How ANUSA Spent Your SSAF in the First Semester ANU Announces New Changes to Graduation Schedule
Prompting Frustration and Anger Amongst Students Stickers, Artwork and Vandalism Intimacy
NILFS: Networks I Liked to Fuck Kneeled in Worship The Cuck Chair
Yeah, the Captain is Cool or Whatever, But it’s Like Totally Platonic and Chill Adolescence
Yearning
RELIQUARY, a sonnet CONTRITION
Vulnerability Tumlr’s Echo Ivory and Pear The Stringer Word The Hunt of the Wolf Taboo of Vulnerability in Student Entrepreneurship
Letter From the Editor
Dearest Readers,
Welcome back to another semester, and congratulations for making it through the last. I wasn’t sure I would, but I will now (re)join the chorus line of students chanting “new semester, new me”. The ‘new’ will likely look like a short-lived dedication to studying more and spending less. However, I hope this edition inspires you to push the limits of the ‘new’ — to consider taking off the masks we all wear in front of one another. What we consider to be taboo defines the bounds of how intimately we know one another.
I hope to embrace what is taboo in my life this semester. Raised in a family that was always uncomfortable sharing our emotions, I hope to tell my friends I love them more often. I hope to learn that being a law student isn’t the most important thing about me. I hope I can learn to make less jokes out of what my sexuality is, just because I’m avoiding how significant it really is to me. New semester, new me.
Embracing taboo is ultimately about embracing truth, and bringing to light the issues that are too burdensome to deal with alone yet feel too difficult to share with others. In the end, a problem shared is a problem halved.
Taboo is both deeply personal, and deeply political. ANU continues to advertise courses on their website which haven’t been run for years nor will ever run again, and only weeks ago told students graduating this semester that their ceremony won’t be until April next year. The University of Melbourne has recently been exposed for location tracking students through their Wi-Fi use, after promising in 2016 that their system had no capacity to do so. The tertiary education sector relies on the student body being too unorganised and too afraid of the consequences to ever mount a serious challenge.
We could allow ourselves to be complicit, or we could dare to discuss the issues that will continue to affect us or even be funded by our fees, and at the end of the day we’ll wonder why we were so afraid in the first place. Discussing the taboo is our first step, and best recourse, for change.
I will be eternally grateful to everyone involved in Woroni for providing me a place where no discussion or opinion is off limits. Our magazines are consistently a labour of love from our Editors, in particular owing to the work of the fantastic Claudia Hunt and Jasmin Small, and this edition is no different. Thank you also to our contributors for allowing us to share in your delights and your discomforts. Thank you for entrusting Woroni with your truth.
I urge you all to go into this next semester sharing more of yourself with those around you, and demanding more of the institution and societies you inhabit.
Yours truly,
Charlie Crawford Editor-in-Chief
Editor-in-Chief
Charlie Crawford (he/him)
Communications Editor Bella Wang (she/her)
Deputy Editor-in-Chief Sarah Greaves (she/her)
Content Editor Claudia Hunt (she/her)
Managing Editor Phoebe Denham (they/them)
Head of TV Arabella Ritchie (she/her)
Art Editor
Jasmin Small (she/her)
Head of Radio
Cate Armstrong (she/her)
News Editor Raida Chowdhury (she/her)
Art by Jasmin Small
How ANUSA Spent Your SSAF in the First Semester
Dash Bennett
Following ANUSA’s fourth Student Representative Council meeting at the end of semester one, Treasurer Will Burfoot (he/ him) presented an overview of ANUSA’s finances between the 1st of December 2023 and 13th May 2024. This included the figures for the same period in 2022-2023.
While this format aims to compare the current figures with last year’s funding, many expenditures in the report are yet to be fully loaded, which means in many areas the figures are not an accurate reflection of spending. Students must wait until next semester to attain a full understanding of certain expenditures.
This year during the Annual General Meeting (AGM), Burfoot also presented the budget variances for a number of expenditures.
After much number-crunching and sifting through a range of ANUSA reports and documents, Woroni is able to provide a comprehensive overview of the Union’s finances and funding priorities.
ANUSA is currently allocated 55 percent of the total SSAF pool. The Union received around $2,000,000 in SSAF funding for 2024, with an additional $1,000,000 to aid the expansion to include post-graduate and HDR students, following PARSA’s disestablishment last year.
Key areas of expenditure included clubs, O-week, BKSS, ANUSA staff salaries and wages among others
Clubs funding sat at $34,560 in the first semester, which is in stark contrast to $65,656 last year, marking a 47 percent reduction. However, Burfoot explained at the AGM that “there was a backlog of club grants which is now being cleared.” This means the figures for club expenditure is likely to be higher in the second half of the year.
Art by
Jasmin Small
ANUSA spent over $86,000 on O-Week in 2023, while it spent a mere $56,000 in 2024, representing a 35 percent fall in expenditure. However, the cuts in O-week funding are likely curbed by increased funding for ANUSA autonomous departments, who run a number of events during O-week.
The total allocation for BKSS food and consumables sits at around $30,000. This marks an increase in allocation, from last year’s expenditure of $26,000. While Burfoot told Woroni that, “BKSS funding has increased,” this increase is likely to have a minimal effect as actual expenditure on food and consumables have remained relatively alike so far.
In addition, as of the first semester, spending on the Education Welfare Action Group (EWAG) and the autonomous Departments have increased beyond the respective budgets.
EWAG spent around $5000, which is $1000 higher than its allocated $4000 budget. Departments spent around $70,000 during the first semester from its allocated $50,000 budget. At the 2024 AGM, Burfoot explained that these areas “have higher one-off expenditure at the beginning of the year…which is why they can be allocated above up until [semester one] in the year but this will even out later on.”
For the whole of 2024, $2,329,906 is budgeted for staff salaries. In 2023, the budget was $2,082,297. This represents a nearly 12 percent increase –higher than inflation, which peaked at around seven percent between early 2023 and 2024.
Burfoot explained that the large increase in expenditure on wages and salaries was due to the inclusion of post-graduate and HDR students in the Union.
He further explained that the current allocation for student and staff salaries and wages was passed as one of two budgets during the first Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) last year, with the current allocation anticipating an increased SSAF following PARSA’s de-funding. Burfoot told Woroni, “This indicates that while there has been an increase in the Salaries budget line, it is as much in line with predictions as is reasonable in the current economy.”
Perhaps a more bold figure is the $14,000 spent on consulting expenses. Around $6,930 in consulting fees was spent on the Night Café business plan. Consultation concluded that a night café was not a wise venture for the Union.
A further $7,930 has so far been spent on ANUSA’s governance review. In addition, $9,512 was spent on the “Legal/Consulting’’ category. Burfoot clarified to Woroni that the latter was to re-train staff for the ANUSA legal team.
Motor vehicle expenses grew to $11,171 this year, up $6,534 from Semester 1 2023. This is likely due to the maintenance costs associated with the $26,545 Ute ANUSA bought in 2023.
Superannuation expenses have also seen a 43 percent increase, from $80,666 in Semester 1 2023 to $115,512 in semester one 2024.
Expenditure for the Student Assistance Team (SAT) and other support funding increased by $10,998. SAT includes a designated team to help students through various university procedures, while other funding includes grocery vouchers, student meals and other welfare services. The total budget for SAT sits just below $70,000 this year, of which around $50,000 has been spent in the first semester.
Despite public criticism, the budget allocated no money to the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. However, expenditure on activism including the EWAG protest, the National Student Strike for Palestine among others is likely to be scattered throughout the salaries and wages of ANUSA executives, funding for EWAG and other marketing and communications expenditure.
Disclosure: Woroni is also a recipient of Student Services and Amenities Fee funding.
Art by Amanda Lim
ANU Announces New Changes to Graduation Schedule Prompting Frustration and Anger Amongst Students
Constance Tan
Last month, ANU announced changes to the graduation schedule that are set to come into effect in 2025. According to the University’s website, from next year all ANU graduations will be streamlined into a single week per year, held from the end of March to the start of April.
The 2025 graduation ceremony will take place from 31 March to 4 April 2025, and is inclusive of graduates who will complete their program and are originally eligible to graduate this December. Meanwhile, the July 2024 graduation ceremony will proceed as usual, becoming the final of its kind.
A University spokesperson told Woroni that the new schedule, “will bring the full graduating year together to celebrate at the same time.” The change will align graduations “with other University-wide events, such as Open Day, creating an enlivened campus atmosphere”, according to the University website.
The change was announced to the ANU community through a University-wide email at the end of June, during the winter break.
The ANU spokesperson told Woroni, “completing a certificate, diploma or degree at ANU is a significant academic achievement and is rightly celebrated”.
The spokesperson maintains, “The placement of graduations within the academic year was looked at closely by a dedicated working group, as is conventional for such matters. This working group included student representatives, including ANUSA, and we thank them for their invaluable contribution.”
However, on a facebook post, ANUSA Undergraduate Coursework Officer, Harrison Oates, claimed that, “At the [Academic Quality Assurance Committee (AQAC) meeting] 1 in March a resolution was passed to transmit up to Academic Board a recommendation that would see graduations occur in early February and September from 2026, based on a report from a specially-convened working group which recommended the model.”
He continues, “I was broadly in support of this change to alleviate some pressure on our staff from tight deadlines and to ensure that people with deferred assessments could graduate on time with their cohort.”
However, Oates wrote, “This announced change is NOT what was endorsed. For the uni to change the system a full year earlier, and in a manner completely different to the recommendations, is deeply disappointing.”
Oates sits on the AQAC board, along with ANUSA Postgraduate Coursework Officer Rishik Reddy Maram.
ANUSA representatives are also currently collecting feedback on the new changes.
At present, the implementation of the new schedule has been met with its fair share of criticism.
One student shared that because their family and friends live internationally, they had, “already booked tickets (to attend the December graduation), half of which are non-refundable.” The student also mentioned the inconvenience the sudden change brought on each of their family’s personal schedules, especially because they had “been coordinating this graduation with [their] whole family since January.”
The student alleged that the December graduation had been removed from the University’s 2024 official calendar, “at least by mid-May with no formal announcement”, something which they say “should have been made with a year’s notice, not a semester’s.”
Another student who was due to graduate this December told Woroni that they had already made “very costly overseas plans” intended for March to April 2025, all of which will now coincide with the postponed graduation ceremony while leaving them “without appropriate compensation.”
The student also mentioned that because of an adverse health condition, they had already previously deferred their original graduation from this July to December, but “the sudden change has failed to consider the immense health accommodations that chronically ill students like [themselves] have to navigate just to survive.”
They further stated that the University’s announcement of the change “from 2025” was “misleading and unconscionable”, as it failed to imply the changes to December’s’ ceremony as well.
A third student, who had “moved interstate to study [in Canberra]”, said that the change had similarly negatively affected her as her family had “re-arranged plans so that [they] could travel to Canberra for [her] graduation.”
She was disappointed, “that the achievement of finishing university with [her] family in Canberra has been taken away from [her] with no consultation”, further explaining that she has no intention to attend the postponed April graduation next year as “it will feel weird and delayed and self-congratulatory to celebrate the achievement of finishing university 6 months after [she] has actually finished university.”
The University continues to accept feedback on the implementation of the change, saying that they “will provide updates to staff and students when appropriate”.
Stickers, Artwork and Vandalism: How Tensions on Campus are Testing the Limits of Political and Artistic Expression Raida Chowdhury
Earlier this month, ANU students and staff, notably from the ANU Gaza Solidarity encampment, contributed to an exhibition at the ANU School of Art and Design (SOAD).
The exhibition featured artwork on student activism, including anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism, and artwork which criticised the ANU’s ties with weapons manufacturers and private corporations. The following day almost half of all the art disappeared from the exhibit, while a poster of the Palestinian flag and the Aboriginal flag was sawn in half to remove the Palestinian flag.
Note:Theaboveonlycontainssomeimagesofthetheft,moreartworkwasstolenfromotherareasin the exhibit.
Earlier this month, ANU students and staff, notably from the ANU Gaza Solidarity encampment, contributed to an exhibition at the ANU SOAD.
The exhibition featured artwork on student activism, including anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism, and artwork which criticised the ANU’s ties with weapons manufacturers and private corporations. The following day almost half of all the art disappeared from the exhibit, while a poster of the Palestinian flag and the Aboriginal flag was sawn in half to remove the Palestinian flag.
An ANU spokesperson told Woroni, “It has been brought to the University’s attention that a number of posters and banners relating to pro-Palestine activism were removed from a project space in the SOAD’s main building…We want to make clear these materials were not removed by the University nor the School.” The School announced the same following the theft.
The University maintains it is, “investigating the matter to determine who may have removed and vandalised the materials. At this point, it is unclear as to who removed these materials.”
Woroni understands that a report regarding the theft has been filed to the ACT Police.
