Tag: Culture

The Land of the Dead: Rituals and Taboos of the Torajan People
June 15, 2025 11:57 am Comments Off on The Land of the Dead: Rituals and Taboos of the Torajan People
“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.
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.
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.
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 deep-seated 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.

Shivagha Sindhamani Pathak
Zombie Apocalypse: The Genre that Keeps Rising From the Dead
11:44 am Comments Off on Zombie Apocalypse: The Genre that Keeps Rising From the Dead
I am perhaps the greatest fan of zombie apocalypse media you will ever come across, and the impending 28 Years Later theatrical release has me literally and figuratively quaking in my leather boots. From The Walking Dead (a bangin’ comic book series whose TV adaptation takes a hilarious nosedive around season five yet somehow continues for six more seasons and countless spin-offs), to White Zombie (released in 1932 and widely regarded as one of the first zombie films), from Zombieland (classic Hollywood dark comedy material featuring Bill Murray, need I say more), to One Cut of the Dead (a mind-bending Japanese zombie film within a zombie film within a zombie film) and Ravenous (an atmospheric Quebecois art film which was just unsettling enough to be memorable). As you may imagine, I have a few hundred more recommendations of the like.
There’s something about an impending apocalypse that just gets filmmakers, and the audience, going. I’ve always thought that it was the representation of humanity at its lowest and the ensuing terrible acts spelling our collective descent to living hell, interspersed with just enough hope and morality to let us identify with the good guys. It’s the inevitable horde of infinite, true-neutral undead marching ever closer to our intrepid heroes. And don’t forget; there are always some bad guys to show us that the greatest evil all along was our fellow man—very Sartre-esque, if you ask me.
These staples of the genre come together to create captivating worlds in which violence is king and all must bow before it. Gore takes precedence in many flicks; in others, suspense. Our imaginations can run wild with whatever little world-building we’re given. Often, the only thing that matters about the world is that it has ended, and the only thing that matters about the people who used to live there is that they don’t anymore.
Unfortunately for me, the very things that make the genre compelling are also the things that can make certain projects seem woefully low-budget, out of their depth, and formulaic. The attempted subversions of the genre fall flat when they treat themselves as unique—for example, the introduction of a big bad that’s bigger and badder than the impending zombie doom has been done only a million times, or the poignant tale of a good guy who is driven mad by his impossible circumstances and ends up becoming the very thing he swore to destroy, or the hero’s journey ending in self-sacrifice in the service of hope for the human race (yes I’m looking at you, theatrical release version of I Am Legend (and yes, I am aware they are technically vampires, I just don’t care)).
Moreover, zombie films tend to be victims of poor writing, acting and low budgets, like many other horror and slasher films, especially those depicting the end of days. None of these I particularly mind on their own, but it is the coalescence of all these factors that marks many of these films for disaster (don’t be like Undead, an Australian low-budget zombie flick that somehow introduces aliens into the mix). Indie films become claustrophobic, single-set pieces that fail both to encompass the extent of the worldwide tragedy and even to create a compelling narrative in such a small space (some do this well, for example, the zombie-adjacent infection film It Comes at Night which uses one set to its advantage). Those that are most successful, in my humble opinion, lean into their shortcomings rather than away from them, without attempting to do too much. But these are diamond needles in rough haystacks which number few and far between.
So why do they keep making these films, and why do I keep watching them, even if I know most of them will be awful and I’ll spend the next several weeks of my life complaining to my friends about the death of the world’s best (my favourite) media genre? Because every so often a film is released which does one of two things: it brings something different to the table, or it does the classic thing very, very well. Rightly or wrongly, I am tremendously, frothing-at-the-mouth-zombie-style excited for 28 Years Later which is shaping up to be one such movie that will tide me over for a few years of awful pseudo-remakes until the next good one.

India Kazakoff
On Impermeable Bodies
11:39 am Comments Off on On Impermeable Bodies
The languages of the dying suns
are themselves dying,
but even the word for this has been forgotten […]

Translation was never possible.
Instead there was always only
conquest […]
the one language that has eaten all others.

— Marsh Languages, Margaret Atwood
In an auction house on the 29th of October 1998, a codex is set to be sold at Christie’s in New York.
The listing reads as follows:

THE EARLIEST EXTANT MANUSCRIPT OF THE WORKS OF ARCHIMEDES, THE UNIQUE SOURCE FOR HIS ‘METHOD OF MECHANICAL THEOREMS,’ THE ONLY SURVIVING WITNESS TO THE ORIGINAL GREEK TEXT OF ‘ON FLOATING BODIES,’ THE MOST SUBSTANTIAL AND SIGNIFICANT GREEK PALIMPSEST KNOWN, AND ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC CODEX EVER OFFERED AT AUCTION.
— Christie’s Auction Catalog, 1998

