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Rabelais acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land upon which we produce this magazine. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and acknowledge their ongoing connection to Country, culture, and community. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY 2
CONTENTS 04 06 In Focus From the editors The Road & The Research 09 10 Say It Loud! 12 22 The Girl Who Knocked Twice 15 16 18 20 The World as We’re Writing The Golden Blur Movies to Watch This Winter The Glutton, The Werewolf Untitled 3
Hello!! Reader I hope you have been well. I am so excited for you to read this second edition of Rabelais! It’s amazing to see so many students getting creative with their work. While I am very happy that now Rabelais will be more accessible than ever before.. it’s now located in the library foyer. Grab a physical copy if you’re reading it digitally now. I love reading the submissions sent through so please keep filling our inboxes as we are always open to new and different forms of work! See you soon. Josh FROM THE EDITORS 4
Hey! Welcome to our second issue for the year - we hope you’ve been keeping warm as Australia simultaneously burns (metaphorically) and freezes over (hyperbolically). Thank you as always to our wonderful contributors, without whom this publication would be nothing short of a student union ad (no shade, just the truth!). We love you endlessly, even though our email response time might not show it. Let’s face it - Josh and I have inherited a magazine that has been relatively dormant over the last few years. If you had asked the average La Trobian what “Rabelais” was, they might have expected you to produce a map and point to a small island nation in the Pacific (and they may still!). I’m incredibly proud of the number of people Rabelais has been able to reach this year alone, and I’m positive there’s a huge amount of room for it to grow over the next months. So what’s next? Well, it’s as much up to us as it is to you. Please keep sending us shit, even if it is shit – I distinctly recall the “privilege calculator” from a much older edition, which hardly held up at the time and would certainly get somebody cancelled today*. Rabelais began as a weekly newspaper with very limited resources and a group of students passionate about university politics, student rights and a disdain for the overly polished. Obviously, it takes a very different form today, but the commitment to student voice, art and achievement is still what we stand for. Tell your friends, especially if you think they have something to say. Did you know we can take submissions from students not at La Trobe? Neither did we, but nobody’s stopped us yet. Yes, we will get around to the website eventually. Tom *That said, I will volunteer as tribute if you want to see it – let us know at contact@rabelais. com.au! It can be some kind of Rabelais throwback. 5
LESSONS FROM MY FIRST MONTH AT LA TROBE BY BINAYA KANDEL Every Hindu child grows up with the story of Arjun and the fish. Dronacharya lines up his students, points at the wooden fish rotating above the water, and asks each one what they see. One sees the tree. Another sees the sky. Someone sees the fish, the branch, the reflection below. When it is Arjun's turn, he says he sees nothing but the eye. Just the eye. Everything else has dissolved. That is why the arrow finds its mark. I kept coming back to that image during my first month in Melbourne. Not because I had Arjun's clarity. But because I was standing there with the bow, the fish was somewhere up there, and I genuinely could not tell you where. I came to Melbourne with my wife, my daughter, six overpacked suitcases, and what I can only describe as a very optimistic idea of how quickly things would come together. La Trobe had accepted me for a PhD. That was the dream, the plan, the thing I had worked toward. What I had not fully reckoned with was everything that surrounds a PhD when you are also simultaneously trying to figure out which bin to put out on which day, how to open a bank account, where the nearest grocery store is, and how to make your daughter feel at home in a school where she does not yet know a single face. The PhD was the arrow. But the world around it was a lot of noise. A few weeks after arriving, my supervisor mentioned almost in passing that she was selling her Mercedes-Benz C200 and offered to use until I settle or get another car. I said yes immediately, and I am glad I did. In Nepal, you do not need a car the way you need one here. The kirana pasal is down the road. The school is nearby. If you need something, the neighbourhood provides it, or few strides will get you there. Melbourne does not work that way. Here, you drive to the grocery store, you drive your daughter to school, you drive to the university, you drive to everything. The car was not a comfort. It was infrastructure. Without it, the basic logistics of our family’s daily life would have taken months to sort out. The school run alone, getting my daughter dropped off in the morning and picked up in the afternoon, became one of those small but anchoring routines that held our days together when most else was still uncertain. I called it a fortune above coincidence. Because it was. Not just a car. A foundation under a family still finding its footing. Now, here is the part I do not tell people at parties. My first week with the car, I had a collision. Not on a busy road. Not navigating some complicated Melbourne intersection. On the driveway of my own residence. The car was barely moving. The damage was small. But I sat there for a long moment afterwards feeling every bit of it, because there is something specifically humbling about being a person who has driven through the roads of Nepal, the chaos, the narrow lanes, the constant negotiation of space, and then misjudging a stationary driveway in suburban Melbourne. The Crash Nobody Tells You About A New City, A New Life, A New Everything The Mercedes That Came at Exactly the Right Time THE ROAD AND THE RESEARCH 6