In a statement condemning the theft, Ivo, the organiser of the exhibition said, “The theft and vandalism of art from the ANU School of Art and Design clearly violates academic and artistic freedoms that are essential for the effective functioning of both the ANU and the ANU SOAD.”
Ivo, who was a student at the SOAD, in addition has had a long standing history of exhibiting activist art at the ANU, which criticise the corporatisation, massification and casualisation in higher education. This recent exhibition was planned to be interactive, where students and staff could contribute to an “activist wall”.
Woroni understands that following the installation of the exhibition, a sign was planned to be posted saying that the exhibition was interactive.
Fig: Before the Theft.
Fig: After the Theft.
Following the theft of the pieces, Ivo and other students met with SOAD management. According to the attendees, discussions with staff made it unclear whether security cameras were installed in the exhibition. The attendees also explained that SOAD management communicated that School staff felt unsafe, especially because they believed the poster featuring both the Aboriginal flag and Palestinian flag was cut in half with a sharp object.
During the meeting, SOAD management allegedly proposed to postpone the exhibition until semester two.
However, the following week, ANU announced that it would not continue with the exhibition. An ANU spokesperson told Woroni, “The School of Art & Design were not made aware of the interactive nature or content of the display of works in the Project Space installation.”
The ANU explained, “We are committed to a safe environment for our students, staff and community. The Project Space location is a busy thoroughfare, and we are unable to actively manage and monitor works on display at all hours, to ensure a safe working environment for all our community.”
“With this in mind, and after discussing with the organisers, we will not progress with this display of works in this location.”
For some students the decision reflects the University’s refusal to properly invest in the SOAD, while for many other students and staff, the theft and the ANU’s subsequent decision to not continue with the exhibition has sparked concerns about academic and creative freedom.
In particular the encampment has said, “We condemn the ANU for stoking divisions on our campus by publicly claiming that the presence of pro-Palestine paraphernalia on campus is hateful and harmful, thereby emboldening such vandalism.”
Earlier last the month, ANU Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell told the Senate during the Senate estimates hearing that the University actively attempts to take down stickers and posters which included proPalestinian messaging. These stickers included messages such as, “If you are not with Palestine, you are a psychopath”, “Zionism is terrorism” and stickers which feature a cross through the Israeli flag.
When questioned by Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson on the removal of these stickers, the ViceChancellor said, “we work on removing them,” because of their “hateful nature.”
An ANU spokesperson however, told Woroni, “The University undertakes regular clean-ups of all nonsanctioned stickers and posters across the University. To reiterate, all ANU staff and students are free to express themselves in line with the University’s codes of conduct and Australian law. This includes free speech through artwork, speeches and protest.”
Earlier in the year, the ANUSA Bla(c)k, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) department also reported the erasure of a pro-Palestine mural outside the department’s safe space.
ANUSA BIPOC Officer Selena Wania (she/her) told Woroni,“The BIPOC Department held an autonomous event for BIPOC students to come together to express their solidarity with Palestinians through creating a chalk mural on the brick wall outside BIPOC Base (BIPOC Department’s safe space).”
“Through art we’ve transformed a brick wall into a powerful statement of solidarity and resistance –one that reminds all those who walk past it that Palestine will be free.”
The mural was completed on the 26th of March, however, on the 16th of April, Wania found the mural was defaced.
She said, “There is very obviously a deliberate attempt to smudge the mural from the start to the end of its length.”
“Notably, this section of text was rubbed off the most: “’Land back’, ‘Free Palestine’, and ‘روح الروح ‘ translating to ‘soul of my soul’. Additionally, texts such as ‘From the river to the sea’ and ‘solidarity’ were also rubbed off.”
Wania raised concerns that the defacement, “highlights the pervasive nature of racism and the ongoing challenges faced by BIPOC students,” saying, “The defacement of the BIPOC Base mural, our autonomous safe space, is deeply concerning for us at the BIPOC Department and BIPOC students who utilise the space.”
She explains that the incident represents, “the ongoing challenges faced by BIPOC students where even in spaces designated as safe, BIPOC students are not truly protected from harmful behaviours.”
She calls on the ANU, “not only to address this specific act of vandalism but also to confront the broader issues of racism it represents,” adding, “The ANU must recognise this incident as a symptom of larger systemic issues and take decisive action to investigate, hold those responsible accountable, and implement proactive measures to ensure the safety and well-being of BIPOC students.”
Woroni understands that Wania has been in contact with the University in regards to the incident and that no perpetrator has yet been identified.
Since October last year, a number of campus posters including pro-Palestinian posters and posters advocating for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, have caused divisions in the student body, with many students reporting feeling unsafe due to the growing political activity on campus. In addition, posters made by Free Palestine Printing (FPP) can be found around the University, including in many residential halls.
According to ANU policy on academic freedom and freedom of speech, the duty to foster well being, “does not extend to a duty to protect any person from feeling offended, shocked or insulted by the lawful speech of another.”
The recent comments made by the Vice-Chancellor and the decision of the ANU to not continue with the exhibition has raised concerns of whether the University is properly upholding its own policies on academic freedom and freedom of speech.
The University has maintained, “ANU is a place of respectful debate, and we are proud of our long history of student political engagement. This includes free speech through the medium of art and protest. All ANU staff and students are free to express themselves in line with the University’s policies, codes of conduct and Australian law.”
ANU spokesperson has also said, “The [SOAD] has appropriate exhibition spaces to present works of a sensitive nature, where they can be appropriately managed, monitored and supported.” However, whether a similar exhibition on student activism, in particular a pro-Palestinian activism will return to the School is yet to be seen.
As of the date of publication, the ANU has not issued any updates on the investigation into the stolen artwork.
ThisarticlewaswrittenbymembersoftheWoroniBoardofEditors.Itdoesnotaccuratelyreflectany one person’s opinion or views. Please direct message Woroni, or email woronieic@gmail.com, if you have any questions, concerns or corrections. Please also reach out if you would like a photo of you removed from our social media accounts.
Fig: BIPOC mural befor defacement.
Fig: BIPOC mural after Defacement
NILFS: Networks I Liked to Fuck Anonymous
Sherlock Holmes taught me at age twelve that a shiny wedding band is a marker of infidelity, gaining lustre each time it is taken off for a mistress and re-worn for the wife.
Unlike Sherlock, I usually manage to resist the urge to spy and pry whenever a man promotes me to overnight visitor; I’m much too obedient, too well-behaved. Partly an act of courtesy, partly a tacit discharge of my duty of inconspicuousness. The line between the two often blurs at the same speed as legality, but each morning I flee with my belongings and make a souvenir out of a final glimpse of the work pass dangling behind his front door.
After a dozen or so these pre-selecting rituals masquerading as first dates with men you would never see if not for their resume—as closeted as he may be, can you imagine if someone you know spotted you getting drinks with a businessman in a suit the same shade of grey as his stubble?—you learn the customs of the game. All sports have rules, all games have obstacles; well-wielded charm can shirk both.
Ask him about his childhood while you rummage in your purse, placing unread classics and bubblegum by your plate like poker chips to offer yourself as not only fuckable but articulate too. Someone who has studied enough women in literature to emulate Ophelia or Hermia at will. The penetrable façade of self-respect entices men for the same primeval reason that trophy hunters in the savannah prefer to slaughter lions over deer: the thrill of the conquer.
Nod and look up periodically. Your wordless eye contact will cause him to either stutter or slur his sentimental speech, as his antiquated stories slow to the sultry pace of you reapplying the $5 lip gloss you picked up on the way there. Glide back and forth and back again like a metronome to exercise some control over the conversations he dominates. He’ll ask if you wear makeup, say he’s glad that it’s easier for your generation to be ‘expressive’; you’ll chuckle and thank him but assure him that it’s just the gloss.
But looks aren’t everything. You must differentiate yourself as more precocious and put together than the other profiles, many of which he likely texted right up until you arrived to retain as backups in case you stood him up (it wouldn’t be the first time). Be sure to sprinkle in an unnecessary polysyllabic synonym here and there to remind him of your intellect: ditch ‘add’ for ‘supplement’; swap ‘show’ for ‘represent’—or, better yet, ‘schematise’.
Opine on the Oxford comma (because you’re young enough to remember that month of Year Four English and he’s old enough to attend a parent-teacher interview). Draw connections between his life and your own, revealing enough information to maintain a spurious conversation that he’ll quickly forget in a matter of hours once you’ve evolved into your final form: a fleshlight with a pulse and he, an odd flavour of massage oil that is cheap and close to expiration.
The best way to sustain a middle-aged ego is to challenge it—working it up until the point of strain to grow and grow before damage. Male egos function much like biceps, and like any strenuous physical exercise, a bit of fun helps pass the time. Adopt a new, entirely fictitious hobby that matches an aspiration from his adolescence, naively held before his father crushed that dream like tissue paper and forced him into a corporate career— coincidentally, at about the same age as you! Note: he’ll share this story after asking about your family, or when cracking a joke about your maturity (and how it makes him forget just how young you are!).
Remember: the point of these preliminary discussions is to advertise yourself as a prodigy; impossibly intelligent and irresistible, engaged enough in his career to justify whichever euphemism you agreed upon—‘connection’, ‘catch-up’, ‘touch base’—that ignores his age and attraction to you for the small charge of an overpriced glass of wine (typically equivalent to your hourly wage) at a restaurant fancy enough to ensure your agemates wouldn’t find you there. Don’t kid yourself: you both know he could never employ you himself, right? Imagine the scandal! His coworkers already speculate on the state of his prior marriage and most suspect he has a taste in men or young girls or the indeterminate in-betweens. Your addition to the floor would merely worsen the situation, throwing glitter on the embers of an invisible fire.
Despite what the tech designers assume about career connections, the harsh fluorescent white of a LinkedIn request is, somewhat ironically, too harsh and in-your-face to be noticed with any meaningful regard. The best connections are built through subtlety, not compulsion: unfortunately, the “Connect” button can never truly outcompete the unassuming batting of your eyelids at a man twice your age, experience, and salary. Who needs email when you can spot an unbuttoned dress shirt in a nightclub, inverting the power dynamic for the twenty seconds it takes you to part the young crowd like Moses and flirt with the professional who sticks out like a sore thumb? (Or is it wrist? I hear carpal tunnel runs rampant in desk jobs…)
I loathe the term “gold digger” with a passion. It’s an oversimplification of a lifestyle that stigma prevents us from properly appreciating. Rupert Murdoch is onto his fifth wife, Elena Zhukova (maybe sixth by the time you’ve read this). Good for her: wealth’s value ought to be measured by the ease of its extraction, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit a degree of envy over those who can inherit billions through alimony. But Elena met Rupert through Wife #3, Wendi Deng. That’s cheating, far too easy. There is far more merit in what we may call “gold panning”, sifting through a whole heap of dirt and sludge before settling on a nugget worth polishing.
One night, from a quadragenarian Sydney import, I reaped a free meal, drinks, and a job interview for the following week at his friend’s firm. Score. Surely, there’s a talent in that which deserves some applause! And let’s face it: Sexual capital—a commodity realised not only through intercourse, but also through flirting—is more readily available than nepotism. In a sector where half of the commerce and finance and business and law and politics students enjoy internships gifted by gracious parents, what’s the harm in using their coworkers for the same benefits?
I confess sexual networking is not always the easiest feat. After a lovely five-hour dinnerand-drinks-fuelled evening, a policy advisor I met in a taxi turned out not only to be married, but also deeply, deeply repressed. A near-daily flurry of paragraphs and phone calls followed my successful pantomime of precocity, as he relayed an array of crises sparked by my presence which, unbeknownst to me, threw off a heterosexuality it was clear he barely held onto. I blocked him for my own sanity: my services do not yet include counselling—at least, not consciously.
Often, I pretend not to see these men on the tram or when shopping at the same menswear stores they recommended I visit, purchases financed in part by the money I saved thanks to their gratuitous dinners. Only once have I bumped into one holding hands with his wife; many more keep the ring resting on the bedside table, or in the drawer, out of his, hers, and my sight.
Kneeled in Worship
Cody
Williams
There is a heaven in a stranger’s home tucked away in a little lane in Sydney.
The pearly gates, the graffiti, the dim orange street lights, it’s my first time in this city.
He shows me up to his room, it’s homey and quaint. A crack runs up the wall onto the ceiling. There’s a stack of books with frayed edges and yellow pages on the bedside table.
I am a sinner but I have learnt to stop seeking forgiveness that will not be granted.
We talk about queerness, home, dinosaurs, fears of the future, and his fancy sheets.
My mind moved faster than my mouth, I could already feel his kiss before it landed exchanging letters with our lips
Our clothes on the floor, peeled off like lily petals
I expect the crack in his ceiling to burst open; an angel descending to collect me — or punish me — or to kiss me too
But I didn’t look. I could only feel the universe flow through us.
We collapse ourselves into each other; a worship; a covenant, born of sin; we are our own new Gods.