At the time of auction, the ideas contained in the codex had survived over 2,200 years. Seven manuscripts detailing Archimedes’s works remain inside. Two treatises, The Stomachion and The Method, exist nowhere else but within the book.
Five minutes into bidding, Archimedes’ lost codex is sold to an anonymous collector for 2.2 million USD.
Part 1: The Auction
The original codex was a transcription of Archimedes’ surviving manuscripts by a Byzantine scholar in the late 10th century. It was presumed to be held in the Imperial Library of Constantinople.
In 1204 AD, the manuscripts were relocated for the first time: raids by the Fourth Crusade caused the codex to be removed from Constantinople and relocated within Mar Saba, a monastery in a desert southeast of Jerusalem. By 1229, the seven manuscripts were rebound into a prayerbook, a process that involved tearing out the leaflets of the codex and writing over the original text with scripture. An abstract mathematical text held enough value for transcription in 10th-century Constantinople. But by the 13th century in Jerusalem, when parchment was rare, and leather binding was expensive, prayer took precedence. Archimedes’s great treatise was palimpsested—overwritten. The codex remained at Mar Saba for at least the next 400 years.
By 1846, the manuscripts were acquired by the Metochion, or Daughter House, of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre is in the Greek quarter of Constantinople, now Istanbul. How the present manuscript was transferred from northeastern Jerusalem to Constantinople is unknown. In 1899, the library of the Metochion was catalogued by Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Karameus. This catalogue drew the attention of Danish Classicist Johan Heiburg, who visited Constantinople in 1906 and managed to decipher four-fifths of the book. Heiberg examined the manuscripts again in 1908 and photographed the codex.
Following Heiburg’s investigation, the immediate movements of the palimpsest remain in obscurity. What can be said for sure is this: at some point in the 1930s, the manuscript found its way into the hands of French businessman Marie Louis Sirieix and remained under the care of his family until its purchase in 1998. Sirieix left the palimpsest to his daughter Anne Guersan in 1947. By 1998, the codex had deteriorated from decades of improper storage. In this diminished state, almost a thousand years after its initial transcription in the Byzantine Empire, the Archimedes Palimpsest entered the hands of its current owner.
The codex that was auctioned is three leaves short of Heiberg’s initial count. The parchment leaves of the present manuscript are almost entirely palimpsest.
Part 2: The Archimedes Palimpsest
The word palimpsest refers to a document scraped down and layered over with newer content. Often, the overwritten text becomes visible, revealed through the passage of time and chance. Herein begins a cyclical process of formation and reformation, wherein crafters and artisans, priests and scientists encounter the manuscripts and alter them to fulfil their myriad purposes. Cultural artefacts are stripped and then remade in line with the values of each successive society. The history of the Archimedes Palimpsest suggests several such acts of imposition.
First, the ancient Archimedes treatise was transcribed, copied by a 10th-century scribe in its original Greek onto parchment and bound. The original manuscripts were most likely copied in Constantinople. Everything we know of Archimedes exists in three books. Like all of Archimedes’ surviving work, the codex is not a simultaneous reproduction of his writings. It is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, surviving because a scribe in Constantinople saw value in Archimedes’ ideas and chose to transcribe them. As such, the codex, even in its original form, is an imperfect replication. We do not know what liberties the scribe took in their reproduction. What sentences or ideas were forgone because they took too much time to write or were not deemed valuable for the year or the century?
Second, there is the geographical imprint left on the codex. Like any archaeological artefact, the palimpsest has undergone many changes over its nearly thousand-year lifespan. Take a cross-section of the manuscripts, and you’ll uncover traces of something ancient, the past emerging as fragments that lend themselves to our contemporary interpretations. In the case of the palimpsest, form and meaning interact: mathematical script in a Byzantine style is hidden beneath superimposed religious text contained in a book rebound sometime in the 18th century. The codex can be ‘read’ to reveal its history by looking within for symbols and meanings of the past. This, in turn, unveils a periodic exchange of conquest and submission over hundreds of years; as the manuscripts enter the control of each new owner, they are subjected to the epistemological demands of that entity and made to conform. By examining each changing iteration of the codex, we notice how the book increasingly diverges from the original text to reflect its contemporary environs.
Shortly after its acquisition in 1998, the manuscripts were loaned to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and spent the next decade in a lengthy conservation process. The owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest funds the restoration campaign. The project’s goal is: “to digitally recreate the Archimedes Manuscript of the tenth century as closely as possible, as it was before it was palimpsested around the year 1200”. As a result of the Archimedes Project, you can find a fully digitised scan of the original Archimedes Palimpsest on Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. Over two thousand years of unstable transit, the manuscripts have been digitised and are accessible to anybody curious enough to look.
Part 3: Survival
That a copy of Archimedes’ treatise exists today, and a readable one no less, is the result of two thousand years of sheer luck. For every text like the Archimedes Palimpsest, many more were lost to war, decay, and indifference. Its survival is an anomaly. At every stage of transit or relocation, there is an alternate world in which the palimpsest perishes and is lost to history. The codex was held in The Imperial Library of Constantinople, which was decimated slowly through a series of sackings and fires. No considerable part of the library’s catalogue has ever been recovered, and as such, the majority of books housed alongside the codex have perished. Even into the 20th century, water damage almost rendered the palimpsest entirely unreadable.
Without the work of conservators and restorationists, books like Archimedes’ codex would be lost. When the predominant culture does not place value on an abstract mathematical treatise, these works fade into obscurity. The knowledge that endures is often only a reflection of whether the survival of a text is worth the cost of its preservation.

Maya Haggstrom
How to Write Love Letters
March 13, 2025 11:29 am Comments Off on How to Write Love Letters
I have an ardent confession to make: I love love.
Not the kind where you keep your options in a shopping cart, swiping left and right like you’re browsing for a winter coat. Not the kind where you meet someone twice, tell them they feel like home, and then disappear from the face of the planet. Not the kind where you bask in the warmth of a “what are we?” conversation when you’ve already met their mum. And certainly not the kind where affection arrives in the form of “you up?” at 3 a.m.
I love love: the kind where you buy them flowers just because; where you remember the little things, some told, some observed. The kind where you keep a secret list of their likes and dislikes in your Notes app; where you write silly little love missives, i’s dotted with hearts, and slip them into their bag. The kind where you soak paper in coffee, spray it with your perfume and post letters that smell like you. The gut-wrenchingly vulnerable kind of love.
And oh, love letters! I love love in love letters. Because what do you mean you sat down, picked up a pen, and poured your feelings onto paper, knowing those words would endure? Love letters once carried the weight of human emotion, but maybe we don’t want to confront that weight anymore. Maybe knowing you can always just ghost someone feels safer. Maybe we fear the vulnerability, and lack the sheer courage it takes to send something we can’t edit, can’t unsend, can’t delete. After all, it takes time for ink on paper to fade.
My fervent interest in the disappearance of love letters led me to Kafka’s Letters to Milena, a poignant glimpse into what love once looked like on paper.
If you don’t know Franz Kafka (which, honestly, loser behaviour), here’s a crash course: brilliant, existentially tortured, and pathetically in love. A man obsessed with writing letters. His letters to Milena Jesenská, his long-time lover, are some of the most intimate insights into his mind.
Now that I’ve read the book, and based on the multiple love letters my friends have penned for me over time, here’s how to (and how not to) write a love letter.

Lost for words, not lost for love

Your love letter doesn’t need to begin with a grand, sweeping declaration of eternal devotion. You don’t need to overthink it. Just start writing.
A lot of Kafka’s letters to Milena are simply him describing his day, his surroundings, and the way the world feels without her in it:
“I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care. The balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes… Lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you.”
He describes the world around him and says, I wish you were here. That’s it. That’s love.
Love isn’t just grand gestures; it’s the desire to share even the most mundane moments with someone. It’s missing them, not just when you’re alone but in a room full of distractions too. Write, no matter how trivial your thoughts seem. Ultimately, it’s the sentiment that counts.

