The spate of recent attacks on certain Footscray businesses by perpetrators as yet unknown feels quixotic: smashing in a few windows and spray-paining ‘fuck off hipster scum’, or throwing a bag of rotting meat at a business, cannot be expected to reverse the tide of gentrification. Such actions misunderstand the relationship between gentrification and hipsterdom, construing as they do hipsters as active agents of gentrification rather than their presence as an epiphenomenon of it.

To respond to Storrar’s question by showering him with money – so much money, in fact, that it may potentially impact his benefit payments and require the assistance of a financial manager – seems to misunderstand the nature of the problem, no matter how well-intentioned the many donors may be.

This elision between queers and paedophiles is an old trick for homophobes looking to whip up a little hysteria – one that goes back to Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children campaign – but refreshingly enough, it seems that most Australians are not buying it this time. Instead, a new narrative of queerness and childhood is emerging. Instead of the (asexual, presumably straight) child at risk from predatory queerness, this new narrative casts the queer child at risk from callous homophobia.

Everyone except the most flagrantly freeloading of publications, it seems, agrees that something needs to be done about the parlous state of writers’ pay – but what, exactly?

2015 has been something of an annus horibilis for self-styled 'wellness warriors'. First, alternative therapy advocate Jessica Ainscough passed away from the cancer she had been treating with Gerson Therapy. Next, celebrity chef Pete Evans had his infants cookbook Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way pulped on the eve of its release date after one of its recipes was found to have potentially baby-killing levels of vitamin A.

Not long after Melbourne teenager Masa Vukotic was stabbed to death, my Facebook feed was roiling with emotion. Vukotic was not the first woman to be murdered in Australia this year, and, shamefully, will not be the last, but something about the attack – perhaps the fact that Vukotic was killed in broad daylight while exercising in a public space – triggered the kind of fierce public reaction not seen since the murder of Jill Meagher in 2012.

In marked contrast to Prime Minister Tony Abbott – who seemingly can no longer receive a break from even such an ideological organ as The Australian – Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has recently honed her public image to a fine point.

Music festivals are, almost by definition, supposed to have their fingers on the cultural pulse. Thus it hardly augurs well that the Beyond the Valley festival – a new player in Australia’s already-crowded music festival scene, to take place on Phillip Island over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day – has chosen to promote […]