That moment was, I later came to understand, a fairly accurate preview of the months ahead. The skills you bring with you are real. The experience is genuine. But competence built in one context does not simply transfer to another. In a new place, you begin again carefully, humbly and sometimes at very low speed, on a very short driveway. The first week at La Trobe hit me the same way. There was the orientation week, which was not so much an orientation as a sustained avalanche of things to know. HDR requirements, the GRS portal, LMS logins. Each one assuming I already knew the previous one. By the end of each day, I felt less informed than when I started, which is a strange thing to feel during orientation. Like a cup held under a tap. At a certain point, everything just runs over the sides. Driving in Melbourne produced the same sensation. I had driven for years, but Melbourne driving is a different discipline entirely. Strict lane rules, hook turns in the city that defy every instinct, trams that require you to stop completely and wait while passengers walk directly into the road, speed limits that change every few hundred metres and mean it. In Nepal, you drive with a kind of real-time negotiation. You read the road, you make space, you respond. It is almost conversational. In Melbourne, the road is a legal document. Every deviation has a consequence. And then there was the GPS, something that simply does not exist as a concept in Nepali driving culture. Back home, you navigate by landmarks, by memory, by asking someone. Here I was completely dependent on a voice coming from my phone, recalculating every time I missed a turn, unable to deviate, unable to ask anyone. The city had to be downloaded before it could be lived in. On the days I took public transport, Melbourne revealed a different kind of logic and, honestly, a different kind of lesson. The tram is slow and steady, winding through the inner suburbs like it has nowhere urgent to be. The train cuts further, connecting parts of the city that feel entirely separate worlds. The bus reaches the corners the others do not. Each has its own rhythm, its own timing, its own unspoken rules about where you stand, when you move, whether you make eye contact. What I noticed, riding these routes, was how much they mirrored the research process itself. There is never just one path to where you are going. Some routes are faster but ask more of you, more transfers, more attention, more tolerance for uncertainty. Some are slower but clearer. Some days you board the wrong line entirely and must get off, cross the platform, and start again. But the network will get you there, provided you know where “there” is. When the Information Becomes a Flood Many Roads, One Destination 7
Beyond the systems and the roads and the rules, there is something harder to name. The culture underneath all of it. The way things are done here, which nobody explains because everyone around you already knows it. At La Trobe, I found myself rereading emails to my supervisor three times before sending them. In Nepal, a professor is Sir or Ma’am, always. The relationship carries a weight of respect that shapes every interaction, every question, every piece of written communication. Here, my supervisor was on a first-name basis from day one. Students in seminars challenged ideas directly, confidently, without any of the careful framing I was accustomed to. Intellectual pushback was not considered impolite. It was considered engagement. That shift, small on the surface and significant underneath, took real time to adjust to. My daughter was doing her own version of this, in her classroom, every single day. New country, new school, new friends, new everything. The daily drive to drop her off and pick her up, which had initially felt like one more unfamiliar routine to absorb, became over time the most grounding part of our day. A fixed point in a schedule that was still finding its shape. I want to say something directly to any Nepali graduate reading this who is about to begin, or who is in the middle of that first overwhelming month. The feeling that everything is too much is not a sign that you made the wrong choice. It is a sign that you are in a place that is genuinely larger than where you started. That is the whole point. You did not leave Nepal and travel this far to stay the same size. The first month of a PhD is not a week that resolves into clarity. It is more like the beginning of a long drive on an unfamiliar road. You do not know all the turns yet, the signs do not all make sense yet, and you will almost certainly take a wrong exit at some point. What matters is that you know where you are going. Not the route. The destination. Keep that clear. The rest is navigation. Your “why” has to be that clear. The reason you left, the reason you chose research, the reason you are sitting in a university library in a city that is still becoming yours. That reason must stay visible to you even when everything else is fog. The journey will humble you. It will surprise you and detour you and occasionally knock you sideways on the driveway. But if the destination stays in focus, the arrow will fly. It always does. For every International student who packed their ambition into suitcases and boarded a flight toward something larger than themselves, this one is for you. Learning the Culture Nobody Wrote Down THE ROAD AND THE RESEARCH BY BINAYA KANDEL The Overwhelm is not the Problem 8
