Marathons for weeks

In the shadow of Alpine granite and along dumpster-lined alleys: that’s where little efforts are played out.

I run. I’ve written about it here, many times. I’ve seen parts of cities and lands and communities I wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for running. I’ve run when I’ve had little else to do, I’ve run when I’ve had too much to do, I’ve run when numb with sadness and I’ve run when my legs felt like they’d lift from the earth with kaleidoscopic joy.

Then, in late May, I started running a total of 42.2km or more a week and I put a label on it: amarathonaweek.com. The idea was to run a marathon’s worth of miles each week, building up to the mighty Sydney Marathon on 17th September, and, along the way, raise funds to support those living with frontotemporal dementia, the disease that ended my mother’s life in 2020.

So, I ran. And I kept running. I posted about it on social media and I told stories about my mother and I spoke with FTD advocates and I shared photos of my family and I tried to get word of rare and early-onset dementias out into the world.

And, somehow, I raised more than $12,600 for the Australian Frontotemporal Dementia Association.

It caught me unawares, the inflow of support, well-wishes and sheer energy-giving positivity. I’m grateful to the bottom of my battered toes and I am now feeling the responsibility to keep going, adding where and I when I can to a growing awareness of dementia beyond Alzheimer’s. Dementia is all around us.

THANK YOU to everyone who donated, you put a spring in every of my many steps.

–My donation page is here, my marathon Insta is here and my marathon site is here.–

Blog, Portfolio

Voices lost

Not long ago, I interviewed an academic whose field is AI in literacy. Before I began my questions, she started with her own: Are you afraid of what AI might do to your job?

I began working in a London newsroom in 2007. Two phones bleated and flashed all day long, banks of TV screens showed 24-hour news channels and I occasionally took copy over the phone, typing stories for reporters on the move. There were four daily editions of the newspaper. Inevitably, as cortisol levels screeched into the red, I watched nose-to-nose shouting matches between editors on the backbench.

To the side, tucked away and largely silent, was a single online editor, brought into the fold shortly after I began. He knew, of course, what nobody else wanted to admit: three years after the launch of Facebook and nearly a decade after Google’s arrival, print media was in deep and unchartered turmoil. Job losses, oligarch schmoozing and expenses tightening followed.

We lost a quarter of the newsroom in 2009. In Sydney, we lost a third around 2013. We lost another third in 2017 and there was a cull in the middle somewhere, too. In the last few weeks, rounds of losses at the ABC and SBS. 15 years since my first day on a newsdesk and no-one knows, still, how to reconcile news journalism with the braying realities of the unchecked internet.

If there’s a status quo that sums up my time in newsrooms, it is this: redundancy rounds. This, I should add, before generative AI – another, uglier beast yet – really bites.

So, my answer to that sharp-thinking, wise scholar is a little lazily reached, but borne from experience. I’m not worried, I’m curious. I’m used to instability. Or, as one editor quipped, if you haven’t been made redundant three times, you’re not trying hard enough. Bigger than that, though, is this: we’re surrounded by living, breathing stories that are waiting to be told.

My last two pieces for the now-defunct SBS Voices focus on Muslim integration and sexual violence. They’re raw and they’re hopeful and they speak to and for those whose voices have for so long been ignored by the conversation in Australian media.

They were told by humans, to humans. They are stories with roots that reach back many generations and their essence cannot be dug from a corpus or ploughed by bots.

Here they are. And, thank you to the outgoing team at SBS Voices for their support and commitment over the years.

The school experiment that changed me

He took my body from me and I’m still trying to get it back

Blog

Wish you were here

This was the third time she had left the very average Sydney hotel without her rain coat and the third time she had needed it. How can the sun so often hide its face halfway through its dayshift? she wondered.

Where she came from, its rays barely made it down to her balcony; they got lost somewhere in the blanket above, in the bitter grey. She and her neighbours hadn’t seen a cloud slide across a blue sky for years. Here, in this city, on this beach, the sun was like a slap from a hand whose veins bulged with heat and precision and determination. The sky was bluer than she’d ever seen. Its rays would incinerate the roller awning on her balcony, she suspected, before deciding she’d happily forfeit the old blind for a morning of sky and a world above.

Only, within the last five minutes, as her bus waited in line to slot into a parking spot on Bondi Beach’s corniche, the blue had bruised and large, wet drops began purposefully hammering onto the coach roof. She climbed down from the air-conditioned chill, made her way across the concrete footbridge, carefully avoided joggers and skateboards licking their way past prams – mums running towards shelter – down onto the famous sand and allowed herself to get wet.

Portfolio

Ending period poverty

My first piece for the connective and globally-minded team at Missing Perspectives.

When Rochelle Courtenay visited Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory in 2019, she was shocked to learn that Aboriginal individuals had to use mattress foam instead of sanitary pads when they had their periods.

A vending machine providing free pads has since changed that. But period poverty, described by the UN as the struggle to afford sanitary products, remains an all-too common situation in remote communities in northern Australia, where a packet of sanitary pads costs between $15 and $20.

“We make sure people don’t have to pay those prices,” says Rochelle, Founder and Managing Director of Share the Dignity. The charity has installed free sanitary item vending machines across Australia and in 2015, she sent pallets of sanitary supplies to Coolgardie in Western Australia after a woman was fined $500 by police for stealing a packet of tampons from a service station.

Bianca Rayner of the Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service (CAYLUS) in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory says some Aboriginal families in the region cannot afford blankets and shoes. Period products at exorbitant prices are well beyond their budgets.

“It’s really tricky from a financial perspective but also the shame around it,” she says, explaining that menstrual products are usually kept behind shop counters where the attendants are male. Her team delivers sanitary products and educational tools as part of its Menstrual Hygiene Management program.

Menstrual inequity, highlighted by World Menstrual Hygiene Day, is often compounded by water and sanitation access, cultural norms and expectations, and education. But it also extends well beyond remote Australia and can force individuals to stay home from school and work, exacerbating the economic vulnerability of people who menstruate. Period poverty and poor menstrual health exist all over the world, but in Australia, a member of the OECD and home to over 2.2 millionaires, the issues are only “getting bigger,” says Rochelle.

One in five Australians now lives below the poverty line, representing a fast-growing number of people for whom menstruation means compromising on the most basic of needs.

“Getting period products becomes less important than putting food on the table. We’re hearing stories, even in Canberra, of women using wadded up toilet paper,” she adds.

In the Share the Dignity’s landmark 2021 survey into periods in Australia, more than 40 per cent of 125,000 respondents said they sometimes, regularly or always found it difficult to buy period products because of their cost.

Rochelle successfully fought to end goods and services tax on sanitary items and has seen a commitment by every state and territory to provide free sanitary products in schools. Victorian government policy, new legislation in Canberra, and a “game-changing” children’s education program in Queensland are positive steps.

Still, the work of organisations such as CAYLUS are a “drop in the ocean”, admits Bianca, and it’ll take a more inclusive conversation to truly make a difference. Global initiative Period Positive Workplace, will bring the corporate world and men into the picture.

“This is not a female issue,” says Rochelle, “this is society’s issue.”