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Foreword: This fictional piece was inspired by my interest in the psychological and neurodevelopmental effects of childhood trauma, which began after reading The Boy Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz. Throughout this story, I have attempted to touch on the powerlessness felt by victims of child abuse and the…
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Marta: Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Edawed Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, rips down a compulsive response in the human psyche: hysteria. What is worth believing? So too did Arthur…
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There all the barrel-hoops are knit, There all the serpent-tails are bit, There all the gyres converge in one, There all the planets drop in the Sun. – W. B. Yeats, Supernatural Songs, IV 'There'
The Brown Betty teapot’s older than the Hills Hoist and twice as stubborn. Five generations of paddy women, and decades of…
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Where’s Currumbin? What does it have to do with brightly coloured beer? Angus Taylor’s economic beer theory? A ‘Kerrupt-flip’?
Be patient ’til the last.
In 2022, on a surf trip to the Pacific, I first came across Bede Durbidge. Bede – a former WSL veteran of a decade and decorated Pipeline Master – told…
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Is this still what we fought for?
That’s the question that seems to hang quietly behind so much of the cultural discourse right now. From album covers to courtrooms, from social media trends to political movements, feminism feels at once everywhere and somehow nowhere at all. Its language has been adopted, repackaged, and monetised to…
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In Her Name
Mary Magdalene is posited as Christianity’s exemplar of repentance, the apostle of Christ, the faithful woman, freed of seven demons. Worthy of hymnal adoration, and biblical heralding… but the rankle, the blister, the problem was she was robust, energetic. A prostitute. None of which were revered in the picture of the Christian…
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I was five years old when a boy took hold of my shoulders behind the water fountain without warning and pressed his lips against mine.
The common rhetoric I often encounter as an indirect response is that of “so what?”; essentially, how can such a trivial act lead to tangible detriment to the woman? I…
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After watching Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, the politically astute and the ignorant alike sat up in their seats – it was a final, overwhelming announcement that fascism is back in.
The EIU's 2024 Democracy Index resoundingly supported this proposed democratic backsliding, reporting a historical low with 130 of 167 states registering stagnation or decline…