In his consecrated embrace I learn to forgive myself.
//
In-between his fancy sheets two naked bodies lay.
Until the morning magpies in the wattle tree outside wake us up
The sun crawls in from his window, calling me home. It ignites his body— his skin and body hair burning gold in the light; silhouette of an angel’s halo next to me.
I kiss the stranger goodbye.
I leave a bit of me behind with him, in heaven. and I take a bit of it with me too.
Art
by Jasmin Small
The Cuck Chair La Petit Mort
Have you ever noticed that, without fail, every single hotel room has a random chair facing the bed? Who is going to sit there? And why? It seems out of place, but it’s always there, so there must be a reason for it.
To me, this chair is affectionately known as the cuck chair. A space left to either physically or theoretically feel the presence of the person left out of the classic hotel affair. Whilst I’m well aware that the supposed reason most hotel rooms have these random bed-facing chairs is to bump their star ratings, it’s impossible to ignore its other potential purpose for existence.
I like to explain my sexuality to others using the cuck chair. And no, I don’t mean I like to get cuckolded, as much as that opening might make you think that. For context, I’m aromantic but not asexual, which has more of an impact on my sexuality than I ever would have thought. I tried to date when I was younger, but it only made me anxious. It felt more like going through the expected motions rather than sincerely acting upon my own wants or desires. In my adult life, I now struggle to navigate my own sexual preferences without that opener of romantic interaction, especially because I don’t enjoy typical casual sex. So, like the cuck chair, I like to observe from the sidelines. It’s also hard to be a cuck when you don’t have a romantic partner to cuckold you.
Instead of a cuck, I would consider myself a voyeur. I only have my version of sex a couple of times a year, and that’s enough for me. This is mostly because having kinky, but consensual and respectful, sex requires more administration than you would think. Usually, this looks like me helping a dominatrix with a scene well-suited to me, often with a sub who is an exhibitionist and enjoys the extra attention or a masochist who likes the shame of extra eyes. Either way, all that’s needed is my presence. And, honestly, that’s all I am willing to give.
But why is that all I want? Why do I like to be an outside viewer of my own pleasure, sitting in the theatre of desire and watching the show play out from my seat in the back? Why can’t I see myself in the stories of others, with their hallway crushes and the trust in giving away that fabled V-card? Why can’t I be normal, or even slightly more vanilla?
Like any overthinker, I have put too much time and effort into trying to psychoanalyse and rationalise why I feel this way. It’s one of the only ways for me to mourn my potential normality in a productive way.
My initial thought was that I was, and still am, incredibly disconnected from my own body. I’ve never seriously felt much of anything. I’ve never broken a bone, never gotten a cut deep enough for stitches, never even bruised myself particularly badly. This is also probably why my pain tolerance is sensationally low; I take pain meds at the first hint of discomfort. I’m extremely pain averse, so does that also mean I’m pleasure averse? Maybe.
I’ve also been quite physically sick since I was a child. I grew up with migraines, and a variety of genetic and organ dysfunctions that made me fear my own body and respond by attempting to control it. I’ve seen several of my organs move with my bare eyes, which was existentially horrifying. I can’t take any hormonal birth control and getting pregnant would kill me; another reason to avoid penetrative sex at all costs. But I’ve always felt fine even when I was shuffled from doctor to doctor, each more baffled by the dissonance between my test results and the fact that I felt nothing out of the ordinary. My physical reality was at odds with my perception of it. So now I perceive my body through a kind of perpetual dissociation; watching over it like playing the Sims, making sure my Sim’s needs are met once they start to get low without guidance from my senses. I’ve had to see it this way to not get stuck in a self-pitying spiral.
Does my inability to feel my sickness — but my constant awareness of it — mean that I’m a control freak in the sheets? Do I want to micromanage how I achieve orgasm like I do everything else about my body? I’m not sure.
This isn’t my only theory; I’m nothing if not a dweller. Whilst my family are very sex positive, I cannot deny that I internalised the shame society attaches to women’s sexuality. I spent much of my teenage years trying and failing to figure myself out by untangling my complicated feelings and desires, none of which was made easy by the fact I’m aromantic. I have laboured over letting myself feel desire without guilt. This was especially difficult because I’ve never particularly liked being touched.
The only other potential source I could point to is my parents’ divorce. How Freudian, I know. They separated when I was in my early teens, right around when I started to develop a sexuality at all. So did the dramatic collapse of the romantic relationship that I looked up to in my childhood and adolescence lead me to view all romantic relationships as doomed and not worth the trouble? Honestly, a bit. But given my parents were better apart than they ever were together and both of them have moved on to more fulfilling and healthy relationships afterwards, I doubt this. This is specifically questionable because kinks can sometimes be partially genetic; and no one wants to think about their parents like that, especially considering my own proclivities. But still, add it to the list of contenders for why I can’t come if anybody is focusing on me.
Is any of this introspection even worth it? It doesn’t make any difference to how I’ll proceed with my sex life. None of this changes what I like and how I like it. It helps though. It makes me feel like my abnormal, but satisfying, approach to sex isn’t so out of left field. A reason for why I can’t just be like everyone else.
Because God, it would be so much easier if I didn’t have to have all this set up for me to achieve sexual gratification in someone else’s presence. Whilst I’m glad that I’ve gotten to the point where I’m content with my sex life, that doesn’t mean that I don’t mourn what I could have had. That I don’t like having something to point to for an explainer, some reason for why I am the way that I am. After all, I’m not going to change any time soon. Having a reason for it doesn’t make a difference in what I do. Which is watching others’ desire from the back row and finding pleasure in it. I’m happy watching, I’m happy not participating, I’m happy to sit in the cuck chair.
Yeah, the Captain is Cool or Whatever, But it’s Like Totally Platonic and Chill: A Pirate Love Sea Shanty
Daniel Minns
As a young boy it was plain to see Swabbin’ decks, moppin’ floors the life for me
So I took a job out on the sea
Right hand man for Heraldo
‘Boy, on board it’s you and I
Listen, obey and you’ll get by’
His cocksure grin and glitt’ry eye
It set my heart aglow
If our pirate duty call
We’ll plunder farmer’s markets stall
Adopt a dog and call him Paul
Plat-on-i-call-y though
‘Boy, on board it’s you and I
Listen, obey and you’ll get by’
His cocksure grin and glitt’ry eye
It set my heart aglow
Watch his ass my eyes are peeled
Run from the law through a daisy field
Cardigan disguise we wield
It’s chill he is my bro
And when we drink rum we get silly
But sometimes he drinks it with Billy
His right hand man won’t change though, will he?
Who is this ugly crow?
Billy is not even hot
He’s got no teeth from the black rot
Too-wide eyes and his hat’s store bought
It’s not like he’s Rob Lowe
Jocelyn Wong
by
Jocelyn Wong
Tie me down I guess cap’s cute
With his eyepatch and his tight pirate suit
But we’re friends so the point is moot
These feelings I will stow
Two pirate bros’ll never part
Along with the loot he stole my heart
Why deny and stop our start?
Guess I could be his beau…
‘Boy, on board it’s you and I
Listen, obey and you’ll get by’
His cocksure grin and glitt’ry eye
It set my heart aglow
‘Boy, on board it’s you and I
Listen, obey and you’ll get by’
His cocksure grin and glitt’ry eye
I love you Heraldo
Scan the QR code for a performance of this piece by the author
Adolescence
Aala Cheema
April is the cruellest month
And it’s all quiet on the western front
You said you were the softer one
Now, I’m so drunk on bottled rum.
You used to say that I’d die young:
Seventeen and half unstrung
Line chaser, fool faced and,
Staring up at the sun.
Spring flowers, and the power of your hands
I don’t think there is anything I can’t withstand
I sit here watching the birds come over the trees
Their song echoes the tune of my anguished pleas
How was I to know you’d be the first?
Black dress, fist full of dirt,
Slipping away so softly
No one dared stop me.
Melancholic moon decrescent
Thrust your hand into my chest and, Wake me from this fever dream
I wish we could return to sixteen.
All those days up on the balcony
Holding hands, waiting for some sign to see
The sun’s incandescence
Setting on the free fall of adolescence.
Yearning
Layla Brady
ContentWarning: Mentions of Homophobia
you never touch a man like you want to cover your desire with a coat you never touch a man like you want him to touch you you the stony rock face weathering the elements reluctantly eroded by the rain’s patience
if you didn’t want feelings taking root like sequoias you shouldn’t have let him stroke your short hair you pull him to the ground and stay there someday they’ll find out and find you locked like skeletons of lovers rotted in tender embrace clinging to him like a rose thorn you two can’t get up you, too, can’t get up you await your divine curse it feels biblical in an Old Testament kind of way like a warning parable in your father’s favourite verse and it’s as scary as you feared it would be running to Narnia with him and you worry you’re in heaven (though you’ll never be there) if you’re the ground, he’s the lightning that strikes it if you’re the roots, he brings you beams of warmth if you’re the lake, he’s the stars in its reflection if you’re an apple underfoot, he helped you fall gently so when you feel like hiding, you burrow your tainted hands in the soil and wear the earth like a pair of gloves the rough dirt getting under your nails and under your skin
“yearning” is insufficiently ugly for this flagellation he pulls the clouds over your shoulder like his jacket he makes a halo of the moon you dig your feet into the dirt and wear the planet like a pair of shoes
by Jasmin Small
you write this poem, your mother lying sleeping next to you the shame of it the sinful sweetness of forbidden fruit the stickiness dripping down your chin the rivulets making crosses at your clavicle like a hot iron brand and you hold your own hand all you know is that you need to bury it your vulgar hunger six feet under though you’re still not sure why wanting feels like punishment
Jasmin Small
RELIQUARY, a sonnet Jaden Ogwayo
The more we age, the more you taste of wine: A sweet and sour blend of floral liquor. I chew your flesh—like Christ’s—a bite divine; A chalky taste remains, it leaves me sicker.
A Eucharist resides within your hands; Held tight as if to pray or suffocate. How often do you beg for God’s demands? How long until the yearning turns to hate?
Your piety: half-salve, half-aftertaste. Corruptive plague, like rust, I dull your sheen. O well-spoiled saint, what moral good you waste On me, a mortal neither pure nor clean!
Upon a hell-bound journey, we begin. Apostate and apostle, faith and sin.
CONTRITION
Jaden
In the holy blur of incense and myrrh, I worship my bishop. My hero, my shepherd, my humanist. The one who commits. In his eyes, I find light And the God that produces it. To pay respect, I genuflect.
I start on solemn knees. Palms clasped, At the sight of the cross, I freeze. Sprucely lit. In an instant, You pray to it. I praise it. It bestows a glow
On the patrons of the chapel, Gilded bright by the rays of the night Who penetrate the windowpane— They warn me; They warm you. We disrobe—how unbiblical. Two lascivious lunatics.
Profane bodies: Nullified, purified, freed of all stains. Absolved In the solvent of leaden paint. A pendulous chain Sways on your chest: A crucifix to match your shelf.
A call for help, so loose it fits Around your clammy neck. Shadowed,
Constrained as a tulip is. Your sacrilegious appetite Catches on the snare of my bite. Tonight, You entered
This linen-lined vestal temple; An apostle of the gospel. You took part in the rite. You ascended, ordained. You exited a proselyte; an apostate. Exiled Son of Christ. You placed His Flesh on the helm of my tongue.
Bitter and impaled; Wrung-dry and regaled
As your hubris is. His husk is thinly skinned. Your lust, It sings in hymns. Injustice on a whim.
Ogwayo
This crush is your ritual, Your Eucharist. A place Where chaste saints face sin; Where disciples face discipline. I savour the wafer, Mulling over The flavour of my Saviour:
Broken skin; Battered beige, blistered white. Blemished from within.
Punished for my behaviour. A cocktail of constraint; Censure and restraint. That coarse bread we’re force-fed:
Who else chooses it? Who refuses it?
Taken in clenched mandibles
As godless beggars
Squeezed through a comb of vacant pews. You indulge on sinews; You chew them quick.
Parasitic swine. Pentecostal pig.
You eye at unclean tissues, You gnaw at me once more. You keep your beverages sanguine.
After the lamb’s blood, You languish in the anguish.
Capillaries were too saccharine to abstain. Repent calcifies your sorry teeth
Like a carnivore
Compelled to carnal meats. Blasphemy bred and born From the toil of matted sheets
Evades the Lord and His scorn. I anoint thee In the oil of cathartic release.
Tumblr’s Echo
Why are we still romanticising mental illness?
