The supreme court ruling to overturn Roe vs Wade in the US has sparked enormous global discussion about women’s bodily autonomy and what should be an indisputable right to decided what happens with...
Category: First Person
The imperceptible line between life and death
Content notification: This essay discusses grief and medical trauma. When my colleague died walking to work one morning, I passed an unexpected sympathy around: ‘When you are dying, you do not know...
‘Angry Little Asian Girl’ laughs at the patriarchy
Angry Little Asian Girl: Moments with My Mother’ is a collection of comics featuring the series’ central character, a grade-school Korean girl named Kim and her mother. Each comic is full of...
Lismore floods: ‘We escaped with our lives’
After her Lismore flat was flooded in February, independent disability carer Lauren De Groot is living in a borrowed caravan with her young daughter, Freya. Her losses are mounting up. Just last...
How gender bias can impact a life
Last month, feminist editor and writer Zoya Patel delivered a speech at the Canberra Labor Club that blew the crowd away. Through the lens of her own family, Zoya reflected on how gender bias...
Experiencing racism inside the media
I was being humiliated, my position had essentially been made redundant as all of the decision making had been taken off me in a way that implied my total incompetence. I was repeatedly berated in...
The childhood trauma that devastated my friend, Kate
This is an edited extract from Jo Dyer’s Burning Down the House: Reconstructing Modern Politics, released this month as part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest series. In...
On Reckoning: when rape became the national conversation
Amy Remeikis, political reporter for The Guardian, has written and extraordinary essay, titled On Reckoning. This work tells of the moment when the personal became very political and when rape...
Dad’s diary: nursing three kids through Covid
Here at the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, one of our key pillars when it comes to gender equality is "share the load." In this personal diary, veteran journalist and dad Mark Tamhane describes the nitty...