order for them to grow back stronger and healthier. I laughed out loud. I think the biggest thing I longed for as a child was to recognise myself in the world surrounding me — to see people that I could imagine myself becoming. Dear reader: I hope you recognise yourself — past, present, and future — in these words. I hope you laugh out loud.

So I know Julia Gillard is a white woman, but there’s this one (1) line from her farewell speech that occupies a third of my mind: “It will be easier for the next woman.” And it’s a roundabout way of going about it, but I think about it almost every day because the very act of existing as a person of colour is a political act, and from that I know whatever you and I do now will make it easier for the next people who come. Thank you so much to the Editorial Team—our Editors and subeditors— and to you for picking up this bad boy. Have a blast, bestie.

Photos have always been a big part of my family. Growing up, my favourite activity was to flip through our stacks of photo albums that contain decades of memories and history. When the theme for this edition of Myriad was decided, I wanted to visually create a sense of nostalgia and reflection in a playful and down-to-earth way. But of course, I owe it up to my amazing sub-editors, who have brought these sentiments to life through their talents and dedication. I hope the readers can feel the care and affection that were given to each piece by the contributors, editors, sub-editors and everyone who worked on this edition. Above all, I hope everyone can find pieces of themselves and fragments of their own coming-of-age stories through these pages. Happy reading!

We’d like to thank every contributor who shared their words so beautifully and generously in our issue. We feel so, so lucky to be able to read and love your words. We’d also like to thank everyone on the editing team — your careful eyes and ears have helped each piece be the best that it can be. Lastly, we’d like to thank you, dear reader. We hope you reminisce and revel in these words and stories, and then go out and make your own! Love, Kaley, Jo, and Xiaole (Your Myriad 2021 Editors)

G G N N I I C C U U D D O O R R T T N IIN

"I am Kitman Yeung (she/her), I experiment with nostalgic sensitivities through mediums of illustrations, oil painting and animation. "

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"An aspiring graphic designer. Drawing and painting enthusiast. Useless plant parent."

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istics and "majoring in lingu ic languages; mus criminology; love " keeps me sane

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er) 2nd "Hasti (she/h student year Design (´◡`)"

Hasti B ahar (s he/her)

(she/her) Jenny Chen

Janna Dingle (s he/her)

"Hello! My name is Janna Dingle (she/he r) and my fascination with magazines and graphic designs ha s led me to take pa rt in Myriad's 2021 ed ition. In my free tim eI like to read, take ca re of my cats or illustrate. "

GRAPHIC TEAM

EE E H H T E T H T H T T E T E E EEEETT M M E M M M M A A E E TT

E E V V I I T T A A E E R C CR

Kat ha Vill anu eva (sh e/h er)

"I'm a science gal who loves reading literature in her spare time! "

"I love reading so much more than writing; if there was a way to become a writer without actually writing, I'd have found out about it already!"

Stephanie Vita (sh e/her)

my Nigerian and "Hi! I’m Isi, I’m a e she/her. I’m pronouns ar g and n ti ri Creative W ar ye d n co se all nt and I love Politics stude nres are n! My fave ge things writte and olitical fiction speculative p urite y all-time favo poetry, and m and Toni Gillian Flynn e ar rs o th au Morrison!!"

" Hi, I'm Nidhi - creative sub bie for Myriad 2021. I love cats, puns, the colour yellow, experimenta l poetry and intersectionality! "

Isioma Ogwu (she/her)

of " I'm a Masters udent Criminology st ity of at the Univers k in or Melbourne, w re the Disability ca ve lo d sector, an essly writing shamel ry!" unhinged poet

Nidhi Rao (she/her)

yake Methni Dahana (she/her)

Purnima Padmanabhan

" I’m a desperate screenwriter with low iron and I somehow got lucky enough to subedit for Myriad; if you’re a TV producer and you’re reading this, please hire me I’m super cool I swear. "

(she/her)

E E H H T T S S I I E E R R Y Y R H HEE R A A TT

N N E E M M M M O O C C M A A E TTE M

mi urns/ Na Namita B

"Second year JD student trying to balance out study with some creative fun!"

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"Third year sociology and media communications student, twenty-second year confused, small human." student, current BA a is h it a "F er, and pport work u s y it il b a dis scinated urnalist fa aspiring jo l, s historica by all thing ." ry a and culin linguistic,

Iza Munir (she/her)

(she/her) Faith Tabalujan

ndez María Paula Herná (she/her)

I am a woman " My name is María and rolled in the from the global South en Studies. I like Master of Development tiful sunsets of soup and also the beau my bike Melbourne. I enjoy riding and out of everywhere both during lockdown. "

"Caroline wan ts a radical re imagining of Asian Aust ralia. She’s tir ed of “Where are yo u from?” stori es and trauma-as-sp ectacle; instea d, she wants to see an Asian Aust ralian identity and p olitics outside of whiteness. Cu rrent book recommendat ion: Minor Fe elings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition by Cathy Park H ong."

rs of Public "Art is studying a Maste es music, and International Law, lov thoughts coffee and has too many sion shows. To about movies and televi tes straight be accosted for 47 minu ntly about whatever he’s curre free to dig him listening to, please feel ss pile of legal out from the most restle research. "

er) Caroline Wang (she/h

Arthur Chandler/ Art (he/him)

Bloodline (2021) Dilini Jayawickrema Painting 30cm x 40cm "The image encapsulates and symbolises experiences, memories, and emotions one goes through over a lifetime. The front on gaze makes the image intimidating and evokes curiosity of the viewer. The wrinkles, blemishes and white hair show the physical changes one goes through their life, yet it is also symbolistic of emotional toughness we gain over time through experiences."

Katara Cathy La

羅彩梨

Acrylic on canvas painting, 20cm x 25cm

" I fell in love with 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' as a kid, and my understanding and appreciation of the show's depth has only grown since. I think what really captured my attention was the richness of the Avatar universe, which is heavily based on Asian and Indigenous cultures. As a young girl, I really looked up to Katara. I love seeing WoC characters who are strong in skill and virtue, because that's how we exist in the real world."

I close my eyes for a moment and start to feel myself floating. The wind pushing me up is akin to the hands of all the people I love. I open my eyes to something I’ve never experienced or seen before. I’m flying in the fairy floss of this world, and I don’t ever want to land. I pick up the postcard and hold it up towards the lifeless ceiling I always see before getting out of bed. I hear footsteps creaking on our old wooden floor. Through the corner of my eye, I see June coming into the room. He raises an eyebrow, shooting me a look of confusion. I keep my eyes locked onto the postcard. I turn it around and see a photo of a heart-shaped fairy floss. I chuckle. My eyes dance to the familiar scrawl underneath, that reads like a love song.

His eyes widen. “Where is he now?” “Spain.” “Why now?” June asks. “Why not now? There’s never going to be a right time. I know the outcome is uncertain, but I’ve got to do it.” “Why?” I look away. “He’s coming back soon. I’m sick of hiding myself June. ” June sighs. He wraps his arms around me. “I wish I could tell you it’s going to be alright.”

“What are you doing?” June asks. “Today’s the day I start living, June,” I say whilst looking at the postcard. June sighs. “What is it this time?” he asks condescendingly. “Oh June, so full of life, so full of hope, so young and naïve. As your older brother I have so much wisdom to give you.” “Wisdom? You?” He snatches the postcard out of my hand. He snatches the postcard out of my hand. “Give it back!” I wrap my arm around his neck and reach for the postcard. He drops it and sees the fairy floss photo.

Sunlight pours in through all the windows. I look in the mirror my mum uses to put on makeup. Her eyeshadow palette calls to me. The colour ‘Ballin’ catches my eye. It looks as though someone has managed to grind 24 karat gold into an eyeshadow square. I apply it the way I’ve seen many YouTubers do it, the pigment popping against my dark skin. I’m reminded of when I was ten and I tried putting on makeup for Christmas. Grandpa immediately wet a cloth and wiped my face aggressively. 'Don’t act like a girl, you look ridiculous!’ he said angrily. Tears poured down my face until I realised both mum and dad were looking away as if they agreed with him.

“Fairy floss?”

“Yeah, it’s what we had on our first date nearly a year ago.”

I haven’t worn makeup since then. My palms are sweaty, soaked as if they’re underwater. I slap myself.

I pick up the postcard.

“Get it together.”

“I’m going to tell mum and dad and…” I hold the postcard up to his face.

Breathing slowly, I check both eyes. They look like gold fishes drawn by children. Still, I have never looked better.

by ilundi tinga

Fairy Floss

I wonder how they’ll react to it this time. And with that, fear hits, as if this is my last day. Ten million thoughts invade my mind. I look out of the window, paranoid that someone might be watching.

“Are you a tourist or a permanent resident?” she asks.

All I see is a heart-shaped cloud in the sky. Like fairy floss. Free.

“Do you have ID and proof of citizenship?” she asks, still looking at the computer.

A light bulb turns on in my head.