Charli Anderson
ContentWarning: Mentions of Personality Disorders, Eating Disorders and Mental Illness
One of the darkest corners to find yourself in on the internet in the mid-2010s was under a cryptic username, browsing a sea of black and white images on Tumblr, dry quotes from the likes of Effy Stoneman and Lana Del Rey, and grim hashtags that need not be repeated here. For many teens, Tumblr created an awareness of mental illness while simultaneously triggering the demise of their own mental health. It was educative in that a single browsing session brought to light extensive examples of the contents of the DSM-5, but also harmful, replete with misinformation and without any reference to mental health support. Disconcerting images were reblogged to form collections, or ‘boards’, pieced together ‘thematically’ to create an overall ‘aesthetic’ of suffering and tragedy. Tumblr boards were a marker of one of the many identities teens wore across the ever-increasing social platforms on which they existed.
Initially, many flocked to this side of Tumblr to seek connection, support, and recognition for psychological struggles that had for so long been villainised in other mediascapes. These spaces were some of the few in which such struggles could be expressed candidly, without judgement. But soon these communities became depressive echo chambers, where negative ideas and beliefs were reinforced in closed systems through repeated exposure.
For many, there was a further reason beyond connection to remain engrossed in these echo chambers. The suffering depicted on Tumblr was desirable. Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ suggested that traits such as wealth, power and strength were once considered ‘evil.’ ‘Good’ was defined as its counterpart, being self-sacrificing for others, achieved by avoiding self-pleasure and subjecting oneself to pain. Hence, pleasure and meaning were derived from suffering. Some might suggest that Tumblr offered a platform to explore these potential desires.
However, due to the nature of the content shared, it was soon apparent that a very particular reflection of suffering was being idolised. Mood and eating disorders were commonly portrayed, while personality disorders, for example, remained ‘too extreme’ for the Tumblr feed. Even amongst the disorders represented on the platform, only specific symptoms were deemed ‘appropriately romantic’. Messaging, such as anxiety being ‘cute’ and eating disorders suggesting ‘selfcontrol’, not only invalidated mental illness but also derailed the conversation from one about seeking assistance to one attaching value to pain. The effect of this selective portrayal of mental illness was to create an almost hierarchical conceptualisation of psychological disorder, further excluding certain experiences from the conversation while epitomising skewed versions of others.
Tumblr’s popularity significantly declined due to a major disruption to its functioning and format in 2018. In its wake grew another platform that would soon serve a similar purpose. Enter TikTok. Unlike its more ‘polished’ social media counterparts, this short-form video-sharing platform allows for unfiltered self-expression, with an algorithm drawing ‘like-minded’ users together with unmatched precision. Effectively, the more content a person shares, and the more personal and ‘vulnerable’ they are, the more their content is ‘pushed out’ by algorithms to enable greater interaction.
Art by Jocelyn Wong
by
Jocelyn Wong
At first glance, candid self-expression on TikTok is a far more productive way of destigmatising mental illness than reblogging images on Tumblr ever was. Echo chambers on TikTok are far less obvious, and boundaries as to what is ‘accepted’ in relation to ‘romantic’ experiences of mental illness are less defined. In many ways, this creates a more ‘humanising’ depiction of mental illness with less focus on idolised experiences. For many in neurodivergent communities, this increased representation and discourse on TikTok was the ‘push’ that many undiagnosed individuals felt they needed to seek formal support. This is particularly apparent in minority and intersectional communities, whose voices are rarely represented in broader conversations about mental illness and disability.
Yet the format of the platform prevents fulsome conversation. A 5-minute scroll by the author on ‘mental health TikTok’ commenced with videos from psychologists advocating for support, to videos oversimplifying the negative side-effects of mood stabilising medication, and finally, videos eerily similar to those on Tumblr, showing black and white images of desolate scenes with captions such as ‘my mental health is getting so much better / oh way down we go.’ Comment sections are filled with ‘real’ and ‘how do I silent repost’ (reposting a video without one’s followers viewing it), as well as ‘I can’t go to therapy because my parents don’t believe in it,’ poignantly depicting the juvenility of the audience. The more users engage with such content, the more the TikTok algorithm feeds it back to them. The capacity for unfiltered discourse quickly becomes shrouded with misinformation and disinformation, worsening existing challenges in the mental health advocacy landscape.
Despite society seeming to have moved on from the days of Tumblr, with ‘healthy’ mental health discourse being at an all-time high, these TikTok videos suggest that we are only a few steps away from falling back. Although the candid nature of TikTok has shaken some taboos, the speed with which negative echo chambers can form is deeply concerning. Content moderation may provide some answers, but to really address the problem, we need to start asking why these communities are so attractive and why being a part of them seems to override the desire to get better. Do we really desire suffering, or are we driven by social connection regardless of how destructive it may be?
I consider the pear. Its otherwise perfect skin is blemished with a single dark mark.
“Do you think this will keep until tomorrow?” I ask her. She appraises it carefully and nods. She tells me it will.
We’re standing in the squat aisle of a suburban IGA. It’s blistering hot outside, but we’ve braved the baking heat to pick up some provisions for lunch.
I look at my list. “We need carrots,” I say. She tells me they’re in the white hessian bag, already full and in my basket. “Cucumbers then,” I insist. Again, she tells me they’re in the white hessian bag.
Examining the list, I look into the basket. “Eggs, milk, chops, mayo. Got all that.” I feel like I’ve forgotten something.
“We need carrots,” I say. She checks, then tells me they’re in the white hessian bag. “What about cucumbers? Did we get those?” She nods and points to the bag again. I look in and see she’s right.
While gazing at the cucumbers, I notice a pear in my basket with a small mark on its flesh. “Do you think it’ll keep? If I have it for breakfast tomorrow?” She takes the pear from my hand, looks at it, and then tells me she thinks so.
When we go to the checkout, the cashier, Jim, as always, asks if he needs to worry about how heavy the bags will be when packing them. In response, she smiles and reassures him that heavy bags are fine—that’s what big, strong granddaughters are for. I smile at her. It’s nice to have her along to the shops. Normally, I go alone.
We look at my collection of bone-handled knives after lunch. I tell her I’ve been collecting them over the years because newer knives just don’t sharpen as well. I tell her that they’re sterling silver and each of the tiny symbols embossed in the blade indicates the provenance of the metal, who made the blade, and who was reigning in England when it was crafted. I show her my little book, which would tell me in detail what each of the emblems mean if I ever really read it. She spends some time looking over them, and I can tell she likes learning something new.
She makes our tea for us, using my old teapot. I tell her the story of when I bought it and how it takes years to season until it makes a perfect cup of tea. While I tell her this, she pours half soy milk and half full cream into my favourite mug. She microwaves it for thirty seconds and takes it out, putting a strainer over the mug to pour the tea. She hands it to me and asks me if it’s alright, and it’s perfect, just the way I like it.
While we drink our tea, we discuss the importance of sharp knives.
When I was a child, my father would sharpen his knives daily. They had to be sharp so that he could butcher the sheep properly. I tell her how he’d put them on their backs, their heads over a sling. He’d gently tilt their chins back, his hands holding the crease of their neck to get them into the right position, but also so they could see out the barn door and glimpse the sky. Then he’d find their vertebrae with his hand, and in one clean slice, he’d sever their throat.
She brings her knives to me sometimes, and I sharpen them with my stone, even though my fingers aren’t quite so strong anymore, and these new stainless steel knives are too hard to sharpen properly. I think about the sheep and the bonehandled knives. It’s important to have sharp knives.
After the shops, I bumped into the door on the way back into the house. The handle had bruised my arm.
I’d unbuttoned my overshirt enough to pull my head through and take my arm out, but I’d miscalculated how much space I’d need. She’d untangled me. We had looked at the mark; it was purple already and bleeding just a little. She’d brushed her fingers over it. Once I’d rebuttoned my shirt, I’d gone to get the doings for a salad out of the fridge, wondering if we had carrots.
Her skin wouldn’t have been marked if it had suffered the same bump. When her fingers had skated over my arm, they’d been smooth as ivory and strong, and they gently pressed against my bruised pear skin.
I think about the pear and the blemish on it. I wonder if it’ll keep until tomorrow.
Art by Jasmin Small
These cautious pins on my jacket Stab through my skin, begging to stay there. I see you in every word I write And I beg myself to say it.
When I seek you out today It is just like it was in those fields of tall lavender. I read books and think of you; I read books and think of me.
How easy it is to learn a new language, Instead of spitting out those three heavy syllables, Choking on them like cherry pits, Dislodging them with my single painted nail.
I can say a three letter word, Or I can feel the entire Earth at once Let go of the politics of an open door And pull you through when you hesitate.
I can say I do like you, Or I can stencil the stars on my wrists, Dancing with you as the silver on my thumb Brushes against your beckoning belt loops.
Violet is a violet is a violet is a violetViolet coloured glasses, violet coloured eyes. I see you, floating down the loveliness extreme I see you between every line, around every corner.
Will coming into existence cause me to be seen? Or will being seen bring me into existence? I dance erratically and I write letters to you But I still can’t say the stronger word.
The Stronger Word
Annalise Hall
Art by Jasmin Small
The Hunt of the Wolf Caitlyn Cutler
ContentWarning: Allusions to Mental Illness and Suicide
The wolf that stalks the village is silent as a mouse. While his paws pad softly on the blindingly white snow, his prey try their best to ignore him. They see the wolf creep quietly into view, and quickly close their eyes, plunging themselves into a darkness they hope will somehow be safer than the light.
If the men and women of the village present themselves to the wolf, he will not hesitate to tear them to pieces small enough to be blown away on the wintry winds. But the wolf does not hunt the adults; not like he does the children. His intelligent red eyes are always fixed on those too young and innocent to know yet how best to protect themselves.
The wolf requires only the slightest of openings to launch his attack. A bedroom window left slightly ajar is all he needs to climb in and wrap his yellow teeth around the wrists of a crying child. The parents that sleep in the next room will rarely hear a whisper before the wolf is gone and the child’s lifeblood has soaked the mattress as red as the carnations that will be laid on their grave.
Once the wolf has made a kill, rather than building up their defences, the other people of the village fall into a despair so immeasurable it cracks open their walls, allowing the wolf yet another victim, and another after that, until so many have been lost that the wolf will finally feel sated enough to retreat into the gloomy shadows.
There is a tale known well by all those in the village. It tells of another wolf from many years before, slain by a young girl they called Little White Riding Hood, named so because she would never leave home without her riding hood as white as the snow that fell around her.
The morning was bitterly cold, and the birds were hiding away with the rest of the village when Little White Riding Hood awoke. She had never much minded an early start when it meant rising with the sun.
Her mother was already packing a wicker basket full of sweets when Little White Riding Hood was greeted in the kitchen by the most scrumptious of sugary smells.
What have you been baking, Mother? asked Little White Riding Hood, trying to sneak a biscuit without being caught.
Granny is ill, so I thought you could take her these sweets.
While her mother covered the basket with a small green cloth, Little White Riding Hood slipped a knife into her pocket. For protection from the wolf, she told herself.
The moment she opened the door, an icy breeze brushed over her like a million fingers lightly tickling her skin. She pulled the hood tight around her body, forming a shield against the weather, but also, she hoped, the wolf.
by
Jocelyn Wong
The trail from Little White Riding Hood’s home to Granny’s was a winding gravel path through the woods, lined with trees so tall it seemed they could touch the grey, sombre sky. Their leaves had been surrendered to the autumn a few months earlier, so the branches were distinctly bare, and cast claw-like shadows onto the ground below.
Little White Riding Hood had not been walking for long when the wolf discovered her, alone and shivering, the perfect prey. She saw him perched calmly on the trail ahead, but her mind told her to keep walking, that there was nothing she could do to escape him, and that she was far too weak to fight so instead she must surrender. The further along the path Little White Riding Hood inched, the nearer she got to the wolf, until she was so close she could feel his foul breath hot on her face.
She was scared, but she was also resigned. She had always known the wolf would come for her, just like he had the other children of the village. If she was being honest, Little White Riding Hood had known the wolf was hunting her for a while now. For weeks she would see him skulking on the edges of her vision, waiting for an opening to make the kill. And now, by traipsing into the woods by herself, she had presented him with the perfect opportunity.
But Little White Riding Hood thought of her sick Granny, and knew she had to finish her journey. She closed her eyes to take a deep breath, and when she opened them again, unsure of what to do about the wolf, she found him to be already gone. Without another thought, she marched on ahead, determined to reach her destination as soon as possible.
When Granny’s cottage finally came into view, standing starkly brown against the backdrop of snow, Little White Riding Hood rushed to the door that she knew to be invariably unlocked, and pushed it open.
Granny was laying still in her bed, peacefully sleeping away the day, so Little White Riding Hood crept slowly to her side.
Granny, she said, gently nudging her, it is your granddaughter. I have brought you some sweets.
But Granny did not wake. She did not even stir, despite the nudging turning into shaking so forceful that the basket of sweets was flung to the floor.
Little White Riding Hood started to panic. Her breathing came faster and faster until the air was barely making it into her body at all. Tears were streaming down her face, obscuring her view of the wolf, who had silently slipped into the cottage unnoticed while she grieved the loss of her Granny.
