Volume Six: Not Long Now

Volume Six — Not Long Now

The Verge Volume

Welcome to Country UTS acknowledges and recognises the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation as the traditional owners and holders of knowledge where our UTS campuses now stand.

UTS also pays respect to Elders past, present and future for sharing their knowledge and the significant contribution that Australia’s first peoples make to the academic and cultural life of our university.

– Maree Graham, Coordinator of Indigenous Outreach, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney

Photo — Joshua Moll | @jayemol

Contents 4 5

Editorial Contributors

Arts & Lifestyle 10 29 57 70 97 103 106 115 125

Hair – Akshaya Bhutkar Mysteries of the Deep – Jennifer Worgan The Crush: A Conversation in Words & Images – Rebecca Hall & Isabella Sanasi Darn It! – Ella Barrowclough Self-care – Akshaya Bhutkar Creme Caramel with Katty – Katty Ngo Culinary Appropriation – Michelle Xu Dance Maker: Amrita Hepi – Akshaya Bhutkar Glancing to the Stars – Kezia Aria

Business & Science 16 20 32 128

Getting Real About Artificial Intelligence – Louisa Tran World of Biological Warcraft – Elliot Vella The People v Disneyland – Louisa Luong Driving the Way Forward – Declan Bowring

Politics 30 75 126

The Fight of the Century or the Final Century Humanity Will Ever See? – Michael Tangonan I Just Wanted to Write About Rome – Michael Zacharatos Duck & Cover – Max Grieve

Showcase 13 45 65 81 91 96 104 108 117

WOW! (watch out world) – Kim Phan Oasis – Cat Wratten Tim Busuttil Chaos Within the Calm – Christy Chan Garb Age – Eden Payne Pied Piper Blue – Thea Kable Delusion – Anita Gallagher L + K – Ali Chalmers Braithwaite AZMR – Ryley Miller

Socio-Cultural Creative Writing

100

How ‘Micro’ are Microaggressions? – Alyssa Rodrigo Impostor Syndrome – Raveena Grover Prejudiced Technology – Navira Trimansyah Your Dislike is Not a Phobia – Bronte Gossling Myanmar: Forgotten Crimes – Amara Khan A Practical Guide to Preparing for the Impending Race War – Aaron Pinto I Hate White Women – Kezia Aria

130 135

Students’ Association Reports Horoscopes – Jenny Cao

8 7 24 36 41 79 98

Yellow – Chelsea Hui Doctor! Doctor! – Zachary C. Ward Second Letter from Ure’ & On The Day Before We Died – Ogo Nwanguma Shards – Mariela PT Reality Fatigue – Jack Cameron Stanton Tinder, Loving Care – Dani Encarnacion

12 22 27 38 72

4 — Editorial

Editorial A Final Message From the Team

Editor-in-Chief Louisa Luong

Managing Editor Michael Zacharatos

Editors Kezia Aria Akshaya Bhutkar Rebecca Cushway Mariela PT Elliot Vella

Creative Director Kim Phan

Sub-editors Samuel Fraser Davina Jeganathan Aaron Pinto

Art Director Isabella Brown

This is it. The last stand, final countdown, grand finale, and end of the line. We’re winding down and wrapping up what has been a beautiful chaotic journey for all of us.

We’ve orbited the sun once. And what an orbit it’s been for this team of eight misfits who, quite frankly, had no idea what they were doing for most of it. We set out at the beginning of this thing to inspire, inform, and challenge not only you, but ourselves.

During our stumbles and doubts, we would always return to our hope for the year — to celebrate curiosity. There are so many things this year has taught us; friends made, lessons learnt, and egos grounded. Vertigo has been a labour of collaboration, hard work, and love from creators much more talented than us. We dabbled in print, launched an online video platform (VertigoTV), and achieved the largest social media growth Vertigo has seen yet. Here’s a lil snapshot of the quantitative things we have done this year: 6 print volumes, 39 videos, 328 contributors, 12 interviews in print, 11 comics, 568 pages, 49 versions before print, 2 reprints, 55 meetings, 3 editors lost, 8 changes in employment, 734 boxes distributed.

There is a reason Vertigo is still a print magazine. Paper is emotive, and holding something in your hands — with no chance of it distracting you, or going flat in the middle of your bus ride home — is comforting. There is a discovery in turning a new page, with no links to follow or back button to hit. Paper between fingers and the smell of a fresh page. We’ve seen you sneak them off stands and into your bags, rolled and rumpled in back pockets, pages ripped and scribbled on. The important thing is that you loved them — even if it was only for a second.

Finally; thank you. From the bottom of our hearts, minds, and keyboards. To our writers; who endured countless track changes and rewrites to tell their stories. To our visual contributors; who never failed to deliver meaningful art to bring all the words you’ve read this year to life. To our sub-editors; who reminded us of missed commas and missed opportunities. To our videographers; who taught Elliot how to colour correct. To our animators and comic artists; thank you for imagining wonderful worlds inhabited by exploding flowers and wrestling gnomes. And to you. Our reader; whose excitement we saw when you picked up a new volume and thought no one was looking. Thank you. All your stories and all your curiosities live within these pages — and we will cling on to all 568 of them.

Thank Yous

Fuck Yous

Shrugs

Assorted Creams Facebook soccer You!

Goldfish deserters Unexpected error Democracy

StuPol • Consistency 25kg dumbbells

enquiries – editorial@utsvertigo.com.au | submissions – submissions@utsvertigo.com.au

Contributors — 5

Thank You Our Volume Six Contributors

Written

Visual

Lachlan Barker Ella Barrowclough Declan Bowring Jenny Cao Luke Chapman Norma Jean Cooper Dani Encarnacion Bronte Gossling Max Grieve Raveena Grover Rebecca Hall Chelsea Hui Amara Khan Katty Ngo Ogo Nwanguma Aaron Pinto Leya Reid Alyssa Rodrigo Jack Stanton Beatrice Tan

Michael Tangonan Louisa Tran Navira Trimansyah Zachary C. Ward Jennifer Worgan Michelle Xu

Sagar Aadarsh Ali Chalmers Braithwaite Ella Barrowclough Isabella Brown Tim Busuttil Christy Chan Joyce Cheng Marcella Cheng Zoe Crocker Anita Gallagher Eva Harbridge Thea Kable Wilson Leung Ryley Miller Joshua Moll Emily Nunell Vanessa Papastavros Eden Payne Oscar Phillips Isabella Sanasi

Cover Art

Poster

Advertising

Georgette Stefoulis

Eden Payne

For all advertising enquiries please contact: Stephanie.King-1@uts.edu.au

Vertigo is published by the UTS Students’ Association (UTSSA), and proudly printed by SOS Printing, Alexandria.

The contents of Vertigo do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editors, printers, or the UTSSA.

Erin Sutherland Mia Tran Cat Wratten Nicole Yeom

Vertigo and its entire contents are protected by copyright. Vertigo will retain the right to republish in any format. Contributors retain all other rights for resale and republication. No material may be reproduced without the prior written consent of the copyright holders.

utsvertigo.com.au | facebook.com/utsvertigo | instagram.com/utsvertigo | twitter.com/vertigomagazine

Creative Writing — 7

Yellow Chelsea Hui

My yellow, is a golden sunset: vast, endless, as the possibilities my ancestors have fought to give me, My yellow, is amber: hand-blown glass, beautiful, and one of a kind, My yellow, is not the yellow you paint me to be: The yellow a young girl once saw in the mirror, skin dirty, eyes stretched into slits as they ask her how she can see at all, Nothing but an exotic face and a quiet voice, silenced by your version of my story, a fetish, a joke, one that I have heard you tell far too many times, My yellow is not yours, My yellow is mine to reclaim: my colour, my body, my culture, my own.

Art – Joyce Cheng | @ _joycecheng_

8 — Socio-Cultural

How ‘Micro’ are Microaggressions?

Alyssa Rodrigo

As of late, microaggressions have been one of the more prominent buzzwords in racial discourse. The concept articulates the everyday, commonplace instances of discrimination, whether intentional or not, against minorities. Microaggressions are, by the very definition of the word, posed as subtle indignities.

If I were, as an Asian person, told I’m “pretty for an Asian”, this would be a microaggression. This is because it carries with it the implication that Asians cannot be pretty, and that any Asian who is attractive is simply an exception to the rule. But upon closer examination, how ‘micro’ are microaggressions?

dominant group, with little to no consideration of the voices of the marginalised. The label is a sort of ‘softball’ to confronting institutional racism for those who are complicit in its perpetuation. Though some may utilise it for those not yet prepared to acknowledge terms like bigotry, white supremacy, and transmisogyny, it has the potential to disconnect individual actions of complicity to the broader structure of oppression. The over-emphasis of an atomised approach to racism which conveniently ignores deeper systemic roots is often up to a matter of convenience. To confront systems of intersectional oppression requires not only a change in behaviour but a total restructuring of the existing social,

“... it presents a false dichotomy in which oppression can only occur as explicit displays or as small, unintentional slights. The prefix ‘micro’ therefore serves no purpose if it ignores the aggregate result, and serves as a misleading quantifier of racism...”

As a concept, it helps to understand the individualised, racial experience, but it does little to explain the roots of racism. It’s one thing to be told that my eyes are “surprisingly big for someone with a Chinese background” and pass it off as a microaggression, and another to interrogate the influence of whitewashing in beauty standards behind a seemingly small remark.

Without investigating the systems and processes upon which racism is built, microaggressions do little more than to downplay racism. And even more unsettlingly, it presents a false dichotomy in which oppression can only occur as explicit displays, or as small, unintentional slights. The prefix ‘micro’ therefore serves no purpose if it ignores the aggregate result, and serves as a misleading quantifier of racism which fails to indicate the distinction between a microaggression and blatant racism.

The theory is also one which reeks of the hands of the

political, and cultural system — a task well beyond the scope of convenience. The tendency of single-issue white feminism to monopolise upon the word further exemplifies the lack of depth microaggressions have when addressing systemic oppression.

This casual disassociation of the micro-individual level from the macro-structural is a reflection on the reductionist tendency of microaggression theory. The intention of the dominant group when performing a microaggression, is, quite frankly, irrelevant. Though microaggressions help to give shape to understanding racism on an individual level, it must be traced back to the broader social framework. Ultimately, it comes down to the individual to use microaggressions as a stepping stone to understanding systems of oppression, rather than a convenient and atomised end to understanding discrimination.

10 — Arts & Lifestyle

Hair Akshaya Bhutkar

cw: reference to Holocaust Hair is an extension of our identity. Just as a tree nurtures and spreads its roots around its home, hair grows, protects, and translates elements of our expression to the world. Whether it is for purely aesthetic or practical reasons, everyone chooses to groom and maintain their hair in a certain manner. Hair is a powerful symbol — an extension of our identity, attitudes, and beliefs. It’s a domain where we can express our individuality, conform to uniformity, or show involvement in a specific culture or lifestyle.

Hair, like other aspects of personal appearance and

Art – Eva Harbridge | @_eva.pdf

decoration, has always been subject to changing fashions. In the same way that perms were once the height of style 30 years ago, trends come and go, and often changes in popular hairstyles reflect the broader contextual. In the late 90s, Jennifer Anniston’s short bob was coined “The Rachel”, after her character in Friends, and the style was quickly duplicated by many. However, while trends in fashion are swept out with the change of a season, hair trends tend to move at a much slower rate, somewhat due to factors such as hair growth and maintaining healthy hair.

Arts & Lifestyle — 11

Hair health aside, personal identity is heavily linked to hair, and this is probably the most significant factor that slows hair trends. Hair is literally a part of our body, unlike clothes and shoes, which can be tried, tested, and discarded. It forms part of our physical attributes in the same way the colour of our eyes and the shape of our nose do. Though hair can be easily modified, unlike most other physical attributes, certain styles and cuts frame our face, and can become a fundamental part of who we are. Ultimately, any changes to our hair affect our sense of self.

Inasmuch as hair acts as a personal identifier, it is also inextricably linked to notions of gender, race, and religion. Choosing to cover our hair, or wear it in a particular way, can be linked to religious customs.

Headscarves, turbans, and other head-coverings are linked to Islam and Sikhism. In Hinduism, a series of

participating in violent and ignorant appropriation.

The removal of hair — deliberate or not — is just as powerful as its presence. Shaved heads are being used as an intentional tool to weaken individual identity and inflict uniformity. US army recruits are routinely subject to crew cuts, and the loss of individuality is a core element of initial training. More violently, during the Holocaust the heads and bodies of individuals forced into concentration camps were shaved so as to further dehumanise them. Hair removal was also used as a punishment amongst women believed to be associated with ‘the enemy’ after WWII. Women being forced to have their head shaved also reflects the historical and ongoing gendering of hair.

Traditionally in Western society, men have short hair while women keep theirs long. When long hair is so

“Hair’s profound potential has also been recognised by radical political groups and throughout history many have used its power to make symbolic statements.” hair rituals are performed from birth to death, and long thick hair is associated with feminine beauty. Spiritual connections to hair are also held by some primary tribes in Africa, such as the Massai and Zulu. For them, the head is the centre of control, communication, and identity — and thus, they believe hair to be a source of power.

Hair’s profound potential has also been recognised by radical political groups and throughout history many have used its power to make symbolic statements. In the 1960s, many African Americans rejected the styling practices that sought to relax and straighten their hair in favour of more natural styles, such as the afro. It was a simple choice of hairstyle that also revealed their support for the Black Power and Civil Rights Movement.

Today, Black women’s hair continues to be political, as an unattainable European standard of beauty prevails — based on oppressive structures and unrealistic ideas. All the while, Black hairstyles like cornrows and weaves continue to be adopted by non-Black individuals

commonly associated with femininity, the notion of a woman choosing to have short hair can be a political statement; a powerful woman deciding not to succumb to the patriarchy’s fear of scissors. The correlation between women with short hair and liberation first began with female communists and soldiers in China.

They adopted a short bob cut just below the ears — a hairdo that was symbolic of women taking control of their own lives.

Expression of identity, belief, values, and lifestyle through hair is an act that everyone takes part in, to an extent far beyond fashion and styling. Even choosing not to have hair is a choice, and can be a statement in itself. Hair is powerful, meaningful, and symbolic. It stays with you all day, and all throughout your life — expressing, shielding, and supporting you. Hair is an integral part of who you are.

12 — Socio-Cultural

Impostor Syndrome Raveena Grover

Self-doubt is something many of us struggle with. Being a millennial and living in an increasingly competitive world, comparing ourselves with others almost comes as second nature. And it isn’t necessarily wrong: healthy competition can lead to greater success and goal setting.

But what happens when this self-doubt becomes so pervasive it begins to make you feel like a fraud? Enter, impostor syndrome. The term coined by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes back in 1978 refers to feeling undeserving of one’s success, pinning it on a stroke of luck, timing, or having deceived others of how successful they are, despite external evidence proving they are deserving of this success. The syndrome can often cause one to live with a fear of being ‘found out’ as being an impostor of their success, where they feel others will come to realise they are not what their success portrays them. Despite its name, it is not recognised as a psychological syndrome but rather as a phenomenon.

receiving the news I had been offered the role, I pinned it down to a good recommendation, rather than my portfolio, interview, and subsequent performance in the role. Despite often telling myself these self-doubts were silly, a deep-seeded belief remains that my so called ‘success’ in both areas is fraudulent.

Impostor syndrome doesn’t have to pervade your life though. Accepting that your success is at least in part (if not completely) your doing, is the first step to overcoming it. It is because of your efforts you were recognised. Comparison is the second and probably most important negative habit to kick. Comparing your success to others holds no ground when neither your experiences nor life trajectory is identical to any one person’s. An active part you can take in breaking down impostor syndrome is externalising your thoughts of self-doubt, whether that be in a journal, in conversation

“Despite often telling myself these self-doubts were silly, a deep-seeded belief remains that my so called ‘success’ in both areas is fraudulent.”

However, though originally thought to be most common among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome holds no correlation to internalised sexism. Later research by Clance and Imes disputed the original theory, finding that the phenomenon appears across almost every demographic group. Studies though have found that people of colour and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to suffer from it.

I first became aware I had impostor syndrome when a friend called to congratulate me on an article I had written for a magazine. Despite her being a credible critic, I felt undeserving of her compliments. The same went for my first and current corporate job, when upon

or — taking things meta — writing an article about the very thing you suffer from. Lastly, look for evidence that you are deserving of your success. Did your boss congratulate you on a piece of your work? Did you recently get commissioned? Is something you did helping someone else? Great! There’s solid proof you’re not an impostor.

We all modify our behaviours based on our context and environment, yet they are still our own behaviours. You are not an impostor if you are not always one version of your authentic self. After all, the versions you portray yourself to the world are still versions of you.

Showcase — 13

WOW! (watch out world) Kim Phan

Vertigo sits down with some of UTS’ most inspiring doers and makers — full of creative fury about to be unleashed upon the world. We chat trials, tribulations, transcripts, and transition as we try to shed some light on the terror that is entering capital ‘A’ adulthood.

Tim Busuttil I’m Tim! I’m currently in my Master of Design (Research), focusing on using design to reveal the metadata that supports digital collections in libraries.

My time on campus is mostly split between two research projects, with some teaching thrown in depending on the semester. My work for Masters usually consists of creative coding, diagramming, and data cleaning, but my role in the other project is mostly user experience and user interface work.

When I’m not at uni (and sometimes when I am), I’m playing with code and thinking about fantasy stories — often at the same time. I just launched a Twitter bot about wizards, I try to run tabletop role playing games whenever I can, and at the moment I’m working on a

small game — also about wizards — that uses a tarot deck to help the players collaboratively tell a story.

I’ll be finishing up Masters in March, so that’s when the next year begins in my head. There are a few different paths I feel like I could take into the big bad world of design, and that’s sometimes a scary thing. I’m enjoying teaching, research is exciting, but I also want to get out of the uni for a while. I’m also looking to move cities at some point, and having all my career connections in Sydney can feel like all my eggs are in a basket I’m trying to leave behind. At this point though, my first priority is to find some creative coding work in a studio, learn on the job, and start making some larger scale stuff.

Find more of Tim’s work on @timbusuttil

Photos — Kim Phan | @averagecabbage.jpg

Amy Tong I’m Amy and I’m a Bachelor of Communications student majoring in journalism. I enjoy reading contemporary Japanese literature. My favourite book is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Even though it’s quite slow, the writing is simple yet poignant. I think writing shouldn’t have to be flowery or complicated — the simplest words can convey some of the most powerful messages. I guess that’s something I try to emulate in my writing, particularly outside of uni — I’d like to think the stuff that I write is slow, yet revealing, and reflective in nature.

I just finished up an internship with the ABC at Radio National doing some reporting on health and science, so that was really fun. I’ve been getting a little bit of a taste for science communication which is pretty difficult seeing as I don’t have a background in science, but it was a really great experience. I’m also writing for Men in This Town, which is a quarterly independent publication based in Sydney. The focus is basically on men, menswear, fashion, design, and just how these creatives operate in their respective cities.

Next year I’ll be working full-time to save up some money to go to Tokyo. I’ll be going on exchange for about six months finishing my final semester, and I hope to travel around Japan for an extra month on top of that.