“I do, but is proof of citizenship necessary?” I raise an eyebrow. She ignores me and continues typing. I sigh and give her my passport. She carefully looks at it.

The bus I’m in lurches to a stop. The smell of weed infiltrates it as a group of guys get on. They all wear a uniform of white singlets and tattoos. They take their time casually walking through the aisle, following what seems to be the leader at the front. He has pale skin that I can tell turns into a tomato as soon as it hits the sun. His teeth are yellow, probably from cigarettes, judging from the smell. He slowly saunters towards me, his pants falling below his butt. The instant his eyes meet mine, his face begins to shrivel up like a scrunched-up piece of white paper. His eyes begin to inspect me. My heart doesn’t know what to do so it abandons ship, and I’m left as a living corpse. “Hey mate, your makeup is sick,” he says, nodding at me. I’m speechless.

“I’m an Australian citizen. Why?” I look down at her busy typing.

“I didn’t realise we were at the airport,” I say with a fake smile. She sighs and gives the passport back. After finally finishing the paperwork, I sit down beside a white woman and her husband. Both keep glancing over warily. “Have you purchased your ticket?” husband asks, accusing. I look up at him.

her

“Yes, that’s why I’m here waiting, like you are.” The woman nudges him to move one seat over, putting a distance as if my presence is repellent.

The bus halts a second time. My phone buzzes. A text from mum. I wait for the blood to start moving through my body again. I get up and walk to the front of the bus. I turn around to look at the group of guys in a new light. "Thanks for saying that!" I shout. I have goosebumps. In bold letters, the words ‘Skydive Melbourne’ are written across the front desk. The receptionist, an old white woman, looks at me with a glare that contains the pits of hell. “Are you here to skydive?” she asks. “Nah, I’m here to get a massage,” I say sarcastically. She stares at me. I awkwardly chuckle.

‘Can you buy some eggs and milk today?’ I type. ‘Yes’. I’m pulled back into the pool of anxiety around telling her. When I was thirteen, I saw a boy around my age looking at eggs in the supermarket. He was wearing a shirt that said ‘Love is Love’ with a rainbow heart underneath. I couldn’t help but stare at it. “You shouldn’t stare,” Mum said as she dragged me away. I asked her if I could have a shirt like that. She said we couldn’t afford it, but she bought June an expensive Star Wars shirt that same week.

“Yes, I’m here to skydive.”

I get up and walk back and forth whilst biting my nails, waiting to be called onto the plane. I begin to rehearse what I’m going to say to my parents in my head. My mind seesaws as I prepare myself for different scenarios. Maybe Mum will cry and faint while dad holds her and looks at me like I’m the devil. Maybe they’ll both laugh and cry while hugging me. Maybe they’ll pack my bags and kick me out. What if Mum smiles at the postcard? What if Dad asks me about him? This is it, there’s no going back. I’m in a plane surrounded by white, dancing clouds. It reminds me of when we danced together, how our eyes would lock. His ebony eyes pulled me into a trance. His hands held me securely. How I wish he was here to do that instead of sending me postcards. The instructor taps my shoulder, telling me we’re going to jump. Waves of unease consume me, but I know it’s not the scariest thing I’m going to do today. My fists tighten. With a deep breath I step off the plane. The air drags my skin back as if I’m elastic. I’m hit with a million air bullets. My soul begins to ascend. I close my eyes for a moment and start to feel myself floating. The wind pushing me up is akin to the hands of all the people I love. I open my eyes to something I’ve never experienced or seen before. I’m on top of the world and at this moment, it doesn’t matter what colour my skin is or who I love. I’m flying in the fairy floss of this world, and I don’t ever want to land.

Dear Kuhu from 2011, Do you remember the time you locked horns with our first-grade teacher? It was about your grades in an English grammar test. You really didn't like those red circles around your answers, especially when you believed that you were right. It was stupid to fight over grades. Nonetheless, you were right to fight because Ms. Mittal’s ‘reasons’ were not reasonable enough. You knew that her response of: “Those are the rules of English” was not good enough. There was absolutely no reason to think that 'the doctor' should be referred to in subsequent sentences as 'he' & not 'he/she' or 'they'. You didn't know the gender of the doctor. Your teacher didn't bother to mention it in the test. Why was it wrong to refer to them as ‘they’? Why did you lose a mark for that? It would be quite a while after the incident that you would realise the importance of those questions, learn about identity and pronouns in a way that your first-grade English teacher could never explain to you. For now, know that “English is a stupid language” is not a good enough explanation. Do you remember how many times you felt weird when you got called a foreigner? Some said it was your nose, some said your eyes. They said it made you look not Indian. You either looked Chinese or Japanese or Nepali, none of which was a bad thing, except you were made to believe it was. So, you had slightly South-East Asian features. Why was it a big deal? What you found even weirder was being praised for having fair skin. All that made you question your identity and made you realise for the first time how people around you formed notions of identity based on physical features. It would be years later that you would become aware of terms like internalised racism and decolonising beauty standards. For now, know that you are as Indian as you can be. Do you remember how much you loved pink? Not hot pink though, that brightness used to hurt your eye. It still does. Pastel pink was prettier. Much to your astonishment, most of your dresses and toys were already pink because pink was for girls. You didn’t mind, unless it was hot pink (unfortunately, most of the time it was). But pastel you loved. When you grew a little older, you tried to hate it, since it was too girly for you. But in your heart, you know you still loved it. It was just the idea of pink being the girlish, timid colour that didn’t suit you well. It would be much later that you would learn about the origins of pink—how it was the colour of the brave. About pink capitalism and how it constructs gender roles and identities. For now, know that it's you who decides what pink says about you. Do you remember all this? Because it’s important that you do. I am here, writing this letter to you as I prepare myself for another day of obsessing over human identity and its role in conflicts, resolution, development, and the like. I do so because of you. It was you who first instigated in me this passion for exploring human identity when you asked those questions to your first-grade teacher. When you asked those questions to yourself. For that, I am grateful. You must keep questioning anything that does not make sense to you because it is your questions that have set me on this path to find the answers.

Kuhu, do you remember? Anushka Singh

Yours truly, Anushka Singh. September, 2021.

As the title suggests, this piece was created as a representation of the artist’s personal journey of identity formation and expression. The greyish-black canvas attempts to showcase the artist’s PoC background. On the same canvas, this piece has attempted to highlight how shades of identity are ever evolving, suggested by the overlapping strokes. The rest of the negative space is also suggestive of the journey yet to cover, and therefore, the absence of colour here is symbolic of the potential shades of identity in the future."

Anushka Singh Digital Illustration, 1233px X 1982 px

INTIATE’S VOW Isi Isi Ogwu IsiOgwu Ogwu

One who witnesses – be

Adorned with clay,

there as She changes me,

crowned in commune with

I am the Bride of the

the divine.

Orisha , sister change

Transformation,

me,

reawakening in my Saint –

Chi and Eke3, change me I sow sweet offerings, harvest the answers of

The breaking of twenty

the Gods,

legs and fifty wings,

Copper lady, journey with

Consume, with abundance, feast-fed ashé 4,

me today, change me

change me Strip me bare, break my cloth – the ram battles

Say, priestess, what

headfirst,

destiny shall you grow

Ncheta , beneath your

from your palms?

skin, divine image lay,

I carry kola-nut, seek my

change me

ancestors' blessings

and pray they change me 5

Iyalawo ! Mother of mysteries, In the line of my mother, and hers, change me.

1 2

Yoruba deity Memories

3 Types of physical and spiritual embodiment in Igbo spirituality

4 5

A power to make change Ìyá mother, awó mysteries

家 (Home)

Carmen Chin Film Photography

" 'Home' is a complicated concept for me, it isn't something that comes as straightforward as it would for most people. I was born and have most of my family in Malaysia, but was raised and lived most of my life in Singapore, so 'home' isn't just one place, but an amalgamation of unique aspects from these two places that come together that define the word for me on a personal level. These photos were taken by me over the past year, either of my trips back to Malaysia or the familiar places and roads in Singapore."

Haji Lane, Singapore

Cemetery in Selangor, Malaysia

Eastwood road, Singapore

Malaysia Food stall in

Old salon in Singapore

, Singapore East Coast Park

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希希

陳泳希

Vanessa Chan

IDENTITY RESISTANCE

[Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this piece contains the image of those who have passed away.]

CW/s, racism, cultural genocide, incarceration, stolen generations.