IN FOCUS BY IMOGEN MCMAUGH 9
SAY IT LOUD! WE SPEAK TO GUMBOOT THEATRE COMPANY ABOUT THEIR RECENT SHOW BY THE TITLE ‘CONFESSIONAL’ Tom: You guys are in the same space as Articulate and it’s really a typically small space. Throughout the show, we see you making use of, for example, the door or the entryway - people burst through. I’m really curious about what that was like in rehearsals. How did you make creative use of the space? What decisions did you have to make, when you were confronted with a smaller space like that? What changed about the show in this venue? Alice: We really try to play around with different ways of using the theatre. It’s written into the script that we’ve got a scene that happens from the audience… the show lends itself the opportunity to use the space in different ways. So that was a fun challenge with a venue that was changing a lot. I think we learnt pretty early that we have to, in this space, really acknowledge what the audience can see. There aren’t many backstage areas, and so we’ve had to acknowledge when the audience can see someone walking through a door, or someone standing in a corner. It’s not the most conventional theatre space, [but] I think we’ve risen to the challenge. Chloe: It was actually good as well because it really did allow us to have a completely new version of the play. That definitely helped me have a fresh set of eyes. Rossa: Because we didn’t get to see the venue ‘til quite late in the production, it meant that, in rehearsal, the main thing we were focusing on instead of blocking was intention and other great juicy acting bits. Josh: What were some of the challenges throughout this process? Lucy: I did the show in Perth last year and I found it hard bringing something new, especially since I’m the only person playing the same character for a second time… like, how do you make it entirely different and entirely new? It was helped a lot by [our] amazing cast and all of the scenes I was doing with new people – that automatically changes things. Yeah, not having my characterization be stale and like, “oh, this is just what I did last year.” Summer: I watched the rendition that happened in Perth and I loved it. And that meant I also had watched the character who I’m now playing in a different person’s portrayal. So when I began the process, I found myself often trying to repeat what they had done or make the same choices or similar choices as them. And it took me a couple of weeks to shed that external persona and try and find an identity within myself, within the character. I think there’s [also] something about having a show that has [a] live response… you can figure out what on a given day [a] certain group of people is reacting to. Tom: I have a question around the confessions themselves. Alice was working very hard before the show to find confessions from audience members, maybe people who weren’t even going to be in the audience. Do you ever have to vet the response? Have there ever been confessions where you’re a bit, like, “what is going on? What the hell?” Or do you ever have to give content warnings for the show? Alice: It’s tricky because the content of the show already tackles tricky topics. We’re working with religion in a very satirical sense. There are some confessions in the show that we acknowledge are actually really not that funny. The audience confessions - it’s really interesting because this is the first time we’ve done it twice in the show. In the original version of the show, we didn’t do it at all. And then in Perth, we picked three confessions per show… this time we’re picking six. When we’re selecting what goes in the show that night, we’re really thinking about tone. We work with confessions that are about grief, and confessions that are about religion… and some that are just really funny and light-hearted. When we’re selecting the six each night, we’re thinking about tone and we’re thinking about where they go in the show… like [having] a really sad 10
INTERVIEWEES: Alice – Lead Artist, Writer, Director Rossa – Actor (Kate, Sam), Set, Props Chloe – Actor (Hannah, Pip) Summer – Actor (Sister Catherine) Lucy – Actor (Madi) scene go straight into a really sad confession. The whole narrative of the show is about building community through confession. And so we want to keep the audience up where [we] can. That informs what we select. As for the confessions that are just in the show every single night, it’s probably worth acknowledging that for every iteration of the show, there have been different confessions each time. And that’s the actors that pick those confessions. We had sections that were great and worked awesome in Perth, and then this time they weren’t picked by the actors. That’s interesting as the writer because I’m like, “oh my god, but wait, that one’s so funny.” But then also, [the choice belonging to the actors] is really important. The heart of the show is the show belonging to everyone, and everybody feeling like it’s been crafted by all of us. It’s an ensemble effort because the whole show is about community. Rossa: With all of the confessions in the play, because they’re all verbatim, we also really try to honour that that’s someone’s real confession, someone’s real words. And yeah, some of them are crazy, some of them are really out there and wild, but that’s kind of the beauty of it. We’ve tried to be the opposite of judgmental about all those confessions because we all have crazy stories that we’re scared to admit to other people, you know, strange, juicy things. And what’s great is that a lot of audience members come up afterwards and go, “oh, wow, I’ve actually done something similar” or “I so relate to that confession”, and that’s