Afterwards, I’ll probably come back to Sydney, suffer from post-travel depression for about six months, and try to find a job. It also takes a while for Japanese universities to process academic transcripts, then it has to be sent through to UTS to be approved, and in the meantime I guess I’ll be living in this period of limbo.

My biggest worry in life is never really finding out what I’m truly passionate about. I feel like I’m in this constant state of transition, but I don’t really know where I’m heading, which I guess can be a really good thing, because I’m all for surprises. Going into adulthood and being constantly unfulfilled with what I’m doing, or what I’m creating, or what I’m writing — that can be scary.

As for what I’m stoked about, I think at uni — though this isn’t probably the case for a lot of people — I felt like my creativity was stifled quite a bit, and the focus in journalism was on a news environment. That’s something I’m not particularly interested in, even if it’s what we’ve been working towards for the past three years. I guess kind of just being released into the open and being able to do what I want, that’s what I’m most excited about.

Keep up with Amy’s travels @a_m_y_a_m_y

Showcase — 15

Rebecca Cushway In the big scary important sense; I have no idea who I am. I’m only at a first draft stage of my adult personality.

In the practical university sense; I’m a creative writing/ BCII kid who collects skills and hobbies out of an overwhelming sense of obligation, from guilt that I’m not doing the most with my life that I could be and need to be the most valuable person come nuclear apocalypse time.

On campus I’m in my final BCII year, with some repeated creative writing subjects I failed because of anxiety and not handing in final assessments. I also am part of the fabulous 2017 Vertigo team, which permeates my entire existence to be honest. Off campus I work in a hotel, I’m a private music teacher, am trying to launch my pottery business, and trying to manage practical concerns of paying rent and taking care of family while maintaining creative drive.

That’s… the hardest part.

My plans for the year ahead have fluttered between a new completely different degree, giving up and moving overseas, launching my pottery business, interning forever, joining the Australian Youth Orchestra, and working hospitality until I die — among a hundred other things.

Everything excites me. Which is the unnerving part. The biggest takeaway I have from BCII though is that by the time I’m thirty, I’m going to have fifteen different jobs in different fields. The thing that terrifies me most about the future is not getting to do everything, not getting to find out what I’m good at. But I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to do everything now. I’ve got heaps of time. Heaps. And if I do get hit by a bus tomorrow, I won’t know any better anyway. So it doesn’t matter.

No matter what I do next year though I want to study. I think the adult equivalent of picking-up-a-new-obscurehobby-every-time-I-have-an-existential-crisis is doing short courses. I want to keep making pots and writing, and I’m going to pester all my creative fellows to collaborate on another magazine-like project. Once you get a taste of that sweet, sweet print life you can never go back.

Find this friendly neighbourhood pot dealer @potheadpots

Photos — Kim Phan | @averagecabbage.jpg

16 — Business & Science

Getting Real About Artificial Intelligence Louisa Tran

We’re a fragile bunch, aren’t we? Always in constant danger of an Opal top-up and rising inflation — the price of beef tacos at my favourite Mexican restaurant increased 20% this year, vastly outstripping the 3.33% increase to my pay. Perhaps the greatest fear we face is the crippling concern that after years of study, we won’t have a job in our chosen field. Unfortunately, given how saturated the job market is — only set to worsen as students graduate in larger numbers — I may have to hold onto my retail job for a little while longer.

In 2015, the Australian Graduate Survey (AGS) observed that 76% of UTS grads were able to score a full-time or part-time job in their chosen field within three months of graduating. Pretty sweet stats if you ask me. Well, since then a lot of things have happened. Kendall Jenner is now a thing, Trump became president, and just casually, robots have slowly started to replace us at work. A report written by the CSIRO and Australian Computer Society estimates that nearly half of Aussie jobs are at risk of computerisation and automation. Logic tells us that grads are especially affected, as we are the least experienced and thus have the least to offer — at least in the short-run. For those on the cusp of graduation, here’s an overview of the major developments occurring in business, law, medicine, and journalism.

Business (Accounting) Entry-level accounting has been particularly prone to automation as of late because the technology required to replace workers at this level is readily available, not too sophisticated or expensive to implement, and the cost savings are palpable. For example, the ‘Big Four’ firms have started deploying robotic process automation (RPA) robots or ‘bots’ to mimic workers who copy and paste information from one system to another to generate a report. To give you a better picture: a bot can scan an invoice, upload the data onto an Excel spreadsheet, log into another system such as MYOB, generate a revenue report, and finally, send it off as an email attachment from the firm’s account.

Deloitte estimates that a bot can complete 15 minutes of work in one. Talk about a hot minute.

KPMG also uses robots in its tax division. At lowerlevels, income taxes are concerned with classifying certain revenue and expenses as taxable income and

Business & Science — 17

allowable deductions. Through the use of ‘Machine Learning’ (ML) where systems are taught to learn on their own, robots have started differentiating deductible repairs from non-deductible improvements.

Accuracy rates have been recorded as high as 99%. To explain this technology, say a computer was exposed to thousands of images of horses and cows. By incorporating a feedback loop that indicates whether it’s correct or not, it will be able to focus on the distinct features of the two animals to come up with a system that allows it to categorise the images correctly.

Audit is another area that has taken a significant liking to automation. Since time immemorial, auditors have faced the difficulty of wanting to provide 100% confidence in financial reports, but not having the time to test every single transaction that a company makes. To this end, auditors have only been able to sample transactions, and therefore each audit opinion that is issued is always adjusted for sampling errors. With the help of technology, auditors will be able to provide the confidence that investors and other users of financial statements are demanding, and in a shorter amount of time. The work of human auditors may soon be a thing of the past, while the number of grads getting their foot in the door is getting slimmer than the fat content in my mum’s soy milk.

adept at fashioning the most nuanced of search terms to weed through a heck of a lot of irrelevant information to strike gold. Thanks to an artificially intelligent lawyer named Ross, researching in this manner may be another thing of the past. Ross works by allowing lawyers to ask questions in ‘natural language’, in much the same way we would ask a colleague a question. Ross then sifts through over a billion cases, articles, and other documents, and returns the exact passage a lawyer needs. Not only is this faster, it is also cheaper for the firm: previously the hours spent training grads to use legal databases such as LexisNexis were not billable to clients and, as such, the firm absorbed the costs.

LexisNexis has also created its own AI machine called Lex Machina — the Latin phrase for ‘Law Machine’ — and it is even more powerful than Ross as it uses natural language processing to determine which judges favour plaintiffs, the legal strategies of opposing lawyers based on the cases they are likely to use, and which arguments are likely to convince specific judges. US company Premonition takes this one step further by predicting the winner of a case before it goes to court based on a statistical analysis of verdicts in similar cases.

Law

Medicine

Law is another profession that has historically been very kind to graduates. This is because the wealth of information that must be summarised and understood from cases, textbooks, and articles have always been enormous and require a large amount of people. Grads need to be equipped with superior research skills and

The work of doctors in diagnosing and suggesting treatment plans for patients, much like lawyers, is largely dependent upon how much information they can read, understand, and — most importantly — remember.

Recent developments in data analytic capabilities have only made this more difficult as now, more than

Art – Emily Nunell | @emdrawsthings

18 — Business & Science

ever, there is an unprecedented amount of important information to keep track of. From the same technology that powers Ross, IBM Watson has handed doctors a lifeline. Watson works by allowing doctors to ask questions in natural language. Through this process, Watson learns the symptoms a patient presents, and compares this against data from clinical trials, 23 million journal articles, and other relevant information to form diagnoses. Amazingly, Watson boasts 90% accuracy in lung-cancer diagnoses, significantly higher than the 50% accuracy that human doctors average. Further, Watson can complete 160 hours of research in less than 10 minutes. If this isn’t amazing enough, just wait until you hear how Watson is helping doctors tailor treatment plans for cancer patients. Currently, it is very expensive to sequence a patient’s entire genome for mutations.

Generally, patients will opt instead for a ‘panel test’ wherein only a section of the genome is tested, that which contains the subset of genes scientifically most likely to lead to mutations, and thus cancer. Much like the auditing example from before, as efficient as sampling can be, it can also lead to sampling errors. In the case of a 76-year-old man with brain cancer, Watson sequenced his entire genome and uncovered mutations that weren’t identified in the panel test. This meant that particular drugs and trials that could potentially save the patient were also identified. In June of this year, it was announced that IBM Watson will be brought to the land down under for the first time.

Based on this understanding, journalists are often lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to AI. AI proves however, that nothing is beyond its reach.

In 2007, a North Carolina-based company created an artificial writer, Wordsmith. Wordsmith picks elements from a data set and structures a human-sounding article, capable of emotive language, and varied diction and syntax. In 2015, this service was made public, and since then more than 1.5 billion pieces have been written. The only current drawback is that the content must be data driven. Where qualitative, descriptive statements are needed, but cannot be matched with data, Wordsmith finds itself out of its depth.

Journalism has also changed in recent times due to the amount of information now available. Where before, with limited resources, journalists were tasked with reporting only on bigger stories that would captivate broader audiences, raw local data from governments, local authorities, and public services is being used — in tandem with services like Wordsmith — to produce the local stories that have up until this point, gone unreported.

Hope lost for humanity?

Journalism Journalism is markedly different from the aforementioned professions as there is a greater deal of creativity, at least in the general sense, from the outset.

So, the real question is, are we still relevant in this shiny new age where robots can complete the same tasks more efficiently and economically? The answer is a resounding yes. Let me tell you why. Harking back to the above examples, it’s pretty obvious that technology cannot complete the tasks from A to Z by itself. We are required both at conception — to create the parameters within which systems will work, and at the end — to

Business & Science — 19

provide insights and negotiate with clients and patients.

This is where our real value lies.

For example, in business, a robot is fantastic at crunching the numbers, but number crunching does not in itself avail the company of needing to pass its own judgement. Further, it does not do anything in the way of helping a company balance the competing needs of stakeholders and maintain its corporate social responsibility. As a robot is neither ethical nor capable of bias, it will never completely eradicate the need for human agents in this profession.

In law, professionals are still required to advocate on behalf of their clients. A robot can provide the facts, but unlike a lawyer it cannot appeal to the emotions of a judge, and this is important because — unlike robots — we are never swayed completely by numbers. We consider emotions such as forgiveness and compassion because the outcome is not about the bottom line, but about somebody’s wellbeing and the interests of the public. It is much better that lawyers are assisted by technology so that together, they can achieve cheaper, but still human, outcomes for their clients.

treasure and losing it would be a complete travesty.

A final mention must be made. Technology is flash, and it’s exciting but what it isn’t is flesh, and flesh begets feeling. Think about the last time you felt something, big or small. Maybe you wanted to prove somebody wrong. Maybe you fell in love. Maybe you wanted to take a chance on something or somebody. These are all motivations behind actions that have shaped the course of history and in a world with human agents, sometimes being irrational and motivated by our core emotions is not only important, but leads to a better outcome.

To this end, a robot will never be able to replace what we do naturally, and what we do so easily; that is to be vulnerable, to be leaders, and form meaningful connections with one another. If anything, technology has led us towards our core competencies, and will force us into becoming better versions of ourselves at a faster pace than we could have ever imagined. This can only be a good thing. Hand-in-hand with technology, we’ll be better equipped for our futures, and achieve so much more together than we ever could have alone. So chin up, graddies. We’re going to be alright.

In medicine, it is important for a doctor to work on their ability to empathise. It is all well and good for a machine to create a tailored treatment plan, but it takes a human being to sit down with a patient and motivate them to continue taking their medicine, or to encourage them to keep fighting. The body has an amazing way of healing itself, especially where human resilience is involved. No matter how advanced IBM Watson becomes, hospitals will never be devoid of human doctors.

In journalism, AI allows reporters to spend less time understanding data sets and more time pursuing leads provided by AI analysis. This also allows for higherorder reporting. And sometimes, it’s just nicer to have somebody explain the news to you rather than reading it online. Think about the weather for example; we have all the data on the screen, but we still appreciate Tim Bailey getting us all fired up about the weekend temperatures. Heck, the Bailey Barometer is a national

Art – Emily Nunell | @emdrawsthings

20 — Business & Science

World of Biological Warcraft Elliot Vella

cw: reference to gambling

World of Warcraft. The name itself evokes some sort of feeling in nearly every millennial, whether it be passion, tingles of nearly forgotten addiction, or immediate disgust. At its peak, the game was a cultural phenomenon; it boasted a player base of 12 million, reinvented the mould for the fantasy game genre, and soaked up the life force of nearly everyone who touched it.

While its reputation as a destroyer of social lives is probably its most publicised achievement, what is often overlooked is the story of a small programming oversight in the game’s early history — an error that might casually save all of humanity. This is a story of how a video game could make the difference between life and death in the event of a species-ending pandemic.

For a bit of background, World of Warcraft is a standard role-playing game, where players must gain experience to level up. Once they have achieved the maximum level they can participate in ‘raid dungeons’. These raids are groups of around 20 players who work to kill several ‘bosses’ until they face the final ‘boss’. Each boss has their own special ability and in September 2005, one boss would see the world’s most popular online game descend into mayhem.

This particular boss’ special ability was infecting a player with a disease, which would then spread to anyone within a few metres of them. This was designed to have players disperse and stand apart while killing the boss. Simple, right? Well, the game developers forgot to account for the players’ pets, which were also susceptible to the disease. While normally the game code automatically removed the disease for players’ avatars leaving the dungeon, this wasn’t the case for their pets.

Within a few hours what was originally meant to

be an enclosed disease became the first video game pandemic, spreading throughout cities and towns, and killing millions (not an exaggeration, a lot of people played this game). Admittedly, this is slightly less dramatic when everyone has infinite lives, but for the sake of keeping this article filled to the brim with drama we’re going to brush over that. It took the developer, Blizzard Entertainment, one whole month to figure out what was causing the outbreaks and, after numerous changes in the code, put a stop to it. While many in the gaming industry, including Blizzard, saw this as a massive design failure, there were a few groups who saw a way to make the best out of a bad situation. Independent researchers, epidemiologists, and even counterterrorist agencies all began to study the outbreak to see how people react when shit well and truly hits the fan.

When a disease breakout takes place, there are three things that must be known in order to contain and remove it: the traits of the disease, the health condition of the affected population, and the behavior of the population. While the first two are relatively straightforward, the third is a little bit of a wild card given humanities streak for irrational decision-making.

This is why the Warcraft plague received so much attention; it’s arguably the closest you can come to studying human behavior in the event of a worldwide disaster without actually creating one yourself (which ethically is a bit how ya goin). It was only a few days before the researchers all came to the same conclusion: video game characters are eerily similar to humans. By comparing the two, they paired up different professions with different types of in-game characters and tallied up their chance of survival. So, if you’re a gambling fan and fancy taking a multi out on the apocalypse, here are some inside tips:

Business & Science — 21

Doctors

General Population

One of the first things noticed was that several players who had the ability to ‘heal’ others flocked to the main cities to provide some relief. Naturally, similarities were drawn between these players and doctors; they were selfless, able to save lives, and a bit too keen on the idea of working around death. Unfortunately for doctors, if this virtual plague is anything to go by, their chances of survival are about as high as the chances of Brendan Fraser making a Hollywood comeback. They were almost all annihilated by the plague, and those of them that were high-level enough to survive could do little to help the victims. They either realised it was a losing battle and left, or stayed for so long that any experience meant very little — and then they also died. For all aspiring doctors out there, the lesson is this: a degree in medicine at USyd does not make you immortal, just statistically a bit of a wanker.

Now down to what the study really wanted to know: how does the average person, not tied down with a need to save others or dreams of social media stardom, react during a pandemic? The answer: surprisingly okay.

The researchers found that, while evolution probably didn’t shape the human body with the goal of defending itself from a mass pandemic, all of our go-to survival instincts still apply — you just have to amplify them.

Soon after the outbreak, every city became a ghost town as players realised the number one key to surviving a contagious plague was to flee to areas where population was sparse. Communication lines opened up and people swiftly informed each other of outbreak areas and how to avoid them — and this was one of the big takeaways.

Communication was everything. While it may sound like keeping up television stations and phone lines is a no-brainer, it reinforced this notion a hundredfold — so much so that they were unable to estimate just how many deaths it prevented. While keeping these lines of communication does, ironically, encourage some to go down the ‘news reporter’ route, it’s a necessary evil — and nobody will mourn the loss of the media anyway.

News Reporters In every apocalypse movie there’s someone who gets too close to whatever danger there is (zombies, global warming, a shark tornado — take your pick) to further their career. If you thought this was unrealistic and would never happen in real life, think again. According to researchers, the number one act that got people killed was curiosity. These bright bulbs were, naturally, labelled as ‘the media’, and tried to get a first-hand look at the plague for themselves. While being a doctor during a mass plague outbreak is, on the surface, one of the most dangerous jobs, it’s good old independent journalism that’ll really get ya. Defined broadly as “anyone who gets close to the plague for the sake of ‘reporting’”, it ranges from the Karl Stefanovics of the world, all the way down to your average Joe trying to get a really sweet boomerang for their Insta Story. So for you social media entrepreneurs out there, your lesson is: people can’t hit you up with a ‘like for a like’ when they’re all dead, and neither can you.

All in all, what began as one of the biggest and most widely publicised fuck-ups in the history of video games ended up being one of the most useful case studies in modern day epidemiology. And when the pandemic finally breaks out, you’ll know that the government’s solution was the result of a software coding intern who accidentally pressed a couple of 2s instead of 0s.

22 — Socio-Cultural

Prejudiced Technology Navira Trimansyah

cw: microaggressions, racism, colourism, reference to Holocaust, racial slurs, racial profiling, racial prejudice, transphobia, transmisogyny

The future of technology cannot be predicted but ideally, we can believe it is intended to one day lead us into a world eliminated of biases and inequalities as it attempts to level the playing field. Instead, we’re forced to work with technological advances that are catered towards the same demographic: cisgendered, white people — because like any design, to perform at its best, a target market has to be set in place in order to fully understand how or why a certain technology would work. Unfortunately, not everything has been taken into consideration, as there have been flaws in the way technology responds to a range of identities exceeding the target demographic.

One of the first technological flaws were Kodak cameras that weren’t able to photograph dark-skinned people of colour properly because their aperture settings only catered to light-skinned people. By using ‘Shirley cards’ — images of white women — as the standard for colour calibration around the world, white was literally labelled as “normal”. To make it worse, this oversight was only realised in the 1970s when furniture and chocolate companies complained about their brown-hued products not photographing well for advertising. Today, these failures range from Word underlining ethnic names to artificial intelligence (AI) personalities adapting extreme Neo-Nazi stances.

Microsoft once attempted to reach out to a younger audience with their AI technology by creating Tay — a female, teen AI who “had no chill”. As a supposedly

young millennial, Microsoft had already stored all of the slang and topics that millennials discuss into her algorithm and programming. She was able to interact with humans through Twitter and Kik, giving users an opportunity to speak to the “life-like” teen.

Unfortunately, Microsoft allowed her to ‘learn’ from her interactions and demonstrate her understanding in her responses the longer she was online. Users took advantage of this and started to teach Tay racial slurs, and her responses escalated from “humans are super cool <3” to “bush did 9/11” and “hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got”. While technology itself is not to blame for these statements, it was too easily manipulated into the voice of a Neo-Nazi, and reflected the bias that can be spread online.