Every now and then, most often when I’m sat through yet another tedious late-night meeting, my grandfather will send me a text message. They’ll contain a childhood photo of my younger self with a relative I can’t remember the name of, or near an entire essay on precisely how to cook that curry we grew up on. Occasionally he’ll throw over some light reading – on the history of our family, our successes, or perhaps the latest developments on land management up north on our country. They read as a reminder, at times clear in intent and others less explicit. I am Arabana, I mustn’t ever forget that, and how could I? I grew immersed in this pride – in my auntie’s beautiful dot paintings pinned to the walls, playing around with those beautifully carved clapping sticks. I felt it in tearing up just a little when I heard those distinguishable intonations away from home. I was taught that there is so much beauty in that legacy, and that I was intrinsically and irrevocably connected to my ancestors, and the lands in which they came. My mother would promise over the years to take me and my little siblings up north to Kati Thanda, on our ancestral lands, to appreciate its beauty when filled up after those long years of drought. I felt my spirit at ease watching the endless expanse of red on those long drives to Mparntwe to see my aunties, uncles, and a seemingly infinite number of cousins. There are so many of them, hundreds, that I could hardly keep track of whose kid was whose. This is how I define my positionality to this land, and how I find myself relating to the world in its whole – in family, culture, and heritage. As I grew into my adolescence, my peers began to suggest, or at times more directly decide, that I could not be of whom my family had spoken of with so much love in their hearts, because I had come out of my mother’s womb far too fair. -

Endlessly subjected to skeptical implications and interrogations of my existence, I had felt thrown into an impasse where to identify proudly would be condemned, but to not would be total rejection of my upbringing – and in turn the hopes and dreams of my ancestors before me. I recall all too vividly when I started to doubt if, in my generation, I was “Aboriginal enough” anymore to claim that heritage, a tragic thought in hindsight. I can’t have been more than ten or so, sat neat in a row in a rowdy, overcrowded classroom. Every little Aboriginal kid is familiar with this story, I think. The teacher was up front trying to convey the horrors of cultural genocide to thirty children thereabouts far too young to understand. They showed this picture on the projector. The clean chronology of an assimilation program – a “half-blood” grandmother, her “quadroon” daughter and finally, her perfectly bred-out “octaroon” child. He had been deemed white enough to blend into mainstream society and had lost enough of his culture to be marked as a respectable Australian nationalised. All I could see was my complexion in direct comparison and I saw myself reflected in that little boy. I decided there that I must have been a bit too bred-out myself. It took almost a decade from there to find the security to unapologetically proclaim my identity, and for the inquisition near analogous to gaslighting it has subjected me to, I claim an incredible amount of pride in that. As I matured, I came to understand that my appearance in of itself could be an illustration of that erasure, but only if I allowed it to be. My change in perspective developed into a source of strength, that when one looks more like me - fair skin, green eyes, hardly the accepted “image” of an Aboriginal person - identity itself becomes an act of resistance.

A b d f t m s i t p w a a

Forcibly assimilated into a settler-colonial individualist existence where those distinctive markers of heritage only serve to define you as the other, persistence against erasure is the greatest mark of courage. Aboriginal – how dare you claim as such, when they had tried so hard to eradicate you from existence? In later years I have found an incredible amount of solidarity in my peers, often people of colour marginalised in identity themselves. For them, and the courage they have imparted onto me, I am eternally grateful. To tell the country that you’re not Australian – you’re Arabana, or you’re Wiradjuri, that you are still here, I consider this as one of the loudest forms of resistance. If I were to simply accept that I wasn’t Aboriginal enough to do so, it would have been a testament to the pervasiveness and brutality of that insidious program to remove us from modernity – which, while ringing painfully true, I couldn’t choose to further this cultural erasure in good conscience.

I d “ h c n c f t

That image continues to profoundly shape who I am today, but now in a way that only strengthens, rather than instilling any sort of doubt or uncertainty. Where I was once unable to even bring myself to check that box on meaningless standardised testing, I now openly share my truth to anyone who cares to listen. I am Aboriginal, and proudly so, because I was not meant to be. I might look more like the young boy in that portrait of assimilation, but that is only a testament to my heritage enduring. I owe this to my ancestors and elders who fought so hard to persist – in disease, incarceration, and genocide. I look through those old black and white pictures, of Clara and of Minnie, and God, we are still here. This fight extends beyond the individual, and only together in strength can we resist in a country hell-bent on erasing us from the narrative. And so we will continue to persist, in generations to come. My children too will be proudly Arabana.

LAUREN SCOTT

Please, give me your hand

CW: Depression, suicidal ideation The migraine came on like a crucifixion, like having the right lobe of my brain nailed against time, and all I can say is it felt like a gift. Utterly unasked for unearnt like growing teeth or a blade in the abdomen to these things the body can only say Yes. The rain came on sudden and soft, and the smell of it: dirt and earth. Then the sky to my left breaking blue and clear as soon as it began, ending. Cars driving by in a glowing sheen of dew like gigantic undying flowers, new as the beginning of time. The end of the world and the start of it again and again in the death of each second. Is that what is meant when something is said to be a given? What is an absolute gift but that which is self-contained? Without conditions, causes, consequences.

Does not every self-contained thing contain within itself the promise of destruction? I needed a Panadol to end the pain, then remembered how I had emptied them all in the tin can I had left by the mattress on the floor of my friend's room when I was unable to sleep alone and so badly wanted to die Wanted to hold the act of dying in my palm like a verb made into a noun. Like a full stop at the end of a sentence that has already happened— isn't that a given? Death but a matter of punctuation. At least the migraine was articulable, known, the throbbing between seconds like a heartbeat. I hope you can understand I can only give so many answers to a disease that occurs where reasons end. Please, give me your hand— I am reaching to you with my pain like a handful of flowers

Xiaole Zhan

Purnima Padmanabhan 40

‫سميتك هبة هللا‬ Hibatallah (‫ )هبة هللا‬pronounced Hee bat Allah. A gift from God, is what my parents named me. Hiba (pronounced Hee ba) means gift and Allah means God. Growing up in a non-Western Country, my name was never something that I thought about twice. While my name was not super common, it was not out of the ordinary, plus everyone just called me Hiba which is a very common name across many cultures. Spending my teenage years in Australia, I have had my name not only mispronounced —but sometimes people have just decided to opt out and call me by my very boring and bland surname - Adam. I have been called many names, including Hiber, Hibtulah, Hiper, young- lady- over- there and, on some occasions, Emma. If you are my friend, I have shown you at some point the list of names people have decided is my name over email. I have been asked once "Why don’t you change my name?". I was a bit taken back at the moment. Changing my name has never crossed my mind. To me Hiba was not a very difficult name, and even if it was, I think as humans we are owed to have people try to learn to pronounce our names. It is a basic level of respect. So I won’t be changing my name to something easier for mainly white people to be able to pronounce. If they can pronounce Björk, they can pronounce Hiba. A gift from God is what my parents named me, and it is exactly how I see my name. Something that no matter how many times is mispronounced and butchered reminds me of my complex and ever growing identity.

Hiba 42

Self Portrait Frankey Chung Digital

"In 2020, I identified with a fragmented version of myself and wondered why. Here, I pursue the multi-faceted aspects of who I am in a collage of selfies taken throughout a year that felt like nothing and everything. "

Portrait of a Manor House: Wiradjuri Country Patrick Mercer Rocky Ponds Road was a meandering dirt track that made its way through the scrubby hill country from the hamlet of Cumnock, to the road connecting neighboring Yeoval to the regional “centre” of Parkes. It seemed that far west, a “centre” was defined by having a Target or a second Macca’s—even still, it was the nearest supermarket for hours. Unsealed roads bookended my school day; a six-hour commute from dirt track to tarmac, two school buses, and a car ride each way. 5:30 am starts to catch the school bus from Cumnock to Molong (“many rocks” in Wiradjuri), then another bus on to Orange before arriving at the Catholic high school my parents stubbornly committed me to. The schools of Orange had conspired to design a flowing, efficient series of school day finishing times intended to ship the farm kids back to the tapestry of nowhere towns across the Central West of New South Wales. “The bell doesn’t dismiss you, I do,” as all teachers flex. “Wrong, sir—the bus driver does!” Mani was the third and final farmstead our family had lived on. The first, Eurimbla, which either got its name from, or gave its name to, the local district, had been lent to us by a fine Christian farming family, the Potties. In an act of unmitigated charity, they had vacated to let us live there while Dad renovated the house we had moved to New South Wales to live in. ‘Barina’ was the house

Nwe had “won” in a $1-a-week rental program designed to give Cumnock’s population a shot in the arm. With six kids (my second youngest brother, Jed, was only weeks old at that point), we certainly were a dose of what the village needed. But Barina had been abandoned for twenty years— crawling with snakes, rats, owls, bats. Redback spiders lurked in every boot, and the sweltering heat blew in from the northwest, desert winds trapped there by the hills. Outdoor toilet, asbestos walls, and black mould ceilings: we had retreated first, all eight of us, into a borrowed caravan before the Pottie’s generous offer.

