Last January I met with a friend who had just completed a year of No Retail. I’ll give a little backstory before explaining the challenge. Kari spent time volunteering for the Good Will and learnt something surprising: the crap you donate thinking you’re some virtuous Mother Theresa – jettisoning your H&M blouses that never fit…
Read more
When I think of backpacking, I think of dragging a battered backpack along the road and changing from buses to trains to coaches to trains to buses. I’m not sure if this next admission will make me lose my Backpacker Cool Points (Ha… like I had any of them) but in the whole time I’ve…
Read more
**TW: rape, violence** It’s been one year, one month and ten days. One year, one month and ten days later and I am not afraid of going to sleep anymore. Like a child, I was afraid of the dark. It’s fair to say that I haven’t really known myself in this time. I have been…
Read more
At the moment, I’m in a rather enviable position compared to most foreign backpackers in Australia. I have just had the last of my 88 days signed off for my second year Visa and I have only been here for just over four months. Now I have almost eight months up my sleeves to…
Read more
In celebration of Father’s Day, Holly Lazzari shares a story about her dad and reminds us to appreciate the people we have in our lives. I’ll admit it; I’m a complete Daddy’s girl. My dad and I find the same things funny, we always have stuff to chat about, we have loads in common, and a…
Read more
People seek out the warmth of the sun. They bemoan their bad luck when it’s too hot, and hate it when an overcast sky blocks the light it emits. We don’t hide from the sun, but we have a respectful fear of it. The sun’s a lot like life. When it’s perfect, we revel in…
Read more
One of my favourite things about Australia, and something that I didn’t realise before I came here, was how diverse its landscape is. I knew Australia was vast but my idea of this crazy country was pretty much similar to one of those maps you see on Tumblr or Buzzfeed: People living on the coast,…
Read more
When I look back upon the arc of my life, I realise that my times in nature have led to moments of self-discovery. Through being outdoors, I have stumbled upon a few gems about myself – and this probably wouldn’t have happened within the confines of my home, office, or elsewhere in the built…
Read more
As I travelled the vast and beautiful land of Europe, many unique destinations left an impression on me: the Venetian canals, the castles in Tuscany, the cosy log cabin between the snow-capped mountains of Norway. But none of these placescompared to the eye-opening experience that was Dachau, and the truly saddening impression it left on…
Read more
Love Life is Lip’s new fortnightly column for all things love, relationships, and getting along, brought to you by Camilla Smith. I’ve heard that love is a disease, an extreme of feeling very much like madness. It blows in from some distant, tropical climate (I’m sure) and is infected by a germ of so deadly…
Read more
In a recent study conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, dissatisfactions of the physical appearance of the body have been discovered to be evident in children as young as eight years old. These kinds of body image issues, affecting both men and women, are perfect representations of the impact of the media…
Read more
In Lynn Coady’s short story ‘Hellgoing’, published in the 2013 collection of the same name, the protagonist unleashes on her friends a weekend’s worth of frustration after visiting her father. Her friend Ruth leans in, ready with a ‘discussion question’ as the conversation turns to men in general. A feminist and academic, she never…
Read more
I had a lot of time to think about things while I was bouncing down dirt tracks on my way back to Alice Springs after a month-long jaunt in the Outback. My thoughts were mostly, ‘I hope those cows on the side of the road aren’t going to suddenly launch themselves in front of this…
Read more
Join Camilla Smith for Lip’s fortnightly column on love, life and relationships! It’s funny. Just the other day I was sitting at a bus stop, freezing my teats off in this wintry Canberra weather, when I overheard the giggly, excited chatter of a young woman in her mid-twenties behind me. She was, apparently, ‘head over…
Read more