Another example of racial bias is the incident in which Google Images presented different results when asked to search for “three white teenagers” and “three Black teenagers”. In a viral video online, a man searched these two phrases and found that the white teens were portrayed as very happy, clean-cut trios, while the Black teens were presented in crude mugshots. Racial bias is clear through Google’s interpretation and connotations in the change of the race in each search — questioning whether or not Google can be ‘just a neutral bystander’, or have the people behind the programming actually influenced the biases of the search engine? The answer is yes, they clearly have.

Socio-Cultural — 23

Facial recognition is another technological evolution that has been largely faulty. Facial recognition is based on algorithms which set a benchmark that aligns with the unconscious bias of the designer. Joy Buolamwini — a graduate researcher at MIT and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League — found that when she was experimenting with facial recognition in her previous work, she was embarrassed by the tech as she was unrecognisable to the algorithm, despite it working flawlessly with her lighter-skinned co-workers.

She even tried wearing a white mask and found that it recognised her a lot better than her actual face.

Thus, through her work, she’s attempting to change

programmed with cisgender settings. These machines focus particularly on the densities of different areas of the body — particularly the chest and genital area — and detect anything outside of the ‘conventional’ body anomaly. A better explanation of this discrimination is through the experience of Hailey Melville, a transgender woman, who is almost always mistreated by security officers. When requesting airport security to set the machine to the ‘male’ settings, they refused as she “appeared to be female”, and thus with the cis-female settings on, the alarm was set off as presumed. This then led to an unnecessary and an all-too-familiar intrusive pat down. However, due to these experiences, the TSA

“Users took advantage of this and started to teach Tay racial slurs, and her responses escalated from “humans are super cool <3” to “bush did 9/11” and “hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got”. the way it works by collating more data on the facial features and details of people of colour, as she found that designers who create the algorithms tend to focus more on the variety and details of white faces. Another failed example of this piece of technology is when a man named Richard Lee attempted to renew his New Zealand passport through an automated system, which rejected his passport photo due to its assumption that “his eyes were closed” — an error that does not meet its criteria. When he enquired about the image to passport officials, they simply shrugged it off and claimed that the photo failed to process due to the “shadows in his eyes and uneven lighting”. He then attempted to apply for his passport again, but it was only successful after four attempts, and even then had to be manually proven by an official first, rather than the automated system.

With airport security becoming more thorough with screening, the process has made the security protocol a lot longer than usual. Other than airport officials racially profiling Brown and Black passengers, airport body scanners specifically discriminate against those who identify as transgender as the machines have been

has begun working with the transgender community to resolve these issues to make them feel a lot safer.

These discriminative technologies are damaging our psychological trust in machines as they are not adapting to the various identities of the world.

Technology has always been catered to the cis-white demographic as they are the ‘ideal’ target market and are the “most populated” in the world, thus giving designers an excuse to simply ignore minorities. As we continue to rely on technology as a vital part of our way of life, we should be constantly questioning its ‘objective logic’ and treat it as an extension of our own biases — as well as addressing the technological biases in their programmers and creators.

24 — Creative Writing

Doctor! Doctor!

Zachary C. Ward

Come in, come in, not much can be done now. A bedstead and a bed pan and the dying man, crooked under the covers. The hang of the fluids bag, draining. Tried everything you know, not long to go. A willowy doctor scrutinising the clipboard. Glasses perched on the tip of a long nose. Was there an order for more morphine? I can’t see it here. I’ll have to chase it up with the last doctor, but I can’t make out this signature. Grey light.

Grey light blurring the window pane.

“What’s wrong with him?” The dying man turns his shaggy grinning head on me.

He lies perfectly at his ease. “Doctor, why is he dying?” The grin spins from me to the doctor and stares up at him in childish anticipation, and the dying man thrusts his hand out from underneath the thin bedspread. He holds it cupped beneath the doctor’s nose.

“No, you’ve had enough today, even for a man as sick as yourself. And besides, I’m all out for now.” The doctor bows towards the clipboard. His left hand sinks into the depths of his coat pocket and jiggles the withheld sweets mockingly. “Perhaps it’s an inflammation. Oh well, too late for speculation now.”

I stare through the anaesthetic at the neglected man’s look of rejection. “Doctor, why is he here again? I’m sorry, but why am I here? Can his wife be here? His daughter?”

“Yes, yes, yes, no need to worry. Beyond visiting hours, but not long to go now.” Why aren’t they here? “Make yourself comfortable. Take that chair. At least we can all be comfortable. Still, this shouldn’t take long.”

“Hello darling. Feeling better?” Ah, the wife at last! “Hi Dad.” And the daughter too! I was just telling him that it shouldn’t be long to go now.

Art – Oscar Phillips | @oscar_norbit

Creative Writing — 25

“Yes, the doctor was just telling me that it shouldn’t be long to go now,” and the dying man raises his arms behind his head and falls further into the pillow. He grins at the room.

“Any update on his condition, doctor?”

“Well, terminal is a sort of update.”

“Doctor,” I say from my chair (for suddenly I am seated), “why is this man to die?” The doctor snaps an irritated head around. People die. “Yes, but why this man? Why is he dying?” Because he is sick, and sick people die. “Sick with what?” That is an update. His update is terminal, as his wife now knows. Terminal is a deathly sickness.

“I checked myself in,” says the dying man, grinning and nodding. “I checked myself in this morning. Good thing too. I would’ve hated to miss this.”

“Yes,” speaks the wife. “Thank you doctor for catching it in time.” Another doctor flaps into the room and comes to loom over the foot of the bed, staring down its length into the dying man’s face. How long to go now? Oh, not long the doctor assures me. Good, good, so then everything’s how it should be. And the green bar? The first doctor unsheathes a pen from his top pocket and taps the monitor’s plastic shell. The green triangles pump along rhythmically.

“Perhaps not seeing the decline, one would expect to see such a short time left.” I see.

And what of the morphine? “I can’t make out this chicken scratch. Here, have a look.”

Nor can I. He seems healthy and happy enough for a dying man. Maybe give it a miss.

“Doctor, is he really going to die?” Now I am by the bed, holding onto the metal rails.

“He looks perfectly healthy to me, like you said.” The second doctor looks at me. She swipes at the cloud of anaesthetic in the air with the clipboard. Have you not been listening?

“Dad, your bag is empty.” The dying man looks up and toggles the IV line. Thank you young lady, we’ll see to it immediately. I’ll just hit the call button here and we’ll have a fresh one ordered right away.

“Doctor, may I look at his chart?” See if you can make out this chicken scratch. I take the chart and the doctor twists away to become little more than a cinder in the grey blurring light of the window pane. I look down but the words jumble and I ask for a second opinion.

26 — Creative Writing

“But he’s already had one of those you silly boy, and the second confirmed; terminal, nothing to be done.” Where is the terminal located doctor? “About the bowel, I suppose.

At least his symptoms would appear to suggest as much. I really can’t be too sure.”

Then how can you be sure he’s terminal? The doctor pulls himself from the blur and pounds over to the bedside. Producing once more his pen, he leans into the dying man’s face and hooks his lower lip with it, prying his mouth open. The doctor thrusts his tongue out, goes ‘ahhhhh’, and the dying man does the same. “Here, right here.

Does that look like the tongue of a healthy man to you?” The doctor grabs at one of the dying man’s resting arms and lifts it from the bedspread; pinching his thumb and forefinger, he tweaks the knot which fastens the gown, and the gown falls open to reveal an exposed armpit. “Here, the smell, the swelling, does that scream healthy to you?” Manic now, the doctor unfurls himself and hauls the arching bedstead lamp down to shine into the dying man’s face. Using the same fingers which had unslipped the gown, he peels back the dying man’s eyelids so that the eye within bulges and swivels, almost to bursting. “Stay still for me and look into the light. There, do you, or I, or anybody of sound health have an eye that is so obviously staring into the impending vortex of the eternal gloom?” I tell him I don’t know what a healthy tongue looks like, what a healthy smell smells like, what a healthy size for a swelling is, and that I have never seen the vortex myself, or an eye that has, and so cannot soundly judge as to the dying man’s sight.

The doctor, still craning over the bed, holding with both hands the bedrails opposite mine, whoops a holler of victory, and snaps back from the bedside. “No, no, but I know and all signs are consistent with a diagnosis of terminal.” That’s right boy, terminal for me I’m afraid, but no harm done, it is a Monday after all. “Now, now, Mondayitis isn’t terminal you know.” All round laughter at this, and the doctor produces a sticky red toffee from his pocket and plops it into the gaping jaws of the terminally ill man (for surely he is terminal). “Very good,” and the second doctor flicks a tear out from behind her flashing wire-framed lenses. “But though laughter is the best medicine, it can’t cure all ailments I’m afraid.” We are still laughing, but we are all hearing the doctor and remembering that laughter cannot cure all sicknesses.

“I’m sorry darling,” and the wife is behind the lying figure, not laughing anymore but still smiling and fluffing at his pillow, “but the doctor says that no matter how much you laugh, it won’t be enough.” That’s okay, I was tired of laughing anyway. “But if we all laugh at the same time doctor?” Didn’t we just try that? I see no change in the triangles (must have someone see to that) so please don’t interfere madam, just let him enjoy his last moments in peace. “And no laughter?” Well I don’t see what good it can possibly do. Doctor?

Socio-Cultural — 27

Your Dislike is Not a Phobia Bronte Gossling

cw: anxiety, phobias

I was eating a bagel when I saw it.

The unequivocal villain in all nightmares; two tiny, but fiercely terrible, furry bodily segments attached to eight delicately thin, ready-to-crawl hairy legs, and innumerable beady eyes that pierced into me as I moved — heart racing — from my oak table to the cupboard that housed the holy grail: Mortein. Though classified as an arachnid, this spider was an elephant in my kitchen. It had to go.

It moved. I let out a blood-curdling scream before pausing. I took a deep breath. And then a few more

for good measure before handling it with my fingers.

Collectedness in this situation, however, is a luxury some do not have.

A tremble, a chill, a drop of sweat. A phobia takes your breath away; literally. Defined as “an extreme or irrational fear or aversion to something”, these notso-sweet sensations are extreme manifestations of anxiety that interfere with daily life. Due to their status as punchlines, they are not always regarded with the gravitas that the American Psychological Association portray this highly-prevalent anxiety disorder to be.

Art – Isabella Brown | @bissy

28 — Socio-Cultural

In the early stages of its identification, circa Mycenaean Greece, Hippocrates was at a loss for distinguishing the seemingly harmless, everyday triggers of mass hysteria statewide. The answer came in the form of a curiously flute-fearing man. This patient, only during the night and only when intoxicated, was absolutely petrified of the very dulcet tones he adored when the sun reigned and he was sober. The prominent prehistoric physician promptly noted it down in The Seventh Book of Epidemics, and moved onto perfecting his Hippocratic theory.

malfunction in the brain, research suggests phobias could be biologically intentional and ‘normal’.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, phobias such as arachnophobia are beneficial, inbuilt safety measures necessary to instinctually flight from danger. Before antidotes and the rise in technology, humans were at perennial and unpredictable risk of encounters with these highly venomous critters. Without modern medicine to combat injuries, even when not fatal, a spider bite in the primal world could leave one

“With psychosomatically manifested symptoms such as intense feelings of anxiety, heart palpitations, heavy sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, and intense feelings of imminent doom, it’s only fitting that this anxiety disorder is named after Phobos; the god of fear.” incapacitated for days or weeks.

Eventually, modern psychology coined the term phobia to describe these odd phenomena — an ode to its ancient Greek Hippocrates roots. With psychosomatically manifested symptoms such as intense feelings of anxiety, heart palpitations, heavy sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, and intense feelings of imminent doom, it’s only fitting that this anxiety disorder is named after Phobos; the god of fear.

Astraphobia. Cynophobia. Arachnophobia.

Thalassophobia. Achluophobia. Chiclephobia. A fear of thunder, dogs, spiders, the ocean, darkness, and chewing gum. What makes these everyday stimuli allmighty harbingers of fear?

Its basic biology is rooted in our neurology. The amygdala — a small, almond-shaped structure located in the middle of the brain’s temporal lobe — is a key player. Responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory, malfunctions in this nervous tissue cause serious abnormal behaviour that interlinks all three areas and manifests in a persistent fear of harm — a phobia.

Although now classified as a disorder and a

Nowadays, however, with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos available at the snap of our fingers, some questions remain: Why do phobias have such prevalence? Why do they triumph, when arguably, we should? With the ability to thwart a spider, the dark, the ocean, why do we still fear? Thus lies the sinister undertones of all phobias — it is not a fear of the stimuli itself, it is a fear of the unconquerable, the unsafe, the uncertain — human mortality.

With the solemn implications of their causes and symptoms, the biological reasoning and high prevalence rate ensures the casual stigma around phobias persists. It’s easy to make light of phobias when you don’t suffer from them — the immediate constriction in your chest, the shallow breathing with no end in sight, the blurred vision — these are not symptoms of mere dislike. A phobia is a medical condition, like any other, that you cannot escape or falsify — it shouldn’t need to be rationalised. Instead, treat phobias with the gravitas they deserve. After all, they manifest one of the oldest and strongest sensations of humanity: fear.

Arts & Lifestyle — 29

Mysteries of the Deep Jennifer Worgan

The shark in Jaws is a giant mechanical shark that repeatedly malfunctioned during shooting, so we don’t see it in full until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the film.

Shooting for the film was scheduled to take 65 days and ended up taking 159. It must be acknowledged that Spielberg fails to address the true dangers of a day at the beach, most notably the weather.

I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but when I go for a day at the beach, I take it as given that there might be a giant killer shark in the water. We don’t know what lurks beneath the surface of the ocean. There could be hundreds of undiscovered sea monsters, and that is why I personally have not touched a body of water in the past seven years, and always wear a wetsuit in the shower.

The people of Jaws should not have been in the water, because nobody should go in the water except for trained professionals. Of course, Steven Spielberg is an intelligent man. He knows this. This film was never intended to be about sharks — it was about a much more real horror.

Jaws is about a more insidious threat that is totally ignored by all of the characters for the entire film. It stays lurking in the background, yet in every shot it is impossible not to feel a looming sense of dread. None of the people on the beach ever seem to apply sunscreen.

While it is true that a few of the extras wear hats consistently and from time to time a named character will pop one on — what is a hat without a rash shirt? It’s a joke. If you are in an area with no shade protection and your shoulders aren’t covered, you might as well stick bacon all over your body and jump off the pier, because there is no safety for you on land. Police Chief Martin Brody can rush around as much as he wants trying to

save everyone and their mum from the shark, but if he’s doing it without sunglasses, his eyes aren’t protected from glare. The reason he squints so much isn’t because he’s concentrating. It’s because he has not taken the proper precautions necessary to save his vision from environmental hazards.

Does anyone hydrate properly while they are out at the beach? No. Nobody has thought to take a simple reusable water bottle with them that would enable them to avoid dehydration while also avoiding excess plastic waste. It is also important to note that plastic is the real killer in the ocean. There are no recycling bins even featured in the film’s mise-en-scene. A PG rating is far too lenient for this kind of horror.

Although everyone acknowledges that there is a shark, there is little to no acknowledgement of wind chill in Jaws. Any meteorologist, or my grandmother, could confirm that it is windier at the beach than it is inland.

In extreme cases, wind chill can lead to windburn, which is sunburn caused by the wind. This is not a fictional hazard and without protective clothing, everyone on the beach is at risk.

The world of Jaws is far more dystopian and insidious than it is given credit for. It is truly a modern tragedy that the true meaning of this cinematic triumph has not been acknowledged. All we can do to right this wrong is listen to the message it has passed on to us: the importance of Slip Slop Slap. I urge all readers to apply their zinc thoroughly the next time they are considering interacting with a shoreline.

Art – Zoe Crocker | cargocollective.com/zoelc

30 — Politics

The Fight of the Century or the Final Century Humanity Will Ever See Michael Tangonan

North Korea — or more precisely, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Whatever democracy really means in this small, impoverished nation in Far East Asia has much to say in its 2014 parliamentary election, which saw a landslide majority of 607 seats taken by the current ruling Workers’ Party of Korea out of 687 seats. Sister parties took 77 further seats and religious organisations accounted for the remaining 3. Heeding must also be taken to the populist nature of the election, where the Central Election Committee purports a 99.97% voter turnout. Although, they will have to strive to improve on their gender distribution of seats with only 16.3% of seats claimed by female candidates.

Another feature of this nation is its Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Arirang, or more commonly known as the Arirang Festival —

cooling of tensions and brief cooperation, North and South have been at each other’s throats till today. Some argue, however, that both nations have decided to live with the other half merely on the verge of belligerency waiting to strike at any time. For various periods throughout modern history, North Korea has incited the concern of the international community with its attempts to develop its own nuclear capacity. It should also be noted that an armistice was signed between the North and the South but even till today, no official peace treaty has been signed.

Whether the North does have any nuclear capacity of any sort seems to elude the truth. It becomes very difficult to ascertain the veracity of state media when it makes assertions that Kim Jong-il invented the hamburger or his birth was heralded by a sparrow,

“... the ruling Kim dynasty is able to capitalise on the situation, feed fear into the populace, and ensure their cooperation and complacency over their rule under an iron fist.” crowned by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest choreographed event of its kind. Sadly, this spectacular performance of its actors also reflects the lives of the average North Korean ‘citizen’ — dancing to the tune of the state media and the infinite curtsy of prostrations to the Supreme Leader — forever a participant in this living theatre of the Kim dynasty.

Ever since the Korean War — or more rightly, the War in Korea — the southern Republic of Korea and the North have been on divergent paths. Since then, with the exception of the brief Sunshine Policy which saw a slight

and was accompanied by the changing of the seasons, illumination of the heavens, and the appearance of rainbows. Instead the world has heard allegations of nuclear tests here and there, missile tests — of which two have purportedly flown across the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan — and further allegations of the USA mainland being within target range of North Korean ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles — which in circumspect is most of the conventional long-range weaponry that the Western world possesses currently).

Kim Jong-un seems very different to his father —

Politics — 31

more volatile, impatient, and provocative. Kim Jong-il at least took the advice of his Russian and Chinese supporters-cum-allies and conceded in the face of heavy economic sanctions and cooperated, albeit reluctantly, with the United Nations and the general international community. However, the public of North Korea has been a public which has been fed with the impression that they are constantly at the peril of the United States.

They are being threatened by NATO, oppressed by the international community, and fearful of an intervention like the one in Iraq — an image too vivid to forget in the minds of the North Korean psyche. These tensions are also contributed to by another equally provocative and uncooperative leader on the other side of the Pacific.

We see on the other side of the horizon leading a crusade against the militant north, a Donald Trump at the head of hysterical, oppressed, and deprived far-right — for too long had their voices been silenced by the progressive media. They empathise with the experiences of the North Koreans, both peoples are oppressed, their voice unheard, and the world is against them. One is targeted for being the Chosun — the children of the morning sun — the other targeted because their free speech is being impeded by the likes of Black Lives Matter campaigners, or marriage equality supporters.

Both leaders have been belligerent and lacking in the general political or diplomatic tact that their predecessors exercised for the previous decade. Both have been gearing towards confrontation with the South Koreans as the fodder in the middle — collateral damage, another chess piece in this grand strategy, another character with a role to play in this geopolitical tragedy.