Eurimbla was where I had learnt the meaning of neighbourship, failed to learn to ride a motorbike, and experienced the joy of caring for animals. Geese, chooks, and guinea fowl; entertaining farm dogs of questionable breeding, bored and chained to lamp posts. Lambing seasons spent shooing away crows and foxes and eagles who would strike birthing sheep at their most vulnerable. Late nights and early mornings of feeding greedy, orphaned lambs. By the time we had moved to Mani, I had been well and truly stripped of my urban naivety, acquainted instead with the benign beauty and savagery of nature, as well as the futility and often negative impacts of human intervention. My pet lambs considered themselves dogs in their mind’s eye. I had rescued them from the foxes and cruelty of the world, denying the crows, one of my Mother’s people’s totems, their rightful meal. They were quietly taken to slaughter, without my consent, by the farmer who rented Barina to us. I wept for them, just as I would weep for my chickens, who were taken in the night by a mother fox who I saw many times over the course of a winter. Dad had pointlessly shot at her once with a nail gun, probably just to temper my vengeance. Both the fox and the hen were settler pests on the landscape in their own way, but I had spent that winter tracking her den down,beneath a small bridge over a brook that fed into a string of dams. One spring afternoon, patrolling the bush near the creek, I stumbled

upon the mother who froze, a cocktail of fight and flight. There was also pleading in her eyes, while three cubs frolicking and playing behind her, unbothered by my presence. The colony makes enemies of all its twisted bastard offspring. I recognised now not a monster, but a mother with mouths to feed. Would my Mum have done any different? Mani Manor stood back a good few kilometres from Rocky Ponds Road, and collecting the mail was a task requiring a set of wheels. The “driveway” wove from paddock to paddock, through mobs of shorthorn heifers milling at the cattle grate as bulls jockeyed impetuously among themselves, separated from their prize by only thin, razor wire. A bull left to its own devices amongst a herd might root itself or its mates into injury or even death, not to mention the true waste—the real money in the cattle industry is made not in quantity but quality, by the sires and matrons of esteemed bovine bloodlines. No use crying over spilt milk, true—but wasted stud progeny? Now that would bring a tear to any stockman’s eye. The sparse bushland that stretched from the road eventually gave way to undulating pastures, a chequered mosaic of red clay and loamy earth, green grasses and yellow canola blooms. The mauve and indigo of Paterson’s Curse was a blessing in times of severe drought. Long-dammed creeks cut across the landscape like muddy pearl necklaces on the throat of the foothills before untaming themselves into the mountains above the valley. The Goobang Mountains, a wall of ancient stone—monuments to forgotten islands above long-gone inland seas—held Mani in a comforting embrace. The Goobangs ran north to south, separating

the goldfields of Parkes from the tablelands of the Central West. I cannot remember a happier isolation: two hours from the nearest supermarket, half an hour to the nearest village, an unfathomable distance from my friends, my dog Copper, an untrained kelpie, and a found solace in the hills. The bushranger Ben Hall had once roamed the Goobangs, and was the scourge of the squattocracy who lorded over their blood-stained gains of violence and the corrupt police who enforced their claim. They had eventually trapped him in the bush that had been his fiefdom. Even the most wary dog must eventually lie. Troopers had unloaded their rifles on his sleeping body early one morning, wrapping it in his swag before dragging his corpse behind their mounts through the dusty streets of Forbes—a spectacle of frontier justice and reminder to all who might dream of their own Goobang escapades. Like Achilles unto Hektor. No elaborate musings of “such is life”, nor a Priam to quietly reclaim the body of Ben Hall; Hall’s spirit was not the only one that lurked that old place. The New South Wales Police had locally perfected the savage art of the dawn ambush in those hills. In those hills, forgotten campsites long dormant along dried creek beds; flints and stone axes with the jagged teeth of purposeful human interaction; middens of stone and bone and sometimes teeth belied the shallow burial of a cautiously unremembered past. Ochre on rocks at the peak of a grand waterfall, the soot-lined ceilings of small caves—it was clear that it was not just the wombats who had imprinted on the granite and limestone of that place. Hushed whispers of tragedy echoed across centuries into the guffawed musings of the station manager who had recounted, as I repainted his white timber fences, of at least one massacre that had taken place on the old property. The house was old but not that old. The current building, which seemed to have been dropped haphazardly out of the sky, shying away from the beautiful vista up the mountains, was built in the 1930s. The ruins of several other houses remained on the property, and it was probable that this new structure was either near, or on top of, an older building. The house had been the childhood home of Her Majesty Queen Susan of Albania, née Susan Cullen-Ward. She had gone on to marry Crown Prince Leka, the only child of His Majesty King Zog (the first of the Albanians), and they had spent their lives together as King and Queen in exile after the Albanian throne had been abolished first by the Italians in the Second World War, and second by the Communist Party of labour of Albania. Their life together seemed a tenuous one, dancing from Sydney to Paris, then to Madrid where they were again forced to leave due to Leka's possession of weapons and hired mercenaries. A brief stay in Rhodesia, where Leka seemed to have been an arms dealer, was brought to an end with the triumph of Mugabe. An interesting life ended with throat cancer in the city of Tirana, Albania, where Susan was interred in the Mausoleum of the Albanian Royal Family. All this is to say that the house lay claim to an interesting history.

I had already met the colonial maid who paced the long central hall of Mani, from the servants’ quarters where my room was, past several sitting rooms, the kitchen, the master bedroom, and then on to the children's wing. She had been seen in the many mirrors of the house, and had once walked by my dad, my sister, and I as we watched television one evening. But her presence was no great shock as even in the house not so old, the history of the Country beneath it knew no bounds. In those hills was the first time I felt my Blakness—some sort of deeper, grounding, transcendental sense beyond superficial identity. It was late winter, bitterly cold up in the hills, even there on the borders of desert country. I’d wandered up the peak closest to home, a rocky outcrop that offered panoramic views down along the main creek in the area, towards a neighbouring property and then north towards Yeoval, offering two hundred degrees of flat country South to Cumnock. It was rife with wild goats, pigs and cattle, as well as emus and kangaroos and rock wallabies. I'd learned not to be bothered by sudden encounters, nor the sensation of wary eyes upon me. This time, however, was different. The same ethereal chill brought on by Mani’s forgotten matron gripped me—it was somehow deeper, a fear more primal than any before. An Aboriginal man, old by my estimation, stood on a nearby outcrop some kilometres away. The bush fell silent. The birds, a usual spectacle of colours and feathers and noise made themselves scarce; even the silliest galah wisened. This was nothing to take lightly as farmers in the area, including Mani’s station manager, had been known to shoot flocks of galahs and cockatoos, implying that their grip on the danger posed by humans was negligible. His gaze was piercing. Even across that kilometre, I could see that he held a staff or a spear. I'm not sure how long our standoff lasted, but eventually the wind rushed up the peak, whipping the trees into a swirling torrent as each individual leaf and branch came alive. The man was gone. I've only ex-

perience something so primordial once Though their names change across the three deserts they encompass, the story remains the same—seven sisters, whose physical remnants are the Three Sisters rock formation in the Blue Mountains, were followed by a man who wished to take one or all of them as wives, rejecting the careful kinship dictums of their people. He chased them across the continent to Cave Hill where the sisters leapt into the sky, becoming the Pleiades constellation. The man is said to have remained, residing in the cave. A savage desert rainstorm had chilled my feverish visions of the man atop the hill, illuminated by lightning, till I was woken by my swag collapsing under the weight of rainwater. I had described the vision to other Blak students I was on the trip with. “What? You’ve never had a Blakfulla moment before?” That house, that Country, has it’s claim on me even still. When Mum and I were away entertaining prospective elite Sydney boarding schools, it knew its grip might slacken. Dad had awoken to loud footsteps and running in the halls during our absence. When Red-Belly Black Snake Country heard I would be attending the prestigious St Ignatius Riverview College of North Shore Sydney, it had struck me low with a violent dose of Chickenpox, probably starting a chain reaction within my body that changed my life. My white blood cells betrayed me, attacking my endocrine system. I lost nearly half my body weight, was cursed by an insatiable thirst; sunken and hollow eyes peered out of a broken, dystrophied frame. I thought I had escaped that place, the six hour commutes, the quiet discomfort of isolation. It was not till I had returned from boarding school that the curse was confirmed. I was Diabetic now—a disease historically mistaken for a Vampire's curse, as its victims day by day wasted away by consumption, blood turning sweet. I was a Diabetic now, like so many of my people were cursed to become by white flour, white sugar, white weapons. I could never doubt my Blackness again.