Say what you mean, mean what you feel

In one letter, Milena tells Kafka she loves him, but she also loves her husband, Pollak, and will never leave him.
Emotionally devastating? Yes. Diabolical? Yes.
But at least they’re honest with each other. They both know where they stand.
A love letter must be steeped in truth, a sincere reflection of your heart. Be clear in your intentions, and for the love of all that matters, don’t twist something as sacred as a love letter into a tool for manipulation or love-bombing. It should resonate with authenticity, so that even decades later, when discovered in a forgotten shoebox, its essence remains as vibrant and true as the day it was penned.

You can be vulnerable without being a walking red flag (unlike Kafka)

“Perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most—you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.”
Look, I love vulnerability. I love raw, messy, unfiltered emotion as much as the next person. But there’s a fine line between being deeply romantic and concerningly unhinged. Kafka, unfortunately, did not know where that line was.
You, however, should.
Pour your heart out, yes. Tell them how much they mean to you. But maybe don’t write things that make them question whether they need to file a restraining order. Aim for endearment, not distress. Love letters should leave the reader feeling adored, not burdened.

Beware: love is both glory and doom

“I wrote you a note from Prague and then from Meran. I have not received any answer. It so happens the notes did not require a particularly prompt reply and if your silence is nothing more than a sign of relative well-being, then I am completely satisfied.”
Kafka writes every day. He writes without expecting a response. Because perhaps the greatest joy of love was always being able to express it.
Now, I’m not telling you to flood your crush’s inbox with a thousand love letters even after they’ve clearly rejected you. I am not enabling that behaviour.
All I am saying is, don’t be afraid to let people know what they mean to you. Just don’t expect too much in return. As much as it sucks, sometimes HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU. But then there is always that lucky possibility that they adore you just as much as you do. You’ll never know until you deliver that letter.
Kafka is overwhelming and raw in his honesty. Would a modern-day Milena be charmed by Kafka’s letters, or would she block him for sending messages at dawn that sound like existential crises? Who knows.
Letters to Milena reminds us that love–real, heart-wrenching love, is worth writing down.
Sure: we’re all hustling through life, our emotions are condensed into emoji quick-reactions and hastily-composed replies to Instagram stories, and vulnerability feels more like a risk than a rite. Who has time for grandiloquent prose when doom scrolling is afoot and another “seen” notification waits to be artfully ignored? Love letters are a high-stakes gamble with scant returns.
But here’s a little secret: I still have every note and letter I’ve ever received, lovingly placed on my bedside table. Some are from people who have since become strangers to me, while others are from those I speak to every day. Regardless, I cherish the habit of revisiting them every few weeks.
People often lose sight of how loved they are, no matter how many cutesy reels you send their way. Love letters, however, ensure that this truth remains vivid and undeniable.
So, write one. Let the people you love know you love them. It will always be worth every effort.

Anuva Rai
March/April Gig Guide
March 12, 2025 6:41 pm Comments Off on March/April Gig Guide
Woroni Radio welcomes you to the first Woroni Gig Guide for 2025! This guide lists most, if not all, shows happening in Canberra between now and the start of April. Originally, this was devised as a feature for the upcoming Extinction magazine, to showcase the fact that local live music is very much, in fact, not extinct. However, timelines made this impossible, so we have published it on our site so that whoever needs it can use it to its fullest extent. This list isn’t comprehensive, so if you know of any upcoming shows, feel free to let us know via emailing radio@woroni.com.
Bands, times, and prices are accurate at time of writing * = concession prices
Every Saturday
Wayne Kelly Trio @ Tilley’s Devine Cafe Gallery (6:00pm, FREE)
Friday 14/3
Crucial Waft (calyx, Sia Ahmed + Tom Fell & NIMBY) @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $15)
Tijuana Cartel @ The Baso (7:00pm, $51)
A Commoner’s Revolt, Domesticated Incels & Ben Pegram @ The Polo (7:00pm, $15)
Saturday 15/3
Pseudo Echo @ The Baso (7:00pm, $51)
Lost Coast & Flik & Frames @ The Polo (7:30pm, $20)
The Filthy Darlings, The Shadow Ministers & The Petch Experience @ Smith’s Alternative (9:00pm, $15)
Sunday 16/3
Georgia Bennett @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Inez Hargaden (4:00pm, FREE)
Sam Buckingham @ Smith’s Alternative (7:00, $25*)
Tuesday 18/3
Ruthie Foster @ The Street Theatre (7:30pm, $75)
Thursday 20/3
Kim Salmon’s Smoked Salmon @ Smith’s Alternative (9:30pm, $35*)
The Brother Brothers & Isobel Rumble @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Friday 21/3
Khan & Voodoo Acid Space Kings @ The Baso (7:00pm, $30)
Majelen & Tessa Devine @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $15*)
RAMSTONE, The Filthy Darlings & Napoleon Ice Cream @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $20)
Shivi Vachaspati Trio @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
Ziggy Alberts @ UC Refectory (7:30pm, $93)
Saturday 22/3
Blue Angel & Dr Wiedemann’s Orchestra & Black Owl Quartet @ Smith’s Alternative (3:00pm, $10*)
David McCredie @ Smith’s Alternative (6:00pm, $20*)
Eviscerate The Crown, Russian Novel, Telurian & Switch Up @ The Baso (7:00pm, $18)
FUNLAND (Tired Lion, Verge Collection, Egoism, Smartcasual, Sonic Reducer, Sunsick Daisy, Swapmeet & Archie) @ UC Hub Courtyard (4:00pm, $52)
STS Fest (Flavuh, The Engine, Nuta Mantis & Buffy) @ Dissent Bar & Cafe (7:30pm, $20)
The Sunday Estate @ The Baso (7:00pm, $23)
Zambezi Sounds @ Smith’s Alternative (9:00pm, $15)
Sunday 23/3
Chris O’Connor @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Comfy Gutters & Liz Caddy @ Smith’s Alternative (3:00pm, $10*)
Moondog @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Wednesday 26/3
Kristina Olsen & Peter Grayling @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $25*)
Thursday 27/3
Travis Collins @ The Baso (7:00pm, $33*)
Friday 28/3
Black Owl Quartet @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
Cardboard Cutouts & Sex With Men @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $15)
Kasey Chambers @ Canberra Theatre Centre (7:30pm, $91)
Lakeside at 5 (Rachel Thoms Trio & Aidan and Bianca) @ Tuggeranong Arts Centre (5:30pm, donation)
The Crossbenchers @ The Old Canberra Inn (7:00pm, FREE)
The Weeping Willows & Great Aunt @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Saturday 29/3
Big Reef, Rat Boy School Excursion & Buzzcuts @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $10)
Capital Punishment (Shackles, Fat Lip, Gravitate, Highland Light, Discount Code, Step 2 Me & Minefield) @ The Baso (7:00pm, $45)
John Craigie & Kassi Valazza @ Smith’s Alternative (6:00pm, $45)
Johnny Reynolds Band @ The Old Canberra Inn (2:00pm, FREE)
La Descarga & Los Chavos @ The Polo (7:30pm, $35) Sunday 30/3 Flik @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Georgia Bennett @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Tuesday 1/4
Stand Atlantic & RedHook @ The Baso (7:00pm,. $56)
Thursday 3/4
Kim Churchill @ Smith’s Alternative (9:30pm, $40)
Pierce Brothers & Flynn Gurry @ UC Hub (7:00pm, $46)
You Am I & Grace Cummings @ UC Refectory (7:00pm, $91)
Friday 4/4
Bootleg Rascal, Dante Knows & Dizzy Days @ The Baso (7:00pm, $45)
Flynn Marcus Quartet @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
We Mavericks & Two If By Sea @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Saturday 5/4
Ess-Em, Doxxed & A Commoner’s Revolt @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $20)
Lucie Thorne + Hamish Stuart @ Smith’s Alternative (4:00pm, $20*)
Sunday 6/4
Dean Haitani @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Lewis DeLorenzo @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)