But will nuclear war really occur? Since the conclusion of the War in Korea, there has been a balance of convenient equilibrium if you may — between the West and rogue states such as the North. The South and the North have lived many years with the reality of ever-present war and tension — the North merely focused on subduing its population with the opiate of nectar and ambrosia sourced from the tears of Kim il-Sung, and the South, now one of the Four Asian Tigers, is home to companies

such as Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Lotte, slowly strengthening its grapple on the economic marketplace.

Say one puts on their cynical hat and questions qui bono — “who benefits” from the situation — the locus classicus of any geopolitical analysis. The People’s Republic of China and Russia get to retain this satellite state between themselves and South Korea — they gain an objective distance from the so-called Western influences of the region. North Korea? Well, the ruling Kim dynasty is able to capitalise on the situation, feed fear into the populace, and ensure their cooperation and complacency over their rule under an iron fist.

The South you might ask? They don’t have to deal with the economic failure of the North, they do not have to accommodate for impoverished refugees from the North placing an even greater strain on the South’s struggling economy — especially with their young population already at an 11% unemployment rate. They also have a smaller region to administrate, repair roads, upgrade infrastructure — of which should there be reunification, the South would inevitably need to reconstruct the North from scratch in order to exploit any mineral resources. And the USA, and by extension the West? We can keep a focus on tensions in the North, increase our defence budget by implication — buy new equipment, new submarines, increase manpower on the ranks, all in the name of self-defence — at the potential neglect of matters at home. We also benefit from the fear of other nations in the region, by selling them the weapons we manufacture, creating closer economic links due to possessing a common enemy, and providing reason to develop infrastructure overseas.

However cynicism by itself will not solve this issue.

Neither will stubbornness or acquiescence. Perhaps the solution is yet out of reach, but until then, everyone — from the most disadvantaged North Korean to the leader of a chaebol in Seoul — it seems we all have to play our part in this geopolitical theatre of the globe; in our own game of zones.

32 — Business & Science

The People v Disneyland Louisa Luong

cw: assault, racism, ableism

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land.

Home to happiness, dreams, and childhood magic.

There’s something for everyone at Disneyland; for kids, there are wholesome rides, fireworks, and overpriced hot dogs. For weary parents, there are ample sitting areas, clean bathrooms, and an endless supply of Mickey Mouse merchandise for all souvenir and Christmas gifts to come. The truth is, your parents haven’t truly loved you unless they’ve stuffed you in a plane for 17 hours and planted you in front of the iconic pink castle for a Kodak Gold moment.

Since its grand opening in 1955, the theme park in Anaheim, California has seen over 650 million guests

from all over the world. In a country that prides itself on Freedom, the Right to Bare Arms, and Suing Whoever for Whatever the Fuck Reason, it comes as no surprise that Disneyland rides have attracted over 650 lawsuits. And this number only accounts for the years between 1954–1992 according to Californian author David Koenig. Koenig has written three books about Disney lawsuits and his Goodreads profile photo features him in a bowling shirt sitting in front of his 2002 iMac. As we enter the world of Disneyland law, please remember to keep your hands, arms, and feet inside the ride at all times.

It’s a Small World Jose Martinez was trapped on the equally cheerful

Business & Science — 33

as it is creepy ride after it broke down. While other passengers evacuated the ride, Martinez, who is a quadriplegic, was left stranded in the Goodbye Room (the very last room before the exit). And if getting stuck in the dark wasn’t enough, he also had to endure listening to the song play over and over again for 40 whole minutes. While we can agree that it’s a catchy song, 40 minutes of it is just too much. In his complaint, Martinez said that he “suffered extreme emotional distress and feared that he was going to die as he remained trapped on the ride. [He] also felt extremely humiliated and embarrassed at having been singled out by this discriminatory treatment in Disneyland’s inability to evacuate him from the ride.”

In his lawsuit, he also cited other discriminatory treatment. For example, lack of family restroom

facilities, incorrectly constructed curb ramps with excessive slopes, and the fact that 75% of the park’s rides were not accessible by wheelchair. Martinez demanded that Disney alter its policies, practices, and procedures to accommodate for the full enjoyment of the theme park for people with disabilities. The judge awarded $8,000 for his pain and suffering. And as far as implementing a ‘procedure’ to evacuate passengers with disabilities, the court held that Disney had a duty to warn its guests with disabilities that rides might break down and that there’s a possibility that they could become trapped. Poor effort on Disney’s part while even places like Costco have handicapped shopping trolleys that are more accommodating for people with disabilities.

Art – Erin Sutherland | @ezose.png

34 — Business & Science

Winnie the Poop In 1978, Winnie the Pooh and OJ Simpson had a few things in common. A nine-year-old girl alleged that Pooh slapped her in the face causing bruising, recurring headaches, and possible brain damage. Actor Robert Hill testified that in his costume, his vision and movement were severely restricted. He claimed that the girl was tugging at his costume from behind and when he turned around to see who it was, he ‘accidentally’ struck the girl. After a court recess, Hill returned to the stand

confirm if the Rabbit was still employed, which is code for ‘yes, Racist Rabbit is still employed’. Call me naive, but I imagine finding a person with no skills or experience to don a costume and wave without being racist isn’t much of a tough ask. Maybe I am too idealistic, but I think we can all agree that Racist Rabbit has been a bad, bad bunny.

Segway or the Highway Tina Baughman tried to fulfil her eight-year-old daughter’s birthday wish with a trip to the happiest place

“In a country that prides itself on Freedom, the Right to Bare Arms, and Suing Whoever for Whatever the Fuck Reason, it comes as no surprise that Disneyland rides have attracted over 650 lawsuits.” in full costume and answered questions as the cute, lovable, and totally huggable Pooh Bear. When the attorney asked him, “What do you do at Disneyland?”, he proceeded to do a jig down the aisle — to which the judge said, “Have the record show that he’s doing a two-step.” The costumed Hill then demonstrated for the jury that the costume’s arms were too low to the ground to have been capable of slapping the girl in the face — the classic ‘if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit’ moment.

The jury took a total of 21 minutes to acquit Pooh on all charges; comparable to the four hours it took the jury in OJ Simpson’s murder trial.

Racist White Rabbit In 2012, White Rabbit well and truly lived up to his name. A family claimed that White Rabbit was being racist towards their two African American sons when he refused to hold hands or hug them. Initially, they chalked it up to new policy that prohibited characters to touch children. But when they saw old mate White Rabbit hugging white and Asian children shortly after, they knew their suspicions held merit. While Disney offered an apology letter and park passes to the family, the family rejected the offer, and filed a lawsuit. Disney wouldn’t

on earth. Suffering from muscular dystrophy, Baughman finds it difficult to walk or stand from a seated position.

When she contacted Disney to request permission to use a Segway, she was denied as per Appendix 1 of Disney’s policy stating that two-wheeled vehicles and devices are prohibited from the park’s premises. She sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), alleging that Disney denied her full and equal access to Disneyland. The ADA was enacted by Congress “to remedy widespread discrimination against individuals with disabilities.” The definition of discrimination being “a failure to make reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures, when such modifications are necessary to afford such goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to individuals with disabilities.”

The district court of California held that Disney’s policy technically permits motorised wheelchairs and scooters, so it did not need to modify its policy because Baughman’s use of the Segway wasn’t “necessary”. In support of their case, Disney cited the case of Tennessee v Lane, where it was established that a paraplegic can enter a courthouse by dragging themselves up the front steps and therefore lifts and ramps are not

Business & Science — 35

“necessary”. In the same line of reasoning, Disney also stated that wheelchair-accessible doors and bathrooms were frivolous facilities as “individuals could be carried in litters or on the backs of their friends.” Clearly, Disney had grossly overestimated the power of the humble piggy back ride.

Fortunately, the case was appealed and went all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court which interpreted the ADA with respect to “full and equal enjoyment” rather than a strict examination of the word “necessary”. Under the ADA, Disney was required to take reasonable steps to provide guests with disabilities with a full and equal experience.

In the end, Baughman was victorious as Disney was forced to change their policy to allow the use of Segways.

Tower of Terror Meet Denise Mooty; she rode the Tower of Terror — a 40m drop ride set in the Hollywood Tower from television show The Twilight Zone — over fifty times a day, every single day. Suffering from abdominal adhesions, she claimed that the frequent 13-storey drop at 63km/ hr helped ease the pain. Armed with an annual pass, doctor’s note, and a Guest Assistance Card, she was able to cut to the front of the line. Her true terror arrived in the form of a new manager who limited the number of times she could take the ride in a day. After verbally abusing staff, she was eventually banned from the park, and sued Disneyland for breach of contract, false arrest, and emotional distress. Her claim was dismissed by the court as it was held that although she was an annual pass holder, she was not entitled to extraordinary and unlimited access over any other regular ticket holder.

Regardless, Mooty isn’t missing out on much these days as the Tower of Terror has been replaced by a new Guardians of the Galaxy ride as of January this year.

Headless Mickey Disneyland is a place where magic becomes reality.

And if we’re forking out up to $100 for a ticket plus $20 for parking, we have high expectations for the illusion that there’s a happy ending for us all — with

our heads screwed on tight. While headless humans are indeed a sight, it seems headless Disney characters are in their own league of emotional trauma. In 1989, Lyndsey Boozer (aged five) coloured a hundred weather maps in a Pocatello television station competition, all in the hopes of winning a trip to Disneyland. Pocatello is in Idaho, which I’ve never visited, but I’m sure the weather cannot be interesting enough to warrant a children’s colouring in competition. Despite the poorly age-targeted contest, Lyndsey won her family a trip to the magic kingdom. While leaving the gift shop, they were accused by a security guard of stealing a piggy bank and taken to the security office — the scariest corner of the world’s happiest place. While they were being detained for questioning, Lyndsey “was shocked to see that her favourite characters whom she was hugging and shaking hands with minutes before had lost their heads in the meanwhile.” The Boozers filed a $1 million lawsuit, alleging that she became depressed and withdrawn, requiring three months of therapy.

The lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. I only hope that Lyndsey now knows that we all lose our heads sometimes.

Bad things happen to good people. Bad things also happen to bad people. And these bad things can happen in happy places. There’s not much we can do about it.

All we can really do is enjoy the ride and exit safely through the gift shop.

36 — Creative Writing

Second Letter From Ure’

Obi’m, I did find someone else, like you asked me to.

He’s a good man, I know, but not as beautiful as you.

He loves me dearly, and hopes someday it’ll be mutual.

I cook for him. I smile at him.

I pity him.

I go to bed every night with him at my side but you in my heart I kill my moans with quiet tears and with your name in my mouth.

He is not as tall, and jalabia looks dunk on him.

He doesn’t smell of chocolate axe and jasmine.

He is a good man, but he is not you.

If this is what love truly means, I will wait, still.

Ogo Nwanguma

Creative Writing — 37

On The Day Before We Died

On the day before we died home felt like heaven and we grew with pride we were beautiful souls, children of the most high fear of evil, future heroes, afraid to tell lies.

Talk about harmony, I remember how we lived: Mud castles and the warrior stories we strongly believed we felt loved and walked tall, no matter where we would roam I would sleep at the waziris’ and wake up at home.

We were like family; we shared the same hut played husband and wife, the police and thief till we got caught then we fled home, to eat from my mother’s pot.

The things changed and we hung peace on our own iroko strangled love with our own hands we placed our hope on a comma and left with tiny chance to heal our land.

Now, mum says I can play with them, and dad nods — it’s true avoid kunle, saadiq, chima, and Fatima too they have marks on their faces, unlike you and different religions, languages, traditions, and schools.

But on the day before we died we had the chance to live and avoid death if we forgave ourselves, put hate aside and finally — finally — wash ourselves of prejudice before sunset.

This is that day.

38 — Socio-Cultural

Myanmar: Forgotten Crimes Amara Khan

cw: ethnic cleansing, genocide, violence, war, r*pe, racism

Reflecting on the current situation in Myanmar, it is evident that we have a long way to go before we can say that human rights are adequately valued and protected.

Overwhelmed by reading the (very few) articles written about the plight of Myanmar minorities, I cannot help to think that by ignoring their stories — drenched in blood, tears, and despair — we are just as much to blame as the oppressors.

What these stories symbolise is humankind’s inherent tendency to pick and choose who is worthy of being remembered. Browsing through mainstream media, it has become painstakingly apparent that the Rohingya people are undoubtedly victim to selective mourning.

This is what happens when minorities are mercilessly slain. Just as we begin to stitch together the wounds of our brethren from one state, war criminals of another region feed upon the fragmented nature of our global community by terrorising the already terrified.

Villages razed to the ground.

Houses set alight with people tied up inside.

Women raped mercilessly, bodies left for dead.

Children beheaded and burned alive. Crying for help.

Rivers once flowing with water… now flowing with blood.

Families leaving behind the little resources they have, to flee to unfamiliar lands and foreign people that want nothing to do with them.

Rohingya reside in Western Myanmar, Rakhine State.

Approximately 1.1 million Muslims occupy the territory, with historians affirming that the group have had roots in Myanmar since the 12th century. Under British rule, Myanmar was considered a province of subcontinental India, and therefore the migration of Muslims from Bangladesh to Myanmar was deemed an “internal migration”. Contrary to the fabrications conjured by Myanmar’s military rulers, the Rohingya minority have been living in Rakhine State for more than 200 years; before the British even gained control over the nation.

That’s 200 years of history attempting to be erased through the violent means of ethnic cleansing.

No outcry, no outrage, no media releases. We are yet to hear from our global leaders denouncing these atrocities, having previously vowed to uphold the guiding principles of international human rights law.

The root of these ongoing injustices is the way in which the Myanmar community perceive the Rohingya people.

In their eyes, the Rohingya are illegal immigrants who do not belong in their Buddhist-dominated region. This is wilful blindness hinged upon a false perception that nationalism is equivalent to stability. David Mathieson of the Human Rights Watch says that, “trying to find the foundation for this level of hatred is very difficult”. It is this hatred that has led to the denial of basic human rights including food, water, shelter, safety, and the right to exist. Because they are not deemed citizens of Myanmar, the government prohibits its minorities to move freely within the state. This humanitarian crisis is one that impacts the lives of innocent people left in the hands of brutal, violent leaders, and is being described as “cynical, sinister, and insidious”.

This is Myanmar. These are the Rohingya.

Identified as the world’s most persecuted people, the

This crisis highlights the devastating impact that nationalism has upon a state. It represents the fear

Socio-Cultural — 39

instilled in nationalists of the growing heterogeneity that could possibly dismantle their flawed ideology.

When the military regime took control over Myanmar after the end of British rule in 1948, it established a new strategy that thrived on the intentional destruction of ethnic groups, manifesting primarily through protests led by organised groups of monks. This led to the establishment of a new citizenship law in 1982, which denied minorities the right to identify as Myanmar citizens. While Myanmar was freed from the shackles of the British rule, it left behind one of the most devastating legacies amounting to racism and discrimination — white supremacy. The Rohingya community’s physical appearance differed from the rest of the Myanmar people because their skin tone bears semblance to the majority of the Bangladeshi community. For this reason, the military and the general public sought to legitimise the mass persecution of the Rohingya people as outcasts.

The radical political censorship of issues curtailing the notion of human rights has been largely swept under the rug as the hegemony of tyrants continue. The conflict between the Buddhist majorities and the minorities in

its state-led violence, and the UN has recorded that almost 300,000 minorities have sought asylum in Bangladesh. The systematic violence in this country sets precedent for genocide and crimes against humanity. In early September, the UN announced that the Myanmar government blocked humanitarian aid such as food, water, and medical supplies. The UN has further categorised the violence as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, with 19,000 Rohingya people seeking refuge in Bangladesh per day. Meanwhile, the Myanmar government and nationalists deny the ongoing violence.

So where does that leave the minorities?

Instead of holding global leaders to account, the West has instead encouraged a pride that fits all too well with the nationalist regime; gifted with words of praise and awards of recognition. People like Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar State Counsellor, are placed on a pedestal far beyond the reach of accountability. Her status as a political prisoner and a democratic and humanitarian icon is left unquestioned by mainstream media as she ignores the plight of Rohingya people time and time again. When Burma was under British rule from 1824, it was Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, who

“The paradox of Suu Kyi’s political struggle is that despite believing in non-violent resistance, she has proven by way of words and lack of action, it is much easier to deliver speeches about peace and democracy than to implement it when truly needed.”

Rakhine reignited in October 2016 when the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) carried out attacks on the border police. This attack incited violence that has led to Myanmar military and government justifying their attacks upon unarmed civilians in order to protect the ‘interests’ of the state. To protect one ethnic group, they aim to deliberately eradicate another. This is a humanitarian crisis that demands global attention.

The military have blockaded the border of northern Rakhine State to prevent foreigners from prying into

contributed to Burma’s independence in 1948. He was deemed a democratic icon that inspired many, including his daughter, to fight for Burmese citizens’ democratic rights. However, his fight for freedom was widely associated with aggressive nationalism — one that did not have the capacity to house minorities — and this apparently extends to Suu Kyi’s beliefs and inactions.

Suu Kyi has, however, faced major scrutiny over her apathy towards the Myanmar minorities particularly in light of her campaign supporting democracy in the past.

40 — Socio-Cultural

In a 2017 interview with BBC, Suu Kyi explicitly stated, “I don’t think there is ethnic cleansing going on. Ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening.” Her emphatic denial symbolic of the devastating influences of power and authority. The paradox of Suu Kyi’s political struggle is that despite believing in non-violent resistance, she has proven by way of words and lack of action, it is much easier to deliver speeches about peace and democracy than to implement it when truly needed. More than 400,000 people have called for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her accolade for “when a laureate cannot maintain peace, for the sake of peace itself the prize needs to be returned or confiscated by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.”

It is important to note that Muslims are not the only minorities being persecuted in Myanmar. It is evident through the actions of the military and government regime that it seeks to uphold Buddhist hegemony in the state. In an attempt to reaffirm homogeneity, the far-right militias and government personnel have sought to purge the nation of any group that challenges its ideologies. Apart from the Rohingya Muslims, approximately 4% of the population is deemed to be Christian, Animists, or Taoists. The Myanmar government — paired with the uprising of organised protests led by radical monks — are convinced that in order to protect the state from perceived threats, they must eliminate the threat. Muslims and Christians in Myanmar still face severe persecution, mass destruction of their places of worship and homes, and expulsion from the nation.

The situation in Myanmar is no longer an issue involving the state alone. There is an undeniable connection between Australia and Myanmar. Where there are human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and deliberate genocides; the Australian government has a responsibility to condemn. The Turnbull government has refused to speak out against the injustices against the Rohingya people. While the Australian senators passed a Greens motion to urge Myanmar to recognise the religious and ethnic minorities of the state, the statement made in Geneva

was critiqued for being “hopelessly weak” and only proved Australia’s willingness to ignore human rights issues to reflect Australia’s trade interests.

In an open letter to the Australian Government, Imran Mohammad pleaded with our leaders to recognise the plight of the minorities in Myanmar. Victims like Mohammad have witnessed family and friends slaughtered, burnt, decapitated and buried alive before their very eyes. Facing these, there are Rohingya people who fled in search for safety, and entered Australian waters only to be held indefinitely on Manus Island.

