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.

Zelda D’Aprano held onto the chain with the devotion of a worker who sifted through the words of bosses to find that reason to obey, she held the chain with the ease of a woman holding a handbag of unfair payslips, she held the chain with the strength of her father’s will to survive the Nazis and the drive of her mother’s hope to share our burdens.

Janusz tucks his mouth into his elbow, makes the shape of the word with his lips. He recognises the sound, insectile in the distance, pictures the plane on the runway, propellers whirling, ready to launch. He rolls his head so his cheek rests against his forearm, the open pages of his maths book a pillow beneath.

If most videogames are collaborative stories that the player travels through and participates in, like an actor following their part of the script, Elden Ring is more like a complex puzzle box that players collectively poke at, trying to find a way into to figure out its secrets. It pretends to be about masochistic individual performance but is in fact about collaboration, helping each other out, and working against a deliberately obtuse and unfair opponent.

ABC News Exchange is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. / Time: Jan 6, 2022 03:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney / Interviewer: Why are you boycotting Sydney Festival? / [redacted]