welcome to the writing chaos.
it’s that time of year when i get to write ‘freelance writer’ on all my tax forms. hello ATO please consider this proof of my employment.
Team, it has been an absolute month and as I write this there is still more than a week left in June. And it’s EOFY, we’re hectic all round.
I’ve moved house twice in the space of two weeks. My phone is refusing to take phone calls, except sometimes, but never the important work ones. And my car stopped locking so as Richard read the user manual, I pulled out and inspected most of the fuses in Bev. If you see me in person and ask me about any of these things, I will kick off.
I’ve had a metric fuck ton of writing work which, whilst busy, has been an absolute fucking treat. I’ve looked at so many different topics and got to chat with lots of interesting people. In fact it’s been so interesting that I’ve been ignoring my bed time, and if you know me well, you know there is nothing on earth I love more than sleeping and eating.
To celebrate the writing work I’ve done this month and to allow myself time to get all of my life admin (incl. tax) shit together, I’m sharing with you the freelance work that I’ve written that’s been released this month.
I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing it 🫶🏼🫶🏼
To kick things off, I thought I should start with the big guns: I had an essay come out in 2025 Winter edition of Meanjin. It’s called ‘Abortion, naturally’ and I think you should all read it.
This piece was nine months in the making and I’m super stoked with the final product.
It’s behind a paywall, but for the cost of less than one almond croissant per month, you could have access to every single Meanjin essay and there are some absolute fucking crackers in there.
Below is a lil snippet from the essay, what you’re not seeing is all of the animal anecdotes.
“How could something be legal yet hard to get? And then I remembered that many things in life are legal but hard to obtain, like apricots in winter. Hear me out: it is legal for me to eat apricots, but they’re only available in some places and not all the time. They are very expensive if you want to buy one in the middle of the desert in winter, but very cheap during the summer season near an apricot farm. This is the same principle for abortions; the closer you are to a city centre, the more money you have, and the state or territory that you live in all influence how easy it is for you to access apricots. I mean abortion.”
If you so desire, you can find the article by clicking here.
In another strange turn of life events, I received an email from a very exciting source who asked if I could perhaps write a piece about some of the scientists aboard the recent Nuyina Voyage to Antarctica. I calmly responded about 30 seconds later saying ‘absofuckinglutely’.
It was a similar story to one I’d worked on at the beginning of last year, but this time the team were in a different area of Antarctica and seeking to find out what animals actually live and exist around the east coast.
The Denman Glacier is one of the most remote and least studied places in the world. It’s located on the East Antarctic Peninsula, which is the side of Antarctica closest to Australia.
The glacier has retreated 5km in the last 20 years, which could have massive global repercussions.
If the entire Denman Glacier melted, global sea levels would rise by 1.5 metres.
Unfortunately, we don’t know when these repercussions might set in.
So it’s no surprise that the Denman Glacier was the destination for the first marine science expedition of RSV Nuyina (pronounced noy-ee-nah).
Of course, they found a bunch of never been seen/found before animals, and will attempt to use decode the genomes of these different species to better understand past climate change, in the hope that it could predict the future.
Pretty fucking cool stuff!!! You can read the full story here. No paywalls 🤑
If those two things didn’t already get your brain cells bouncing, then never fear, there’s still two more articles to go.
I sat down and had a yarn with Corey Tutt, founder and CEO of DeadlyScience. It was a cracker of a chat. I learnt a lot. Most of our two hour chat didn’t make the cut because of word count reasons (boo) but it’s still very much worth a read.
Yes it was released in May, I’ve been BUSY.
You can read the full story here. No paywalls 🤑
The final article of mine that has come out this month, was about bounties. Unfortunately, Cosmos Magazine has recently closed and is no longer producing hard copy magazines. In good news, that means this article is not behind a paywall, and everyone can read about the environmental movement and how the 1970s changed our bounty systems for the (and I cannot stress this enough), better.
Here’s the first three paragraphs. But if you can be assed, check out the full story here. No paywalls 🤑
For almost two centuries, Australia has been home to bounty hunters; paid to hunt and present their kills to authorities. From colonisation to the mid-1970s, bounties were targeted at ‘nuisance’ native species. These species were unfairly targeted, having been falsely accused of destroying agricultural efforts and ultimately, ruining the colonial project.
The arrival of the 1970s brought with it the environmental movement, at which point, many bounty programs began to shut down. A rebirth in the early 2000s brought back our bounty programs, but with a new target: destructive, invasive species.
From the blistering cold in Tasmania, to Western Australia’s arid regions and the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland, bounty hunters were and are utilised all over Australia as a pest management tool, to keep some of our invasive species at bay.
This was another long haul piece, which I’ve been fucking loving working on. Logistics included 2-3 months of emails with comms teams (this is all I do now), a 1am meeting with a researcher and plenty of hours researching the colonial project. It was a hoot of a time.
Okay that’s me done. I’m off to fuck about and finish my never ending to do list. At least I can tick this off now.