Cameron Upton
So, You Want to Read Judith Butler? Start with these 5 Essays.
February 27, 2025 3:53 pm Comments Off on So, You Want to Read Judith Butler? Start with these 5 Essays.
Love them or hate them, Judith Butler might just be one of the most influential thinkers of the last 30 years, spawning and developing our understanding of basically all humanities concerns: sexuality and gender, language and meaning, peace and violence, relationships and family, identity and subjectivity, law and politics, and even life and death.
I would argue that anyone studying law, arts, philosophy, languages, politics, and even biology or medicine would benefit greatly from at least one of Butler’s insights — and I’d assume that’s very likely to include you.
Butler is best-known for their theory of performativity, applying linguist J. L. Austin’s theory of ‘performative’ utterances – acts of speech which, in being spoken, bring that action into being (e.g. “I promise…” → constitutes a promise) – to a general understanding of our performative constitution of gender/sexual identity – acts of social speech, if you will. Or, in Butler’s words:
Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. (Gender Trouble, p177)
Confused? Don’t worry.
Whether you’ve ever referred to gender as ‘performed’, or simply acted in a way that was intended to represent – to ‘do’ – your gender (like actively choosing the cologne that’s assigned to your gender)… you’re evidence of Butler’s argument.
Butler’s ideas remain equally consequential and controversial in the wide-ranging canon of continental philosophy; whilst the philosopher has books and prizes written in their honour, they have also been dubbed ‘the Professor of Parody’ with protests against their work in Brazil which burnt an effigy of her.
That said, Darin Barney provides the following defence of Butler, summarising their legacy amid polarised reception amongst certain sections of their academe:
[Their] work… on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has… also changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression, by lending recognition, dignity and power to their experience, and by illuminating the contours of an ethics in which we might begin to live well with, and because of, the differences that constitute us.
Where do I stand?
After reading the preface to Gender Trouble in Year 10 at the ripe age of 15, my life was never the same; truly, an anagnorisis of my gay (?) teenagehood.
Butler’s work proved instrumental to my relationship with myself, my body, and the plethora of bodies and selves (and embodied selfhoods!) I have come across in my lifetime. I probably revisit Butler on a fortnightly-to-monthly basis in some capacity, either reading their work directly or another scholar’s Butlerian analysis.
However, even a Butlerite like me can admit that their work can be difficult to read, especially for a beginner. 26 years ago, Butler won first prize in the journal Philosophy and Literature’s ‘Bad Writing Competition’ for a 94-word sentence.
…Regardless of the polarity of their work’s reception, Butler’s importance as a theorist, a writer, and an academic is clear.
So, having chipped away at Butler’s body of work for four, coming on five, years… I have collated an ordered list of five essays (~70 pages total) to get started with Butler’s work, each with a difficulty rating, the length, the overall topics, and my favourite quote.
Essay 1) Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’
For: anyone!!
Difficulty: 1 / 5 stars (2000 words)
Topics: Queer and feminist politics/activism; performativity; queer history
Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.
Let’s start with an interview with theorist Julie Gleeson. Here, Butler’s reflections span a range of topics, tracking temporal and cultural differences in the many political arenas in which they operate: queer rights, access to academia, collective action, what it means to have or do a gender. While not essential reading, Gleeson’s interview showcases Butler’s interconnected, interdisciplinary approach, deepening your reading of her work.
Essay 2) Protest, Violent, and Nonviolent
For: politics, international relations, history, and law students
Difficulty: 1 / 5 stars (12 pages)
Topics: (Anti-)Fascism; political action; democracy; class; justification of violence; harm
Protest is a way of voting on and with the streets, asserting a sense of the people that remains radically unrepresented by the “representative” government that exists. (p 239)
Two great things about this essay are that it’s written really simply, and there are no overdrawn academic footnotes as Butler introduces, analyses, and moves on from each external reference. This is great for those without a thorough backing in theory or philosophy, hence why I’ve suggested it so early in my list of accessible Butler works. Read these 12 pages and you’ll never think the same way about the scenes of violence our society lets slide (but maybe shouldn’t): tasers, arrests, insecticide, your parents smacking you.
Essay 3) How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?
For: philosophy, linguistics, and English students
Difficulty: 2 / 5 stars (18 pages)
Topics: Descartes; the mind vs the body; thinking; writing; embodiment; metaphysics
There is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the writing that it produces. (p 28)
Did you take PHIL1004 and also find yourself deeply dissatisfied with Descartes’ work? Read this. I found this when preparing for my PHIL1004 final exam, desperate for an articulation of the holes I kept poking in Cartesian mind-body dualism (the idea that our minds and our bodies are separate entities; the former, reliable and the latter, an obstacle to our access to the former). Butler tears Descartes to shreds, without the overly verbose technicality that analytic philosophy seeks to ingrain in a budding philosopher. Like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Butler exposes the impossibility of Descartes’ attempt to disembody himself through his philosophical practice.
Essay 4) Kinship beyond the Bloodline
For: sociology, biology, medicine, policy, law, international relations, or history students
Difficulty: 3 / 5 stars (22 pages)
Topics: Family; queerness; slavery; blood; culture; race; friends-as-family; relationships; coming out; family law
On the one hand, the reduction of kinship to genetic tie… is one way that the government evacuates the affective character of the bond of kinship. On the other hand, that same affective tie is presumed and exploited by the exact same policy. (p 33)
Is blood thicker than water? Butler manages to pack a LOT into this essay, blending STEM and the Arts remarkably, hence my 3/5 difficulty rating; even though everyone should read this essay, some aspect of this analysis will almost certainly be outside of your usual. Butler covers epigenetics, migration policy, tribalism, reproduction, and the family to present an account for how society and science blend natural and cultural processes in its heteronormative structuring of relationships.
Essay 5) Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
For: anyone gay; English, sociology, philosophy — or any Arts students
Difficulty: 4 / 5 stars (12 pages)
Topics: Phenomenology; bodies; theatre; gender; identity; performance; speech acts; gay shit
Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. (p 527)
I’m leaving the most challenging, but most rewarding for last: where it all started (at least, the gender theory). It’s here that Butler first introduces their theory of gender performativity. This piece is technical, but not particularly challenging – I read it in Year 10 without any background in philosophy; for me, my curiosity about much-asked questions (Why are you gay? What makes you gay? Are you a guy or a girl?) were plenty to pique my interest.
If you want to really, really understand every question you’ve probably asked yourself from an early age about your gender and our gendered world, these 12 pages are scripture. Although written in 1988, Butler presents a cogent explanation of many historical and current phenomena, and how male and female are unstable, shifting, and largely discursively established categories: how can “man” include Louis XIV’s silk stockings and Andrew Tate’s extra-tight V-neck shirts? How can “woman” both presume and chastise sexuality?
The danger of Butler’s work, its thrill, resides within these 12 pages…exemplifying knowledge’s power to challenge power itself.