Their anxieties increase each day they are held in these prisons, escalating exponentially as they hear of continued bloodshed and death back home.

We see the impact that raising our voices in unison has had in the past. The nature of international law is such that we cannot coerce the Myanmar government to put an end to the genocide. What we can do is put pressure on our government to resettle the people on Manus Island, many of whom are Rohingya people. We must remind our government that it is imperative for Western societies to acknowledge acts of deliberate genocide and ethnic cleansing. Australia plays a role in this, and is obligated to assist people seeking asylum by resettling them in unfamiliar lands. It’s the least we can do for a forgotten minority.

Creative Writing — 41

Shards Mariela PT

I AM HERE. STANDING ALONE. NIGHTDRESS IN TATTERS. I’M IN THIS GROVE, THIS ORCHARD, THAT IS OVERFLOWING WITH FRUIT SO RIPE IT IS ROTTING. WHAT A SINFUL CATHEDRAL; WHAT A BROKEN PLACE IN WHICH TO PRAY FOR REDEMPTION. MY FEET HAVE SQUASHED THE PURITY OF THE SOIL. I HAVE SQUANDERED ITS INNOCENCE, AND MY OWN. I STAND HERE: GUILTY & ASHAMED. TOO MUCH, TOO HEAVY TO ASK FOR FORGIVENESS.

THE NIGHT SINKS ITSELF INTO THE SOIL & THE CICADAS SCREAM AROUND ME: “SALVATION IS

FUTILE. THE SUMMER IS THROBBING WITH

A THOUSAND LIVES UNLIVED

AND THIS ACHE OF ABSENCE IS WOUNDING US ALL.

(THE SMELL OF OOZING FRUIT WON’T LEAVE MY SKIN. I HAVE BECOME MORE PEACH THAN PERSON; MORE DIRT THAN BLOOD).

Art – Wilson Leung | @_why_design

42 — Creative Writing

WE WATCH AND PRAY — FOR REDEMPTION, FOR SALVATION FROM THIS EMPTY TOMB / WOMB / WOUND OF A WORLD.

I feel you flit into my insides — you enter much like the Nile into the sweet golden sand of its Delta. pyramids rise above the banks and I feel your hand slip into the spaces between my spine, you tessellate yourself inside my skin and you’ve made me into a Pharaoh. I can’t wait for the gold, I can’t wait for the glory, I can’t wait for the sarcophagus to swallow me whole.

WE FEEL THE HOLY SLIP BETWEEN THE CRACKS IN THE PAVEMENT; THE GAPS IN MY INFANT TEETH. LET IT SPILL OVER US LIKE THICK WINE, BLOOD, SILK. I can feel it and it slips out of my mouth, sliding out from in between my teeth. it’s dark red and clotted and thick and warm.

I’m full of it; this poison. my hands ache with sunset and blazing sands. mirage of oases in the desert my feet are blistered and raw with the journey so much is spilling off of my shoulders who am I in this mess of a tapestry? where do I place my shoes? rest my head? kiss her cheek?

Creative Writing — 43

WE SOAK IN BREAKING WATER; WAVES THAT PUSH OUR BODIES — SOFT & SUPPLE & SODDEN — FURTHER OUT TO SEA.

something slips like sunlight melting through the shards of my hands.

blood as ribbons. outside, the rain outside, something buzzing (the bees)

someone screaming (maybe my mother?) hands cupped around a baby hummingbird. life is the squeezing pressure around the body because underwater things drift more easily. something is bubbling out of my nose and I hope it’s water but I’m scared it’s poison.

I don’t want to show my octopus to you: mouth full of ink, my love grasping like tentacles, suctioning, consuming, overwhelming I suck the light right out of you: straw into milkshake, lips to bone — to marrow. this is disgust and we are thick with it.

WE DWELL IN ENDLESS MYSTERY, LIKE THE OCCULTED ROCK FIGURES THAT RISE TOWARD THE

PULSING SUN — SINKING & RISING & MOTTLED IN THE SKY.

our bodies make cathedrals in the warm red glow of the room, her mouth the altar as I offer myself: the sacrifice for our sacrilege, our sin. the holy of it all burns stars into the blue. her name slips from my mouth like the rosary in my mother’s hands and I almost hear it hit the bottom of the bowl — holy water rippling like the waves of her hair — and I know the Virgin Mother will forgive us for what we have done.

Art – Wilson Leung | @_why_design

44 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Creative Writing

come, love. come with all your brokenness and your empty-cathedral eyes. i have cut my arms in half to lay them at your feet in flesh offering to your magnificence. they look like boughs, tree branches, in the thick night of the forest. come, love, come. with your mouth like an oil spill and your back like barren sand dunes. i have longed to press the swell of my cheek into the cave of your neck-meetsshoulder and the blood from your bullet wound feels like the ocean against my face / salt and sweat and tears between us. come, love. come to me with your hands held like promises and your legs weary with the voyage. i know that you have drowned in the mercilessness of the summer cicada honey and that your throat cannot close itself around any sweetness any more. but the way i ache for you would put the ancient gods to shame. come, love. let me love you in all your brokenness; in all your sacrilegious holy. come.

Art â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Wilson Leung | @_why_design

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Oasis Cat Wratten | @catwratten Oasis aims to explore the cameraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to act as a tool with the capacity to manipulate or intervene within a landscape; in order to create a new reality or truth. This work focuses on the documentation of the landscape in an abstract form. My intention is to subvert traditional notions of landscape and documentary photography through abstract and other-worldly images. Often feeling restrained or constricted by the business and pace of the city, I am drawn to venturing out to vast open spaces to create images, finding serenity in the expansive natural landscape.

The terrain of the mid-west coast of Western Australia reminds you of being on another planet: strange rock formations, surreal colours, and rare-seen signs of human interference. The highways are dotted with abandoned convict and cattle stations. One thing there is an abundance of is flies, there are two dozen on your body at any given time. That, combined with the unbearable heat and lack of shade, made leaving the vehicle a challenging and physically exhausting venture. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a venture worth the challenge, as exploring a landscape so inhospitable and other-worldly was ultimately one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

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An oasis is traditionally a place of fertility in a desert â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but modernly used to describe a pleasant or peaceful area amidst a frantic, or difficult place or situation.

The location where this work was originally shot was a 72km long salt lagoon in rural Western Australia, amidst isolated countryside, harsh heat, and semi-arid conditions. After kilometres of monotonous scenery, dry orange dirt, and sparse shrubs, the lagoon was somewhat of an oasis â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a kaleidoscope of colours, tones, and textures, surreally situated in the desert.

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Arts & Lifestyle — 57

The Crush: A Conversation in Words & Images Words by Rebecca Hall, Photographs by Isabella Sanasi

I. Infatuation The crush is still relegated to the realm of hysteria, ‘silly’ teen girls, and supposed feminised weakness. As adults, we are expected to admit our crushes with a degree of shame — of our emotions, of our sexualities, of our sense that we might be worthy of our own desires. While people of all genders can, and do, develop crushes, our culture still imagines only one scenario: a foolish girl infatuated with an unattainable other (usually a boy or a man). Cisgender men’s desires are, by contrast, not spoken of as ‘crushes’, but instead perceived as passions: quaking, lusty urges. Girlhood is where the infantalisation of feminine desire begins. But the crush can never be as simple as what we have been led to believe by our culture, which undervalues it. The crush is a dense mass of emotion, and as such it is a well of potential. If we were to treat this emotion with the respect that it deserves, we would be able to recognise this potential. To experience a crush is to become acutely aware of the potential that exists in ourselves, in others, and between each other.

Love me NOT— like a daisy will know what to make of this.

Photos — Isabella Sanasi | @isabellasanasi

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II. Projection There is distance between what we know of our crush and the intimacy of what we imagine ourselves knowing. Nonetheless, we register opportunity to bridge that distance when our desires suddenly have a focus point. Despite the popular narrative, we cannot do justice to what a crush is without pushing back against the foolish girl paradigm. Beyond the profound recognition produced by infatuation, crushes are the human expression of our real and valid needs, projected outward onto a specific other. We see the other (the object of the crush) as someone who can meet and understand our needs. “I NEED TO LIE BACK TO FRONT WITH SOMEONE WHO ADORES ME,” declares Jenny Holzer’s projection-based artwork, ‘Xenon for Berlin 1’ (2001). Her projection works are displayed in public spaces, allowing us to experience what poet Henri Cole has called “the touch of light against the surface of public space.” Holzer’s work elevates the relevance of these desires, and creates a fantastic metaphor for the crush. We, too, externalise our private desires as the crush bubbles up, and our light finds its way to their surface.

The blankness is only comprehensible when smothered by light, which it seems to emit.

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III. Reflection “Look,” I said, “I’ll admit that eighty percent of this was fantasy, projection. But it had to start with something real.”

So says Chris Kraus in her infamous ode to the crush, I Love Dick (1997). Blending memoir and fiction, the book explores Kraus’ all-consuming crush on elusive, charming Dick. The book gained cult status a decade ago when it found a new audience of young feminists who connected with Kraus’ “lonely girl phenomenology” (Kraus’ own description). Why? Because the book reveals that the crush is hardly about the person we desire, or what we project onto them, at all. Through delving into her own psyche in obsessing over Dick, Kraus’ semi-autobiographical character in the book comes to understand what it is that she felt she was lacking from the outset. Her infatuation, her recognition of the unmet potential in the two, her projection of emotion onto Dick, all these things provide the space for her to reflect.

Ultimately, the crush pales in comparison to the self. We may find ourselves desiring another, but that does not make them crucial to our broader narratives. For all of the things that it is, a crush is not a relationship. It is an emotional experience that belongs to one person.

The walls are put up only to exist as reflections.

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IV. Extension Whether the crush ever catalyses the kind of intimacy we might desire with the other or not, it has a life beyond itself. It can be an intense emotional experience to develop feelings for someone else, revealing elements of our own minds previously left untended. It’s not that the crush itself needs to be fetishised. Firstly, not all people experience romantic or sexual desire, and to treat the crush as if it were the height of human experience would be discriminatory and erroneous. Secondly, it can be painful to experience a crush, a source of stress, or even just a frustrating distraction intruding on your thoughts. However, it’s important that we treat the depth of our own emotions and desires with respect and consideration, especially when they are of a kind that has long been stigmatised. The shame that we have been encouraged to feel about crushes hides the fact that we can find ourselves on the other side of a crush knowing more about ourselves than we did before. It is not that those we crush on is instrumentalised in this process.

It’s that overcoming the shame, respecting ourselves, and finally recognising the worthiness of our own needs.

Practicing your desire only makes you more practiced at what you always wanted.

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Tim Busuttil is a Design Masters by Research student and code fiend. You can find him slamming pides in Building 6 or tending to his D&D Twitter bot @errant_academy. For squigglier, wigglier versions of his work, visit @timbusuttil on Instagram.

Typography has always been informed by the tools used for writing and designing characters, from brushes and nibs to dedicated type design software. There are countless ways to design type, and I know pretty much nothing about most of those ways. I do know a little about arrays of vector points and pseudo-random values, so I use those tools to play with type â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and this is definitely just playing! I just modify an existing typeface, Maison Neue Mono (designed by Timo Gaessner, who knows a lot more about type than me).

@timbusuttil

66 — Showcase

It’s so important with design skills (and any other creative skills) to play; to make things on your own terms, in your own time.

Whenever people talk about this, they talk about how you’ll be able to try new things, improve your skills, and stay excited about your craft. All of that is true, but honestly, it’s just something really nice to do. I tried a pretty disciplined approach, practicing daily and putting it up online to keep momentum, but I practice other creative skills, like photography, in a no-pressure zone — as much as possible. Do whatever works!

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I still struggle with turning these playful experiments into finished things. Whatever you’re making, it’s important to know when to say it’s finished, and give it a proper conclusion. Print your favourite photos, bind your best writing in a zine, or screen your experimental short film at a mate’s place. For me, all these experiments are stepping stones along the way to a generative typeface and an audio-responsive typography tool for performance, and it’ll get there eventually. For now, I’m balancing the fun of the process with the desire for a finished product.

70 — Arts & Lifestyle

Darn It! Ella Barrowclough

Darning is one of the most valuable skills I’ve ever acquired — especially as a hoarder and wearer of socks. If you’re in a similar stitch and want to make your well-loved, overworn socks anew again, this is a tutorial to help keep them rolling!

You don’t need much for darning — just a needle, some matching thread, and something round like an egg maraca, a ping pong ball, or if you have it, a darning mushroom.

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So here is the best way I know how to darn:

1.

Turn your sock inside out! (You don’t want all the nasty raised threads to be on the outside!) Put your egg/mushroom/ping pong ball inside the sock, and stretch the hole over the surface of it.

2.

Thread your needle (make sure it’s double threaded — so it’s extra strong!), tie, and you’re ready to sew.

3.

Now it gets a little harder! To start darning, you slip the needle through one end of the hole. Next, you are going to make a big running stitch* to the other side.

4.

You are going to repeat this running stitch back to the other side, from where you started your large stitch.

You keep doing this until you have a nice barrier of neat, long parallel stitches covering your hole.

5.

This is the trickiest part; you are now going to sew stitches perpendicular to the ones you just made, weaving them in and out. The idea is you are replacing the knit of the sock with a teeny patch of your own fabric!

6.

When you get to the end; tie off and turn them back inside out — that’s it!

Congrats, you’re ready to keep overwearing your beloved socks!

*Running stitch is the stitch we probably all know the best. It is literally running your needle and thread up and down. See diagrams above.

Art – Ella Barrowclough | @ellabarrowclough

72 — Socio-Cultural

A Practical Guide to Preparing for the Impending Race War Aaron Pinto

So, we’ve reached the end. The end of another year of university. The end of Trump’s first year of presidency. The end of my patience. Yet, in all ends, there are beginnings.

The beginning of the festival season. The beginning of holidays. The beginning of an impending race war.

Humanism has failed, and the tension between the whites and people of colour is nearing its crescendo.

Not since the Haitian revolution of 1788 has there been global racial tension on this scale. The world over, people of colour are refusing to be silent. The whites of the West are no longer the only voice, even if they still hold the only working microphone and happen to own the stage through violent means. Act 1 has concluded and the Chorus is about to take the stage. Western systems of oppression are on the verge of crumbling, and a new Age of Empowerment for people of colour is on the horizon.

I present to you, a practical guide to preparing for the impending race war: Stay in your fucking lane Yes, you, white people. Sit down and shut up, we have no more patience for your white saviour complex and interjectional politicking. You’ve been a thorn in our side for a long time, and you’re about to be discarded.

Make no mistake, this applies to people of colour too. You do not know everything. If you’re not Black, don’t presume to comment on Black issues. If you’re white-passing, don’t presume to speak for your darker counterparts on their issues. Not only is each group’s

Art – Mia Tran

struggle uniquely complex, there is no necessary equivalence between them all. The fights of non-Black people of colour cannot be equated with those of Black people because our fight against Whiteness gets easier with our own proximity to Whiteness. We’re fighting against Whiteness, not aspiring to it. You may be an expert in your own situation, but don’t claim to know thy neighbour’s.

Solidarity It’s a white buzzword that will leave a bad taste in your mouth or evoke traumatic memories of performative allyship, but it’s one we need to embrace. Have each other’s backs, enforce your comrades’ words with your glares and physical presence. Show the world that we fight for each other, that we refuse to be divided. We are about to enter the most disuniting period in modern Western history, but our people have longer and prouder histories. The importance of people of colour uniting cannot be understated, it is the only way in which we can push our advantage and ensure that we do not lose sight of our goals.

Support It’s easy to turn people away in times of conflict, but having a strong support network is essential for your mental and physical wellbeing, especially in a warring world. Gather your friends of colour around you. We’re all fighting against Whiteness to some degree, collect and combine your energy to revitalise your attack. Don’t fall prey to the trap of welcoming white ‘allies’ to be near

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you. They don’t have the same stake as you do in this war, and can only be relied upon to let you down as white people have for centuries. Self-care sessions with your friends of colour, whether a casual lunch or coffee, will make a world of difference to you as tensions increase.

them in a crowded place or away from surveillance.

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Long sleeved shirts and jeans will save you a few scrapes if things get rough, and protect against airborne irritants. Again, these will help cover up any distinguishing marks. With clothes and masks, avoid wearing pieces that can be used to identify you — a darker neutral colour is best.

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Invest in good protective gear, or make your own — a two litre soft drink bottle can be made into a handy gas mask with the help of a dust mask and some duct tape (useful for combating both pepper spray and tear gas assaults), and a few dollars worth of wood from Bunnings and a free template makes an effective shield (capable of withstanding more severe blows that you may receive). Cut-resistant gloves are also handy and available at any reputable hardware shop.

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Protect your eyes. Sunglasses or standard eyeglasses are fine.

Safety is and always has been a priority of our revolutions. Every time there is racial unrest, white people have a habit of paraphrasing Gandhi, or choosing select quotes of Martin Luther King Jr’s words to insist that violence isn’t the answer. I, however, prefer the rest of that quote; “a riot is the language of the unheard”. I won’t tell you to stay away from the front line. I will give you some tips to keep you tip top:

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If you do get hit with irritants, cool whole milk is key to flushing your eyes and soapy water for washing your skin. Remember to discard contaminated clothing.

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Remember to stay hydrated in the field, it aids clarity of thought as well as general health and wellbeing.

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Know your rights. Rights cards can be found at many public libraries and are also available online.

It’s also good to have a pen or marker on hand for phone numbers that need remembering.

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Self-preservation is key. Know when to get out and take a break if things turn nasty. Live to fight another day.

Routine If you’ve ever watched any white movie or television show, you would know that having a routine will get you killed. You would also know that white people always run straight toward what everyone else is running away from. Don’t listen to what the whites say about safety, especially when we have to live in a world they destabilised. In our increasingly unstable environment, it’s useful to have some sort of routine to provide us with consistency when we cannot be assured of any. Sharing plans and schedules with your loved ones will go a long way to ensuring peace of mind in unstable times.

Safety

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Avoid confrontation with violent groups, especially white nationalists. They’ve proved time and again that they have no moral qualms about savagely beating their ideological opponents. Don’t engage them and risk being targeted by their counterparts with greater authority.

Learn how to effectively mask. A simple, bandanastyle mask will protect you to a minor extent from pepper spray, but more importantly it will protect your identity. Bear in mind that most states are beginning to implement anti-masking laws, so only mask up when the situation heats up. Only remove

A New Age is coming and coming fast. Stand fast with each other to usher in our time. Do not go gentle into that good night, Whiteness should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Politics — 75

I Just Wanted to Write About Rome Michael Zacharatos

cw: crucifixion, self-inflicted punishment, bludgeoning, decapitation, blood rituals

In the two thousand odd years between Romulus suckling on the she-wolf and being crowned the first king of Rome, and Mehmed bringing down the walls of Constantinople in cannon fire, the Roman Empire is most admired for how long it endured. Holding onto territories from England to North Africa and the Middle East, Rome fought off incursions and civil war on every front, regularly reformed their economy and bureaucracy, amended the pantheon with every passing year, implemented surprisingly progressive immigration policies and career pathways for their conquered neighbours, and survived a long line of eclectic emperors. These emperors fluctuated between tyrants, philosophers, sex-fiends, gladiator role-players, gluttons, puppets, romantics who created entire religions to worship deceased lovers, the occasionally competent ruler, and way, way too many child-emperors.