kind of the exciting part of the show. Josh: What character did you relate to the most? Lucy: I’ve definitely been a Georgie at some point in my life. Maybe not quite to the extent that she goes to, but kind of feeling like, “oh, I think this guy really likes me.” And then at the end, you’re just like, “oh, I’m such an idiot.” Every time she says that line, it really gets me. I’m like, I have said those words before. And the lovely thing is that she’s got this wonderful friend to pick her up at the end of that. I also relate to having wonderful friends to pick me up at the end. Chloe: I actually am the same. It’s genuinely been an interesting experience, because in Perth I played Georgie, and at that point in my life it was genuinely a comfort to [realise] everyone’s a Georgie or everyone knows a Georgie. And now I’m playing Pip, her best friend, who owns her shit and who’s there for her friends. I’m really trying to enter that period of my life right now. Life imitates art, guys. I find a lot of myself in Georgie… but I think there’s also a lot of Pip in me as well. The play’s such a beautiful place for that because it really does mirror all the aspects of girlhood and who you can be… one day you might be 11
this person, one day you might be this person. I think the audience can always relate to a character in the show, no matter where they are in their life. Summer: Of the six [main] characters and then the four or five other[s], I’ve definitely had periods of probably everyone. I’ve definitely had a Georgie period, heavily. I’ve had periods where I’ve felt on top of the world – I’ve felt like Pip… owning my shit. I’ve had moments where I’m the nun, and I’m a little bit confused about what’s going on. And then I’ve also had moments where I’m probably a bit of a dick. I’m a bit Nathan-y. But I think I would like to relate to [Georgie] the most because even though she goes through a period of being naive to a person’s ulterior motives, she comes around and she does realise… that’s probably the most secular track in that sense. Rossa: There’s a great line in the play which isn’t actually a character, it’s a real-life verbatim text, which is, “what’s the furthest you’ve gone for a crush?” And they say, “literally whatever the other person wanted just to get them interested in me,” which is Chloe’s great line. I feel like we’ve all done that at some point. Tom: CONFESSIONAL touches on this concept of humanity being linked through a shared, cathartic experience, [with] people releasing experiences, shame, secrets. Where do these confessions come from and how do you think that contributes to a sense of confessions being intrinsical [sic] to the human experience? Alice: There were two things that really inspired us. There’s a thing called the Unsent Project, which is an archive online where you can look at notes people have written to other people and you can search it by name… you can see like 100 notes that are all addressed to you. I remember Primala brought something to the table called Post Secret, which is people writing secrets on ordinary household items like scrap paper/postcards, and it gets put online. We were like, how do we create something that allows people to be completely honest and vulnerable? And how do we make that in a theatre context? We made an online form - we were like, “please confess, it’s all going to be anonymous. We’re writing a show, what’s something that you’ve done?” I think everyone holds a lot of shame about things they’ve done. I also at the same time hear people saying no one’s ever had an original thought. That used to really terrify me as a theatre maker because I was like, “oh my god, I’ve got nothing to say that is unique and wholly individual.” But now I feel really liberated by that because I’m like, “oh my god, nothing is unique and individual.” Therefore, I can write whatever I want and someone will resonate with it. How cool is that? [The confessions] have come from everywhere. We’ve got some [from] when we were prepping for Comedy Festival, where we went, “hey, we want Melbourne confessions specifically.” As the writer of the show, I don’t feel like I can ever take credit because the text is not mine. It belongs to other people… at least 50 people… because the content is theirs and the confessions are theirs. It’s the actors because they selected the confessions. It feels like a show that’s been handed through so many people. Summer: There’s so much stuff I have done in my life where I look back and go, “oh my god, no one can ever know that. That goes to the grave with me.” When I watched the very first iteration of this show, I realized everyone is in the same boat. We all have something that we feel a bit dirty about. I think it’s really brave when we come out at the beginning and ask the audience members, “can you please tell us a confession?” Because I don’t know if I would be brave enough to give my darkest confession, but I do love hearing them. There have definitely been ones that have shocked me… but I’ve never gone about it with an air of judgment, because we are so grateful that someone is letting us use that material as a part of the show. Josh: Now that this is coming to an end, what’s the next project? Alice: It’s sad, right? We don’t know when, for the five of us, we’ll be working on something altogether next. And that’s part of the sad and wonderful things about theatre. This feels like a question for Penny, really, in terms of, like, Gumboot. Penny’s got fruitful plans for Gumboot. Do you have anything you want to plug Rossa? Rossa: Gumboot Theatre… definitely follow them on socials. Hashtag watch this space, hashtag more good things coming. They’ve already produced two great works - there will be many more so they’re a company to watch out for. SAY IT LOUD! 12