Take me, she cried to him, kill me. I cannot take it all any longer. I cannot live in this cruel world any longer!
The wolf prowled towards Little White Riding Hood, who had grabbed the knife from her pocket and fallen to the ground in a mess of misery. He knelt beside her and took one wrist in his gaping jaws. Blood started to escape from her pale skin, and as she watched it completely soak her hood a deep red, an unexpected wave of strength came over her. Something in her mind, something quiet that had been long suppressed, whispered softly to not give up.
The wolf looked at her inquisitively, her small wrist still hanging from his salivating mouth even though he was no longer biting down.
Do not give up, said the voice. You are stronger. Do not give up.
Little White Riding Hood heard the words in her head get louder and she tightened her grip on the knife. As the wolf’s slitted eyes grew wide with realisation, she sliced the blade savagely across his throat, killing him in one sweeping arc.
When his lifeless body slumped to the floor, Little White Riding Hood saw the wolf for what he really was. Not a beast that hunted bodies, but one that attacked minds. A creature that would feed dark thoughts into the minds of unknowing innocents until they believed their only choice was to end it all with a quick cut down each wrist.
But the newly named Little Red Riding Hood — for her hood was now stained thoroughly with blood — had not saved her village for long. Because a few years later, a new wolf appeared, and after him there was another, for no matter how many times we slay them, there will always be monsters in the dark.
An entrepreneur is an individual who starts or owns a business. Entrepreneurs are perceived to be risk-taking and adventurous, rewarded by big successes. However, despite this image, something significantly overlooked is the discussion of vulnerability and failure in the context of student entrepreneurship. Specifically, openness surrounding resource barriers, lack of experience and industry know-how, and failures in business projects.
The Taboo of Being Vulnerable in the Face of Failures and Setbacks
Social media perpetuates an overwhelmingly positive image of entrepreneurship, showcasing success stories and the glamorous aspects while glossing over the challenges. This creates a misleading narrative that can discourage student entrepreneurs struggling with setbacks and failures, making them feel isolated in their experiences.
Many people find it taboo to acknowledge or discuss failures with their peers, friends and family. However, failure should not be viewed as a dirty word. In fact, it is time to celebrate the ‘F word’ by reframing how we see failure and seeing it as a critical part of growth for future endeavours. As a student entrepreneurial community, we need to realise that failure is a necessary step to progress!
My Personal Journey: Jasper and Winks
As a university student and entrepreneur, I have experienced firsthand the challenges and failures of running a business while managing academic responsibilities. My journey began with Jasper and Winks, a business offering luxury dog collars, leads, and harnesses inspired by my family dogs, Jasper and Willow. I launched this business during my second year of university with high hopes and a clear vision.
Despite my enthusiasm, I rapidly encountered numerous challenges. Differentiating my products in a market saturated with established brands was one of the most significant obstacles. Resource barriers, including limited funding and insufficient industry knowledge, lack of corporate connections and reputation around the brand, compounded my difficulties. My days off from university were spent catching buses across Canberra, armed with samples and pitches, and visiting various stores to encourage them to stock Jasper and Winks’ products. Each rejection felt like a personal failure, contributing to physical and emotional exhaustion.
Art by Jasmin Small
However, each rejection came with some friendly feedback from store owners and self-reflection on points to change for future discussions with potential clients. One thing I found in common with all the different attempts I made was that embracing my vulnerabilities and being honest about my journey often resonated with others. When I shared the personal story behind Jasper and Winks and my vision for the brand, I connected with other business owners on a deeper level. This approach proved far more fulfilling, real and valuable. Specifically, this approach aligned strongly with the POP Canberra Store on Lonsdale Street in Braddon, known for supporting local small businesses.
New Venture: Duke The Label
Last month, our family welcomed a new puppy named Duke. Duke ignited a newfound appreciation for the taboo of vulnerability in student entrepreneurship, inspiring me to embark on a daring new business venture. Duke displayed a playful and fearless nature during his interactions at puppy school. Despite his initial hesitation, Duke courageously embraced his hesitancy, eagerly diving in with all four paws engaging with his puppy peers! Witnessing this bold display of vulnerability was a powerful reminder of the importance of embracing uncertainty in the face of fears in pursuing our goals.
From this transformative moment of inspiration, Duke The Label was developed. It offers classic, timeless tote bags meticulously crafted from premium 100% organic cotton. Though my journey with this new venture has only just begun, I can candidly share that I have encountered my first setback. I sought to sell my products on consignment at a gift store but was regrettably turned away. This setback has enlightened me about the qualities that store owners desire, reinforcing my determination to refine my product offerings.
With each design, I envision capturing the hearts of the Canberra student population and individuals seeking a practical and beautiful bag for their everyday tasks.
As I pen these words, I hope that Duke The Label will soon find its esteemed place in boutique stores around Canberra. Through the brand, I aim to champion the significance of embracing vulnerability and uncertainty, believing wholeheartedly that these qualities serve as catalysts for discovering new opportunities.
Reflecting on Vulnerability
Upon reflection, I recognise the importance of candidly discussing the challenges and vulnerabilities inherent in entrepreneurship. By sharing our struggles, we can cultivate a more supportive and realistic entrepreneurial community. My experiences with Jasper and Winks and Duke The Label have underscored that true success is not merely defined by achievements but also by the courage to confront and overcome difficulties. Ultimately, dismantling the taboo surrounding vulnerability and failure in business is imperative for fostering a more transparent and encouraging environment. Embracing these aspects and sharing our narratives can empower others to navigate their entrepreneurial endeavours with greater resilience and confidence.
Hari Kishon Pawar
In its summer months, Canberra became a quiet city as its dutiful public servants dispersed to their hometowns across the country. Hari had grown to relish this time of year, finding solace in the city’s gentle rhythm. For him, there was an unnamed joy in riding his bicycle along the usually grey asphalt, which today glistened a velvety black in gratitude to the rain. As he rode under a canopy of scribbly gums, he took a deep breath in. He liked the enormity of Australian trees that seemed like they were given permission to grow as tall as they wanted, unrestricted by apartment developments or stifling pollution. He liked the homes he rode past; some recently renovated, some unkempt, all astonishingly expensive. He liked the smell of the eucalyptus trees that perfumed still streets. Most of all, he loved the ritualistic concertos of black and white magpies who performed for the ears of those who cared to listen. He rode his bike quickly. It would be moments before the heat settled, humidifying the air.
He pedalled to the newly opened café near his share-house and stood around hoping to be allocated a seat. The café had emerged without prior advertisement, with its indoor plants, sleek concrete fit-outs and a strict policy of serving only its signature almond-cashew milk with coffee. These distinctive features, combined with its mysterious debut, were enough to qualify it as the latest hotspot in town. Patrons justified the expensive coffee, sold in even smaller cups, on the basis that the milk was house-made and noted the vibe the café offered.
Hari attempted to catch the waiter’s eyes, a pale, statuesque man, clad in an oversized shirt, baggy shorts that hung from his hips and leather Birkenstock Bostons. Hari had learned, mostly from observing his university classmates, that people like the waiter often dressed like this because the aesthetic of carelessness was trending, and had nothing to do with one’s finances.
Failing to get the waiter’s attention, Hari decided to pick a table and sit down. As he settled into his seat, the familiar discomfort he had only experienced in Australia began its dull ache.
DidheignoremebecauseIambrown?
Hari did not know he was brown until he moved to Australia. Of course he knew he was lighter than most and darker than some, but he had never considered it a part of his identity. In India, he was a Catholic, a Goan and a boy, and never identified based on the colour of his skin because everyone was brown. In Australia, questions about how he spoke English so well or even at all made him realise that the colour of his skin implied certain assumptions about his personhood. He accepted very quickly that in Australia, he was a brown man.
The waiter came over and placed a menu before him with a brief, but definite smile. He smiled at me; maybeheiscomfortablearoundbrownpeople.The discomfort eased, slightly. In this space of affluent ease, Hari took a deep breath in and reminded himself of a truth he had chanted in such moments of smallness. I matter.
When the waiter returned, this time with an empty glass and bottle of water in hand, Hari noticed his nimble fingers painted with black nail polish. As the waiter placed the glass in front of him, he watched carefully how little water droplets ran across the waiter’s varnished nails. Perhaps he was wrong all along. Maybe he is a progressive radical. Maybe it’s not that he doesn’t care about me, maybe he doesn’tcareaboutanyone.
Perhaps it was this observation of the waiter’s nail polished fingers and the slowly settling Mumbai-like humidity that gave Hari the courage to recall a memory he had often refrained from accessing.
He closed his eyes and remembered him.
His seven-year-old self.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The scorching southern Indian heat made bare skin tremble, uncertain whether to perspire or burn, ultimately stinging in confusion. Naturally, mothers, who had the luxury to, forbade their children from playing in the sun, confining them to their air-conditioned apartments. This afternoon, Hari’s mother had invited her circle of friends and their children for lunch. As their guests arrived, the women exhaled in relief, basking in a sense of earned grace. They exchanged kisses on sweaty cheeks, which eventually cooled in the manufactured air, solidifying their blush into pink smudges. Meanwhile, the children, unbothered by social niceties, congregated in Hari’s bedroom.
“Let’s play Hot-Wheels!” exclaimed Peter. Hari had liked Peter but thought he displayed an irresponsible manoeuvring of the cars, often sending them airborne as though his imagination did not consider the tiny human driver inside.
Radhika moaned in disagreement. “Let’s play teacher-teacher.”
This was a game where Radhika and another girl, Cassy, assumed the positions of teachers and conducted the afternoon as a classroom, issuing tests and grading them. The impending doom of school the next day clearly ruled out this option.
“Let’s play dress-up,” said Samantha. “Peter, Sanjay and Cassy, you can build the runway. Radhika and Ethan, you can make the outfits. I will do the hair and makeup. Hari, you can be the model.” Hari had always liked Samantha because despite being the smallest of all the children she had the loudest voice and always made him feel safe. The children, each equipped with a task they could derive some fun from, agreed and got to work. It was this quality that Hari had liked the most about Samantha, that she had a way of organising people so that they would feel included.
As the stage crew arranged pillows and cushions to form a runway, the fashion designers raided closets to source fabrics to configure outfits. In the midst of her orchestrated chaos, Samantha made Hari sit and pulled out a bottle of nail polish.
The duo inspected the bottle labelled ‘Ruby Rouge’, holding it close to their eyes. Hari closed his eyes for a moment, absorbing the colour. Crimson rolled into a deeper maroon, simmering with glitter, like waves crashing gently on a beach. There was magic in the viscosity of the swirling, triggering an excitement Hari had never experienced before…
“Paint my nails,” Hari instructed, eliciting a wide smile from Samantha.
Samantha got to work, first massaging his hand, and then complimenting the curvature of his cuticles, as she had learned from observing her mother’s manicurist. Hari smiled because he knew his cuticles were more square than they were curved, a feature his mother said he inherited from his grandfather. She dipped her wand into its pot. He watched her face as she painted his nails, with its intense colour-between-the-lines concentration. It was not long before she was done looking up at him with brazen satisfaction.
Hari lifted his hands and waved them in the air as he had watched his mother do. As he waved, air filtered through his fingers, filling him with a sense of authority. He brought his hands closer to him, clawing them inwardly to inspect Samantha’s artwork. Despite her best efforts, parts of her art violated the partition between skin and nail. It doesn’t matter, he thought to himself. Simmering inside him was an excitement he had never felt before. The only comparable feeling he had experienced until that point in his life was that of an early summer’s day at the beach: pleasantly warm, hopeful and ridiculously, unbelievably happy.
Samantha completed his look, by smearing glitter across his eyes and applying a tinted, melted lip balm to his lips and cheeks. Before long, Radhika roped a bed sheet around his neck, which Ethan fastened with a belt, sprawling it into a skirt. Cassy garlanded a rhinestone string around his neck. As he stood back and looked at himself, rainbow prism cast from his rhinestone choker onto the mirror, expounding multi-coloured hexagons across the room. The excitement he felt before evolved into joy. For the first time, he felt a sensation that if he were to step outside his body, he would break into glitter and bright light. In that moment, he knew that if he could, he wanted to feel this way for the rest of his life.
The children stood aside and watched their creation in awe. It was unanimous that their talent deserved the appreciation of their mothers. Radhika, to whom authoritative sass came naturally, corralled the women’s attention in anticipation of a spectacular show. The women silenced themselves to entertain the child. Sanjay closed the curtains and dimmed the lights, while Peter shone a bright torch as a spotlight. Cassy ran to the music player and inserted a cassette titled ‘Dancing Queen’.
As the music player started its melody, the women smiled, hoping for a mostly synchronised dance by the girls and disengaged participation from the boys.
