When we are kids, people ask us what we want to be when we grow up, and the answers usually revolve around occupations. Do children ever answer ‘a homeowner’? And how does one decide they’ve reached grown up land? 21st birthday parties don’t really count anymore. We seem to have a picture of someone who…
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The little girl grasps her pencil, pink tongue escaping her lips as she practises the alphabet’s lazy loops and disciplined lines. When she closes her fuchsia notebook, Barbie’s symmetrical smile gazes up at her. The girl stashes her pencil in a pencil case printed with three dainty Disney Princesses before opening a My Little Pony…
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‘Jo. You’re in. Jess, you’re in. We gotta work on your spikes though.’ I’m 14. Eight of us sit on the first two rows of bleachers in the concrete gym, shivering in navy PE uniforms. Mr Johnson, all long hairy legs in obscene running shorts, is reading out a list of girls who got into…
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Have you ever considered homebirth? Well, neither have I, but that’s because I deliberately avoid all contemplation of having a baby because it’s terrifying. After reading Peace, Love and Khaki Socks, however, I find myself cheering for the home team. Kim Lock’s novel is about a young woman grappling with a surprise pregnancy. Freelance graphic…
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‘Ajax Spray n’ Wipe made everything alright.’ ‘I wash all my curtains in Stergene. I’m very fussy about the way they’re cleaned.’ One quote comes from an advertisement in a 1956 Woman and Home magazine. The other is from a 2010 television ad. In both, women give testimonials about cleaning products. We’re used to seeing…
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Thank you to all of the mums (and dads) of the world. Thanks for having sex, enduring a nine-month period of an alien growing in your belly and then pushing it out in a tawdry episode of sweat, blood and tears. And maybe poo. Because I really like your baby. I like the way I…
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By now, you would have heard about the intense tragedy of this Bangladesh garment factory’s collapse. Rana Plaza was an eight-storey building in Dhaka’s manufacturing zone, housing multiple factories where clothes for Western brands were manufactured. The owners and managing director of the complex allegedly ignored safety warnings and employees saw cracks in the walls…
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The Emerging Writer’s Festival (EWF) is for writers. Midnight scribbler? For you. Aspiring novelist? For you. Screenwriter? Cartoonist? Got short stories published? For you. For you. For you. In its tenth year, the festival brings together newcomers as well as old hats in the media world (e.g. John Safran and Elmo Keep) to present a…
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Famous social rights activist Desmond Tutu once said: ‘Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.’ While it’s easy to declare these sentiments on a Facebook status, it can be difficult to integrally act it out. Little bits of good have become…
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‘Dear fingernails…I’m sorry it took me so long to realise your cracks and peels were beautiful and alive. I’m still coming to realise that my cracks and imperfections are beautiful, too.’ This is an excerpt from Attention: People with Body Parts, a collection of words offered by various contributors to the project, now published in…
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My Mum used to tell stories at bedtime, and one of my favourites was Upside Down World. Visitors to this realm would sip donuts through straws and slide backwards up slippery dips; the laws of our universe were reversed. In The Age this week, Amrit Dhillon explores a society that sounds like a real Upside…
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Orlando Bloom is a sexy beast. This is scrawled in blue ink on the autograph page of my grade eight yearbook. At 13, that was only the beginning of a long obsession that my best friend and I had with ‘Orli’; we were dedicated fangirls. It seems fangirling is an essential part of growing up…
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A fiery Spanish mama called Amparo Sanchez cooks albóndigas for you (and the rest of the crowd in the open tent), speaking in the rhythmic, lisping tongue of a Catalan native. Her stories of Spanish food, a family cooking together, and gender inequality are translated while four screens around the tent show the view…
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‘Me Tarzan. You Jane.’ Men are assertive. Women are nurturers. Women scrapbook and men play videogames. Men want no-strings sex while women seek intimacy and love. We have defined the difference between the sexes for centuries by grouping behaviour into masculine or feminine categories, believing that’s just the way it is. We’re made that way….
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