BY JADE BOLWELL Are you looking for the perfect film to inspire your winter vibes? Here are some movie recommendations based on the sort of winter you want to have! If you’re looking to drink too many chai lattes and snuggle up next to a rainy window, you should do so while watching one of these films! Are you not going to let the horrible weather ruin your photogenic outfits and nights out? Got a Pinterest board full of foggy city views with bleeding street lights? These films will put you right in the mood. There’s no shame in trying to convince yourself it’s still sunny and warm and not at all horrible, dreary weather… These films will take you out of the cold for a few hours! Are you dreaming of getting cozy next to a fire in a secluded cabin in the woods… Do you need a movie to bring the eerie atmosphere? If you’re back home for the break or just looking to relive when life was easier for a couple of hours, these film recommendations are for you! MOVIES TO WATCH THIS WINTER COZY WINTER ★ Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022). ★ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). ★ Climax (2018). ★ When Harry Met Sally (1989). ★ Paddington 2 (2017). ★ Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). ★ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). ★ In the Heights (2021). ★ The Parent Trap (1998). ★ The Shining (1980). ★ The Thing (1982). ★ Misery (1990). ★ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). ★ Mrs Doubtfire (1993). ★ Groundhog Day (1993). late-night city winter summer-isn’tover-yet winter spooky winter nostalgic winter 13
THE GIRL WHO KNOCKED TWICE BY HASSAAN KHURRAM A FICTIONAL SHORT STORY A stranger, a stolen charger, and a kitchen table that held it all together — the night before Semester 1 that nobody planned for. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a university residence hall in the days before semester begins – a tentative, almost hopeful quiet. Bags are still half-unpacked. Names are still being learned. And somewhere between the jet lag and the first grocery run, a floor full of strangers starts, slowly, to become something resembling a community. That was Tower 1 of Chisholm College in the final days of February 2025 – a little United Nations of students from Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Mauritius, all finding their feet in a warm Melbourne summer that was, mercifully, beginning to cool by nightfall. Semester 1 was set to begin on the 3rd of March. One more sleep. One more quiet night. As it turned out, that night would be anything but quiet. Two friends – let’s call them Hassaan and his flatmate – were winding down over dinner, the conversation easy and unhurried the way only latenight meals can be. Their third roommate, C, had joined them briefly with a drink, and somewhere between the plates being cleared and the idea of sleep, Hassaan mentioned something that had been nagging at him since the night before. “I saw one of the Residence Team standing outside C’s door at 1am. In the dark. Just… standing there.” He had been in the kitchen for a late-night snack when the figure appeared – a staff member, lurking in the shadow of the common area, asking, in a low voice, whether C was home. A friend of hers, apparently, was in the building and needed to be picked up. Hassaan had said he wasn’t sure, offered to pass the message on, and thought nothing more of it. Except that he never saw C the next day. And now, casually, he was bringing it up at dinner. C, it turned out, had heard every word. 14
She came into the kitchen looking flushed – out of breath, visibly anxious, as if she had been working up the nerve to walk through that door for some time. When they got her to sit down and slow down, the story she told was both completely mundane and quietly alarming. A few days prior, C had been at the reception paying her rent when she got talking to another girl – one we’ll call K. K explained that she had a booking at Chisholm, but the room wasn’t confirmed yet; accommodation was in that frustrating administrative limbo where the paperwork exists but the key does not. C, being C, felt for her. She was a woman, alone, with nowhere to go for the night. So C did what many of us like to think we would do: she brought K back to her room. At first, it was fine. They talked. They bonded. But over the course of the evening, something shifted – not dramatically, not in any single moment, but in the accumulation of small things. K never said thank you. Not for the room, not for the food C retrieved from the kitchen. And when C returned from one of those kitchen trips, she noticed something missing from her belongings – a charger, or something similar, quietly relocated into K’s bag. She let it go. Then she let it go again. Then she realised she wasn’t going to sleep with this person in her room. With quiet, impressive resourcefulness, C had manoeuvred K out of her room and into one of Chisholm’s common study rooms – a comfortable enough space, with sofas and air conditioning, where K could spend the night without the arrangement feeling cruel. Then C had slipped back to her room and gone very, very still. When Residence staff found K in the common room on their nightly safety round, and came to C’s door, C had simply not answered – not out of malice, but out of sheer, exhausted relief at having closed the chapter. Except the chapter wasn’t closed. Because while C had been telling this story – while the three of them sat in the kitchen processing it – K was, at that very moment, asleep in the room of another flatmate: M. M, another resident on the floor, had crossed paths with K after C’s discreet exit and, feeling the same pull of empathy that had gotten C into this situation in the first place, had offered K her room for the night. She meant well. She is that kind of person. The kitchen table went very quiet. “There’s a stranger in M’s room right now,” someone said. Nobody needed to say it again. They knocked on M’s door, gently, and got her to step out for a moment. M confirmed what they feared – yes, K was inside, apparently trying to sleep. And yes, M had started getting that same unsettled feeling C had described. Something just slightly off. A gratitude that wasn’t quite there. 15