Samantha held Hari’s hand. “Remember,” she warned, “I want fierce.”
by
Hari stepped into the circle, surrounded by an audience of gleeful children and curious women.
He took a breath in and remembered the intense joy he felt only moments earlier. He stared at his nails as the singers began their singing. He felt the excitement rush through his little body once again. He let the force carry him as he danced to the lyrics. As his heart beat faster, he danced more easily, feeling the rhythm of the song and watching the prisms of colour he cast from his body. It was in this moment that Hari’s happiness morphed into euphoria.
It was not until the song finished and one of the women turned on the lights that he noticed the look of shock and disappointment on his mother’s face. As he surveyed the other women, he noticed the communal concern settling into their ochre skin. In the moment of silence that followed, Hari could feel the light he conjured leaving his body and with its departure came a deep sense of knowing that it would not return soon. It was this moment of sinking and shame that made Hari understand that there were certain things that boys who were Catholic and Goan were not allowed to do.
The loss of this joy always made this a difficult memory to remember.
As Hari opened his eyes, he glanced over the menu before him. Yet, there was only one thing he had an appetite for. He got up from his table at the café and rode his bike to the nearby shops. He walked into the pharmacy and down the aisle labelled ‘Beauty’. His eyes scanned the shelf until he saw what he wanted. At the counter, he was served by a boy with crisp blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. Hari peered down the cashier’s slender neck and onto his name badge. ‘Sammy’ it read. He smiled.
When he got home, he sat at his desk taking in the world before him. He watched the mountain and its gums glisten in the afternoon sun while fallen leaves on the lawn rustled against the gentle treckles of wind. Hari’s curry-leaf plant and chilli shrub basked in their corner of his garden. There was peace in this room of his. As the tree outside his window swayed, he pulled out his bottle of nail polish. He unscrewed its cap and applied the paint to each nail, one at a time, feeling a familiar warmth return. As the feeling intensified, he glanced outside his window once again. An ebony and scarlet gang-gang perched on his fence watching him, unbothered.
Amanda Lim
Art by Jasmin Small
Token Muslim Friend
Nasi Lemak
ContentWarning: Mentions of Death, Genocide, and Islamophobia
Growing up, religion was never something that was really important to me. When I was asked to introduce myself, I would often limit it to my name, what level of schooling I’d done, and something like my age. I never thought to mention anything about my religious practices. I mean, what did it matter? To me, it was always a private, personal thing—don’t ask, don’t tell. But the older I grew, the more I realised how important it was to have a concrete sense of identity. In my third year of university, I began introducing myself with my name, my level of study in university, and my religion. The longer I stayed at my residential hall, the more it was cemented in me that I was one of the only people of my religion in this environment; and as my head of halls preached egalitarianism and the value of learning about other cultures, I realised I might have to take the role of the tokenistic Muslim Friend.
Obviously, this scared me. My biggest concern was, would people still invite me to drink with them? Would people view me differently? Thankfully, no one really bothered me about it and my friends’ perception of me remained relatively unchanged. I got the odd Eid Mubarak here and there, but most people respected my wishes to not make a big deal out of it. Somehow, coming out as religious caused me more fear than coming out as bisexual, but was just as well-received.
But this new declaration of my religion did not help me during the height of political demonstrations on campus. Friends that I never imagined would ask me my views on condemning extremist groups on purely religious grounds were asking me exactly that, and often. It was something I couldn’t escape, and to be honest, I really didn’t get it. I never asked my white Christian friends what they thought of the Klu Klux Klan. So what gave them the right to ask me that? It’s not like my thoughts would have an effect on world politics anyway.
“Well, you’re Muslim, you might think what this group is doing is fine because of religion. I mean look at al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the like. Isn’t this just another jihad?”
Very obviously, this was an incredibly uncomfortable thing to hear, and equally an uncomfortable thing to answer. This comment made me realise just how normal Islamophobia had become to me, and weirdly enough how I barely noticed it. Had I become so out of touch that I didn’t even notice when someone was attacking my beliefs? Was being surrounded by people from the same ethnocultural background starting to cloud my view of the world?
Again, very obviously yes—and not just Islamophobia, but outright racism. One of my friends once told me that they liked one of our other Indian friends better than me because they laugh at memes with the Indian song (“Mundian to Bach Ke/Beware of the Boys”) that he sends them. He said that they have more of a sense of humour than me, and that it isn’t that bad or racist. But who is he to decide that? Another one of the residents at my hall once told me that 9/11 must’ve been very celebrated in my home country, and that he’s surprised I don’t go out to celebrate.
I didn’t understand how people felt comfortable enough to outright say things like that, especially those that constantly talked about how unsafe they felt on campus due to recent events. Why did it take them feeling scared in a place they call home to understand the damage of their own words and actions? Surely, there was just a disconnect in empathy for some people. Maybe now the same people that made me bear the brunt of their internalised Islamophobia would understand how hard it can be. That’s what I thought, until someone mentioned in the famous AGM how as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, you cannot, in good faith, advocate on the side of Palestinians—because Hamas would “kill gay people any chance they would get”. It physically hurt me to bite my tongue and not speak up. This wasn’t a lack of empathy, but pure Islamophobia and neoliberalism. Palestinians that are members of the LGBTQ+ community did not die because of their sexuality but rather because of the fact they are Palestinian.
At my residential hall, religion is celebrated unequivocally. Our head of hall is always happy to help run events pertaining to major religious holidays, and encourages residents to come forward with ideas for events in this vein. I definitely wasn’t the first resident to suggest a celebration for the end of Ramadan, and it was amazing to see it come to fruition. Yet, I always felt ever so slightly uncomfortable at my hall—being part of the smallest religious minority kind of made me feel like a zoo animal. I was expected to be the teacher, and people felt they had to attend every event that pertained to my religion otherwise they would be seen as Islamophobic. People would outright apologise to me when they couldn’t make it to some of my events for whatever reason. But after October 7th, all I received were accusatory questions about my beliefs. Maybe this was another disconnect in empathy, but then I began to realise that is simply not the case. I had to accept it at face value—it was pure Islamophobia, and because I was one of the only Muslims at my residential hall, I had no one to affirm that. All I had to rely on was my wits, and everything I’d learnt so far about it.
When I first moved out of home, I decided to get a pet fish. It was originally an exercise as part of my journey back into religion. Islam teaches empathy and value for all life, and having a pet allowed me to deeper explore the value behind all life. That fish meant everything to me and taught me the value of caring for a life outside of mine. It was probably the closest thing to motherhood I’d experienced in my twenty years of being alive. Every time any of my friends made fun of him, I felt waves of rage coursing through my blood. No one can and should even think of hurting another living being, let alone one that I took almost-maternal care of. Whenever I closed my eyes, I felt pure rage and fear that something could hurt my fish.
If I felt this way for my fish, I can’t imagine what the mothers in Rafah felt for their children. When I saw photographs and videos of mothers mourning the lives of their children, holding mutilated bodies of babies to the sky like God can hear their screams to put an end to this, I felt sick to my stomach. The idea that something can hurt your child for a crime that they can’t even understand because it is completely beyond their comprehension fills me with an indescribable rage. You don’t even have to be religious to understand the value of another life that is completely separated from yours. Having children—and to be honest, having anyone—die senselessly for a cause that serves nothing but harm for the land and people involved is not something that anyone should be proud of.
Never again is for everyone, and you simply have to be human to understand that a death toll of 37,980 people is unnecessary. It should cause you anger, and the words of genocide apologists do not matter in this conversation. If the Israeli state stops fighting, the war will end. If the people of Palestine stop fighting, there will be no Palestinians left to rejoice at the end of the war—there will simply be more Israeli real estate built upon the blood of children that did not understand why they had to die.
From Molly Houses to RuPaul A History of Queer Performance and Feminity
Since the beginning of human existence, queer people have loved, created and performed. Across this vast span of time, queer identities have been accepted and vilified in waves. Within these evolving contexts, the performance of feminine dress, makeup and mannerisms by queer men has been subject to changing ideologies and understandings of what is accepted and what is taboo. From the hidden molly houses of 18th century London to the globalised phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race, this essay will track the changing acceptance of performed femininity through time.
When we look back at Western history, we project a strictly heteronormative view onto the past, assuming that current attitudes towards gender and sexuality are the most accepting they have ever been. This isn’t strictly true; progress has not been linear. In England prior to the 18th century it was expected that men, particularly men who exhibited roguish charm and masculine energy, would have sex with both women and adolescent boys. Openly queer aristocratic men would use their flamboyant personalities for social capital, having wives but openly keeping male lovers.
However, in the early 1700s this changed. The Anglican Church began to crack down on actions it saw as immoral, and queer identities were pushed underground. While the upper classes of gay men were forced into the closet or out of society, lower class gay men were prosecuted by the law, often sentenced to being beaten by the public at the pillory. As the social rules and norms around queerness changed, it was no longer acceptable for men to engage in sex with other men in any context. Effeminacy was seen as disgusting and immoral, and any man who engaged in sodomy was branded a ‘molly’. Randolph Trumbach’s Sex,Gender,andSexualIdentityinModern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London describes the place of mollies in English society as a kind of third, abhorrent and unnatural gender. Mollies were not seen as men, but they also weren’t seen as women. The church painted mollies as a threat to public safety, a dark force which would corrupt society, particularly children.
During this time, venues called ‘molly houses’ began to spring up as a safe space for queer people to gather and enjoy one another’s company. Often in secret back rooms or above straight drinking houses, molly houses were highly secretive in order to protect the patrons who gathered there, and fostered a queer subculture within which performance of femininity was central.
While men would arrive at the molly house wearing masculine clothes, once they arrived many of them would change into womens clothing, put on makeup and use female names and pronouns. It’s not often useful to try and fit modern words into historical contexts, but many of these people might have been what we would understand today as transgender or transfeminine, while just as many would have identified as men, but enjoyed performing femininity. These performances became ritualised, with small plays, marriages and even births being acted out by the women. In a highly volatile and stigmatised world, where their very identity and gender expression was the utmost taboo, mollies in the 18th century gathered together to perform for themselves and one another, using femininity not as the aberration it was seen as by the wider community but as a joyous and beautiful thing. Many mollies engaged in sex work, and often times the “weddings” performed in molly houses were a humorous precursor to a one night stand, but molly identity wasn’t just about sex — it was about rejoicing in themselves and their fellow queer sisters.
In 1926, one of the largest of these molly houses, Mother Clapp’s house, was raided by police and 40 individuals were arrested. Three men were subsequently hanged: Gabriel Laurence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright. Whilst sodomy (anal sex) was criminalised, it was very rare for anyone to be hanged for it as it was very difficult to prove — the court required evidence of seminal excretion. But these men were killed anyway, because the church had become so heavily involved in this ‘moral issue’ that it insisted they be hanged as an example to other queer people. The message was clear: their identities must be hidden on pain of death; there was no longer a place in society for them.
Some scholars have used the word pogrom to describe the wide police search for “sodomites” that took place during this time. While few men were hung, many many more were beaten, imprisoned and tortured. The impact of this criminalisation was felt by queer men in England until 1967, when gay sex was decriminalised, and even beyond, in 1994 when David Bonney was the last queer man in England to be sent to prison for his sexuality, as it was illegal for gay people to serve in the armed forces there until 2000.
While there aren’t many records of molly houses after what happened at Mother Clapp’s, queer performance and drag culture was not extinguished. In New York in the 1920’s the queer ballroom scene was born and later revived in the 1970s and 80s. The ballroom scene involved queer people dressing up in costumes around specific categories, and being judged based on their creativity and adherence to the theme. Dance was also a large part of these balls, where several dance styles such as Voguing were born. The format of drag balls were a precursor to the style of RuPaul’s Drag Race which took some of the processes and the verbiage of the ballroom scene and turned it into a reality TV show. Across its 16 main US seasons and various international and spinoff series, DragRace has become a hugely successful international brand, launching drag queens such as Trixie Mattel into successful multi-million dollar careers. While drag has been a large part of the queer community for years, DragRace’s mainstream success introduced a much broader section of society to the artform, gaining drag a large non-queer audience and pushing it out into the mainstream cultural consciousness.
Drag and ballroom culture both revolve around playing with gender. In both scenes people use makeup, clothing and mannerisms to perform femininity. While there are many types of drag, some of which don’t revolve around creating a facsimile of womanhood, the foundational artform which supports drag is this celebration and replication of femininity. Just like the culture of the molly houses, drag has its own rituals, slang and performances. The ball and drag scene has slang such as “Realness”, “extravaganza” and “fishy”, (a queen who looks especially feminine) and molly houses had slang such as “Battersea’d” (a word for venereal diseases). Drag culture has strong matriarchal connections, with the concept of a “mother” (the queen who mentors a new drag performer), and mollie’s often called one another “mother”, “ma’am”, and “Mrs”. Drag names such as “Laganja Estranja”, “Lady Bunny”, and “The Princess”, don’t sound too different from some of the recorded “maiden” names that Mother Clapp’s mollies went by: Lady Godiva, Black Eyed Lenora and the Duchess of Gloucester. These similarities between two queer performance cultures separated by three centuries and many waves of queer persecution are testament to the tenacity of queerness and the power of its desire to create, connect and build community.