YASMIN G BROCK

STREISAND IN THE SUBURBS There's a place for us, A time and place for us. Hold my hand and we're halfway there Hold my hand and I'll take you there… Somehow, Someday, Somewhere! (Leonard Bernstein & Stephen Sondheim, 1956)

I am trying to remember the first time I didn’t quite fit in, or perhaps felt the first niggling yearnings to be elsewhere. As one of the all-time favourite idols of my childhood sang once or twice: “Somewhere!”. It makes me wonder, why is it that some of us absorb the country of our birthright into every fibre of our being whilst others amongst us always hanker for tales of another clime or city? I mean, growing up I always felt a comfortable familiarity with Australia but at the same time a sense of restless detachment. Is that the inevitable product of being second-generation mixed-race progeny of a mother from a Tibeto-Burmese Indigenous tribe and a feisty Cornishman? After all, my own parents did leave their established northern hemisphere roots to begin a pioneering life in the Antipodes, circa 1970! Perhaps their sense of impetuous wanderlust was contagious? Whatever the case, I have since discovered that seemingly trivial details of my youth -

ended up having a peculiarly familiar resonance in later years. As for how Barbara into the picture, I just remember being awestruck by a female voice that could unleash such a mighty wave and range of sound! It was possibly only matched by her notoriously bossy obstinance. Later her otherworldly ‘Somewhere’ stood in stark contrast to the ‘easy going’ nature of the country I was born in and I became increasingly determined to find it. In my early childhood, many of my friends were children of immigrant parents. To my knowledge, they have all evolved into ‘well assimilated’ second-gen multicultural Australians — well on the surface anyway. Me? I think that’s arguable. Anyway, my folks began their first decade in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney where just about every new immigrant, cosmopolitan and eccentric gravitated. We weren’t rich but we were surrounded by quite a range of social and cultural stimuli. Yet despite my reasonably stimulating and fortunate early

childhood, the first time I felt an inkling of being somewhere far away from “all the action” was during an episode of Sesame Street. Yet despite my reasonably stimulating and fortunate early childhood, the first time I felt an inkling of being somewhere far away from “all the action” was during an episode of Sesame Street.

Sunny day everything's AOK Family neighbours and friends that's where we meet, Can you tell me how to get How to get to Sesame Street? (Stone, Hart and Raposo, 1970)

Yup, that was it. The faux brownstones of Brooklyn, Susan and Gordon the Black American couple full of warmth and goodwill, Bob the friendly White piano teacher, Big Bird, Maria and Luis the Puerto Rican store owners, Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Bert, and of course Cookie Monster. The myriad of other colourful puppets and John-

John who counted to ten through chubby cheeks and gesticulating fingertips were my people! Ah, I knew it then… Sesame Street was where it was happening. In comparison, Australia was borrrrring! I might have had a reasonably multicultural posse in Sydney, but Sesame Street (a product of melting pot New York if ever there was one) was next level! I was seeing skin tones and a culture unlike my own and I was transfixed. So, this feeling of straddling two worlds or more, how did it begin to manifest? Well, my mother once told me of an incident I find quite telling. She was out grocery shopping with me but I had lost interest in the fluorescent lit, cling film wrapped steaks and mince so had ventured over to the dairy shelves to gaze at the more colourful assortment of milk cartons, margarine tubs and yoghurts. Apparently, a lady was busy making her selection but smiled at the pint-sized purveyor of chilled lactose. I replied enthusiastically with: "My mummy is from India and my daddy is from England. My name is Yasmin!" Seems this was my version of small talk as

an emerging young socialite standing in the dairy section of a Bondi Coles, aged three. The response? "Well, you are an interesting little person aren’t you?" They soon became equal parts of my psyche. Dad with his sardonic sense of humour, love of Handel, Python and spy novels; mum with her effusive hospitality, delectable dishes and tales of growing up in Meghalaya. Perhaps that is why I used to and still do associate the vast majority of urban Australia with the comfortable and normal but stiflingly mundane. Distant lands have always seemed infinitely more exciting which is probably why I later spent 12 years living in them! And as a consequence of this, I have to admit that even now I feel more ‘global citizen’ than I do true blue ‘Australian.’Hmm, yes, I think this is where all the trouble may have begun! An interest in global imperialism and international, economyclass, backpacking was already forming. It was only a matter of time before this social butterfly would re-emerge as an anarchic socialist! Having parents from two different cul-

tures had a significant impact on me. I think this crosspollination made me aware of being ‘different’ from as early as I can remember. I also think it prompted a desire to traverse the globe. Australia was home but olde worlde Britain and the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India were part of my DNA.

only child of two rather unconventional, slightly batty immigrants and their motley assortment of friends from every possible social class, ethnic background, sexual orientation, intellectual slant, artistic or political leaning. It’s not very surprising that being an ‘easy fit' would prove a bit problematic in my adulthood.

So was it in my tweens? My teens? My troubled 20's? Well actually it was waaaaay earlier (and parentally assisted). I first travelled to India and England aged seven when my mum and dad decided it was time to visit their own families. If I hadn’t already eaten too many apples from the tree of knowledge, I had by the end of this trip. I thought “overseas” was fantastic! Now not only had I watched my parents and their Irish friends behaving badly at drunken barbeques with a mixture of fascination and disdain; or marvelled at the breathtaking harbour views and sleek interiors of the Jewish millionaire’s mansion, but I was also now “welltravelled!” Back in Sydney, my mind went into overdrive. Everything became a learning opportunity. On car rides through Darlinghurst and Kings Cross I remember asking my mum and dad: “Why are those drunk ladies stumbling around the street half-naked?” When watching programs with my parents: “What is a mistress anyway?”, and “Why do people take drugs?” When my English grandmother finally visited us she once grimaced: "She knows too much." Well, it wasn't my bloody fault was it? I was the

One Saturday night (still in my early childhood), I woke up in the middle of a movie my parents were watching on TV. It was an experience that imprinted itself on my imagination and shaped the trajectory of my life in years to come. I saw an image that propelled giddy bold ambitions and a restless sense of discontent with anything ordinary. Looking back, it was probably a blessing and a curse simply because of the expectations I would set up for myself. I saw a vision of a statuesque woman standing at the front of a ferry singing her heart out. Her hair was in this exquisite twist that crescendoed into a bouffant crown at the top of her head. She was dressed in some sort of vintage hourglass outfit of feminine adamance! Behind her was an expanse of ocean and ahead of her the unmistakable Manhattan skyline and Statue of Liberty! It was Barbara Streisand and she sang…

Don't tell me not to live Just sit and putter Life's candy and the sun's A ball of butter Don't bring around a cloud To rain on my parade…

I'm gonna live and live now Get what I want I know how One roll for the whole show bang One throw, that bell will go clang Eye on the target and wham One shot, one gun shot, and BAM! I'll march my band out I'll beat my drum And if I'm fanned out Your turn at bat, sir At least I didn't fake it Hat, sir, I guess I didn't make it Get ready for me, love 'Cause I'm a commer I simply gotta march My heart's a drummer Nobody, no, nobody Is gonna rain on my parade!

(Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, 1964) There are several chapters that unfold after this little epiphany. The scoop is that I went on to study dance and eventually to pursue a career as a contemporary ballet dancer. Of course, trying to achieve this in 1980’s-90’s Australia proved to be highly problematic. But there was some mettle in Barbara that stayed with me and helped me to last the distance. Without spilling the whole story yet, let’s just say this little Streisand wannabe did set her sights on New York City and did ride that Manhattan ferry!

"In response to the theme of looking back on the past, I rifled through photos I had taken before the COVID-19 lockdowns and found myself drawn especially to moments that captured the beauty of nature."

Cotton Candy Tharidi Walimunige Photography, 107 x 80 cm

"Editing this image to enhance the colours and bring them to the forefront of attention, I wanted to showcase how nature can be perceived as ethereal, especially when we are looking with eyes that are re-remembering what it is like to be outdoors."

Reflection Tharidi Walimunige Photography, 102 x 68 cm

"Cultivating this image and memory as I'm confined indoors brought me a level of peace reminiscent of that which I felt while walking along the very lake featured in this photo."

Birth in Spring Tharidi Walimunige Photography, 107 x 80 cm

"By adding highly saturated colour to this image, I wanted to evoke a sense of the chaotic vibrancy of new life."

H HO OW W T TO O M MA AK KE E A A B BR RO OW WN N G G II R RL L H HA AT TE E H HE ER RS SE EL LF F

Pavani Athukorala Not too long ago, in a seaside town with an unpronounceable name nestled somewhere within that mass of land dismissed as the Third World, a brown girl was born. Hers is a poor town, though by luck, or systemic injustice or the mere grace of God, the girl herself has enough. A stone’s throw from her house are two public schools, both underfunded and hopelessly overcrowded, their gates rickety and pale yellow paint peeling. They are good, ordinary schools, and unsurprisingly, they conduct lessons in the girl’s native language. Ah, now this is quite a lovely tongue. There is a simple, lilting melody to it, and it allows words to be strung together in looser, more circuitous ways than English would ever allow. The girl is a firstborn. Boys are, of course, inherently preferred, but the village has come far enough that whatever surge of disappointment the parents initially feel, it recedes, and quietly forgotten. A firstborn is a firstborn, after all. So they place her in a school that is a little further away, that comes with swimming pools and term fees, mint-green walls and an English language curriculum. There are many such schools in this not-quite-postcolonial land of hers. You put little brown kids in, teach them English as a first language and their own as the second, as though conducting some ethicallydubious social experiment, and then release them into a world that will inevitably confuse them.