What happened next is, in retrospect, exactly what should happen when a floor of strangersbecoming-friends is faced with something none of them signed up for. They didn’t panic. They didn’t gossip. They gathered. Hassaan, in his role as Residential Leader, called reception. Twenty minutes, they said. We’ll be there in twenty minutes. In those twenty minutes, the noise of the situation drifted through the floor in the way that noise always does in a residence hall – through thin walls and open doors and the particular acoustics of curiosity. One by one, other residents emerged, and one by one, they were quietly brought up to speed. By the time K was gently brought out of M’s room and into the kitchen, there was a small, unlikely gathering waiting for her: a floor’s worth of people who had known each other for barely a week, presenting a united front they hadn’t rehearsed. They offered her water. Hassaan put fruit on the table. They sat with her, asked about her situation, and listened – genuinely listened – because underneath the discomfort, the fact remained: K was a person who didn’t have a room. 1:00AM Residence team arrives and hears the full situation. A solution is sought. 1:30AM An unlikely room is found: Menzies Annexes – a space ordinarily reserved for visiting dignitaries. K is given access. 2:00AM K is escorted to her new, rather grand, temporary accommodation. The kitchen lets out a collective breath. 2:05AM K knocks on the door again. She has lost her phone The Residence team had, after thirty or forty minutes of coordination, come through. The room they found was, admittedly, a peculiar one – Menzies Annexes, a building ordinarily kept for the kind of visiting guests who arrive with entourages – empty, a little ghostly, but equipped and available. It wasn’t a dormitory. It was, by campus standards, closer to a VIP suite. K was escorted there as Tower 1 finally, genuinely exhaled. Hassaan started on the dishes. The kitchen was down to the original three again – the same three who had sat down to dinner what felt like an entire era ago. Goodnights were being said. Then came the knock. It was K. She had lost her phone. She was almost in tears. Let it be said that they were kind. They were tired – Semester 1 was six and a half hours away – but they were kind. They called her number. They retraced steps. Nothing turned up. Hassaan suggested she walk the route back to the Annexes; she might have dropped it somewhere along the path. And then, with all the grace they could muster at two in the morning before the first day of university, they said goodnight again, and this time it held. K found her phone. As it turned out, she eventually found her room too – she was placed in one of the towers near Chisholm not long after, her accommodation situation finally, properly resolved. And Tower 1? Tower 1 went to bed. Late, wrung out, a little wired from the adrenaline of it all – but somehow more itself than it had been at dinner. Because there is a particular kind of bond that forms not over shared meals or icebreaker games, but over the moments when something unexpected happens and you find out what the people around you actually do. That night, a floor full of strangers from half a dozen countries found out. They showed up. They made fruit plates. They stayed until it was resolved. Not bad for the night before Semester 1. THE GIRL WHO KNOCKED TWICE BY HASSAAN KHURRAM A FICTIONAL SHORT STORY 16
THE GOLDEN BLUR BY ANONYMOUS The swing of long bright blonde hair, like a golden flash of light. All I see is a blur, the door slams and she’s gone again. Darting between friends, instruments, school and the many facets of her life. A tornado that pulls everything and everyone into her Eye. The golden blur of energy are bursts, Witty and Witless, Smart and Sardonic, Merciless but Generous. She seems to play many parts and roles. Mostly she revels in playing the fool to make you seem foolish. but what she plays best is music! Unbounded in her affinity for it. The golden beams of light bouncing off her hair as she sits perched on stage with her guitar. It’s blinding, overpowering, It’s as impressive as it is frustrating. So much talent, it almost feels unfair. But that’s what it seems to me though. Talented but Immature, Brilliant but Lazy, Genius Limited. It tells you more about me than it does about her. What I’ve deemed of her ability and effort. In this piece I tell you what she is, or at least give an impression of her. Really, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. What are the many ways that her nuance escapes my understanding? How can I actually capture Her depth? I can describe the small box I have created for Her, defined with cliches and tropes, but you would know Her better if I hadn’t said anything at all. My young sister’s life is a labyrinth which I cannot fully understand. She’s a blur, I can’t keep up with. She seemingly never stops, And exists in a different world from me, of people I don’t really understand, and actions I wouldn’t necessarily take. But it doesn’t mean She’s wrong. My job is to convey to You, as much as I try to convey to Me, that She isn’t wrong. She’s just herself. Even though She is a blur, which I can hardly see. 17
