Honi Soit

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s newest collection of prose poetry, Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama, is her earliest work chronologically, written in 2011. The collection’s delayed publishing feels fitting, an exercise in restraint, exploring the realities of illness, repetitive patterns of thought, and the way we become either stagnant or resistant. Stylistically, Butcher-McGunnigle consistently operates in a logic that is singularly hers.

Hundreds of USyd staff members have taken strike action for 24 hours on 2nd September, 2026, as the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) said management’s intransigence at the bargaining table pushed the union to strike. The branch said they are fighting for “workload fairness, job security, disability rights, change management protections, professional staff conditions, and AI protections”.

USyd has contracted the subsidiary of a multinational outsourcing conglomerate ridden with scandals to cater its recent $5 meal program for students. Compass Australia is a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK based parent company ’Compass Group’. Compass Group has been accused of bribing the United Nations to win contracts, and another subsidiary allegedly bribed government officials of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

“I am not worried about the opinion of the Tamil people…now we cannot think of them, not about their lives or their opinion…the more you put pressure in the North, the happier the Sinhalese people will be here…Really, if I starve the Tamil people out, the Sinhala people will be happy,” J.R. Jayawardene informed the London Daily Telegraph in an interview on 11th July, 1983.

For 13 years, a formidable power has been guiding USyd Stupol from the shadows. The young fergs of the Sydney University Labor Club (SULC) come from a long line of political connivance beginning in the early ‘80s. Since 2013 however, when they ceded power (in name only perhaps) to Grassroots, they have opted to pull the strings from the shadows. For nearly 40 years the SULC enjoyed near constant control of the presidency of the SRC. Between the years 1999 and 2013 they enjoyed uninterrupted victory.

Through my time in this country, I have found that the trees bear strange fruits, and the shadows they cast along the white paved ground disguise a secret. I have stood beneath the sun’s rays, the heat beating against my back, and watched this beautiful tree of equality find the footings to grow. Australia has cleaned the black soot of generations of slavery and stolen wages from its porcelain white hands.

“Aphoristically expressed: intellect is born exclusively of suffering”, says Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. You can’t say that though, because suffering is really bad. Many believe it ought to be purely regrettable. However, that good things may come from something is not and should not be confused with a reason to advocate for its perpetuation. Here, it is instead in pursuit of an adequate and reverent response to suffering.

“We talk about enemies more than we used to” is a quote from fictional White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in the award winning show The West Wing from… 1999. The quote offers a powerful reflection of the contemptuous political environment that is present within the show but also seen in real life; where too much time is spent ruminating about these ‘enemies’ rather than achieving actual progress and change.

A new student canteen serving subsidised $5 meals opened on campus last Monday. However, some staff have criticised the service for excluding workers from the cost-of-living relief, while its operator Compass Group Australia has faced union challenges over workers’ pay, conditions, and redundancy entitlements. The canteen is located on level two of the Electrical Engineering Building (J03) and is open Monday to Friday from 8am to 7pm throughout the semester.

On the 14th of January I was struck by lightning. I remember walking onto campus on the footbridge over City Road: I’m heading towards Fisher to study. There’s a decent downpour and some thunder on the distant horizon. Mid-thought, my entire vision is claimed by unbroken, totalising light. It’s only comparable to close-range photography, except rather than an immediate blinding flash it stretches out forever.