Linear progress is a myth that allows us to feel that hard won rights won’t be lost. The Stonewall riots in 1969 were a landmark moment for queen liberation in the West, fought in New York by queer people, mostly trans women of colour, to fight back against police brutality and the criminalising of queer identities. Out of Stonewall, Pride was born, as well as a whole generation of queer liberation ideology which influenced movements all around the world including here in Australia where 2 years after Stonewall in 1971 we had our first gay rights protest in Sydney, starting a wave of activism which would eventually achieve marriage equality in 2017.
But we often forget that there were times before Stonewall where queer people did have rights. The ballroom scene in New York in the 1920’s was explicitly queer whilst also being popular and accepted by broader society. A cocktail of conservative and Christian forces during and after World War II led to queer identities becoming marginalised once more. Gabriel Laurence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright and all the other mollies from Mother Clapp’s would have lived through a time of relative acceptance before being forced underground and eventually executed.
While queerness and the performance of femininity by queer men have been destigmatised in today’s society, we can’t take DragRace’s prime time spot as evidence that queer performance is and will always be safe. Any queer person today, especially visibly queer, effeminate men, can tell you they still face homophobia and vitriol from some people. Several Drag Storytime events for children in Melbourne had to be cancelled in 2023 due to violent threats, and in a now repealed decision, a Sydney council attempted to ban same-sex parenting books from their libraries. Watch DragRace, celebrate local queer artists and performers, and know your history.
In two years it will be 300 years since Mother Clapp’s molly house was raided and all those men were brutalised. Now more than ever we need to fight with and for our queer brothers and sisters to ensure that their identities aren’t unwritten, made taboo, and forced back out onto the fringes of society.
A Ghost in the Garden Aala
Cheema
Snow falls
The crows call
My tell-tale heart cannot start
No one could ever tell us apart
Evil bleeds
The devil speaks
I wish for you to flee
Why can’t you see?
I feel his gaze upon me
The silent sister, soft and sweet
I can see he wants to enucleate her
Skull crush her until she sleeps
Glass fractures, veins rupture
He is the conniving vulture
My sister’s body is upon the rafters
As her ghost in the garden meanders
Wetness upon my cheek
I wonder how I accomplished such a feat
The mourners erupt into applause
The wayward child saved after all
It’s December 18
I’m on the porch dreaming
Of knives and axes
Fire and lances
I am a creature of disdain
Yet, if I only I had the strength to sustain
Some normalcy
To dampen the demons that torture me
The ice, ice lake
My insurmountable hate
I hiss as it glints
I sigh as red drips
Red roses blooming
Ivy on the vine entwining
My sister smiles as she says, “It’s all in the timing”
I wish I could say I was trying
Art by Vera Tan
by Jasmin
The Land of the Dead Rituals
and Taboos of the
Torajan People
Shivagha Sindhamani Pathak
“Everyone should consider death at some point in their life. To observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up.”
– Alan Watts.
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, the Torajan people have a unique spiritual approach to death, marked by elaborate rituals that are deeply respected within their culture. These practices reflect their profound respect for the deceased and belief in ensuring a smooth transition to the afterlife. For the Torajans, death is not an abrupt end but a gradual process that requires meticulous care and attention. Understanding these customs offers a window into how taboos function within a society and what they reveal about their broader conceptions of morality and ethics.
Central to their beliefs is the concept that the soul of the deceased needs proper care to navigate the journey to Puya, the afterlife. This journey is seen as a continuation of life, and it must be carried out with the utmost respect and tradition. When a person dies, the body is not immediately buried. Instead, the deceased are often kept in the family home, sometimes for months or years. During this period, the body is ‘Toma Kula’, a sick person, rather than a corpse. The family continues to treat the deceased as if they were alive, providing food, water, and companionship. This practice is not seen as morbid but as a necessary part of honouring and respecting the loved one.
The funeral, or ‘Rambu Soloq’, is the most significant event in the Toraja community. It often involves elaborate ceremonies that can last for days or even weeks in Tongkonan, a traditional ancestral boat-shaped house where the Toma Kula is kept until the ritual for the afterlife. These ceremonies include animal sacrifices, particularly water buffaloes, which provide the soul’s vehicle for its journey to the afterlife. The more affluent the family, the more lavish the funeral, as it is also a display of social status and respect for the deceased.
To outsiders, the Toraja death rituals seem distinct. The practice of keeping a deceased person in the home for an extended period is different from cultures that prioritise quick burials or cremations. For example, according to some Christian beliefs, there is a strong taboo against prolonged interaction with the dead, with practices emphasising swift closure. Additionally, the sacrifice of animals to accompany the deceased to the afterlife may be seen as unethical. However, when viewed through the lens of industrial practices, such as those behind the closed doors of factories and manufacturing units, the perception of animal deaths, as well as the associated morals and ethics, changes. Therefore, the question is not about what is moral or immoral, but about how practices and rituals are given different meanings across societal contexts.
After the ceremonies, the Toma Kula is officially pronounced dead, and the body is placed in a cliff grave with their ancestors. Sometimes, the body may also be placed in caves or trees, depending on the deceased’s age. For infants and young children, the Toraja practise a deeply symbolic form of burial known as ‘baby tree graves’. The bodies of infants who have not yet grown teeth are gently placed inside hollowed-out sections of large trees, which are then sealed with palm fibre. The belief is that the tree will continue to grow around the child, symbolically nurturing the young soul and allowing it to be absorbed into nature. For adults, cave burials are more common. The body is respectfully placed in a natural or carved-out cave in the cliffs, often accompanied by wooden effigies known as ‘tau tau’, which represent the deceased. These effigies are lovingly crafted to resemble the individual and serve as guardians of their spirit. The caves, typically located in the limestone cliffs surrounding Toraja villages, provide a sacred and protected resting place.
In Toraja, violating Rambu Soloq can bring significant misfortune. It is believed that if the rituals are not performed correctly, the soul of the deceased could become restless and bring bad luck to the family and community. Adherence to these traditions, therefore, is vital to maintaining spiritual and social harmony.
The Torajan death rituals highlight several key aspects of how rituals function within a society. Firstly, they illustrate the role of taboos in maintaining social order and cohesion. By adhering to these practices, the Torajans ensure that the community remains united in their respect for the deceased and their shared beliefs about the afterlife. Secondly, these rituals emphasise the importance of tradition and cultural continuity. In a globalised and modernised world, such practices offer a sense of stability and identity. They connect the living with their ancestors and provide a framework for understanding life and death. By respecting and preserving their ancestral knowledge, these communities cultivate a unique indigenous culture distinct from other societies. Furthermore, the Torajan practices reflect the deepseated human need to make sense of death and the afterlife. Every culture has its own way of dealing with these universal experiences, and the Torajans’ elaborate rituals are a testament to their rich spiritual life and the value they place on honouring the dead.
Examining the Torajan death rituals provides broader insights into the nature of taboos as a concept. Far from being arbitrary, taboos are deeply rooted in the cultural, religious, and social contexts of a community. They serve to delineate the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, helping to uphold the moral and ethical framework of society.
Moreover, taboos reflect a society’s values and priorities, providing a lens through which we can understand its way of life. The Torajans’ focus on elaborate death rituals underscores the significance they place on the afterlife and the continuity of the soul. This emphasis contrasts sharply with cultures that hold different beliefs about death and the afterlife, resulting in certain practices being considered taboo in one culture while being embraced in another. The divergence highlights a fascinating glimpse into how a society can transform a universal experience into a deeply meaningful and culturally specific practice. These customs, while potentially seen as taboo by outsiders, are integral to the Torajans’ way of life, reflecting their values, beliefs, and social structures. Understanding such practices reminds us that taboos are complex constructs that shape and are shaped by the moral and ethical landscapes of societies. They are essential in maintaining social harmony and continuity, offering a sense of identity and belonging in an ever-changing world.
A Journey into the Abject Jaden Ogwayo
ContentWarning: Bodily Fluids, Self-harm, Death, Necrophilia, Cannibalism, Murder and Religion.
Spoilers:Saltburn.
While cleaning your room, you find a thread on the carpet.
If it were red or blue or some other non-natural colour, you may assume it to be a fibre from your clothing or your blanket and vacuum it with the other dust. However, suppose the thread was clearly blonde or brunette: a strand of hair. You aren’t sure whose hair exactly (and maybe this uncertainty conjures up immediate doubts as to your partner’s fidelity or your room’s vulnerability to burglars), but the mere recognition that you’re holding someone’s hair, and not merely some frayed thread, unsettles you greatly.
While hair is not necessarily more unhygienic than cotton, even if that hair were provably sterile, that proof of sterility would be missing the point. It’s not your connection of that hair to any danger that stirs up feelings of uneasiness, but to a latent identity seemingly both absent and present; this thing you hold belonged to someone’s body, as opposed to a bundle of dental floss or a skein of yarn, and that fact sends a shiver down your spine.
This hard-to-label—and even more difficult to dispel—discomfort we feel is what the philosopher Julia Kristeva calls ‘abjection’: a “massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either”. Our experiences of abjection, Kristeva argues, are necessary for the continual maintenance of our subjectivity as we distinguish ourselves from sites of ‘the abject’: that murky zone of flux between objects and subjects, between entities and identities, where the line between someone and something is disconcertingly blurred.
In her seminal (mind the pun) work, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, Kristeva provides and examines a range of matters that give rise to this process: semen and discharge; menses and blood; spit and mucus; pus and vomit; urine and faeces; loose hairs, dead skin, and nail clippings; mouldy food and milk’s skin; and, “the most sickening of wastes”, the corpse: “a border that has encroached upon everything”.
For Kristeva, the abject confronts us with the porosity of the subject-object divide which, for much of the history of philosophy, has been stabilised and solidified into a takenfor-granted binary. This comforts a human race separated from and elevated above its environment, and justifies an assumption of the human as pure, clean, or sanitary. By presenting a third option beyond the subject-object binary, the zone of the abject impugns the very foundations of subjectivity itself; abjection threatens the stability of the “I” and recentres the “ that” behind the exclamation “I reject that”.
Abjection is thus a necessary yet oft-excluded contributor to our subjectivating relations—the connections between ourselves and other subjects and objects (other selves) that develop and nurture our understanding of the self. However, despite its utility in (re-)constructing the self, we are socially conditioned to hate, conceal, marginalise, and denigrate the abject, through what Kristeva describes as “meticulous rules of separation, rejection, and repulsion” which serve to maintain social civility and prevent spectres of unruliness, of abjection. But this policing of the abject—the controlled harnessing of its function to either objectify or subjectivate the body—occurs frequently according to an illogic of gendered, racial, and other cultural double standards.
Take blood: the abject fluid which, for Shakespeare, ‘makes civil hands unclean’. Sex and religion play a significant role in our perception of blood, a substance which would otherwise remain a merely biological phenomenon, like cartilage or enzymes. Contrast the patriarchal culture of menstruation shame, which presumes menstrual blood to be necessarily dirty and a cause for embarrassment, against the heralded iconography of Christ’s forehead, abraded by a crown of thorns, and the consecrated consumption of his ‘blood’ through wine, a ritual practised to align oneself with the Lord.
In fact, Kristeva devotes an entire chapter of PowersofHorrorto Biblical representations of the abject, presented often as (male) sacrifice in circumcision but subordinated when corresponding with maternal expressions like in breastmilk. The nonconformist rejection of symbolic blood in Communion wine is apostasy, while the equally nonconformist celebration of material blood in menstruation—sexual or otherwise—is either fetish, accident, or taboo.
In the context of bloodborne viruses, where an otherwise neutral abject is ethicised and defiled even further, blood functions as a vector both of pathogens and of power, whereby some communities (such as Africans and homosexuals who face contemporary constraints on donor eligibility) are assumed to possess and circulate a blood which is untouchably tainted. In 1987, Princess Diana was essentially canonised in our cultural zeitgeist for daring to shake hands and hug AIDS patients and publicise the scientific truth that HIV spread not through touch but through blood.
Thirty years later, seemingly to continue his mother’s noble act, Prince Harry took an HIV test on live television… right. But the in situ communities of care who served queer, Indigenous, Latin, and African HIV/AIDS patients during the epidemic were not afforded the same theatre of the royal stage. Are the corporeal politics of renewal and recovery reserved only for the platform of a pristine body?