Jaden Ogwayo
“Babe, we have to hang out!”: Sedating loneliness with an Instagram comment
October 17, 2024 1:13 pm Comments Off on “Babe, we have to hang out!”: Sedating loneliness with an Instagram comment
When I reflect on the dizzying fact that it’s been two years since graduating high school, off the back of a bizarre late adolescent experience, floating in 5km bubbles of government-permitted social engagement and filtering my life through a cycle of apps to make my tortured seventeen-year-old existence look like a dream, I have to wonder: how well do I know the people I graduated with? Are we friends? Would I call them my friend, but would they then smile awkwardly at the proposition?
Does an Instagram comment make someone my friend?
The results are in: we’re the loneliest age group in Australia. According to the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Report, 24.8% of Australians aged 15–24 ‘often feel very lonely’. This statistic rose steadily in the twenty years between 2001 and 2021 from 18.5% (some of the lowest rates of loneliness of any age group) to almost 25% (the very highest rates among all age groups).
A spike in strong responses in 2020 shows us that the pandemic was not guiltless in this rise, and rightly so. We’re now left with a generation of 15 to 24-year-olds who spent their most formative years reliant on digitised relationships to maintain a sense of connection. As much as it sounds like a jab delivered down the nose of a disgruntled grandparent at family Christmas, it’s our reality.
It’s easy to turn to the most apparent cause of this resounding sentiment of loneliness to explain the phenomenon. Many teenagers, particularly in metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney, spent days on end seeing only the faces of their family and neighbours, hearing their friends’ voices only through FaceTime or grainy, mid-Among Us game Discord conversations (the darkest of dark times). Physical isolation is obviously conducive to immense loneliness, only worsened by the fatigue inherent to the need to make a consistent effort to connect when natural, passive connection is taken away. Already, today’s Australian twenty-something-year-olds have developed a perception of their own connectedness and loneliness — that they are perpetually connected, and immune to isolation — completely distinct from that of our predecessors.
But there’s an underappreciated phenomenon that permeates our social lives, and one which throws our certainty in our connectedness to others into limbo: the ‘D tier’ friendship, the serial commenter yet frequent brush-paster in the street, the capitalised text conversationalist yet quietly awkward in-person small-talker. The digitisation of our relationships has created a new force of loneliness: a false sense of closeness with those whose lives we observe online.
Our reliance on social media is both beautiful and disastrous. I cherish that a confessional second-account story post allows me access to the most complex inner thoughts of someone I talked to in one food tech practical in Year 9 and never spoke to again. I cherish that they likely have the most elementary knowledge of not only my life but, quite frankly, who on Earth I am at all. I cherish that I have never once had to wonder what almost every person I shared my high school graduation with is up to these days, because their beautifully curated spring photo dumps have comprehensively informed me of their new smoking habit, their well-highlighted hair, their somehow-prevailing friendship with the girl they claimed to despise at 13, and their proudly boasted techno expertise. I know what they’re doing. They know what I’m doing. We know each other, quite surely.
But upon recent trips home and circumstantial run-ins with high school semi-friends, I’ve become less sure. I haven’t spoken to them for two whole years, and upon bumping into them, have had very little beyond pleasantries to discuss. I’m not even sure what degree they do, or whether they study at all. I walk away with the humbling realisation that they might just be more than their highlights, hair-related or otherwise, and we might, in fact, no longer be friends. And for a moment, I feel lonely: how many of the people I remember as friends are actually strangers, whose Instagram stories just flash over my screen?
It is this illusion of closeness we gain from our almost-parasocial ties to old acquaintances that makes pangs of loneliness sting all the harsher. We have collectively constructed a culture where our connections are governed by brief online interactions — over-enthusiastic comments left on an artfully angled selfie in a Macbook photobooth tab, floating red hearts deposited into the like bank of a carousel post of cocktails — and for as long as they continue, how could we ever be lonely? When hundreds of people watch your life unfold, how could you possibly claim to be alone? But when these grounding interactions with the people I so confidently and dismissively label friends strike fear into my heart that perhaps having an active audience doesn’t make one connected, I unbalance, and fall unceremoniously off my (Instagrammable) high horse into a state of miserable, albeit dramatised, solitude.
There are then two ways for a young person with social media presence to be lonely. Conventional loneliness will never disappear; humans are fated to feel isolated, misunderstood, or alone, despite being surrounded by people, at some point or another. The difference for our generation, however, is that we have unfettered access to a fast-release sedative to this type of isolation, which we can tap into at leisure: online validation!
Feeling miserable at the state of your friendships or popularity? Post about it! Scroll your tagged posts! Check that you do indeed consistently get more birthday messages on your Facebook timeline each year, even though that’s the most archaic and meaningless possible way to be wished happy birthday!
The comedown from the high of this digital reassurance, however, is where this secondary loneliness lies. By plugging into easy-access ‘connection’, exempting ourselves from the reflection and humility that comes with a bit of good old-fashioned loneliness, we stand to suffer much more from the wearing-off of what has become our favourite drug. In those moments when we realise that knowing what someone is doing does not give us insight into who they are, we learn that the isolation cure we’ve created not only fails but creates a new problem: the illusion that our connections are sounder than they are, and therefore that they don’t require maintenance. By letting friendships lie in empty promises of drinks in TikTok comments, we risk losing sight of the need to make good on intentions to make them worthwhile. We are lonelier for our blindness to the falsehood of Instagram friendship, and we’ll only continue to become more so in growing up, and apart, and realising that the immediate proximity and ease of connection that high school gifted us cannot be replaced by perfunctory online interactions.
Loneliness and social media go hand in hand to make the inherent uncertainty of being in your early twenties all the more complicated, obscuring reality with illusions of prevailing friendships from our early teens and ever-close friend groups with everything in common. When ruined, these illusions leave us vulnerable to a deeper sense of aloneness — one which can be rectified not through yet another online broadcast, but only through making good on all those hang-out-next-time-you’re-in-town messages.
As much as my grandparents like to tell me that we’ve lost touch with real human connection, we haven’t. We’ve made unfathomably good use of an unimaginable tool of connection, and even if we may lose sight of the forest for the trees of this connection by prioritising conceptual connection over reality, we can be empowered by social media to create and maintain friendships in real, tangible ways.
Text your high school friends and tell them you’d like to hang out. Comment on your distant mutual friends’ thirst trap that you’d like to hang out. Reply to your ex-best-friend’s story while drunk, tell them you miss them, and you’d like to hang out. And then hang out. The internet is always a lonely place, but the real world certainly isn’t.