I hiccup. I’m laying horizontal and my head is hanging off the side of my bed – my whole apartment is upside down. There’s crumbs strewn across the floor and it looks as if they were stuck to the ceiling. Fuck. The hiccups smell like rice cakes, peanut butter, and vomit. My stomach hurts and I feel pathetic. I wonder why I keep doing this. It was one thing when I was sixteen, shoplifting snacks from Ritchies and hiding them in my room. You’re twenty, Jia. Get a hold of yourself. I bring myself to get up and accept reality. I look at myself in the mirror and I look pregnant. My belly is round and taut, and I can picture a small, wet creature growing inside of me. I pull my shirt down and slide on my University hoodie. It’s only april and I hate to be a walking advertisement, but I have a test for bio today and I can’t miss it but I can’t let anyone see me. On the tram I try to listen to music but I really don’t feel like it. Instead I start writing a story in my head about this kid named Marco, who is secretly a werewolf. He discovered this in primary school, when he started waking up in the mornings covered in blood. He’d wash the stains off before his parents got up, desperate not to let them know about it. He’s in eleventh grade now, and- I’m interrupted by a text: Mum: Heard you have test today. We are thinking of you. Amelie and Vishal are already at the exam venue and are waiting outside. Amelie: what is up??? Me: I am so fucking tired. Amelie: sameee i have like no energy Vishal: Me when- me when my mitochondria aren’t producing enough ATP? :) Amelie: oh my god. thats not even a good one. dude The two continue revising Vishal’s flash cards and I just lean against a desk and stare at the wall. I wrap my arms around my belly. I try to breathe, only to hiccup again. I squeeze my eyes tight and wish in this moment I didn’t exist. Marco has an idea. While on his way home to school, he buys some zip ties and his plan is to handcuff himself to his bed frame. That way he won’t get out and hurt anyone. It’s uncomfortable for sure, but he eventually falls asleep, for once not dreading the prospect of waking up. The next morning, the zip ties are broken and he’s covered in blood. Get a hold of yourself. I’m stuck on this MCQ about meiosis and I know I should know it. God, I’m pathetic. I remember the text from my mum and quietly wonder why I’m still doing this degree. Do I even want to go into medicine? I need to go into something. I need to do something with my life. Fuck. So now Marco is really bummed. He cleans up the sheets and goes to the bathroom to wash himself clean. He feels sick. He killed someone. He pokes at his stomach and imagines going to school with The Glutton, The Werewolf Content Warning: Binge Eating Disorder, Bulimia, Fatphobia A SHORT STORY BY DANI BRIAR 18
someone else’s blood and flesh inside of him. He looks to the toilet bowl, and decides toFuck. This poor fucking werewolf. I’m tearing up and I’m about to cry in the middle of the test. I’m still on the same fucking question. Get a hold of yourself. What if one day he goes to school and finds out one of his friends is missing? Fuck. When the test is over Amelie and Vishal come up to me and I try to put on a brave face. Vishal: How’d it go? Amelie: yeah what did you do for that one aboutPanic rises in my stomach. I don’t like where I am right now and so I start walking off. Amelie: jia? where you headed? For some reason I expected them not to follow me. Amelie: you okay? I turn around and when I see her face my knees buckle below me and I am on the floor. Fuck. Fuck. Get a hold of yourself. Not here. Not now. Me: im so so sorry. Amelie: jia? whats... She gets down on the floor with me. Me: im so so sorry amy. im making a scene. im a horrible friend. im a horrible person. im horrible. Amelie: hey, hey, its okay. its just an mst Me: its not that! its- its i barely got into this course and im failing it and what even is the point? what do i have besides this fucking course. everything else about me is horrible. im fucking pathetic and im a monster and fuck. why am i saying this. why am i saying this. I stop talking at this point and just sob quietly. Vishal looks around and I can tell he’s anxious and I feel so so bad. What right do I have to break down? I’m just this fat, pathetic animal writhing on the ground. People are looking. Vishal and Amelie whisper something to each other. I think he has to go off for class. Amelie stays though. She brings me to the corner and sits with me. She gives me a tight hug. I don’t deserve this. She says it’s okay. She says she’s my friend and it’ll be okay. I think about Marco. I want to give him a happy ending. Maybe he goes to school that day and one of his friends notices he looks unwell. He asks what’s wrong and Marco tries to keep his cool, says everything is fine. The friend looks disturbed. He asks if Marco wants a hug. 19
