"Every ten minutes, a child dies in Gaza," Al Jazeera reports on my phone on the bus. It is hell on earth. And every 60 seconds an announcement sounds in formal Hebrew: Even in such times we ask that you validate your travel pass. Together we are strong.

Political journalism follows scandal like a loyal dog. The Murray-Darling Basin is a gift to such an enterprise, breeding scandal and tragedy, windfall and downfall, wealthy abundance and mass ecological death.

On 21 December 2023, at 14:59, a terrorist armed with a ZEV AR15 military assault rifle opened fire in the upper corridors of the Philosophy Faculty at Charles University, Prague, killing fourteen and wounding twenty-five. They were students and colleagues attending lectures, taking end-of-year exams and preparing an afternoon programme of Christmas carols.

Contemporary discussions about the lives and care and education of children in Australia are so cooked, so impoverished and hedged about with assumptions of control and paranoia, that writing an essay like this about childhood, about what it means to be a child in modern Australia, feels like I’m presenting evidence of alien life.

I’ve always had the aching feeling that—as a text to be shared among friends and maybe eventually ‘enemies’—the soul-body dialogue poem is a way of arguing towards spiritual certainty in the face of earthly corruption and doubt.

Through hundreds of retellings, the imprints and reprints from Dampier’s publications—the earliest documented British incursion onto Indigenous lands—entrenched ‘truths’ about Aboriginal Australians. It was not until 1709 that all of Dampier's volumes had appeared and they’re quite a muddle of editions, volumes and parts. He assures his readers, however, that he has been ‘exactly and strictly careful to give on True relations and descriptions.’ In fact these are eye-wateringly derogatory by today’s standards.

It is the year 2060, and we are driving through Kullilli Country, also known as the Channel Country, a Bio-Region defined by its waterways. This ‘State’ was called ‘Queensland’ after Queen Victoria in 1859, and this was in the south-west corner. But really it is where Max’s people come from. At a turnoff on a dirt track there is a wooden sign, with ‘MUSEUM’ roughly painted in white, and an arrow. A few hundred metres down the track is an old tin shed, a shearing shed, surrounded by a few casuarinas. It looks abandoned. But there’s our museum guide Max, standing outside, waiting for us.

The year is 1998 and a spectre is haunting capitalism from ages six and up—the spectre of virtual and robotic kin. All the powers of the capitalist class have entered an unholy alliance to exploit this spectre: Tyco, Hasbro, and Mattel, or: Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and Tamagotchi.

There’s a regime of logic that we can call Australia, that we can say on many fronts is also a fiction. Any poem that meets Australia within its logic, taking it at face value, will be boring and it might be competent. If you use an AI app, it will definitely be competent AND boring materially, but conceptually it’ll be amazing, in that it met evil (management speak/the invisible hand/terra nullius) with cunning, with another kind evil—amoral, not immoral.

We discovered Bargain Hunters: The Curtin NTEU EBA Podcast as our own university, Monash, and the local branch of the NTEU) enter their own bargaining round. After years of workers bearing the burden of rapid COVID changes, cost of living pressures, overwork and decades of growing job insecurity, this bargaining round feels different: an opportunity for workers to articulate a vision of the university against the neoliberalised, corporate managerialism that dominates the sector and most workplaces in the country.

I have watched the 1OUTS rap battle video 2SHAE VS SNIPES, so many times. I’ve watched and re-watched it with old friends. I’ve shown it to new friends from different parts of Australia and the world. A friend from Brisbane recently noted that every time my group of friends from Melbourne hang out, the Snipes video […]

In that moment the audience and Emerald are each abolitionists, and in that moment at the Blacktown drive-in where I witnessed Nope, everyone in that carpark, however briefly, behind their tinted car windows, desired the absence of police, for the police to fuck right off, and in the infinite violent possibilities invoked by Peele, we all wanted to see the police, the dutiful henchmen of capital that they are, gone for good.

Early internet culture, its openness and penchant for performativity—found on the French Minitel, Tumblr, and even the Buffy chatroom—is innately queer. It is important for us to call on this past, to understand its performative nature, and to reckon with its unrealised potential.

Sara and I attend the opening night for the NGV’s QUEER exhibition. We were not invited and we did not buy tickets – in fact we did not even know it was on until stumbling upon it after watching the new Batman movie at the HOYTS in Melbourne Central and deciding to walk home south along the Yarra.

Although mothers and daughters were not an unusual subject, this triptych’s macabre, violent and sexual themes were unprecedented for the period. The first panel depicts a mother and teenage daughter reclining. Dark figures, which art critics have variously described as satyrs, devils or gargoyles, emerge from the mother’s mouth and hands.

Progress on repatriation will only be made by reform to our national institutions; beyond improved funding to Indigenous communities through delivering on Closing the Gap targets, repatriation must be front and centre to the Treaty reforms called for by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Reconciliation demands the restoration of dignity to Ancestors through returning them to their rightful communities and Country, and the permanent return of sacred and cultural objects from which traditional owners have been dispossessed.