She stood, letting the steam envelop her, hearing the drumming of the hot water thunder in her ears, watching as heavy drops, almost solid in their purpose, slammed onto the stone floor, smashing and shattering around her legs. Warm puddles collected on the terracotta tiles, her suntanned feet pale against their burnt depth. Her pink toenails – Tahiti, the brand calls the garish colour – made bigger, brighter by the dim light of the bathroom.

She faced the stream, the scorching water striking her eyelids, rolling over her cupid’s bow, making its way over her small breasts and down, beyond her rounded stomach.

Then, like a wind whipping a sail, she jerked, heaved forwards and tried, willed herself, to cry. Creasing her cheeks, she stood, naked, alone, grasping for the release, the relief. She buckled, yearning for a sob that wouldn’t come, that refused to emerge from her belly, her heart, her guts.

‘Mim, you ok in there?’ Genevieve is at the door, gentle and urgent at once.

Mim feels pain searing through her palms and sees she is clenching her fists, digging her fingernails between the strong tendons below her riverine, young lifelines.

She is grimacing, trying with everything she has – muscles clenched, mouth pulled wide and downturned at the corners – to comply, to force a teardrop away from her body. To add to the flow.

‘Mim? Are you alright?’

She knows she has to answer.  ‘I’m ok. I’ll be fine.’ It comes out aggressively, loud.

As sudden as the pressure change at the end of a squall, she lets go, spreads her hands, inhales and arches her back. She drops to her knees, exhausted, and hunches forwards as a different, equally powerful, force takes over. A laugh explodes from her chest, convulsions snatch her face and force her mouth open into a clownish grin.

Her shoulders shake and she laughs and laughs, imagining how she must have looked as she failed even to cry. How she looks now.

She straightens up, feels the water ricocheting from her wet hair. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says to the row of plastic bottles, the sandalwood soap, the limp, green flannel.

I have never seen anything like it before. This must be what a culture shock feels like.

280 women are prancing across 20 netball courts, acres of spandex flying, garish streaks of colour flashing across the pock-marked surface like an unsettled rainbow vomiting.

Tippy-toes and wobbling thighs, high ponytails and, inexplicably, socks pulled up. A gestapo-like pasty teen – or is she old enough to be a student? – has come ’round checking every set of fingernails, clipper poised, ready to swoop on an errant talon.

Bibs are being exchanged, hair bobbles fixed, visitors wrapped in mothballed anoracks, sit on camping chairs, surrounded by crops of plastic water bottles. Come on girls, they shout at the fully-grown women.

The umpire on my side of the spectacle has her shrill whistle attached to her stubby fingers like costume jewellery with an Olympic twist – no school marm-y loop around the neck for her. She waves her arms erratically, jumping into the throng when things heat up. Her alarming call blends into a din of 39 other whistles, squeaking away, never resting.

All I can think about is a cup of tea which fails to materialise from the excuse for a canteen. No tea or coffee today, the bored-looking lady says. I panic and buy an everlasting iced bun, the kind that, thoughtfully packaged in its protective atmosphere, would survive the apocalypse.

The score is 44 – 27. The Alexandrias have pissed off their opponents and, with a stroke of impressive efficiency, unwittingly pissed off two other neighbouring teams too. Tempers fray. The league ubermensch is called, her bleached hair sitting atop her wobbling head like a clump of cropped hay as the Mean Girl with the blonde bob gesticulates wildly, calls someone a potential danger and stomps off. A counter-attack citing temporary mental illness is flung back at her. She almost had an anxiety attack, thanks to you.

It’s feeding time at the Meadowbank courts, and I have arrived, sticky-fingered, just in time.

My safari into netball will remain just that.

Where are all the strong, young Aussies fighting for a better future?

I profess to knowing much about little and very little, especially, about macro-economics, federal policy and the Australian dream. But I find that I am increasingly at odds with the strangely, no, criminally backward approaches that Australia is taking when it comes to our futures. We need innovation and we need it really badly. I am itching to start protesting, but where are the protests? Where are the young people demanding more from their representatives? Where is the action, the disquiet, the voice of those who are sick of bad, council-style politicians doing stupid things? Has protest taken the shape of the gradual drain of talent we’re seeing from these shores?

Two things worry me the most. First, the cost of education. Never should it be denied and, yet, there is something deeply suspicious about the commerce and quality of education now. Apprenticeships are as important, beneficial and necessary to a fully functioning young workforce as many degrees. Finding oneself crippled by debt is not an ideal entry point into the working world. Be wary of replicating a US-style model of study, where, truly, only the richest can afford tertiary education. Being saddled with $100,000 debt is reprehensible on the part of those mushrooming American institutions – now, with steadily growing unemployment, more than ever. Education is the crux of society, but a credit-card funded degree in something as watery as, dare I say it, media studies, is not the way to go. (And if kids leave their alma maters scores of thousands in debt, at the very least, train them to use an apostrophe correctly. Solecism and Australia seem to go hand in hand.)

Second, who would join me in getting behind a movement to pressure the Australian government into addressing the need for a hardcore RSPT and a sovereign wealth fund… somehow getting around the fact that many of our resources are owned by states, not the federal govt?

We would stand around the monstrosity that is Canberra’s new Parliament House and hold GROW SOME BALLS placards and we’d feel, as we really do as young adults, that we must do this for future generations. Nobody else will: they are too busy arguing over blue suede shoes, ‘Thommo’ and budgie smugglers.

We’re giving away our resources, we aren’t channeling the funds into future growth and non-renewables technology and we’re inexplicably lacking in confidence to stand up and take action on the world stage – and, perhaps more importantly, to the ACTU. We’re blessed, for the first time, with the geographical jackpot, we’re the only country to have an economy that has grown steadily every year for the past 21 and we are having a moment in the global limelight.

Yet, quite apart from our risible politics, we do not have the vision to tax wisely and decisively. Indonesia taxes more on its oil than we do, Brazil more on its iron ore. Norway has a super tax of around 70 per cent and is never lacking business. The MRRT is no silver bullet. It is hardly a fifth grade slingshot.

I’m shouting this into gale forces of nothingness, I know. I’ve never felt so powerless, so poorly represented in my life, so let down in a young country that has everything to play for.