The screaming usually didn’t follow her out of her dreams. But tonight, when she was hounded out of her dreams by the fleet-footed nightmares, they chased her into a hell beyond even their worst reckonings. Anais lurched awake, aware of every drop of cold sweat that petered down the soaked nape of her neck, viscerally aware of each part of her body in a way most people never are. The stifling air around the bench where she had slumped moved as though it had become honey, dappled dust flaring across her sleep-clearing vision passing across flickering torchlight slower than usual for the sleek limestone tunnels and caverns where she made her living and which always seemed to breath with their own momentum; like the lungs of a dragon had been relocated to the mountain’s central heart. The screams which had woken her now silenced. Accidents weren’t unusual in the warehouses, she only hoped her friends hadn’t become the newest victims while her body had so forcibly taken the rest it needed. Scrubbing her grit-stained hands across her bare forearms, her face scrunched. She’d have to buy her section each a round to keep them from telling the foremen she hadn’t been present during the accident. But losing a week’s worth of pay was better than being assigned to the outer sectors of the warehouses, where the weather tangling its reaching fingers into the tunnels was as unpredictable as the heat here was certain. Sliding to the edge of the bench and tossing her exhausted limbs over the edge she hauled herself upwards, torn jumpsuit catching on the rough nodules along its edge. Body shivering, she tried to banish the rest of sleep’s effects from her system. It wouldn’t do to face the foremen more affected by the few minutes of rest she’d seized than two shots of palm alcohol. Her nightmares tonight must have been severe if she was taking this long to reacclimate; normally, she could catch snippets of rest on her feet without anyone else noticing. It must have been serious if no one’s come looking for me yet, she thought, involuntarily shivering again, violently. Looking down towards her exposed knee through the rip in her pants, she could see crystals creeping inward from its frayed edges; spurred on by the sweat from her night terrors. Ice. At the same time, the flames from the torches lining the carbonized walls began to move once again; sucked in towards the main cavern her crevice of a tunnel sprouted from as though the great dragon was taking its first full breath in a thousand years. Her body moved before the thought fully formed. Just one name. Rahja. Pushing open the ailing panels separating the tunnel from the central cavern, she was surprised to already find a foot of snow blocking the entryway and quick thickening ice coating the sorry excuse for hinges. Forcing her to use her whole bodyweight to wedge open the makeshift door and assess the damage for herself. The whole cavern was shrouded in white, thick flakes curling downwards more quickly with each second as the wind picked up in it’s upper reaches; the magic rounding inwards, feeding on itself to kick the squall into a face-tearing storm she knew would come quicker than anyone would anticipate. Scanning the walls quickly, she could see blue-tinged ice crawling up the walls from section B-25. Jonah’s section. She didn’t know what magic had broken free, whether it had been holding a sweet frost or a midwinter blizzard from the northernmost glaciers. She also couldn’t tell if there were more than one that had been damaged in the initial frozen blast. The Market’s warehouses weren’t exactly known for their organizational capabilities. Or their safety. UNTITLED BY NATASHA NAGLE A STORY EXCERPT 20
Usually the uncertainty suited her; it allowed someone like her to get the job after all. But now? Heart stuttering in her chest, she reached blindly towards her nook and grabbed another ratty jumpsuit, more grimy tears than anything else, wrapping it quickly around her head to protect her face from the worst of the icy winds and stepped into the released storm. She couldn’t hear anything but the rasping draw of her breath as she pushed the door the rest of the way open, now battling against another foot and a half of wet snow that had accumulated in the few moment’s she’d taken to assess the damage. Flimsy boots and moth-eaten socks immediately soaked through with frigid waters. But still she pressed on. Section B-32, Rahja’s section, was across the narrow pathways from the damaged B-25. Anais slipped through rows of shelving just wide enough for pallets to pass through, keeping an eye on the growing ice scar dominating B-25’s wall, close enough now that she could hear the tinkle of its crystals as it continued to grow. Snowpack deep enough that her trudging had slowed significantly, her eyes continuously searched for signs of her best friend. She knew the foremen were likely fortified down in their bunkers, while the other workers who had escaped the initial blast radius were forced to find whatever shelter they could in the crevices they could find. Grinding out curses against them from between her clenched teeth, still she pressed on. Rounding B-32’s first corner she received her first clear look at the ice damage, still growing through the stacks, and immediately looked away. Eyelashes freezing as tears welled, four of her friends caught in the initial radius; solidified into the growing ice. A collapsed heap shrouded under the snowpack she knew was Rahja. She wouldn’t have left Jonah. As the full force of her grief swelled, noise swooped back in with the screech of rending metal, snapping her gaze to the shelving across from her; deformed by the creeping frost. And she did nothing as the shelf, containing thousands more pounds of magic, holding who knows what else, came crashing down towards her. 21
AS WE’RE WRITING THE WORLD Ceasefire talks have started to be broken down between the US and Iran, as strikes between the two nations continue. Current Number 1 Album: You seem sad for a girl so in love – Olivia Rodrigo Socceroos about to compete in the knockout rounds, with first round against Egypt. Pauline Hanson becomes the most popular Prime Minister candidate, according to postbudget polls. Venezuela Earthquakes have resulted in over 1,400 lives lost. Current Number 1 Hit: I knew It, I knew you – Taylor Swift The 2026 FIFA World Cup is in full swing, with teams battling through the group stages. Melinda French Gates announced a massive $215 million commitment to women’s health worldwide. 22
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