Greta Clark-Walsh
On Thin Portraits and the Incurable Brilliance of Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Life and Masterpiece, ‘Save Me the Waltz’
March 13, 2023 1:45 pm Comments Off on On Thin Portraits and the Incurable Brilliance of Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Life and Masterpiece, ‘Save Me the Waltz’
“Nobody has measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz

There are exactly two things that I know for certain:
The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.
Zelda’s first and only novel Save Me the Waltz (1932) is semi-autobiographical and, like Scott’s later Tender is the Night, predominantly written about the period during the 1920s which the Fitzgeralds and their contemporaries spent in Paris. It is the lesser-known of the pair, but certainly not the less valuable for it. The novel was written by Zelda in a creative fervour of six weeks while institutionalised for schizophrenia (whether or not she actually suffered with schizophrenia is debated—her “breakdowns” are often attributed to bipolar disorder, or alternatively depression or anxiety). When Scott initially discovered its existence, he was furious; his letters, notably to friends including Ernest Hemingway, and industry figures such as editor Max Perkins, disclose his anger at her depiction of him. In a letter with Zelda’s psychiatrist, he wrote:

“My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.”  –Scott, in a letter to Zelda’s psychiatrist
Originally written, to quote Scott, as a “thin portrait” of their marriage and their characters, in Zelda’s early drafts she went to the lengths of naming the love interest “Amory Blaine” after Scott’s autobiographical protagonist in This Side of Paradise. Afraid that the book would damage his reputation, and angry that she had chosen to write based on the same period of their lives as his then-unfinished Tender is the Night, he convinced her to rewrite it. Eventually, he helped her to edit and publish the novel, and praised its quality. But not before she had made significant changes, which she didn’t appear to resent, and on which we can only trust her judgement as the competent and intelligent writer she has painstakingly proven herself to be.
Save Me the Waltz offers, for the first time, some real insight into the glamorous and turbulent marriage of the Fitzgeralds, as well as Zelda’s thoughts, feelings, and character, beyond what is shown to us in Scott’s work. The female love interests throughout his fiction are, by his own confession, thin portraits of her, his muse. On their marriage, he told a reporter, “I married the heroine of my stories.” At times, he lifted entire passages from her diaries and letters, which Zelda playfully notes in her review of The Beautiful and Damned.

“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that’s how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” –Zelda Fitzgerald, in The New York Tribune
Zelda Fitzgerald has been often viewed as “the original flapper,” “jazz baby,” “wild child.” Rarely “writer,” “artist,” “dancer.” In marrying Scott, she “unknowingly sealed her fate as a symbolic being…as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control” (Lawson, 2015).
Scott opposed most of Zelda’s creative endeavours; he discouraged her work in ballet, and actively tried to prevent the publishing of her book in its early stages. In Save Me the Waltz, protagonist Alabama Beggs’ husband (David Knight) openly disapproves of her dancing, probably reflective of the author’s own situation. David is a successful painter—thinly replacing Scott’s writing—and refuses to acknowledge Alabama as an artist equal to himself. I don’t believe or mean to suggest that Scott was fundamentally a bad person, or a woman-hater. But he was a romantic, an idealist, and he was validated by the standards of the time in his expectation of a romantic relationship with the dynamic of female muse for the male artist—a tale as old as time, an idea which hasn’t been disrupted or challenged until comparatively recently. He built up an expectation which she fulfilled—friends noted how he would hang on her words, scribble down her comments at parties. She was the heroine of his stories, and things were good, so long as she could be reduced to something two-dimensional, and could be distilled into beautiful words and pressed onto white pages.
But then there was the problem of her incurable brilliance, her capacity as expansive as his for creation. In fact, she excelled in ballet and painting and writing. When she wanted to create, she became something more than the heroine of his stories, rejecting the expectations he had so fancifully set. And this, I think, is where their problems began—assisted, of course, by the excessive drinking, affairs, and inadequate mental health care courtesy of the time.
The overwhelming majority of the—sorely limited—critical attention Save Me the Waltz received on and since its publication has been negative; in the preface of the second edition of Save Me the Waltz, Zelda’s writing ability is called merely “surface level,” (Moore, 1966) repeating the oft-cited criticism of her unusual use of language.
But it is her fantastically imaginative language that makes her writing so wildly unique, so fantastically appealing.