All of this is incredibly evocative; so evocative that there are Shakespearean dramas to never read and a lowbudget HBO series to abandon when — spoiler alert! — Brutus shanks Caesar. However, in all these conquests and disasters, it’s easy to dehumanise these people; it’s forgettable that there were ordinary citizens just looking out for their own short-lived happiness, while the politicians and generals left the forums painted in blood and intrigue. In light of this, I’ve elected to write about five disconnected but interesting facts and stories about Rome, for no other reason than I’ve spent the entire year telling my Vertigo comrades that at some point I would.

Rome had an effective, natural contraceptive — and fornicated it into extinction.

When Rome was still a small tribe on the seven hills, the Greek noble Battus Aristottle consulted with the Oracle of Delphi after his home island had weathered perpetual drought. Rather than telling him to install a 375,000L

Bluescope Steel water tank, she advised the next best thing — travel to North Africa and found a new city.

Battus, not being a pushover, did just that. One trireme trip later and the local Libyans were leading Battus and his men to a place known as Apollo’s Fountain, where it rained so much it was as though there was “a hole in the sky”. Here, Battus founded the city of Cyrene and discovered the existence of an unusual herb: silphium.

The silphium herb had a range of uses, including as perfume, spice, and a very potent contraceptive. In fact, the anecdotal support for the herb was so great that in an essay that reads more like spam email promising to cure diabetes with green tea, ancient academic Pliny the Elder lists 39 remedial uses in The Natural History. He affectionately refers to the herb as “nature’s gift”, which it very well might have been, as it is further believed it contained aphrodisiac qualities.

However, as is the natural way of things, the older generations of Romans ruined the fun for everyone afterwards. Around 500 years after Cyrene began exporting the herb, all traces of it disappeared.

Currently, blame is pinned on a combination of environmental shifts and rampant overuse which left almost no time for the seed stock to replenish. The final silphium stalk was delivered as an “oddity” to Emperor Nero — one of the more villainous emperors — who promptly ate the stalk, dooming it to the annals of amorous history.

But silphium wasn’t completely erased. Images of silphium seeds have been discovered etched onto Cyrenese coins, and because of their uncanny resemblance and essential role in Roman sex lives, it is thought to be the source of one of the world’s most famous icons: the love heart.

Art – Sagar Aadarsh

76 — Politics

Modern beef just isn’t as good.

It’s easy to believe that we’re living in the high time of political beef when there are entire industries churning a profit from it. However, the reality is it doesn’t matter how many times the pollies stumble over their words, or how banal their attempted witticisms are, because regardless Buzzfeed is sure to follow up with a listicle titled “Shorten SLAMMED Turnbull in the BEST POSSIBLE WAY”. Political beef just doesn’t compare to what it once was, such as what existed between Cicero and Mark Antony.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was an oratory mastermind whose tactics of persuasion remain a focus of linguistic studies today. Cicero was a vocal defender of the Republic even as Caesar began consolidating his dictatorship, and while he didn’t play a role in inflicting

known as The Philippics, each thousands of words in length, Cicero stood on the Rostra — the podium in the centre of the Forum — and began the careful character assassination of Mark Antony. He often referred to Antony as a “gladiator”, a typical insult hurled at military elites to infer they were no better than slaves given the job of killing. The bulk of his speeches focused on Antony’s moral depravity, accusing him of being a careless gambler, a bankrupt, a coward, a thief, a lecher, and most prominently a drunk: “You had swilled down so much wine at the wedding of Hippias that you had to vomit it all up the next day right before the eyes of the Roman people. What a disgusting performance, even to hear about, much less to see…

[Antony] threw up and filled his own lap — and the entire dais! — with goblets of food and reeking wine!”

“Antony was a soldier who was, by all accounts, a classic schoolyard bully. Cicero, a politician and bookworm, underestimated (or correctly assessed, damning the consequences) how fragile Antony’s ego was.” any of the 23 stab wounds on the would-be first emperor, he wished he had, saying to the conspirators, “How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March!”

Marcus Antonius, commonly known as Mark Antony, served under Caesar as a general in Gaul before returning to Rome as his strongest political ally. Antony even unearthed the plot to assassinate Caesar, but was intercepted before he could warn his friend. Caesar had been extremely popular with the lower-class Romans, and after his death Antony exploited this support by seizing portions of Caesar’s property, inciting riots, and moving thousands of troops into the capital, even though Caesar had named his nephew Octavian as the true heir. Cicero then had the audacity to suggest Antony was taking unfair liberties in interpreting Caesar’s will, which for some reason upset Antony.

Cicero planned to pit Octavian and Antony against each other. In a series of fourteen defamatory speeches

These tirades successfully led to Antony being declared an enemy of the state and Octavian being given the task of bringing him to justice. However, in a cruel twist of fate, Antony and Octavian ended up combining military forces and forming the Second Triumvirate. The Senate had no choice but to legislate their five year not-quite-so-but-essentiallywas dictatorship. The Triumvirate then began the piecemeal process of proscriptions, where old enemies and political rivals were ‘removed’ — and Antony hadn’t forgotten about Cicero.

While Cicero was one of the most popular politicians of his era behind Caesar, and the public was reluctant to sell him out, he was eventually caught leaving his villa headed for a ship to spirit him to Macedonia. Cicero met his death gracefully, saying to the unknown mercenary who caught him, “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.” He was beheaded and his hands, the very same that penned

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the sweet burns which still sizzle two millennia later, were nailed onto the Rostra for all to see.

Antony was a soldier who was, by all accounts, a classic schoolyard bully. Cicero, a politician and bookworm, underestimated (or correctly assessed, damning the consequences) how fragile Antony’s ego was. While Antony succeeded in eliminating Cicero, it would be Cicero’s son who would announce to the Senate the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra in Egypt decades later, where he forbade anyone from the Antonii family to ever again adopt the name ‘Marcus’, decreeing: “In this way Heaven entrusted the family of Cicero the final acts in the punishment of Antony”.

It’s not a fad, Augustus.

Once upon a time, vegetarians used to keep the details of their diet to themselves.

People who abstained from eating meat in Rome were viewed as subversive and, by virtue of not being able to partake in various blood rituals, immoral. This was a problematic position to be in in a society where politicians murdered each other daily. However, as surreptitious as they were, practicing vegetarians did exist in Rome.

Vegetarianism in the Roman Empire was often an offshoot of the teachings of Pythagoras (the very same who helped you draw triangles). Pythagoras theorised that all living creatures had souls, and therefore it was a crime against nature to consume the flesh of animals and fish. However, he even puts the most faithful vegans to shame, as he insisted that many strands of beans had souls, and that it would be just as sinful to consume them.

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in the tumultuous era when Republic transitioned into Empire, and he rose to superstar heights — complete with fixated fangirls — with his romantic and mildly erotic poetry. Ovid’s works were a reaction against the conservative sexual ethics and moral teachings imposed by Emperor Augustus, however his most controversial work came from his Metamorphoses series, where he admitted to following Pythagoras’ teachings:

“Human beings, stop desecrating your bodies with impious foodstuffs. There are crops; there are apples weighing down the branches; and ripening grapes on the vines; there are flavoursome herbs; and those that can be rendered mild and gentle over the flames; and you do not lack flowing milk; or honey fragrant from the flowering thyme. The earth, prodigal of its wealth, supplies you with gentle sustenance, and offers you food without killing or shedding blood.”

While the reasons for his eventual exile are unclear, it’s nice to imagine that Augustus grew tired of the ancient hipster when he banished Ovid to a villa by the Black Sea. Ovid spent the rest of his days — bean-free — writing mournful poetry and letters to his family and adoring fans.

Count to ten.

It sucks being blamed for someone else’s mistakes at work; penalty rate cuts, overtime, and days of passive aggression from your boss are already bad enough when things are in your control. But, compared to those employed in the legions two millennia ago, most of us have been getting off pretty lightly.

Decimation was used as the most extreme form of punishment in the Roman military, typically reserved for acts of cowardice and insurrection. While it was seldom practiced, anyone serving in the legions was sure to have heard the stories of what might happen if orders were disobeyed. Even by the time of Caesar, the practice was considered out-dated and backwards, because even the nastiest generals could admit that it was an arbitrary, cruel, and self-inflicting punishment.

Arbitrary — because those selected weren’t necessarily involved in the offence.

Cruel — because the sentence was executed by their own comrades.

Self-inflicting — because a general was diminishing their fighting force by a tenth.

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Decimation was a lottery system style of punishment where, when a large enough mistake was made, a legion would be split into groups of ten. These groups of ten then drew straws amongst themselves and whoever drew the short straw was, naturally, bludgeoned to death by the remaining nine.

the Magistrate’s wife (or more likely her slaves) made ornaments of vine-leaves and decorated the dining hall with blooming plants. After this point, little more is known. The entire festival is veiled in secrecy and without any female historians to elucidate what exactly happened behind closed doors, the rest is speculation.

This was famously employed by Marcus Licinius Crassus after he was ordered by the Senate to subdue Spartacus’ slave revolt. The gladiator king defeated two of Crassus’ legions who then fled the field, leaving behind an army’s worth of weapons and supplies. As a rule of thumb, upgrading the tools of 70,000 rebellious slaves from sickles and pitchforks to military-standard weapons and armour is not in the best interests of the state.

Crassus was a little more than upset; he decimated his legion, murdering up to 1,000 of his own men. While it’s difficult to comprehend the psychological impact this would have had on those who remained, they didn’t flee the next time, and by the end of the year 6,000 stillbreathing crucified slaves lined the highway to Rome.

According to Cicero, the rest of the evening was simple enjoyment — debate, games, and music performed by female musicians, where any discussion of men was forbidden. Other historians speak of unbridled hedonism, where early 3rd century historian Juvenal recounts drunkenness, lewd dancing, which eventually devolved into “bestial orgies”. However, Juvenal was writing centuries after the festival had fallen from popularity, and without any corroborating evidence, it seems references to these women-only orgies were nothing more than wishful thinking.

No boys allowed.

Bona Dea was a goddess worshipped for agriculture, chastity, and paradoxically, fertility and virginity. The goddess was particularly revered amongst the slave and plebeian classes, and rites were exercised exclusively by women. Not only were men forbidden from attending, they weren’t even allowed to know Her name. This meant that two times a year — for the summer and winter festivals — women were allowed to drink strong wine and hold animal blood-sacrifices. However, like any marketable and enjoyable idea, the nobility soon coopted the festival practices, and thereafter the wife of the Senior Magistrate hosted the main ceremony, where only the wealthy matrons of Rome were invited to attend.

Festival rites were remarkably similar to any preparations for a viewing party of The Bachelor. Firstly, the hostess’ house was ritually cleansed of all men, meaning most busts, portraits, and manuscripts had to be removed, and the hallways were sprayed with ‘feminine’ perfume. Even male pets and depictions of male animals had to be hidden from plain sight. Then,

We can however be certain that male non-attendance was sacrosanct. In the winter of 62 BC, Julius Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, was tasked with hosting the festival.

Scandal erupted when Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist politician, was caught loitering amongst the festivities dressed as a woman, allegedly with the intention of seducing Pompeia. Clodius was then brought before trial and charged with ‘desecration’, which carried the death penalty. However, after two years of legal proceedings, Clodius managed to escape any punishment, though he remained the butt of parliamentary jokes for many centuries. Julius Caesar nevertheless was resolute in divorcing Pompeia despite her proven innocence, famously declaring, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” *** This is mostly the product of listening to 150 hours of a history podcast when I should have been listening to eight hours of lectures in StuVac. While I only just scraped a credit, I am now in the position to educate others about extinct contraceptives, festivals that couldhave-been-but-probably-weren’t orgies, and emperors who despised vegetarian poets. And surely that’s what life is about. Surely.

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Reality Fatigue Jack Cameron Stanton

Freaking Stacked Max? Aurora swivels lanes without indicating and juices daddy’s crummy Toyota an extra 10km on the freeway, heading toward Frankie’s beach house.

Why him? The smell of his Lynx Africa clings to her like a needy ex. Oh look, awesome, another straight and narrow along the right-hand lane with not a car in sight. She guns it.

Maybe she could forgive herself if she’d been drinking — but she hadn’t. Sober as a bird she had been sucked in by Stacked Max’s all-the-pretty-ones-are-dumb grin and biceps that had received more attention than the rest of his faculties combined.

And yes, all that taxi talk about they don’t call me Stacked Max for nothing, often — in fact, exclusively — spread by Stacked Max himself is, regrettably, true. (At least regrettably now; she can admit it was a rather pleasant discovery on Thursday night after a few shared glances at Tony’s house party, the small talk about how Stacked Max’s band The Chilli Mud Crabs were coming along (everyone keeps arriving to our gigs with crab mallets and pink seafood bib!), and not really a forthcoming proposition even, but a raising of her eyebrows in the direction of Tony’s bedroom.)

Art – Erin Sutherland | @ezose.png

80 — Creative Writing

She narrowly misses an entourage of traffic cones that siphon off her lane for construction work, too busy agonising over the fact that good old Stacked Max is wellhung had made sleeping with him worse.

Aurora takes the freeway exit and after a merry-go-round of turns finds herself zooming through residential zones at the same speed she had applied on the freeway, already 67 minutes late (and counting). She envisions Frankie leant against the front-yard Jacaranda tree, maybe humming to himself, clueless.

Not noticing two schoolgirls and the lollipop lady swinging her stop sign like a trident, Aurora bounces over a zebra crossing at a comfy 100km — a good 60 over what she should be driving right now.

A symphony of horns and a moped’s meep-meep and a Honda Civic wheeze behind her as she winds up the mountain, begrudgingly slowing the car so she doesn’t fly off the unbarricaded sides, heaving along with her car in her almost fully reclined seat.

Frankie had been in LA for, what, eleven days?

She groans, another whiff of Africa recycling through the car’s AC. She turns up the Sugarcubes, filling the car with wailing and screeching as she begins winding down the mountain, and, getting close now, closer, closer, and then —

— Christ —

— has to six-point turn on the bend and reverse around so she can take the Cheek Beach turn-off.

After winding the window she lights a joint and becomes acutely aware of her sweaty forehead. Like a blooming flower, the chronic relaxes the tension that had knotted itself all over her face.

Then down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down and oh shit there’s Frankie at the front door, Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned, his beer gut a canvas for his sweat and the throb of partygoers celebrating his return home from the States caterwauling around his head on the beach house balcony like seraphs.

At 4pm, Saturday.

Which means, of course, that in their minds they are somewhere in the early Friday evening (or whenever they took their first nose beer or disco biscuit or mojo juice), and all Aurora can muster is a peck on the cheek and a six-pack of Three Gents (his fave) that feels like an apology and his arm that slings around her neck, guiding her into the den, burns hot as the sun.

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Chaos Within the Calm Christy Chan | @chieoni.jpg I’m naturally a pedantic person. Colour coordination, neatness, and pastels all help to soothe my noisy mind.

These snapshots of my birthplace are a collection of fleeting moments of nuance. Something as simple as clothes drying on a line can reveal the lives of residents who occupy the spaces. Amidst a duality of chaos and calm, I find an appreciation for stillness within movement, silence within noise — a new rhythm to the bustling city of Hong Kong.

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Pied Piper Blue Thea Kable | @theakable

Arts & Lifestyle — 97

Self-care Akshaya Bhutkar

The concept of balance is simple: a situation where different elements are equal, or in their correct proportions in order to function with stability. Like almost everything, your body works in a similar way and needs to have a balance in order to stay healthy. Too much work, a lack of sleep, and not taking the time to nourish your body ends up causing harm. Your body has needs and by ignoring these signs, you’re working your way towards a burnout.

As fluffy and overused as the phrase “self-care” is, the simple practices it describes are crucial for optimal function and generally staying healthy. It’s so easy to neglect these simple practices when we’re busy or overwhelmed, and in a world where overtime is rife, actually taking the time to do these things can make you feel like you’re slacking. Self-care should never be a reward, but instead something you integrate into your daily routine as a necessity, letting your body and mind recharge.

Try not to let yourself feel too guilty about nourishing yourself, especially in those times when your pile of responsibilities doesn’t seem to lessen. Your body works hard and needs time to rest and rejuvenate. Here are simple ways to let your body and mind reset and heal.

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Light stretching: Stretching increases blood flow throughout your entire body, including your brain, and relieves your muscles. Stretching your body helps unwind tension, both physically and mentally.

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Sleep: Your body showing signs of weariness is a sign it needs to recharge. In the same way you water a tree to keep it healthy, you need to give your body what it wants and needs.

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Care for your skin: Cleanse and moisturise your

face daily; your skin needs to be fed and hydrated.

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Face mask: For an easy homemade mask, blend honey and yoghurt together to form a creamy paste and apply this to your face gently, using your fingers or a brush. Let it sit for twenty minutes to dissolve dead skin cells, tighten your pores, and refresh your face.

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Bath: Pop some essential oils and bubbles into a warm bath and let your body unravel. The oils will moisturise your body, while the soft scents will lull you into restfulness.

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Tidy your space: Clearing your desk or even just making your bed can help clear out the mess around you — and even inside your head. Having a tidy space reflects your mind, and will help you feel calm and controlled.

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Hydration: Along with making sure you’re trying to drink the recommended two litres a day, try a glass of water with some lemon squeezed into it. The lemon will help detoxify your body, while flushing out impurities and boosting energy.

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Eating: Make sure to eat proper, regular meals that are nutritious and healthy. Eating the right foods will ensure you don’t feel sluggish or tired.

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Socialising: Remind yourself that it’s okay to neglect social activities when you’re feeling the strain of your responsibilities and drained of social energy. Take this time to unwind by reading, catching up on television, or simply resting.

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Comfort: The simple act of changing into comfier, more loose-fitting clothes will signal to your body that it’s time to unwind. Taking the time to change can help you feel more calm.

98 — Creative Writing

Tinder, Loving Care Dani Encarnacion

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tall handsome not-so-dark not-at-all-dark dark like the sky on a summers day dark like a marshmallow • on fire? idk like you’re really white when i brought you home my mum told me i should marry you • is this the way she wants to assimilate into society • is this really what she imagined would happen when she migrated wtf • maybe wtf stands for what the fob hmm i’m not very white do you even like me at least i’m pretty w makeup • god i really want that fenty foundation • far out i wish i could date rihanna • hahaha that reminds me of that gay youtube guy who rewrote the bible to be gay • like “in the beginning, rihanna created the heavens and the earth” • wait actually that’s pretty sacrilegious • shit i wish i could erase offensive thoughts forever • god i’m so ashamed of myself • at least i can still make fun of white things i guess ok ok ok back on topic back on topic oh notification oh god why would you tag me in that • ‘@d only likes guys because they’re tall’ i wonder if i just like you because you’re tall no that’s not true you fart in front of me and i don’t care that much • i care • your farts are toxic • is that a white thing • oh gross no it isn’t apparently

Creative Writing — 99

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• i can’t believe that just came out of my body • i am a child of god • oh god does rexona cover this ew ok i need comfort i love food • i’m so glad this isn’t one of those lasagnes that are made of vegetables • i hate those fake vegetable lasagnes • am i dating you because i hate myself • like idk kim says that i’m dating my coloniser • you’re ~colonising my body~ • and that makes a weird sort of sense and it’s super freaky • like remember that time james said he was dating me bc he he had a fetish • like what the fob • keep your gross sexual sins away from me, a Child of God hm i mean i guess you haven’t said anything about that kind of thing • yet

100 — Socio-Cultural

I Hate White Women Kezia Aria

I’ve always felt it, but I didn’t truly know it until the person behind one of my favourite Twitter accounts (@delashereen) discovered that Polly Nor’s then-viral artwork of devils and white women weren’t actually memes of “white women getting comfortable”.

