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Moving across oceans to create a new life
After moving from India to Sydney in 2019, Khyati Sharma became inspired to share the stories of fellow expats and migrants through a new online project called Immigrants in Australia, modelled after Humans of New York. Since launching in September, she’s shared the stories of people from all over the world, including India, China, South…
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Be Nice to Australians Month
Part of learning how to become Australian has meant trying to figure out the relationship between Australian and New Zealand. Growing up in Canada, I never thought much about NZ. Australia had a defined character, a national brand, thanks to Crocodile Dundee and Foster’s beer ads. New Zealand was just a place on the map,…
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Traveling well or flatchat?
Australia has 10,000 unique words, according to The Story of Australian English by Kel Richards. In comparison, Canada only has 4,000 unique words, despite having 10 million more people. It’s shocking to me that Canada has even that many specifically Canuck terms, but could come up with three: toque, poutine, and using borrow to mean…
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Melbourne’s most terrifying attraction
When I visited the Medical History Museum at the University of Melbourne, the last thing I expected to find was Champagne Jimmy. I expected to find Dr Tracy’s ovariotomy instruments. Well, not his specifically, but something very much like them. Dr Richard Tracy performed the first such surgery in Victoria in 1864, using this horrifying…
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Lessons from Australia: You don’t hit sleepy lizards
Last week I was on a self-styled writing retreat in country NSW, near the Hunter Valley, and it was sublime. I spent most of the week at this desk, staring out at this view of the Williams River. I was interrupted only by eastern rosellas, kookaburras, and one dead mouse that showed up in the…
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A new life of mud pits and stink water
I recently discovered Anna Altman, an American author with chronic migraines. Altman perfectly highlights truths like this: ‘Our culture encourages us to think that, if we push ourselves hard enough, we can overcome whatever ails us.’ As she discovered when her migraines became debilitating, it’s simply not true. But we deeply want it to be true,…