For the third 2026 edition of Esperanto Magazine, The Sex Edition, I wrote Barbie Doll Bare: A Piece on Genital Beauty Standards. The article explores the increasingly narrow expectations placed on vulvas and bodies in an age where pornography is often encountered long before real sexual experience. The piece began with a question that I found both confronting and strangely simple: what happens when pornography becomes our anatomy lesson? With constant access to highly curate

For Esperanto Magazine’s Permanence Edition, I wrote A Love Letter to Wrinkles, a short essay about ageing, the body, and the ways we are taught to fear the visible evidence of time. The prompt immediately interested me. The Permanence Edition asks what it means to preserve something in a world where everything is constantly changing — our relationships, identities, memories and bodies. I wanted to approach that idea through something we are so often encouraged to erase: wrin

There is something about writing about photography that makes you look at photographs differently. My latest feature for The Big Issue, for the publication’s ‘The Big Picture’ series, began with a collection of photographs by American conservation photographer Chris Linder. The subject was southern rockhopper penguins: tiny, fearless birds that spend their summers scaling almost vertical cliffs in the Falkland Islands to reach their nests. They are also extremely cute. And, a

Bonnie’s paintings do not begin from representation so much as sensation. Their surfaces register movement through material: pigment absorbed into linen, wax resisting ink, and salt redistributing colour into unpredictable formations. In conversation, Bonnie described her process as collaborative with materials — an ongoing negotiation between intention and response in which materials redirect gestures and introduce moments of resistance, delay, and transformation. Linen rema

A few months ago, I published my first feature with The Big Issue — a conversation with poet Nikita Gill about mythology, girlhood and storytelling. Last month, I had the opportunity to publish a second feature with the magazine, this time interviewing Australian actor and writer Angourie Rice. The piece centred around Finding Emily, a romantic comedy set in Manchester, but our conversation moved far beyond the film itself. We spoke about character building, psychology, writi

Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Candid Edition, Issue 1, 2026 (print). Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Melbourne-based photographer Abigail Varney for the first 2026 edition of Esperanto, Monash University’s student arts and culture magazine. The issue, themed Candid, explored ideas surrounding authenticity, observation, and what it means to capture people honestly — concepts that immediately made me think of Varney’s photographic practice. Just b

There is something strangely disorienting about seeing your work in print for the first time. Not on a screen, not in a draft folder, not in a Google Doc you can endlessly adjust — but fixed. Held. Circulating in the world without you. My recent feature on Nikita Gill, published in The Big Issue (Edition 759), began as a conversation about myth and girlhood. But somewhere in the process, it became something else — a reflection on voice, on who gets to speak, and what it means

For World Poetry Day, I wanted to share a piece that sits at the edge of language — where writing begins to fail slightly, and the body takes over. The poem below began with a question that felt difficult to articulate directly:what happens to the body when something is seen that cannot be un-seen? We often think of vision as passive — as something that simply receives the world. But this poem resists that idea. It understands seeing as an event. Something that enters, alters

I made this painting recently, and while looking at it again I realised how bodily it felt — almost womb-like. Womanhood in colour and movement. Perhaps the body sometimes knows before the mind does. Art that comes from the body often reaches back into it. That’s not weakness — that’s where its power is. This painting began as a physical act. I covered a previous canvas with white acrylic, a painting I had been stuck on and unhappy with for months. Over that blank surface I b

Classic Hollywood did not simply repeat the damsel in distress trope — it engineered it. Across adventure spectacle, espionage thrillers, and gothic melodrama, women are positioned in strikingly similar configurations: lifted, suspended, cornered, abducted, drowned, hunted. Their peril is rarely incidental. It is structural. The narrative moves because they are endangered. The damsel in distress is often dismissed as an outdated cliché — a relic of a less enlightened cinemat

This interview began as a commissioned catalogue text for CAVES Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair 2026. The version published here extends beyond those initial parameters, shaped by a studio visit, a sustained conversation with the artist, and photographs I took within her workspace. When I first spoke with Mira about her new works, she returned to the figure of Demeter — the mythic mother who moves between anguish and recognition, sensing her daughter’s passage between worlds. T

Every February 14, we rehearse the same ritual. Pink cards. Lace. Flowers. The language of possession disguised as devotion: Be mine. Valentine’s Day is framed as soft, sentimental, harmless. But embedded within its rituals is something older — a quiet rehearsal of heterosexual destiny. To be chosen. To be admired. To be desired. The card is not just affection; it is a claim. In 1900, on St Valentine’s Day, a group of schoolgirls climbed Hanging Rock. Some never came back. Pi

Cinema has always told women that love will change them. Sometimes this change is framed as growth, sometimes as maturity, sometimes as “finding yourself.” But more often than not, it is a quiet demand to become smaller, softer, more pleasing — to shave off the parts that disrupt desire or challenge male comfort. Across decades of film history, women are repeatedly rewarded for self-erasure and punished for remaining whole. What makes this pattern so insidious is that it is r

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is not simply a historical retelling of a saint’s trial; it is a confrontation with how women’s bodies, voices, and faces are scrutinised, doubted, and punished when they exceed the roles assigned to them. Joan of Arc is condemned not only for heresy, but for the far greater crime of certainty — of speaking with conviction in a world that does not believe women are entitled to authority, especially spiritual authority. J

Last year, I attended Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, a lecture and screening held at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre in collaboration with the Australian Screen Research Collection. The evening foregrounded a lineage of feminist filmmaking that felt both urgently historical and deeply present — a reminder that women’s cinema has always been political, even when it has been intimate, domestic, or deliberately small. What struck me was not just the his

Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Explorer Issue, Vol. 4, 2025 (print). The Nicholas Building elevator has a way of making me feel like I’m travelling somewhere secret. The doors close, the world outside blurs and when they open, I’ve arrived in a quieter part of the city. Not higher, exactly — just elsewhere. I think that’s what keeps drawing me back to Melbourne’s smaller galleries — places like Blindside Artist Run Initiative, CAVES, No Vacancy, fortyfivedown