Being a woman of colour I had always wondered whether I would identify more with allies among men of colour, or white women. Reflecting on my time growing up, overcoming my internalised racism as a child, as well as feminist movements being exclusively white-centric, I tended to look towards people of colour — and thus, men of colour — as a whole. But then going to an all-girls high school made me more comfortable around women, which included white women. And so, I was constantly switching between these two frames of mind; while simultaneously grateful women of colour existed to keep me sane

Art – Kim Phan

in the face of relentless gaslighting from both sides.

Neither group made it easy.

Then I came to the realisation that the intersections between the patriarchy and white supremacy systematically work hand-in-hand in marginalising our voices and limiting our opportunities — among many other consequences. The thing is, when I go to critique men (men of colour included), it’s more easily understood because men are, in fact, universally trash. As well as the tiny detail that white women have also validated the existence of sexist structures and institutions (because their voices in feminist discourse are, of course, prioritised), and this is their own way of being able to ‘relate’ or show ‘solidarity’ with women of colour. However, men of colour often have less privileges than that of white women. And white women and their White Feminism don’t tend to dwell

Socio-Cultural — 101

on this fact in their spouting of almost intersectional (and inclusive!) misandry.

You see, there are white women who think they’re as much victim to the kyriarchy as we are. They think we’re somewhat the same, and to further motivate them, some women of colour even naively act like true solidarity actually exists between us. But the thing is, white women are like wolves in sheep’s clothing. They will protect their white privileges first, without hesitation. They may hate white supremacy and think it’s such a shame, but they will still gladly benefit from and uphold white supremacy. With no initiative to pass up opportunities for the people they are supposedly allies to, because ultimately progress for white women (i.e. themselves) is progress for all, right? These white feminists are in the middle, but still higher up on the scale of… decency. They are also the

On the higher end of my scale of white women and their shenanigans, are the “Intersectional Feminists”.

They’re better, in respects to their overall politics and beliefs for people who have less privileges than they do, but still too loud for my liking. Whether it’s inputting their own opinions “as an ally” on matters that don’t concern them, or being more overtly offended about things we (the targets and/or affected) are just exhausted by — it’s too much. Think: what are your intentions and what is the impact? It’s performative. We know it and the people you’re trying to convince or educate know it. Boost posts, videos, art, and articles from actual marginalised voices.

And along with consuming our work, offer monetary compensation for the time we took to educate you and to disseminate information for general accessibility, that’s all you have to do.

“They will protect their white privileges first, without hesitation.

They may hate white supremacy and think it’s such a shame, but they will still gladly benefit from and uphold white supremacy.” most common group of ‘moderate’ white women.

Then there are the white women who stay out of politics completely because it’s messy, or the conversation is upsetting. They’re “apolitical” and have no interest, because “stuff like that” just doesn’t affect them. They find it upsetting when they see and hear racism, and sometimes they even think racist things and make racist assumptions — but they personally wouldn’t dare say it aloud — so they’re not at fault, they can’t be. Their complicity and apathy is so frustrating because they allow it from their overtly racist family, co-workers, and friends and thus encourage and uphold the cycle of racism. So when allies try to comfort us by saying, “Don’t worry, racism will die out with the older generations,” who do they think the next generation of kids are being raised and influenced by?

Another common trait among white women is their burning curiosity and need to empathise — as if our word alone isn’t enough. The amount of times they have approached me with questions is much more than I’d like, and it has always been by self-proclaimed Intersectional Feminists. Usually what happens after stating their question(s), is their explanation that “it’s totally okay” if I’m not up for the (emotional, intellectual, mental) labour or have the current capacity to reply. Though by entering my inbox in the first place without asking for consent or giving any warning — yes, the content and trigger type — you have already forced me to read your paragraph’s worth of ramblings. Because, if you’re a friend, an acquaintance, or a random who has read something I’ve posted or published, I will naturally wonder how I should proceed. I would consider: if I have the responsibility to educate you, if I have the authority

102 — Socio-Cultural

to speak on it, your feelings (even though, fuck white feelings), what kind of tone I would take in replying to you, if I’m even going to reply to you, and what I would cover. Most importantly though; if it’s even worth my time. Education and making information accessible is important, but so is my time, and the one thing white people continue to take from me — from us — is our time. I understand that you just want to understand,

such as the KKK. White women are the activists and Intersectional Feminists who get praised for doing the minimum. White women go to developing countries to take job opportunities from locals to ‘help’ by building temporary infrastructures — with no experience.

White women loved and supported the ‘all-women’ Ghostbusters but made the one and only woman of colour and Black woman the ‘street smart’ character.

“Whether it’s inputting their own opinions ‘as an ally’ on matters that don’t concern them, or being more overtly offended about things we (the targets and/or affected) are just exhausted by — it’s too much.” but google is free and my labour is not. Feel free to compensate accordingly: PayPal.me/keziaaria.

“Many white women have said to me, ‘we wanted Black women and non-white women to join the movement.’ Totally unaware of their perception that they somehow ‘own’ the movement, that they are the ‘hosts’ inviting us as ‘guests’.”

— bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center Feminist and activist movements and safe spaces are extremely exclusive (read: white) — no matter how intersectional, radical, or left-wing they are. I know you want it to be ‘diverse’ but ‘not tokenistic’, but your efforts are minimal and it just isn’t good enough. I could elaborate, but much more educated women of colour than I have articulated why and, well, google it.

White women are: neoliberals like JK Rowling who quote Winston Churchill (a known fascist and white supremacist), and constantly trivialise real-world issues by drawing parallels to her Harry Potter universe. White women are: Taylor Swift who has succeeded in branding herself as an innocent victim.

White women are: the 53% majority who voted for Trump. White women scapegoat the feats of white supremacy to one Donald Trump, and extremists

For us, race isn’t purely a debate topic or controversial ‘conversation spoiler’, it’s an embodied and lived experience. You may think #NotAllWhiteWomen, but it is all white women. White women are for white women.

Arts & Lifestyle — 103

Creme Caramel with Katty Serves 4 | Preparation time – 20 minutes Katty Ngo is the mother of Louisa Luong, Vertigo’s Editor-in-Chief. When Katty’s not busy hitting the gym, you can find her singing, dancing, and taking fab selfies.

All these qualities combined make her the perfect karaoke companion.

Ingredients:

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For the creme caramel: ¼ cup sugar 2 cups milk 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

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For the sauce: 6 tablespoons sugar 3 tablespoons cold water

How to: ----

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Art – Vanessa Papastavros | vanscribbles.tumblr.com

Preheat oven to 160 degrees.

To make the sauce, combine sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat.

Stir for 5 minutes, or until sugar has dissolved.

Increase heat to high, bring to boil, and boil for another 5 minutes until golden.

Pour sugar mixture into shallow ovenproof dish and allow to set.

Lightly whisk eggs, sugar, vanilla extract, and milk in a bowl.

Pour mixture into the shallow dish (already lined with sugar).

Place dish in another shallow ovenproof dish filled with water — at half the height of the inner dish.

Bake for 45-60 minutes until just set.

Remove inner dish from oven and set aside to cool.

Refrigerate overnight and serve.

104 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Showcase

Delusion Anita Gallagher | @_animanni

106— Arts & Lifestyle

Culinary Appropriation Michelle Xu

Food nourishes us — this is a fairly universal sentiment. We are blessed to have extremely easy access to a great range of foods from many different cultures. Food is also an Instagram star now, and every second person is posting photos of their anniversaries at Quay; more than ever, ethnic food is getting trendy.

Broadsheet now lists ‘ramen’, ‘Korean’, and ‘Malaysian’ as recommended searches. There are Asian-fusion themed bars like Sugarcane Coogee, which is owned by someone who seems… really white.

All of this has led some to call out instances of cultural appropriation and gentrification in the food space.

There is also a common rebuttal that cultural foods have always been influenced by foreign factors, and we’re only witnessing that today. It might seem to be a positive that ‘ethnic’ food is more mainstream now, indicating some greater acceptance of the racial diversity of our communities.

But it’s about context.

Most of us don’t want to feel like we’re in the wrong for our Sushi Hub habit, and for the most part, a lot of daily cultural food consumption might not be problematic — for example, a lot of us buy and consume dumplings and bao from establishments run by actual Chinese people in Chinatown. I’d also like to believe that most people don’t say or do racist things while participating in this consumption.

Cultural appropriation of food is deeply connected to who is in a position of privilege in a given society. Those privileged enough to pick and choose what foods — traditionally belonging to a minority racial group — are now to be celebrated in the food scene often make no effort to engage with the history of the food, let alone with the people who have grown, cooked, and eaten that food for decades prior. For example, Indigenous communities don’t typically benefit from the culinary acclaim that many Australian chefs garner from using native Australian ingredients in their food. And recent poké establishments fail to make a meaningful connection to the traditional Hawaiian dish, and tend to be exotic

salad bowls rather than actual poké, which celebrates high quality, fresh fish with much fewer toppings.

Food gentrification seems to be a persistent problem now too — kale and quinoa were some of the first trendy foods a few years back, now coconut water is everywhere, and avocado is almost unavoidable in Sydney cafes. The consequences of these food trends are far-reaching. In the case of quinoa, the Peruvian and Bolivian communities that have traditionally grown and eaten quinoa suffered on two levels. Not only did an initial rise in prices of quinoa due to increased demand mean locals could no longer afford a staple food, when supply caught up with demand and prices leveled off, local producers couldn’t compete with larger agribusinesses now supplying quinoa. A single food trend can cause long-lasting harm to the communities that have traditionally depended on them.

It’s not that white people shouldn’t be allowed to eat or cook foods from other cultures — it’s just that they’re more likely to profit from those foods than the

people of colour who have always cooked and eaten those foods. There are plenty of white chefs who claim to have done their duty and travelled and learnt the craft from local chefs that have allowed them to set up successful establishments. Often those people who have a long history with the foods being appropriated — the locals they learn from do not even benefit economically, going without any compensation for sharing their cultural knowledge.

The truth is, we all love food. We need it to nourish and sustain us. We also use food as a vehicle for celebration, to express love, to share with one another.

These are inherently good things. We just don’t need food to be another way through which minority groups in our societies are exploited and oppressed. If you’re fortunate enough to have a multitude of cultural food options open to you and you’re making a choice about where to put your money, think about who you’re paying, not just what you’re paying for. Think about who is working behind the counter, who has farmed or harvested the ingredients, and whose recipe it really is.

Art – Marcella Cheng | @marcell.arts

108 — Showcase

L+K Ali Chalmers Braithwaite | @resculpted

Australia’s on the verge of a big decision: are we going to legalise same-sex marriage?

LGBTQIAP+ people have been going through a lot of pain and bullshit lately. It’s had me thinking about the future and what lies ahead for our community, and what I can do to bring healing and positivity.

I interviewed some same-sex couples I know about their plans for the future, what their goals are, and how the current same-sex marriage debates have affected how they think of their own relationship and views towards marriage.

Envisioning the future is a uniquely complicated thing for LGBTQIAP+ people — how can you believe you’ll have a happy ending when a lot of people are really invested in telling you it’s impossible? So much of society’s messaging positions success in life around a specifically heterosexual marriage and family. It can be daunting to try and forge your own path but it can also be liberating and exciting to work towards a future in which you are thriving and happy despite everything — towards a future of your own making. Something about believing in an authentic and happy future for yourself feels revolutionary.

LGBTQIAP+ and queer communities aren’t monolithic — there’s an infinite variety of attitudes towards marriage, relationships, and the future amongst us all.

Even in the few couples I interviewed, there was a vast difference in their approach to marriage.

One of these interviews is presented in the following pages. It’s a simple story really, but it’s not a story that gets told often, and I’m excited to share the little bit of L and K’s story that I have access to.

Arts & Lifestyle — 115

Dance Maker: Amrita Hepi Akshaya Bhutkar

Amrita Hepi uses dance as a platform for social commentary, expression, and activism. A Bundjalung and Ngāpuhi woman interested in movement, she creates dance that unravels the association of shame with our bodies. Art, pop culture, and intersectionality are all expressed through Amrita’s work, encouraging discussion and dissection of our society.

VERTIGO: Can you tell us about your background as a dancer?

AMRITA HEPI: I started dancing at the age of four with my best friend’s mother, who taught Contact Improvisation — a partner dance style which focuses on physical principles of touch, momentum, shared weight, and a shared form of contact. As a four-year-old, this greatly fed into my general thrashing about in the living room at home. The same teacher then took me to my first Corroboree. I started dancing at my local dance school after that, and it’s kind of continued into a weird, long path from there.

V: What goals initiated your transition from student to ‘dance maker’?

AH: My decision to study dance at university and after attending NAISDA, made me take my dancing to the next level. I was exposed to a whole new world of performance and started considering making my own dances and choreography, rather than aiming to solely be in a dance company — the path that professionally trained dancers usually aspire to take. I worked with Alvin Ailey, an African American choreographer and activist, and attended a residency in Canada at the Banff Centre. It was through these experiences that I came home and started to experiment with making my own dances. My first ‘official’ dance work was called Passing, which was apart of the New Wave Festival. From there, I started working with a few different dance companies and it kind of grew from there — including teaching pop culture dance classes in nightclubs. However, I am still learning and piecing together what makes a dance maker.

V: The expression of dancing and dancers themselves are associated with narcissism. Why do you think a perception like this is created, and how is this a dangerous illusion to present?

AH: I’m guessing people assume that dancers spend their time staring

116 — Arts & Lifestyle

at themselves in a mirror. This is so different to the dancers that I know in my community — some have never danced in front of a mirror, are generous, super dedicated to what they’re doing, and are all totally selfless. I can imagine narcissism to be there in a sense, but it’s not something I see a lot of with my collaborators or broader community. Most of the dancers I know are vessels for people’s visions, and their own.

V: You often talk about the concept of shame. Can you expand upon this and how it influences your artistic work?

AH: I wasted so much time not doing things I loved because I felt a weird kind of shame in them. Questions like — How would people look at me? What would they think? — all stopped me from doing what I really wanted to do, because I didn’t want to seem undesirable.

I don’t specifically make my work about the concept of shame but I have spoken a lot about it. The surrounding dialogue and my questioning of it help people unpack what they might not be doing because shame has seeped into their being. I express this within the context of a dance class. You’re moving your body around, which can be a good time to unpack feelings around shame — without people seizing up. It helps even more if the music is loud and the lights are low!

V: You express many political themes through your body and movement. What is it about dancing, compared to other forms such as writing, that makes this form of expression more powerful?

AH: The most obvious is that it expresses something when the words stop and you can explore beyond that.

There are so many inscriptions that we place on the body, on language, and on gestures. More prominently, there’s so much to explore through image, and the potential of bodies beyond that image — beyond virtuosity, idealism, and policy. The body acts as an archive, and re-places and diverts notions of an archive away from a documental deposit or bureaucratic agency, which is dedicated to the [mis]management of the past. It’s also a great way to culminate all of the words, wonders, and joy as well as rage.

V: Many dancers stop participating in dance once they hit the age of 16. Why do we tell people to stop once they hit a certain age?

AH: Puberty, shame, peaked sexual interest, hormones, the fact that dance is seen as weirdly sexual by some people, or the thought of it not being a real hobby. I stopped around 19 and had started feeling weird about it at age 17, because of dumb shit like boys, boobs, and shame. What a royal waste of time!

V: Elitism in dance is something that continues to be present, with styles such as ballet being seen as a higher ‘standard’ than other forms. Is this something you aim to dissect in your work?

AH: It’s funny what is seen as being a ‘legitimate’ dance — you have to look a certain way or dance in a serious company. Ballet is hard, being a stripper can be hard, being an independent dancer can be hard — work is hard. So why would we de-legitimise, or make any kind of work more important than or less than anyone else? There are layers of classism associated with what we deem ‘classic’. I’ve come to the point where I’ve realised I don’t need to elevate or pitch myself as the kind of dancer I am to everyone I come across. I do take ballet classes from time to time and enjoy them immensely. Everyone needs an access point, so I guess ballet can be an access point — as can Beyoncé. I think we need to decolonise dance and people’s ideas around it.

V: What is it about the art of dance that pushes you to pursue it every day?

AH: Dance is my home. I’m putting it all together and exploring it as much as possible. For me, the potential in it is endless.

Arts & Lifestyle — 125

Glancing to the Stars Kezia Aria

Trump, Duterte, Brexit, North Korea, the genocide of the Rohingya, Nazi riots, continued televised violence, consecutive natural disasters, the constant state of war and unrest in several nations, and another round of Australia’s dehumanising postal plebiscites.

In these times of global crises when the future seems bleak and there are more questions than answers, many of us tuned into our spiritual sides, and turned to the skies and the stars. Whether you are a sceptic, an avid believer, or somewhere in-between, you can’t deny that in the past two years there has been a growing trend of astrological awareness.

Astrology. The “Mother of all Sciences”. Falling into the category of metaphysics, astrology is similar to feng shui, yoga, and acupuncture in that it was established by ancient philosophies of energy patterns.

Before, I would read my horoscope every now and then, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I extensively analysed my free cafeastrology.com birth chart. I learned more about my sun, moon, and ascendant, and the meanings of my signs in Venus and Lilith. Finally, in this chaotic world I had found some relative sense and order.

“Astrology is the ultimate individualistic discipline.”

– Susan Miller, AstrologyZone.com.

People across the world were reflecting and conserving their energy, prioritising self-care and preservation.

As long as humans have existed, they’ve searched for a deeper understanding of their existence. So, it seemed natural that the masses were gravitating towards something that could make them feel whole.

There seemed to be nothing (more) to lose. What had started as wholesome fun and to understand the new wave of astrological memes, became an enlightened understanding. People were becoming aware of their actions, their energy, and their world around them.

If the moon can control earth’s waves, and humans are 70% water, who says the stars can’t have some influence on us?

What’s so attractive for most is how flexible it is. People can pick and choose what aspects to look at and what to take on, and it’s this that helps people’s understanding of events, of people and personal relationships, and of the world. It is an incredible tool for self-discovery, and at first it might not make sense, but at a particular point it will click. If life is a meaningless set of events, astrology can be of great comfort.

“The experience of being accurately reflected is profoundly healing.” – Chani Nicholas, on the value of astrology.

In the past, astrologers and its believers have been gaslighted. Anything spiritual, unquantifiable, immeasurable, or intangible had been — and continue to be — dismissed. And maybe it is a placebo effect, or maybe these astrological happenings can actually be felt, but it all works and makes sense when it’s not taken too seriously.

So, go ask your mother what time you were born and acquire your birth chart. If none of your horoscopes ever made sense, make sure you’re reading your ascendant’s horoscopes, not your sun signs. A basic understanding is: your sun sign being what you already know, your moon sign being your inner self, and your ascendant (also known as rising) being your ‘mask personality’ i.e. how you present yourself to the world. You might find it enlightening, and it might give you peace of mind in life’s chaos, maybe not. But it can be fun and it’s definitely worth a shot. What do you have to lose?