“The rain spun and twisted the light of their third wedding anniversary to thin prismatic streams; alto rain, soprano rain, rain for Englishmen and farmers, rubber rain, metal rain, crystal rain.”
Especially towards the beginning of the novel, she writes to disorientate—metaphors composed of borderline-nonsense; surrealist imagery; wacky, Zelda-devised turns of phrase to make your head spin. And it is truly, utterly captivating.
Caught inside Zelda’s words are feelings of bewilderment, joy, fractured relationships, obsession, hedonism, and beneath it all, a fight for a sense of self. Her style, regularly criticised as unpolished, simultaneously confronts the reader with the glamorous, playful ‘Jazz Age’ and its contorted underbelly of subtle misogyny and the imbalanced perception of one’s own identity.

“He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head.”

“She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was grey and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum. There was not a growth nor a flowery substance to break those smooth convolutions, just the puffy rise of sleek gray matter. ‘I’ve got to see the front lines,” Alabama said to herself. The lumpy mounds rose wet above her head and she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on and finally reached the medulla oblongata. Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.”

“Outside the wide doors of the country club they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the jibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow like people making an imprint for a cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that varnished the land like a honey-coating and David swore and cursed the collars of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. They broke the beat of the universe to measures of their own conceptions and mesmerised themselves with its precious thumping.”

Perhaps even more remarkable than the stylistic depth and character of Zelda’s writing is the means by which she presents the feminine search for self within the early 20th century. Throughout Save Me the Waltz, Zelda uses mirrors as tools for the female pursuit of creative, intellectual, and emotional identity, in a blink-and-you-miss-it subversion of what may be considered the traditional notion of mirrors as tools for female vanity.
Zelda conveys the intrinsic dislocated sense of identity within her protagonist from an early age through mirrors and reflections, introducing the idea towards the beginning of the novel.
“She ran her fingers tentatively through her breast pocket, staring pessimistically at her reflection. ‘The feet look as if they were somebody else’s,’ she said. ‘But maybe it’ll be all right.’”
To David’s displeasure, Alabama takes up ballet during her late twenties, where she dances incessantly in a room filled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Zelda thus skillfully entwines Alabama’s near unhealthy compulsion to dance with her unyielding search for identity. It grows into an obsession; a relentless cycle of eating, sleeping, and breathing ballet, despite—or perhaps in part driven by—her husband’s criticism. Alabama’s disjointed sense of self is once again presented in a separation from the psychological and the physical, the mirror and the mind in conflict.
“…she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession.”
However, before there was ballet, there was David, and Alabama initially sought to find herself in him; she feels that being with him is like “gazing into her own eyes”. But this perception of him becomes “distorted,” having warped her own view of him in a fervent attempt to find meaning within herself.
“So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes.”
David, however, only looks in a mirror once in the entire novel, in stark contrast with Alabama’s dozens of times, and it culminates in his being “pleased to find himself complete.” Complete. Assured of his identity, recognised as an artist, an individual, certain of his place in the world.

“He verified himself in the mirror…as if he had taken inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.”
For me, Save Me the Waltz is both joy and melancholy. I wonder if Alabama—which is to say Zelda Fitzgerald herself—ever found what she was looking for. I wonder if, after all the parties and all the laughter, and the breakdowns and the fame and the starlit revelry, she found something that fulfilled her. I hope in her painting, and her dancing, and her writing, she came to some understanding within herself about her world, and her place in it—an understanding that I also hope brought her security and strength of identity.
And so, I’ll leave you with one final urge to pick up the magnum opus of Zelda Fitzgerald (writer, artist, dancer).

Love,
Caelan xxx
Lawson, Ashley. “The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 76–109.
Moore, H,T. 1966, Preface in: Fitzgerald, Z. Save Me the Last Dance.

There are exactly two things that I know for certain: The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.

Caelan Doel
The Jacaranda and the Jar
November 12, 2022 1:03 pm Comments Off on The Jacaranda and the Jar
All that was left was me and the jar of biccies. In the space of silence, there is so much that a food-stained late primary-schooler could hear. After Dad’s assistant, who had entertained me by asking about the square roots and divisions that I had recently discovered, left to do some copying, all sense of movement drifted out the room with her. The tick-tock of the clock bearing from the wall rang through my chest like a dry church bell; always reaching the next tock a moment after I had expected it, yet always jolting. This was the year before I got my first phone. There was no easy distraction. I had already scoured Dad’s bookshelf of faceless leather-bound books so I decided to rest my head in my chubby hands and look out towards the blooming jacaranda tree. Years later, my incoming high-school principal would tell me that the jacaranda represents the time in the Sydney University semester when it is too late to start studying and still expect to pass final exams. I am grateful those trees didn’t follow me to Canberra.

Dad’s assistant had told me earlier that I could have as many biccies from the jar as I very well pleased. I don’t want to romanticise these biccies. It was a jar of ANZACs and shortbreads – a far cry from the velvety chocolate of Tim Tams and Mint Slices that my tweenage heart desired. I thanked her enthusiastically regardless, and ate my first ANZAC with the gusto of a drunken midnight kebab. Satisfied after my first biccie, I looked further into the room for any chance of entertainment. The computer on the mahogany desk was not to be touched. My primary school didn’t give out homework, so there was no work to be done. I didn’t know how long Dad would be in his meeting – any given meeting could be either a 15 minute coffee catch up with a thesis student or a great diplomacy match with an egotistical, self-interested, stubborn academic over a fruitless matter. Every boom from the clock was a reminder that I did not know which one it would be, and patience is not a virtue learned by many eleven-year-olds.

