This post has been sitting in our drafts since before Aussie Spec Fic Week, so bear with us if some of these links are a bit out of date.

The six problems ruining Melbourne’s rail network.

Last week the other week Steph went to the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney (in Chippendale!) and it was great! Modern Chinese art, yes, thank you. And on 30 July they close the current exhibition to bump in the new one so GO TODAY. The current exhibition is heaps of fun.  Sorry, sorry.

Aboriginal mothers kept in jail “for their own safety”, family violence hearing told. Love a system where being victims of DV means being jailed. Awesome. Good times. Definitely post-racial.

Are you a girl under 18 who wants to write crime fiction? There’s dollars available for you for that.

Grill’d is totally paying staff under Award and that is bull.  But since we started this post, they’ve been forced to increase wages and reinstate the fired worker who drew attention to them.

How ‘Privilege’ Became a Provocation. NYT.

Steph is SO EXCITED about Jane Rawson’s new book ‘The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change’. She’s also very jealous that she didn’t write it, but we all have our climate change burdens to bear. Here is a blog post in relation to it.

Ghost bikes.

This story about killer seagulls justifies everything Liz believes about birds.  Also, don’t feed wild birds, and don’t go on a spree of revenge bird killings, that’s just terrible.  Anyway, birds will win that war.

Octopus Wrestling and the Cephalopod Uprising. No Award does not approve of this article’s strong anti-cephalopod bias, not to mention what passes for journalism at Vice, but there are some interesting cephalopod facts in there.

Britain’s Secret Ghost Trains – restless infrastructure from beyond the grave!

Underneath the ‘Orientalist’ Kimono – a brief look at the issues that arise when Asians living in western countries consider something — in this case, white people trying on a kimono — racist, while Japanese people regard it as a positive sign for the future of their culture.  Intersectionalism is complicated!

Melbourne Aquarium conducts an underwater census.  Warning: PUNS.

Pictures of 19th century Sydney show that it was totally a great place for women and ethnic minorities.  We are linking to this for the pictures and the quotes from Josh Quong Tart, not the “cultural assimilation is the mark of a great immigrant” narrative.  (Such narratives tend to overlook the fact that Quong Tart died of injuries sustained in what was almost certainly a racist assault.)

Steph is having a lot of feelings about this post at the Toast: Grief in the Diaspora.