The school is great, and the girl thrives. For the first few years moving between home, where everyone speaks her native tongue, and school, where teachers roll unused tongues laboriously over English vowels, feels like walking on a tightrope. But soon, it becomes effortless. She slips between worlds with a light foot. Time passes. She learns to twist her tongue dexterously around split infinitives and double consonants, weaves a foreign tongue into intricate sentences replete with semicolons and em- dashes and little bits of her heart. She thinks and breathes and tells her first boy she loves him in a language that is both entirely hers, but not quite her own. She sounds nothing like the small town, Third World, country girl she is. Her accent is hard to place, but that’s because it is largely a construction. Think Frankenstein’s monster: bits and bobs pulled pell-mell from Doctor Who and Disney Channel, the occasional y’all heard a smashing! learned from Enid Blyton novels, big words mispronounced because she has only ever read them. Teachers say that her pronunciation is impeccable, that she speaks as though she is white. This is a compliment and the girl glows appropriately pink with joy.

When guests come to visit, her grandmother— who at seventy still wears her ghost-milk complexion as though it is a freshwater pearl— shows off the girl’s bookcases. They are stuffed with Austen and Bronte, Dickens and Shakespeare with barely one brown face in sight. These books are friends, beloved things that smell like home and have kept her company through many lonely nights. But the grandmother’s pride in her granddaughter's ability to swim lazy laps through the English language warps them into something strange and sinister. For in this not-quite-postcolonial land of hers, proximity to whiteness in appearance, education or language—- provides social capital. To be able to read Austen at all is a marker of wealth and sophistication, which is why this fairly uninteresting bookcase is being shown off. The books reek of privilege.

But deep down, she empathizes. She understands why others might consider her presumptuous or elitist; a white girl in brown skin. There are irresistible historical forces that have shaped her identity. The complex web of colonial influences, the desire for social currency in a world where proximity to whiteness translates into wealth and privilege that drove her parents to educate her as they did. Ultimately, she finds no one to blame for her perpetual sense of cultural isolation but herself. And so, she turns her critical gaze inwards: You should have tried harder. Learned your own language better. You were a ready and willing participant in your own Westernization, after all. God, what was wrong with you? And that, reader, is how you make a brown girl gradually, naturally and almost unconsciously, begin to hate herself.

Soon enough, the girl starts to resent her people a little. Someone clucks their tongue at her inability to write as effortlessly in her own tongue as in English. Another tells her that her ancestors, who had been freedom fighters and nationalist poets, would be ashamed of her. She begins to feel like an imposter, never brown enough, never at ease with her own people in her own land. She is terrified that her tongue will slip and make a grammatical mistake when she speaks her native language; that she might forget complex words like constitution and historiography and have to substitute their English counterparts instead. Fuck you, she thinks. I was a child, bright-eyed and willing to please. And please I did. I went to my little English school, attended Elocution classes so my vowels would sound appropriately British, wrote my little essays on Emily Bronte, and became impeccably, perfectly colonized. Nary a crack in the whitewash. I was a good little girl, and I did what I was supposed to. I do not deserve your disdain.

To All The Sites I've Loved Before

Crystal Koa

This

heartfelt

declaration,

love

letter,

sincere

confession from the bottom of my heart to the websites I was dangerously obsessed with in my early teenage years.

Growing up in the early 2000s where terms such as “digital native” were coined, my ease around using the internet and technology

itself

began

when

was

five.

The

joy

felt

whenever Purble Place’s loading screen lit up (remember that cake game that came with Windows?) translated into natural curiosity about what else the Internet had to offer me back then, a young girl keen to lap up any form of media that was pink, sparkly and fun.

As I eventually aged out of the free-to-play games on the Barbie

website,

found

other

avenues

explore

evolving interests. Before I catapulted into Pinterest, where I stole

personality

traits

admired,

first

love

was

WeHeartIt. If you’re unfamiliar with WeHeartIt, imagine 2013 Ariana Grande decked out in a skater skirt and signature hair bow as an app. If Tumblr was Kat Stratford, WeHeartIt would

her

peachy

younger

sister,

Bianca.

Heck,

WeHeartIt’s logo has a pink heart right in the centre! From flower crowns to Christmas sweaters and galaxy printed leggings, WeHeartIt was really a hodgepodge of images that represented the teenage girl in the early 2010s. The frilly pink app coloured my adolescence with endless outfit inspirations I recreated poorly, along with other bonuses, such as a penchant for dramatic writing which I deemed to be poetry.

Of course, if we wanted to talk about dramatic writing, there is no avoiding Wattpad. With its signature orange W icon, Wattpad was a gateway to my personal library. It served as a digital transition from the piles of secondhand chick lit books I devoured from book sales at the mall and 2000s teen novels at the local library. It teleported me from my bedroom to a sanctuary of cliche, yet well-loved fictional tropes. Going to a beach town for summer and falling in love with the boy you’re working with at the ice cream parlour. Getting together with the school’s bad boy after receiving a makeover. As a lanky teenager who did not feel comfortable in her own skin, delving into fictional worlds where the main protagonist was an idealised version of me, a teenage girl, brought me solace. The foreign setting of hallways in American high schools had its odd way of evoking familiarity despite me having never visited America. It was, perhaps, this sense of distance that satisfied my desire for an escape from the real world.

What stood at the heart of the escapist tendencies I fulfilled through frequenting WeHeartIt and Wattpad was a classic, age-old phenomenon: I had a peculiar yet genuine determination to not be like the other girls. This amounted to behaviour I can only describe as going the extra mile, such as listening to Nirvana’s songs just so I could mention “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was not the only song I knew. Spoiler alert - I never did get into Nirvana. However, my desperate desire to acquire a genuine taste for bands I found from desaturated pictures of pale girls in space buns modelling their band tees did pay off: listening to Arctic Monkeys’ album AM led me to discovering a whole new genre of music I love.

It’s satire, really, to consume media from some of the world’s most popular sites— think Wattpad, Tumblr—whilst remaining fiercely determined to become a truly unique

individual

based

the

inspiration

drawn

from

those

sites.

Imagine

thirteen year old girl buying Maybelline’s Baby Lips who devoured cliche chick-lit books on Wattpad thinking she was truly revolutionary!

These obsessions might be comical to revisit, but something precious still remains about the bright eyed, baby faced fifteen year old me who lived out her fantasies through the internet. Regardless of how cringe-inducing those moments might be, the pre-teen years shaped by hours spent curating dozens of photos that just fit the right aesthetic (at one point, it was pastel grunge) are irreplaceable. Being curled up in bed reading about Wattpad protagonists with their light brown hair and a swipe of lip gloss, staring longingly at outfit inspiration I lacked the budget for—those adolescent times of yearning and wishing will always be framed in the gallery of my youth.

First Person - Srishti Chatterjee (they/them)

Studying Arts at the University of Melbourne is a paradoxical journey if you’re a person of colour—you study marginalisation, you learn things that make you challenge authority and power, and yet, you spend all your time slogging away at a degree citing the “expertise” of people who have no idea what it is like to be you. Good heavens, if the university’s founders discovered you study here, they’d flip. I’m a Sociology major, and sitting in the final semester of my degree, I’m looking back at everything I’ve learnt, all the essays, the mountains of research, the surveys, the coding, and the writing. I’ve written extensively on postcolonial gender, labour relations and technoculture—all fields where a key part is—subversion, ie. challenging power. In my foundation Power unit, after the professor blasted some Sex Pistols track in class, he reminded us to “reflect on power throughout the degree, and what you’re learning, and more importantly, what you’re not learning.” Interestingly, the readings that week were all written by white people. A common experience while writing essays is scrambling to find an adequate “scholarly” citation to define an experience lived by marginalised communities to which I belong. I know that queer people are more likely to live with mental illness;I don’t need statistics to know that. I live that truth. Don’t get me wrong—I love a welldone research article, complete with manually coded bar graphs and a calculated centrality. I also know that the inner workings of statistics are invisible. Time and again, personal experiences of people of colour are ignored in academia because there’s less of us here– in our classes, in the books we read, and the scholars we deify.

When you look at the average curriculum of a subject, the majority of the authors will be white, and that is because they are the founding fathers of the subject. You can’t graduate with a Sociology degree without the basic Weber, Marx, Foucault. Lacan, Hegel, Kant, if you dig a little deeper. Even when you move forward in time, reflecting on intersectionality, black feminist standpoint theory, transgender studies, etc., you’re still a lot more likely to have the ‘base’ of your theory in a white cis man, and use a marginalised scholar as a case study, or an alternative framework. Sure, the white men have written great works, on power, class and authority, but that is because those very things were on their side.

Participatory web platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook allow for a certain degree of personal freedom and platform in sharing content. Despite their rather invisible censorship and shadow-banning rules, these platforms are full of first-person accounts of lived experiences—of black and indigenous people, immigrants and refugees, sex workers, rans people, and other demographics whose work rarely features in educational curricula. Usually, these communities are reduced to statistics, the bottom of the barrel, the big groups of people that are homogenised while Western individualism centres white experiences in art, technology, academia and the likes. A feature of being measured as statistics is that it very rarely makes evident why someone might be lower-ranking, or altogether missing, from ‘success’. Yes, of course all the ‘founding fathers’ of Sociology, which developed in the late 1700s, were white men. The same white, European people, who were writing about power and authority and oppression, were also LITERALLY AT THE SAME TIME, colonising many sovereign provinces and nation-states, including my homeland, the present-day India. It is not surprising that authors of colour are missing from the curriculum—it is by design. Concepts conceived by European theorists can often seem universally applicable—for example, capitalism as a sustainable economic and political system. As a Sociology student, I often feel like European thought, which focuses a lot on individual progress and fulfilment, was proven wrong by colonised peoples whose lives were based on collectivism, mutual aid, and togetherness. We built lives of shared stories and resistance, and European social thought just could not fathom the power of communities constructed on stories - told to grandchildren and neighbours, etched on temple walls, and carved into our collective memories. It’s why hegemonic powers burn books and destroy mosques—to take away the shared, to isolate the oppressed.