Patience is a skill like meditation; our digital attention spans are a barrier in our minds to accepting the exercise. Yet, with diligent practice, you begin to enjoy its splendours. At this stage my patience was as unpractised as the clarinet of a child forced into their school band. It didn’t take long at all for that second biccie to fall. It felt very mechanical: I saw the jar, I felt the desire to devour its contents, I tussled in my head for a respectable amount of time, and I ate my next biccie. Anyone who’s ever thought about not scratching an insatiable itch or ruminating on the difficulty of a workout will know that given any negative or positive attention, the itch will be scratched and the workout will end. And, I ate the biccie. Now I was faced with a choice. Indulge in the pretence of patience displayed in my effort, or take this game of temptation seriously. I watched the long flat arm orbit around the centre of the clock through the slowest minute I had ever bothered counting. Neither the laughs and chatter of the Uni students on the tennis courts outside the window nor the typical buzz and business of the office machinery impeached on the tick-tock of that clock during the minute. Neither shadow, shade or hue sparkled or danced across the bookshelf on this gloomy afternoon. I chose to stare at the jar.

That glass jar stood on the coffee table like a piece of iconography on an altar. The fatigue (temptation) would slowly build before collapsing into a state of alertness – a state of normal mind. Yet you know the damage is done. Those waves of temptation rolled over me as the office began to form its own physics of inertia. When I did finally eat my third biccie it was not out of involuntary compulsions like the previous ones, but rather out of a curiosity to see if I was able to resist a second time. The big hand made a few orbits and just when I had forgotten the original reason for my being in the office, my Dad gushed into the room with the vivaciousness of someone whose life was a windmill of moving parts. I bounced like I had been caught stealing from his wallet. Dad apologised for how long he had taken, popped on his jacket and gathered his belongings into an adult leather bag. He asked me what I had been up to considering his assistant was gone and the evident lack of any stimulation for a child’s mind in the room of a Professor’s office. I shrugged and mentioned something about the biccies. No, I wasn’t bored, I insisted, I lied. Would you like a biccie for the trip home, he asked me. I’m okay, I replied.
We had Tim Tams at home anyway.

Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.

Will Salkeld
A Weaving Mind
12:49 pm Comments Off on A Weaving Mind
It’s a bright day, warm and lazy. The kind where you might describe a nectar-gorged bee zig-zagging towards the hive in the park, though there aren’t many this year. Grandmother always kept a beautiful garden, and it’s taking full advantage of the sun this year. Brilliant colours line the flower beds. Lavender, rose, orchid, chrysanthemum, daffodil, and more sprout and bloom.

Boy walks along the path up to the house. It’s distinctive, awash with colour in an insipid street, in a neighbourhood full of yuppies and middle-aged couples one bad day away from a mid-life crisis, the threads of their lives unravelling before them. The path up to Grandmother’s house is red brick and curls up the lawn to the porch. The door is black and an old brass knocker in the shape of a fish is set into it. The curtains are open, in the room to the left of the door. Boy knocks on the door, and presently a pottering along the hallway on the other side is audible.

“Who is it?”
“It’s ______!”
“Oh! Your mother said you were coming!”
The door swings open, and Grandmother wears a light shirt and some simple trousers, looking as if ready to go to the garden.
“Come in, come in! I’ll put some tea on!” Grandmother’s voice is already trailing away as Boy enters the house and moves to the lounge room, sitting on a floral-patterned chair, with a small cushion.

“It’s so good to see you again! It’s been such a while! Most of the time it’s just me running myself around here.” Grandmother places down a small china tea set, and a plate with biscuits.
“Yeah … Sorry I haven’t come out to see you more often. Did Mother tell you why I came to see you?”
“When ______ called me? She said something about some sort of school project.” Clearly in Grandmother’s eyes could be seen the glint of curiosity.
“Well, we have to interview our grandparents about something. Kinda like chronicling the past, or what life used to be.” Boy paused. “And I think it would be good to do it now, before …” trailing off. Grandmother makes no indication of having heard this comment.
“Well then. Did you have any questions in mind? Or were you just planning to ask this on the fly?” Grandmother chuckled. “I’ve got a lot I can tell you.”
“Pick a favourite for me. An all-timer.” Boy set down a small tape recorder.

It was the middle of winter, before ______ met me, before I moved here. In that time, if you were lucky, it would snow, but more often we got these bitingly cold winds, sleet and hail and rain. You’d slide across the road in the car and fall flat on your a-, A pause. -butt, walking back from the shops. I remember one time I’d been sent by my own mother to get lard and soap, and I came home soaking wet after tripping and falling straight into a puddle on the way back. Anyway, that’s how it was then – I could give you a million more examples.

On one of these days, some friends of mine from back then, friends from high school, though of course then it was the done thing to leave high school early, so we couldn’t have been older than ______ is now. They’d wanted to see something new at the pictures … I can’t for the life of me remember what exactly it was called now, something scary, though. So, we’d gone in, me and a few girlfriends and maybe a boy or two … my memory is lacking there. A laugh. Anyway, the movie, it started off in this old house, derelict, you get the picture. These teenagers had broken in there, heard it was the local haunt of a ghost, and at first they hadn’t heard anything. There were a few fake scares – like the teens scaring each other or playing around with something in the séance. But, later on, things started to happen that they couldn’t shrug off anymore – it started with things seeming to move, or scraping noises from below … Hm? Oh, don’t worry, I’m going somewhere. I’m just trying to set a- a mood. Another laugh.

Anyway, this wasn’t a big budget movie, so it looked corny sometimes. It was still creepy, definitely, but it- it was pretty funny in some parts, to be honest. At this point, too, we’d still not seen … whatever it was, that was terrorising these kids. It was just noises and shadows and flashes. So, about halfway through, we were following one of the kids, they’d been separated from the group, and the house seemed to twist and turn and morph around them while they tried to navigate …

And then sitting in the cinema, we just heard this … low, rolling boooooooom. It’s so hard to describe the sound. It went through your body and out the other side and kept going. The building shook where it stood. At this point … we’d all forgotten about the movie in an instant. The theatre was … was nearly full, and there was a mad dash to get out the door, get outside, see what happened.
And outside, there was a billowing pillar of smoke rising into the sky, and a lurid orange and red glow, mixing with the sunset sky. Grey smoke was twisting up and mixing with the white clouds. You could start to hear sirens now, and some of my friends had already hopped in their car, to get a better look and …

I had stood outside the cinema, fixated on the smoke and fire, and some of my friends had also stayed … And then after a while, I don’t know how long we heard – didn’t see –

Grandmother stopped here.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes … yes, but, I think I will have to finish this one another time.”
The tape recorder clicks off.

Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 2 ‘To Be Confirmed’
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.

Ridley Smith