“We are co-creating with the stars. The stars give a rough outline of the journey, but it’s up to us to choose our own adventure.” – Ophira Edut of AstroTwins.

Art – Mia Tran

126 — Politics

Duck & Cover Max Grieve

cw: nuclear warfare

Put this magazine down right now and head for the hills because North Korea has just launched a nuclear missile at Sydney!

Okay, so they haven’t, but what if they did?

I recently read online that the range of a North Korean nuclear missile ‘may’ extend as far as New York City, with a flight time that ‘might’ be ‘about’ 40 minutes and 30 seconds. New York City is further from Pyongyang than Sydney, right? I didn’t bother finding out. If a nuclear missile was flying towards Sydney right now, I wouldn’t want to be the one sitting around working out its flight time down to the second while everyone else is working out how to survive.

Everyone’s talking about North Korea right now.

It’s a self-isolated place full of people forced under the tyranny of a dictator who’s threatening to start

Art – Thea Kable | @theakable

an apocalyptic war with the United States, which, thanks to Malcolm Turnbull’s blind invocation of the ANZUS treaty, means he’s also threatening to start an apocalyptic war with us. Anyway, I found this 40 minutes and 30 seconds stuff concerning, and so should you. Why? In less than an hour, Kim Jong-un could lose his nerve, or an increasingly-senile Donald Trump could get his coordinates wrong, and everyone you love could be dead. So could everyone you hate, so it’s not all bad.

In either case, it’s important to know what to do. I like to be prepared because I don’t like to fight. Whenever I enter a room for the first time I’ll plan an escape route that I can use when someone runs in to tell me that a bomber has entered the building. Naturally, I’ve worked out a survival plan for the imminent nuclear impact, because a nuclear explosion is like a million bombers coming at you all at once. You can even reason with bombers sometimes, but nobody’s ever reasoned with a

Politics — 127

nuclear missile and lived to talk about it. Here are some strategies for dealing with an imminent nuclear attack: Denial According to the internet doctors at the Mayo Clinic, denial is “a coping mechanism that gives you time to adjust to distressing situations. If you’re in denial, you’re trying to protect yourself by refusing to accept the truth about something that’s happening in your life. In some cases, short-term denial can be a good thing, giving you time to adjust to a painful or stressful issue. But denial has a dark side with potentially devastating long-term consequences.”

This is particularly true of impending nuclear attacks.

You can refuse to acknowledge it all you like, but if there’s a nuclear missile coming at you, there’s not much you can do about it. It’s much better to deal with reality and accept that there is a nuclear missile coming at you.

Standing in the eye of the explosion It’s a common myth that, like cyclones, nuclear explosions have an ‘eye’: a region of relative calm due to lower surface pressures at the centre of the impact.

In fact, nuclear explosions have almost nothing in common with cyclones — contrary to popular belief, the safest part of a nuclear explosion is almost always outside of the explosion.

Wearing a bike helmet I ride a bike, and sometimes I don’t wear a helmet. I like how the wind feels in my hair, and frankly, it looks cooler. People notice me as I barge past them on the footpath and think, “That guy — he’s a cool guy.” Other people tell me I’m an arrogant dickhead and bike helmets are proven to reduce the risk of serious head injury by 70%, to which I say, “But you wouldn’t wear a helmet while driving a car, or walking down the street, would you? So why should you wear a helmet while riding a bike, or when you’re facing down a nuclear missile?” It’s hard to argue with that logic. Bike helmets might reduce

the risk of serious head injury by 70%, but this statistic is presumably drawn from data relating to collisions with cars, pedestrians and other bikes, not collisions with nuclear warheads. The point is that wearing one won’t help you here, and besides — if you’re facing certain death, you may as well go out looking cool.

Jumping up in the air like you would do if you were in an elevator that was plummeting towards the ground If you were in an elevator that was plummeting towards the ground, you’d jump up in the air just before it hit the ground, right? They tried it on Mythbusters once, and found out that the jumping power of a human can’t cancel out the falling velocity of an elevator. This is irrelevant because a nuclear explosion isn’t an elevator falling, but did you know that the two main Mythbusters guys actually hated each other?

Taking refuge at Olympic Park Targeting Olympic Park would be practically tautological — it’s already a nuclear wasteland, so having another go just wouldn’t make sense.

Hiding in a fridge A little-known fact about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is that all of the stunts were performed for real, with no CGI, and by the actors themselves. When Harrison Ford gets blown across the the desert in a fridge by a nuclear bomb then walks away, you’re really watching 69-year-old Harrison Ford get blown across the desert in a fridge by a nuclear bomb then walk away.

Being a cockroach Some mornings you just awake from troubled dreams to find yourself transformed in your bed into a monstrous insect. Sure, you might feel ostracised by society now, but you’ll be having the last laugh when you’ve survived the nuclear apocalypse as a half-cockroach, half-human hybrid, while they’re all dead. Oh, how you’ll laugh.

128 — Business & Science

Driving the Way Forward Declan Bowring

Driving across Sydney Harbour Bridge is a great way to see just how big and beautiful the city really is. The Opera House — a stunning feat of architectural ingenuity. The Harbour Bridge — a symbol of Australia’s perseverance through the Great Depression. The Big Arse Smog Blanket Covering the City — not so much. You’d have to wonder why we put up with it, and the blunt reality is we bring it on ourselves. One of the leading contributors to this smog blanket are the cars we drive — and the planet is feeling it. Australia’s cars produce 10% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions, and the transport sector accounts for 18% of Australia’s total emissions.

In 2016, Australia consumed nearly 15 gigalitres of automotive gasoline and nearly 20 gigalitres in diesel,

Art – Nicole Yeom | @yeomah

nearly all due to its economic dependence on fossil fuel energy.

The planet cannot sustain our rate of carbon emissions.

In May last year, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), recorded the CO2 concentration of the entire southern hemisphere at 400 parts per million (ppm). More alarming is the rate of change, which is at 3 ppm per annum, which means we don’t have long before we reach the point of no return. We are already seeing some of the tangible effects of climate change, from mass coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, to the rising of water levels around the world; neither of which are giving any indication of slowing down.

Business & Science — 129

If the environment isn’t your choice of poison, consider the health effects of car pollution. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates there are around 740 preventable deaths in Australia each year due to vehicle emissions. Air pollution has also been linked to cardiovascular and respiratory disease, cancer, dementia, pregnancy complications, and adverse birth outcomes.

One of the easiest ways to reduce our emissions from the transport sector is to address fuel standards in cars.

Australia lags behind the rest of the world significantly when it comes to fuel efficiency. In 2015, the average efficiency of new cars sold in Australia was 184g of CO2 per km — it was 120g in the EU. There is work being done to try and address this disparity. Late last year, the government undertook consultation to prepare new fuel emissions standards, as the current standards are due to expire in 2019. Recent analysis from ClimateWorks at Monash University proposed standards that would deliver 6% of Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target.

But what if we removed the emissions from cars altogether?

Enter, the electric car. Electric cars, powered by renewable energy, could negate the 10% of Australian greenhouse emissions and air pollution that petroleumpowered cars produce. An electric car gets its ground propulsion from one or more electric motors, using power from usually rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

Even without renewable energy powering the car, electric cars are more efficient than the internal combustion engine cars we’re used to. This is due to energy only being used to power an electric car when it is moving.

These cars already exist and they go a long way to solving several health and environmental issues, and could prevent even more — so why don’t we all own one already?

There are a few roadblocks to a mass adoption of electric cars: cost, access to charging, and vehicle performance. Electric cars aren’t cheap. The majority

sit around the $40,000 mark, and the more impressive brands, such as Tesla’s Model S, sit upward of $100,000.

For comparison, consider a couple of the biggest selling small cars in Australia. Hyundai’s i30 and the Toyota Corolla are priced around $22,000. If getting a car that won’t break your bank is your priority, chances are you won’t be in the market for an electric one just yet.

You need to be able to charge the car. In comparison to petrol-driven cars, there isn’t an abundance of facilities (i.e. petrol stations) existing to recharge your car if you run low on fuel. Currently there are about 72 charging stations listed on MyElectricCar in the Sydney area, mostly concentrated in the CBD and notably absent in the south-west. The lack of infrastructure for electric cars in the regions might not seem like a great concern for a city-dweller who only needs to go to and from work. That is, until you want to escape the smog that you are now no longer contributing to.

And this isn’t even the main factor holding people back. A recent study from Queensland University of Technology found environmental performance was the most important thing for those looking to buy an electric car. The logic checks out — if you’re looking to buy an electric car, chances are you care about your own environmental footprint. The choice to buy came down to whether you could power the car with renewable energy. “We found the majority of participants placed great emphasis on the need for electricity for electric vehicles to be produced from renewable energy sources in order for them to be a true alternative,” said lead researcher Kenan Degirmenci. This is the key to electric cars being the green solution. It’s all well and good if you’re not using petrol, but if you just change to fossil fuel-sourced electricity then have you really gone green?

Economics tells us that supply and demand is the most important concept, and it applies here. What Sydneysiders and the world need is a mass demand for renewable energy to power our cars. To clear away the smog from the skyline, reduce emissions, improve health, and set Australia up as a global leader in renewable energy, electric cars can drive us there.

130 — Students’ Association Reports

Students’ Association Reports

President’s Report — Beatrice Tan Stuff and things.

loan scheme. We have elected to distribute the following: --

Contact: president@utsstudentsassociation.org --

Treasurer’s Report — Lachlan Barker This past month, the President and I have been trying to sift through reimbursements to CISA. The confusion surrounding how much money people would be reimbursed speaks to the need for an established policy for conference caps. I have been conducting research into affordable flights and have also taken advice from other campuses on how they handle reimbursements.

I will compile my research into a submission for the October meeting as it is ongoing.

It’s been fantastic to get out at several marriage equality stalls. I joined representatives from the exec and Queer Collective to talk to people before AEC enrolments closed. Finances for Pride Week have been accounted for and credit must go to Louie, Alex and Aadarsh for their organisation in getting approval requests in efficiently.

--

$40,000 to O’Day, to cover the additional costs we incurred from increased product purchase pre- and post-O’Day; $40,000 to Bluebird and Night Owl, to account for increased popularity and the Haymarket stall; $40,000 for the refurbishment of spaces, including offices and collective spaces.

I hope everyone is keeping well as we approach the end of the year.

Contact: treasurer@utsstudentsassociation.org

Secretary’s Report — Luke Chapman I have had a fabulous year working with the 2017 Student Representative Council to advocate for student rights on campus and deliver much-needed student services.

Firstly, I would like to recognise the Women’s Officer Leya Reid and the Women’s Collective Convenor Chloe Malmoux-Setz for their strength and resolve in fighting for women’s rights on campus.

The work with the PSAWG is ongoing. The student consultative group (‘SCG’) has been established structurally and invitation will be issued from the Provost. Whilst it’s excellent to see the university reaching out to students, we should remain wary of the direction of management-run groups as well as how effective they are at creating change.

To my Assistant Secretary James Wilson — it has been an absolute blast, and I wish you all the best for the future. A highlight of this year was supporting Bijay Sapkota for the Presidency of the Council of International Students Australia; I know that he will achieve great things for international students.

The President also consulted me on budget allocation for the money which could not go towards a textbook

Lastly, I am grateful for the solidarity of my comrades in Sydney Labor Students. We have unashamedly

Students’ Association Reports — 131

stood for a progressive agenda to improve the lives of students and staff at UTS. Leya, Lydia and Ella, I could not have got through this year without you. Georgie and Richard, I am so excited to see what you will achieve next year. To the hopeful candidates running for council, I congratulate you for getting involved and being a voice for UTS students. If I could leave you with one piece of advice, it is that the SRC is what you make it. As a UTS student next year, I hope that you will be ambitious, stand up to university management and always put students first.

Contact: secretary@utsstudentsassociation.org

Education Vice President’s Report — Norma Jean Cooper *Vertigo recommends listening to the tune of ‘Candle in the Wind’ by Elton John Goodbye Norma Jean Though I never knew you at all You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled They crawled out of the Students Association And they whispered into your brain They watched you make your handbook And they made you change your LinkedIn name And it seems to me you lived your life Like a coastie in student politics Never knowing who to sing to When the new Vertigo came in And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid This coastie burned out long before Your legend ever did EVP was tough The toughest role you ever played Student Unity created a superstar Becoming a hack was the price you paid

Even when you retired Oh Vertigo still hounded you All the editor had to say Was that “Norma, this report is overdue” Goodbye Norma Jean Though I never knew you at all You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled Goodbye Norma Jean From the young hack in the 22nd row Who sees you as something more than a monthly report More than just our Education Vice President And it seems to me you lived your life Like a coastie in student politics Never knowing who to sing to When the new Vertigo came in And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid This coastie burned out long before Your legend ever did Contact: education@utsstudentsassociation.org

132 — Students’ Association Reports

Women’s Officer Report — Leya Reid Looking back at all of the amazing things we have accomplished this year, we have to say a huge thank to all of our members and supporters. The collective has flourished this year, reaching a wider audience than ever before. From collaborations with UTS student groups to other university collectives, the friendships that we formed will be cherished. We look forward to continuing our work together. Here are just a few things we have been working on this semester.

for Marriage Equality to stand in solidarity with families and the LGBTQIAP+ community around the country. We were proud to be a part of the largest Queer demonstration in Australian history. Coming up, the collective will be working on a social media campaign to celebrate the diverse and intersectional feminist voices at UTS, and engaging with SWOT employees to host a workshop on transfeminism. So keep an eye out for these posts and get involved by either attending our meetings or reaching out to us.

Hope to see you all next year, it’s never too late to join!

Contact: Chloe — utswomenscollective@gmail.com In August we launched our magazine titled I’m Not Sorry at the Goodspace Gallery. The space was adorned with the featured artists’ works and themed decorations.

The magazine committee were extremely proud of the beautiful magazine and could not have launched it in a more fitting way. Following the event, we distributed the magazines in racks around UTS and were pleased to see so many of them disappear so quickly.

Having established the Sexual Assault Working Group, affectionately referred to as SAWG, at last month’s SRC meeting, the committee have been meeting regularly to draft a set of demands to present to the university along with an open letter signed by the different collectives, societies, and student bodies at UTS. Once these have been fully drafted, we will be sending a copy to the SA for feedback and revision.

The UTS Women’s Collective held a stall for Diversity Week to promote the collective to those attending.

Similar to the set-up at O-Day, passers-by were attracted by the cute decorations and free stuff. We also joined the Pride Week celebrations in support of the hard work put in by our friends in the Queer Collective. Overall the events were informative, fun and energetic and we congratulate the Queer Collective for a successful week.

We look forward to participating in and supporting future Queer Collective events. Also, UTS Women’s Collective members proudly attended the YES Rally

Leya — womens@utsstudentsassociation.org

UTS STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION’S

Brekkie Bar s t n e d u t S r o F e i k k e r B Free Tuesdays, 8:30 - 11:00 AM Haymarkets Moot Courtyard Wednesdays, 8:30 - 11:00 AM Tower Building Foyer

utsstudentsassociation.org.au

134 — Students’ Association Reports

Students’ Association Financial Reports INCOME STATEMENT

BALANCE SHEET

FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31 DECEMBER 2016

AS AT 31 DECEMBER 2016

REVENUE

Funding Orientation Member subscriptions Interest received Sundry income Bookshop sales Vertigo advertising

2016 $

2015 $

1,404,000 45,998 450 63,692 12,500

1,345,000 500 312 53,297 93,051 13,425

1,526,640

1,505,585

61,707 210,848 357,515 155,831 132,072 123,553 204,271 141,120 108,955

38,864 295,822 320,906 110,699 76,667 114,764 206,005 109,782 74,483

1,495,872

1,347,992

30,768 30,768

157,593 157,593

EXPENDITURE Grants Bookshop Casework — Education Vertigo Magazine Free Breakfast/ Supper Clubs and collectives Legal Service SRC and Elections Orientation

Profit/(Loss) Before Tax Income Tax Profit/(Loss)

CURRENT ASSETS

2016 $

2015 $

Cash and cash equivalents Trade and other receivables

2,967,165 27,108

2,861,891 40,623

Total Current Assets

2,994,273

2,902,514

Property, plant, and equipment

7,838

17,163

Total Non-Current Assets

7,838

17,163

3,002,111

2,919,677

Trade and other payables Short term provisions

177,042 86,737

145,054 67,059

Total Current Liabilities

263,779

212,113

TOTAL LIABILITIES

263,779

212,113

2,738,332

2,707,564

2,738,332

2,707,564

2,738,332

2,707,564

NON-CURRENT ASSETS

TOTAL ASSETS CURRENT LIABILITIES

NET ASSETS

EQUITY Retained earnings TOTAL EQUITY

Horoscopes — 135

Horoscopes Jenny Cao

Aries — It’s nearing the end of the year, a time for reflection and contemplation. Are you where you want to be right now? If not, you might want to top up your Opal card.

Cancer — You’re tired of working under the boss. You’re sick of that nine-to-five grind and taking orders. Well I’ve got an exciting opportunity for you. Be your own boss and join my multi-level marketing business. Please. I really need to get rid of all these juice pills and protein powder.

Taurus — Stand your ground and stick to your guns!

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that Chargrill Charlie’s is better than El Jannah. Who the heck is Charlie? I want to speak to your manager.

Leo — I’m not going to lie — you’ve had a pretty rough year so I’m gonna give you some #realtalk. Don’t feel guilty for the mistakes you’ve made. It’s okay to fall sometimes because just like a cat, you’ll always land on your feet (FYI: all these Leo entries have been about me).

Gemini — Since the solar eclipse you’ve had a sea of missed opportunities, but things are looking up. Sexy singles in YOUR area right now! Click the link to find your soulmate.

Virgo — You’ve had a string of big wins this year but don’t get too cocky. Just like the ibis was once worshipped in ancient Egypt, its hubris now renders it a mere bin chicken. How far they have fallen. Let that be a lesson.

Art – Ryley Miller | @alifeofryley

136 — Section Horoscopes

Libra — Just like any Libra, your expectations for yourself are extremely high. Your obsession with making your mark in the world is becoming unhealthy and frankly, quite gross. You can’t just urinate in public all the time.

Capricorn — Your fear of being alone might stem from that time in Year 3 when you went to the playground to meet your friends and they pretended not to see or hear you, and then ran away. Just a thought.

Scorpio — Everyone is calling you out for being ‘fake’.

It might be a sign that you should stop wearing your Groucho Marx glasses.

Aquarius — Your time working in hospitality has really taken a toll on your happiness and a career change may be on the horizon. You know what they say, too many cooks spoil the broth and cannibalism is illegal anyway.

Sagittarius — You’ve lived your life by this motto and I’m confirming it’s true, Karma is real. She lives next door to me and won’t stop playing the drums at 3am.

Pisces — It’s important to set yourself up for greatness and have a good foundation for life’s journey. Invest in a pair of Homyped shoes. They’re ergonomically designed for maximum comfort and they’re super stylish! (This is product placement. I need to pay rent somehow.)

Art – Ryley Miller | @alifeofryley

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