I often just think European men thought up ‘ideas and theories’ that they presumed were universal. The lives of our ancestors prove them wrong, so they colonised us until we conformed, and they could pretend they were right.

I have always wanted a PhD. Keeping the paradox alive, I have always wanted to teach classes - to be the brown trans tutor I needed to have. I don’t know if this is very “I am going to change a bad system from within” of me, but I want to teach classes where the firstperson experience will be important. A lot of Plato’s work is in first person, Archimedes thought up his principle in a bathtub. Diogenes looked for truth with a lantern. Engels wrote about class struggle while never having a job, Barthes just ranted about how sad photographs made him. Foucault wrote

extensively in the first person. If you ask why these men’s writings are in our courses, you’ll be told—“oh you’ve got to study them, at least to critique them”. Yet any person of colour contextualising their own lived experience as worthy of consideration, is expected to provide a degree of infallible rigour and scholarly citation that is not available for our communities - they were either not allowed to be made in the first place, or have since been stolen, burnt, and throttled out.

I’m not asking you to not believe data, or theory, or statistics. What I’m asking is that we see tweets and TikToks from people who were intentionally left out of university scholarship, as a narrative worth paying attention to. I’m advocating for stories to be centre-stage, for people of colour to not be homogenous to the nearest hegemony, and for us to be able to tell our stories in first person. The “us” in our communities are a story of resistance and survival—that we’re here, we’re alive with the memories of the ones who couldn’t make it. I’m asking you to remember that ‘crunching numbers’ of our experiences without hearing our stories, crunches down our existence to a residue of invisible methodology. The privileged are evaluated in hopes and possibilities, heard, processed by people. The marginalised get screened out of job interviews and loan approvals, processed by machines.

I’m asking you to not process my entire life by the numbers—age, weight, marks, degrees, jobs, salaries. Measure me by love and heartbreak, marvel at the immeasurability of the love of my friends who cook for me and read me by the infinite possibilities of my people—in joy, grief, anger, and resistance.

That’s all I ask - to be loved, lived, and remembered as a story.

Growing up Asian in Australia Edited by Alice Pung (read in June 2011)

On not speaking Chinese: living between Asia and the West by Ien Ang (read in May 2016)

This is where it started: with an anthology, an assigned text for our Year 9 English class.

Second-year, Bachelor of Arts Subject Code HIST20075 Migrant Nation University of Melbourne

It was 2011, the time before I discovered social justice Tumblr, before Trayvon Martin’s murder and Black Lives Matter. Instagram was one year old, social media influencers didn’t exist, and the term Person of Colour hadn’t entered the public lexicon. In 2011, I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate my internalised racism, how I tried (desperately) to assimilate into whiteness, and the spectre of intergenerational trauma. This is not a story about how I grew up in a white suburb, went to a white school, and wished everyday that I was white. All these things are true. Instead, this is a story about how I came into my racial identity through reading and literature, and all the moments in between. So, I read Growing up Asian in Australia but it would only be later when I would understand its importance: the fact an anthology like this existed in the milieu of Australian literature, nor how it related to me.

I started healing when I discovered Ien Ang, Homi Bhahba and Ghassan Hage. These post-colonial, critical race and diasporic scholars who legitimised my racial anxiety, who gave me the theory and vocabulary to articulate my hyphenated identity, my feeling of displacement, and first language attrition. I found the theory that explained why the question ‘Where are you from?’ was so confronting, and the slow, insidious process of Othering. I found comfort in these scholars who had experienced what I had, and to have my experiences validated by years of peer-reviewed research and oral histories. I was starting to see the cracks in the matrix we call white hegemony, and all the ways whiteness discursively creates non-white identities and representations through our political, social and cultural institutions. Once I saw the cracks, I could not stop seeing them. I wanted to tear the house down.

A CRITICAL RACE

READING LIST BY CAROLINE WANG (SHE/HER)

The Leavers by Lisa Ko (read in May 2018) I enrolled in a class called Race and Asian American Literature while I was on exchange in America. I don’t reflect on exchange often, but I reflect on this subject frequently. Every student enrolled in this class was a person of colour. Our seminar conversations bubbled, erudite, expansive, and incandescent. In that class, we never wondered whether our words would offend or upset; we never derailed our discussions on critical race theory, characters’ interiorities or racial trauma to educate a white person. We never considered how we could be checked by white people, and I realised this is how it felt to be fully present. We were freewheeling, free; it was liberating and soothing to be our entire selves, bringing our full histories and politics to the table without restraint. The Leavers was the last novel of the syllabus, but for me, it was the beginning of a more radical imagining of Asian identity. The way we talk about Asian-ness has been constrained to the realm of identity politics, the loss of childhood innocence and this “sense of inbetween-ness.” But The Leavers demands that we try harder, that we interrogate our status as a “model minority” as an agent of capitalism, Western empire and neoliberalism - not just an identity we inhabit. My experience reading The Leavers was significant for two reasons: the novel itself pushed the boundaries of Asian American literature and my all PoC literature class, which hinted at the possibility of identity-making and community-making outside of whiteness.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (read June 2021) Reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was at once a reckoning and a homecoming. At some point in the last three years, I became tired of the same, repetitive narratives in mainstream spaces. I was tired of hearing stories about children teasing us for our “stinky food”, articles about our fetishisation as Asian women, podcasts that explained ‘Why you can’t ask “Where are you from?”, and yet another Instagram graphic about white people cooking Chinese food, white people launching mahjong sets, white people helming Asian fusion restaurants, white people, white people, white people. I wanted more. I wanted more radical politics, more complexity, more nuanced conversation beyond primary school lunchboxes, cultural appropriation, and white beauty standards. We needed to move beyond these experiences as a defining Asian Australian narrative–one that continues to centralise our experiences in relation to whiteness– and start exploring narratives that are unequivocally ours. This was the context in which I read Ocean Vuong’s debut novel: frustrated, irritated and bored of the popular discourse around Asian- Australian identity. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was a reckoning. Radical in its dissection of race, masculinity, sexuality, and class. Avant-garde in its structure, genre, and non-linear storytelling, slipping between generations and perspectives, from the Vietnam War to the suburban nail salon and heroin-fuelled town where Vuong grows up, between childhood, adulthood

motherhood. Vuong’s novel doesn’t fit the “immigrant novel” archetype, it can’t. It’s a piece of autofiction, it’s atemporal, convergent. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is what I want Asian diasporic literature to become– this is everything it should be, what the future of Asian narratives should hold and where our stories need to go. In his novel, Vuong illuminates the lives of queer Asian diaspora, and asks what it means for first-generation Asian immigrants to write ourselves into existence because that’s how we come to exist. We must write ourselves into the literary canon, we must continue to tell our stories, to tell the marginal stories in our already marginal existences. But Vuong also questions the repercussions of writing ourselves into existence. When we write, we only increase the distance between ourselves, our parents and putative homelands. The more ambitious my written work becomes, it becomes impossible for my parents to understand this existence I’ve chosen to write into being. From the English language, to structure, to values and personal politics, Vuong articulates this in only 200 pages: what are we losing and whose agency are we sacrificing to bring our stories to life.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (read in August 2021) I finished Girl, Woman, Other last month. One of the best novels I’ve read, ever. Sweeping, complex and ambitious, Girl, Woman, Other brilliantly subverts the macro historical narrative with deftness. In literary fiction, the macro historical narrative has incarcerated migrant stories as stories that start on a boat, stories of intense suffering and sacrifice. The macro narrative is a slave story, a patriarchal story, a story of a social pariah, a linear story of ‘homecoming’ where children of immigrants return to their parents’ homeland (think Joy Luck Club). The macro narrative In Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo tells the black British experience through 12 black women. The novel’s details, the shifts in syntax to the shifts in feminist ideologies, not only subverts but absolutely dismantles the macro narrative. Critical race, queer and gender studies academics have been telling us for years about the danger of heteronormativity, white hegemony and the imperative for sprawling, heterogenous stories. This novel is for them. This novel is for us. Writing ourselves into being is a form of resistance.

帮忙看家哦

Home GENTLECODA

Digital Illustration, 427mm x 318mm "I captured my first home, and our cat who would take care of the house for us every day."

Miso Soup

汤

用筷子喝

GENTLECODA Digital Illustration, 325mm x 336mm "For this piece I captured the act of drinking soup with chopsticks."