A similar hypocrisy emerges in representations of war, conflict, and genocide. For a war’s victors, spilt blood on a battlefield transmits shared, collective valour, poetised in the Anglosphere through the symbol of haemoglobin-red poppies. For a genocide’s victims, the russet wash of innocent blood over a once-lush landscape of yarrow, olive, and cactus remains a stark yet silenced reminder of the indeterminate loss of bodies who perish nameless under rubble. Kristeva writes that a body excluded from sociolegal power is mutated into a “source of evil and mingled with sin, abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation, in the mind, between the flesh and the law.”
All around us, the abject both thrills and frightens, liberates and controls, as we constantly interact with and produce sites of abjection. This is most notable in the birth, nourishment, metabolism, and loss of life: the semen required to conceive; the amniotic fluid that sustains a foetus; the flesh and yolks we swallow for nutrition; the pungent, rotting groceries we discard; the spit we use as lubricant; the menstruation, urination, and defecation which each conclude the cycles of our reproductive, renal, and digestive systems.
The abject is closely connected to both desire and disgust. For some, acts of pleasure involve intimate, paraphilic engagement with the abject, such as for coprophiles (faeces) and urolagniacs (urine), for whom the abject and the (sexual) ego are inextricably linked and mutually constituted through an identification with waste. As Kristeva writes in her opening paragraph, the abject “beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects”.
by Jasmin Small
In recent years, the abject has erupted into the mainstream. In December, I went into Saltburn knowing little else beforehand besides that Jacob Elordi—a heartthrob clutching onto our dwindling obsession with Euphoria—was starring alongside Rosamund Pike—the mastermind behind my all-time favourite film protagonist, Amy Dunne of GoneGirl. In Saltburn,opening shots of Felix (Jacob Elordi) and Oliver (Barry Keoghan) misled me into anticipating two gay hours of thespian student romance between a pair of men closer in age to my tutors than to my classmates (but young enough that I could squint and place myself there in the camera’s gaze/gays!).
A brilliant misdirection on the screenwriters’ part, not a soul in that cinema could have preempted the slew of on-screen abjection to follow: costumed teenagers vomiting after excessive drinking; a corpse copulated and inseminated by the murderer; menstrual blood accompanying an impromptu act of cunnilingus; a bulimic girl’s razor-facilitated, literal bloodbath; a wad of semen sucked from the same bathtub’s drain; an oxygen-starved body, withering away in hospital.
Besides Saltburn, the ‘cannibalism as an expression of desire’ trope has gained recent popularity in songwriting, poetry, and art (or, in the case of Ethel Cain, all three), with many turning to the visceral extremities that the grotesque provides as means of capturing the intensity of limerence and lust. At the same time, skincare products involving snail mucus, salmon sperm, and human plasma are all on the rise; beauty gained through excrement. None of us can escape Kristeva’s irresistible powers of horror.
Our Final Taboo? Chris Warren
There is a new taboo emerging due to our possible climate-based extinction: a climatedoom taboo. Doomsters are castigated by media outlets such as SkyNews and Quadrant magazine and climate activists are arrested, fined and even jailed.
Once climate-doom is tabooed, fake optimism is free to spread across the media. Politicians tell us that renewable energy equals ‘net zero’, but this is fake, as all renewable energy emits greenhouse gases throughout its life cycle. We are told hydrogen is ‘Green Energy’, but this also is fake, as burning hydrogen in air produces nitrous oxide, a dangerous greenhouse gas. Electric vehicles emit less than fossil fuel vehicles, but still slowly add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. At best, these plans only delay the inevitable. Delaying climate-doom does not prevent climate-doom.
We are told that biomass is carbon neutral, but scientists like biochemist William H. Schlesinger, interviewed in ScientificAmericain 2018, demonstrate that this is not so. We are led to believe that governments meeting in Copenhagen, Doha, Glasgow, or wherever will initiate action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but this never happens. The accumulation of greenhouse gases is accelerating. So a question is inescapable; are we on a path to climate-based extinction and should doomster claims be addressed? Why is this taboo? Is climate-doom the greatest, most dangerous taboo of all?
The climate-doom taboo is complemented by taboos over population, degrowth, fossil fuel subsidies, and of course, over a meaningful price on carbon. It is maintained by associated denialism within the Coalition and by the machinations of the ‘Friends of Coal’ group in the ALP. Both support expansion of fossil fuel developments and any discussion about removing $9 billion fossil fuel subsidies is immediately shut down, in effect, as taboo by both. Pleadings from the Grattan Institute to merely halve subsidies are ignored. The Murdoch press screams about environmentalists supposedly blocking 19 coal and gas projects in New South Wales and Queensland — the precise actions we really need.
ANU climate scientist Joelle Gergis is well informed and she does not hide the truth. Writing in the current Quarterly Essay she declares “our climate is changing because of what humans have been doing to the planet throughout the entire course of human history”. Bang! She certainly ‘hit the nail on the head’ there. We need to understand what this means.
Our modern lifestyle based on consumption of fossil fuels and petrochemicals accelerates a trend that goes back thousands of years. According to climate scientist William Ruddiman, greenhouse emissions were exceeding the planet’s natural capacity to cope well before the industrial revolution. As the Romans built their fine structures and replaced forests with farming and as rice paddies spread across much of ancient Asia, greenhouse gases were accumulating in the atmosphere but, at such low levels, no one noticed. There was no sign of global warming then as temperatures were still dominated by an approaching Ice Age, but circumstances changed.
Scientists Eunice Newton Foote, John Tyndall and others recognised global warming before World War I, but politicians only noticed it (supposedly) in the 1970s. This was when the ‘JASON’ group presented their report on the long term impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to the US President. Independently, Jules Charney from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that a doubling of CO2 caused 3°C of temperature rise (plus or minus 1.5°C). Oil companies secretly knew about global warming earlier, in the 1950s, but they hid the truth fearing possible community anger, investor concerns and worse: government regulation.
by Jasmin Small
Doomsters may well be right. If present trends continue, future generations have no future. This may not concern those with only 20 years of life left, but should concern those who expect to carry on for longer. It should alarm anyone who expects to experience global temperatures reached in 50, 60, or more years. If warming reaches 3°C it will not stop there. Once land ice starts to melt, it does not stop until the heat is removed. So is there another taboo — can we bring children into the world and let them deal with the overheated future we are creating for them? Let’s look at this.
Past generations were not aware of all the damage they were creating, but we are. Unlike our forefathers, we know that temperatures will rise if greenhouse gas levels increase. We know that beyond 3°C of global warming our food supplies are jeopardised, population centres are threatened by extreme weather events or sea level rise and, worst of all, vast regions of the planet become uninhabitable due to deadly wet-bulb temperatures. Is it moral to subject our progeny to all this?
Let us all end the climate-doom taboo and start taking stock of where humanity is really headed and, maybe, goad our governments into making greater efforts to deal with global warming.
The Grotesque-Carnivalesque
On Mikhail Batin Cyan Metcalf
Mikhail Bakthin’s ‘grotesque’ is a concept outlined in his 1965 work Rabelais and His World, which explores the cultural ethos of the Middle Ages in François Rabelais’ 1532 GargantuaandPantagruel.
The central principle of the grotesque is degradation: the lowering of all that is abstract, spiritual, and noble to the material level. The grotesque embodies a state of perpetual transformation. It is a celebration of the liminal spaces, the excrescences, and the orifices of the human body.
The human body is a theatre of this transformation. Bakhtin writes that it “is constantly active, exceeding its margins: a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed [...] Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination [...] all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world”.
The grotesque is therefore a form of realism; bodies are material, messy things without firm edges or boundaries. They are dynamic, volatile, and exuberant. They happen in the now, like steam pouring out of a fissure in a rock. The grotesque body is a space of encounter, of transition, of appropriation. It is, according to Rod Giblett, the “belching, farting, gluttonous, lusting, creative, procreative body: it is a body having sex, giving birth, being born, eating and shitting, living and dying”. It is always in movement, like the curtain in front of the open window or the loose dress on the dancer.
Bakhtin’s celebration of the material body and its ejecta coincides with a debasement of the abstract and conceptual. As Terry Harpold writes, “vomit, urine, semen, and excrement are the stuff of philosophy brought down to the rhythms of the flesh”. They conflict with a mode of thought that is static, defined, and homogenous. The rumbling of the Rabelaisian belly is a denial of the philosophically static and physiologically moribund. Bakhtin’s grotesque, ever-changing body is a symbol of an eruption of political conflict during a period of profound social transformation.
Social and political conflicts are externalised in what Bakhtin refers to as the ‘carnival’, which is exemplified by mediaeval society. We 21st century denizens would blush beet-red at the violence and prodigality of the Middle Ages. At the election of mock monarchs, who are then beaten nearly to death; at the festive flinging of urine at passers-by; at the blood-besmirched newlyweds leading armed vanguards of attendees; at urine being used as sacramental wine; at all the obscene gestures.
According to Bakhtin, this Medievalist spirit is the people, as a whole, organised in their own way. Here, the individual becomes an indissoluble part of the collective and the lower strata of society can assert their agency in laughter and revelry to contravene the coercive socioeconomic and political order and to renew and regenerate the entire social system. Hence, the grotesque not only exposes the vile inner anatomy, but also what is spoiled, stained, and spurned in the body politic (a largely mediaeval conception of the state and society as a biological body with hierarchical leadership and a division of labour).
Throughout Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin plants the seed of an idea within the reader: that the ambiguous, hybrid, erotic, and uncontrollable grotesque could potentially serve as an escape from purely rational knowledge and disembodied truth. But this escape is dependent on an individual realising the corporeality of their existence themselves.
Bakthin’s thought reminds me of Simone de Beuavoir’s ‘ambiguous subject’. Beauvoir borrows from the thought of Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in arguing that the body is a situation derived from our understanding of the world as opposed to a thing. When we think of ourselves as disembodied beings we forget the most meaningful experiences of human life: the savouring of food, dancing and sex, and the eventualities that lie in malaise, illness, ageing, and death. Pleasant in its eroticism or painful in its existential neurosis, our material interaction with the world is essential to life and should not be treated as taboo. Our embodied experiences comprise our phenomenological being-in-the-world.
With the advent of modernity, the mechanistic has increasingly overtaken the organic. Objectivity is at the forefront of the rational spirit. Humanity has pursued its tendencies towards categorisation, compartmentalisation, and fixing objects and subjects within the world alphabetically, numerically, by priority, format, date, and time. The grotesque has been subordinated to the interior, private individual. She has fostered her omnipotent rationalism and stepped out of the frame to transcend her human body, becoming what controls and passes judgement. For example, under classical Platonic or Aristotelian logic, art is limited to the truthful representation of definitive things and restricted to simple and perfected forms. The universe becomes static, harmonious and whole — a perfect geometry with various symmetries. Here, the body is conceived of in terms of its purity, in it being closed, well-defined, symmetrical, and ordered.
According to Sylvie Henning, the grotesque-carnivalesque is conversely based in the “pathos of change and jolly relativity which does not allow modern thought to stand still and grow cold in one-sided seriousness, useless exactness, and singleness of meaning”. The grotesque body is becoming, it is an openness to futurity which outstrips the conservational impetus to retain cohesion and unity. In this corporeal flux, all conventions, cliches, established truths, and ideologies are put back in contact with material existence, brought down to earth, to be degraded and then renewed. All the while a carnival laughter echoes the liberation of humanity from cosmic terror, from the fear of the incommensurable and the omnipotent.
It may seem that the grotesque-carnivalesque draws one into seemingly sterile paradoxes in which contradictory elements or systems coexist as irreconcilable and yet inseparable opposites. Yet thinking can draw on irritational modes like paradox to arrive at profound insights. Bakhtinian paradoxes in degradation and renewal or uncanny fear and amusement are far more powerful and effectual than linear notions of cause and effect or spatio-temporal representation at capturing life’s complexities.
Bakhtin captures the eternally incomplete nature of being in its growth and becoming and he echoes a profound sentiment: we must embrace the joyous chaos of existence.
We are but a musician in the scratch orchestra of the cosmos, perpetually improvising and experiencing its every note.
We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which Woroni operates, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. Their land was forcibly stolen, and sovereignty was never ceded.
The name Woroni, which means “mouthpiece”, was taken from the Wadi Wadi Nation without permission. Consultation with First Nations people recommended that Woroni continue to use the word, provided we acknowledge the theft, and continue to strive for better reconciliation in future. Woroni aims to provide a platform for First Nations students to hold the University, its community, and ourselves accountable.
A ‘taboo’ is, by definition, a social custom that forbids association with a particular person, place or thing, forbids even the mention of it. Historically, the cultures, practices, art and languages of First Nations people have been made taboo by the colonial structures of white Australia, which continues to impact First Nations people today — children stolen and laws enacted to prevent the continuation of this culture within First Nations communities. By extension, the history of these atrocities has also become taboo.
It is our responsibility to break that taboo. To acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land and to acknowledge all the ways this country continues to fail them, and to speak about it and learn from it so we might be able to do better in the future.
This land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.