We needed to go shopping for ingredients and everybody was arguing about who would get to go with Mum. She was having a good day today, and you always wanted to be with her on a good day. Tita 1 Tessa and Ted were trading insults—they were getting into these terrible arguments lately. The two didn’t like each other much, maybe because Ted was white and Tita was uppity. But mostly, I suspected it was because they were exhausted.

I yanked my shoes on and walked out the door. Mum followed shortly after. We were walking down the street, just the two of us, holding hands like I was eight again. My hand felt so warm. Too warm, almost, like I was holding her heart and I had to hold it just right, just enough to keep it in my grasp, because if I squeezed too tight— It was a weird train of thought, so I stopped. “Kamusta ka na, Mum?”

Tita was in the middle of calling Ted some slur when my mother reached out and wrapped an arm around my shoulder: “I’ll take CJ,” she said. Neither of them liked that.

“I’m fine, Ceej. Great.” She was walking steadily, unafraid. “Good, good.”

“Di ba siya masyadong bata?” Tita said. “Ate May, an adult would be more helpful—”

“It’s okay.,” Mum said. “I’m having a good day today.” We all looked away. It wasn’t something anyone wanted to admit aloud—that this was a ‘good day’. When you admitted it was a good day, you admitted there were bad days. Then you couldn’t pretend anymore. It was like the sinking feeling you get when the lights would turn on after a movie finishes. The slow realisation that you have to go back: this little world you lived in has ended, had never been real in the first place.

“Ceej, you’re smiling really hard, right now, you know? You look a bit deranged.” It was a surreal, almost unbelievable thing to hear my mother speak English. I felt like we were in a dubbed version of a foreign film where suddenly the sound doesn’t quite sync up with the lip movements. “ 'Deranged’, huh?” I laughed. “My mum is so good at English.” She pinched my cheek and smiled. A real smile, teeth and all, not at all like the slight, almost sleepy rictus she’d have when she was having a bad day.

We weren’t ready to stop pretending. Not yet. We kept talking. I told her about the debate competition at school that I won. She told me about school in the Philippines.

“It’s fine, Tita,” I said, “Mum and I used to walk to the store all the time, and I was even younger back then.” I knew that wasn’t what 1 ‘Tita’ means Aunty in Filipino/Tagalog she meant, but I didn’t care. 2 'Ate’ means big sister in Filipino

“You’re lucky you’re here in Australia. You’re very safe here, people won’t hurt you for money, or revenge, or even just for fun. That’s how they’re different from the Philippines.”

“I’m on TikTok. Someone made a montage of little kids like you falling over.”

Mum liked to talk about the Philippines like that —like it was some prison we had to escape. It seemed wrong, though I couldn’t say why. I was deeply unsettled. I couldn’t shake the feeling, not in the time it took to walk to the store.

“Well, you’re littler than me.” There. Her signature grin.

Chelsea was running the register today, but she was watching something on her phone. She was only a couple years older than me, but whenever we spoke, she always acted like it was more. She had a spray of freckles and acne on her cheeks. But what really got me was this wicked smile she sometimes had. Made me think she always had a killer joke she was holding back. I checked my hair in the window reflection and smoothed some stray strands.

“I’m not a little kid.”

“Okay, maybe I am. So what?” “Hmm. It’s not so bad, you’ll miss it. Having no responsibilities.” “I have lots of responsibilities.” “Oh, yeah? Like what?” I had nothing to say to that, nothing that wouldn’t ruin the mood. “That’s what I thought. Well, what’s it going to be today, kiddo? Some more 2-minute noodles? I gotta say I’ve never seen someone buy so much of that in bulk. Your parents don’t feed you or somethi—”

Mum nudged me. “Maganda siya, ’no?” I blushed. “She’s alright. What do you need again? We might need to go to a different shop if it’s a Filipino brand—” “We’ll be fine, it’s just fruit. Why don’t you talk to the girl while I go have a look? Maybe you can convince her to give us a discount.” She winked, before she walked away and left me alone. Chelsea didn’t look up when I approached, which was typical. She’d ignore a customer unless they specifically called for her, and then sometimes she’d wait a little more. “Hey, Chelsea. What are you watching there?” I asked.

“Ceej!” Mum yelled from somewhere in the store. I half-ran through the aisles until I found her sorting through packets of chocolates. “Mum, don’t scream like that, I thought you were—” “I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I found this though, it looks a bit like my favourite snack at your age. Baka magustuhan mo rin.” Mum dropped a pack of Reese’s pieces in my arms. I was allergic to Reese’s. “Let’s… go ask Chelsea, maybe she’ll know what you’re looking for.” “Oh, so you two are on a first-name basis now?”

She spoke without looking up. “Oh, hey, it’s you.”

I held my mother’s hand and led her back. Chelsea was back on her phone; I could hear the faint, grainy sound of a kid crying.

“Whatcha watching?”

“Mum needs help finding something.”

Chelsea raised an eyebrow. “I think this is the first time I’ve met Mrs. CJ. How can I help you?” Mum gave her a warm smile. “Langka.”

“Langka.” Mum started cupping her hands in the shape of a ball. Then she pinched her nose. Her hands shook the whole time, and her words were becoming slurred. A young couple had walked in and were watching from the door. One of them—the girl—snickered.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that, Ms?” “Langka.” “English please, Mum.” She looked confused. “Langka. Kailangan ko ng langka.” This was when the world began to end. It had never existed in the first place, remember? I thought I was going to vomit. “I’m sorry, she’s usually very good at English,” I lied. She was only fluent on her good days. “Well, can you translate for her then?” Mum was starting to look afraid. I gave her hand a gentle squeeze, but I could feel my palms begin to sweat. “I’m… I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’ve never heard of langka before.” “Anong nangyayari? CJ, anong—” Chelsea frowned and put down her phone. “What’s she saying?” “She’s just a little scared, sorry—”

“I think she’s saying it’s smelly? Oh, God, I don’t —” “Goddamn, how can she survive without knowing Eng—” Chelsea stopped herself, but she didn’t need to finish. I knew how the rest of it went. My mother was wrong about Australia. People hurt people all the same wherever you go. Mum gripped my arm, her eyes wet and shiny. Slowly, I took out my phone. I opened the Google Translate app. I asked her to repeat what she said. My voice sounded like it was coming from a different room. And suddenly she had that stupid sleepy smile on her face. Her whole face was somewhere between relaxed and frozen, dead like a doll. Her eyes couldn’t seem to focus. “Vincent,” she said and caressed my cheek. My father’s name. I almost slapped her hand away. I took a deep breath. I reminded myself that I loved her. Then, as gently as possible, I put my phone away. I thanked Chelsea, who only looked at us with mild annoyance before calling the next customers in line. It would be the last time I spoke to her. In my mind, the wicked smile had been displaced by something much more sinister.

“What for?” “I don’t know.” It was becoming difficult to keep the fear out of my voice. “She said she was looking for some kind of fruit earlier? I don’t know—” “Well, think. I can’t understand her dammit.”

My mother understood something from looking at my face. I didn’t know what she saw. But at some point along the walk home, she clutched my hand and whispered: “Sorry, Vincent,” over and over again, like a prayer. ‘Sorry’ was the only English word she ever managed to remember when the sickness took hold of her.

“Vincent’s dead, Mum.” She looked confused. “Sorry.” I hated myself a little more. “It’s okay.” “Sorry, Vincent. Sorry.” “It’s okay.” She apologised all the way home, apologised while I looked for the house keys, apologised while Ted and Tita watched us come in, an unreadable look in their eyes. The woman who was once my mother clung onto my elbow. Later, I would find purple half-moons dug into my skin from her nails, branded while in her clasp. But all I could feel in that moment was how cold my hand was. I helped her get ready for bed—she had forgotten which room was hers, which side of the bed her head goes on, how to take her shoes off. “Wag mo ako iwan,” she said, once she was lying down. Don’t leave me. I pressed my hand to her forehead, cool as stone, and waited for her to fall asleep. After some time, her breathing became so slight, she could’ve been dead.

" A collection of objects that remind me of my family: pistachios I shared with my father, ceramics hand-painted by my grandmother, jewellery gifted to me by my mother, and a wedding photograph stolen from my parents' collection—the only image I own that perfectly captures my split identity."

"A Dionysian musing—items of ecstasy placed on an altar: they promise a good time, but one saturated by drunken mistakes. Still stuck in lockdown, the allure of both is almost too much to handle." 77

"Growing up in an African household I was allowed to make multiple decisions good or bad so I could experience the consequences and learn from them. I had a bad habit of entering the kitchen and grabbing anything colourful that appeared edible from the counter, I have depicted some things I tried. Coloured for great decisions, black for not so great."

Charcoal, 297mm x 420mm

Thank you for reading, we hope you enjoyed this edition

Love, The Myriad team

The People of Colour Department pays respects to the Traditional Custodians on whose land we reside, the Wurundjeri people of Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, sovereignty was never ceded.

Acknowledgment written by Jo Guelas