Yesterday was a year since my father died. I can't believe it. It seems like so long ago, and yet it also feels like just yesterday. I was at the pharmacy yesterday, picking up some medication, and there was an elderly couple ahead of me in the queue. The woman was beautiful, and I think she had dementia. She kept saying things, and her husband kept correcting her.
The pharmacist asked her a question, and she gave a very confused answer, to which her husband stepped in and clarified things. She turned around to me and apologised for taking so long, and I just said, "Absolutely no worries at all," and she turned back around. Her husband then moved away from her for a moment, and she came and spoke to me. I couldn't really understand what she was saying, but she was quite flustered and still apologetic that they were holding up the queue.
I just gently grabbed her arm, looked her in the eye, and said, "It's really okay, you don't need to worry." I'm not a crier at all, but I did feel like crying in that moment. She reminded me of Dad before he got really bad, still sort of with it, but at the same time, completely gone.
It is so cruel—dementia, Alzheimer's, and all those "forget-me-not" type diseases. They say it's not so bad for the person with it; it just hurts for those around them. But I think it can't be a nice feeling to know that you are losing your mind. We never went through that with Dad because he was too proud to have ever said anything about it—which makes me very sad, to know that he went through that alone.
The last time I wrote, I was already down in the dumps because of what happened with my volunteer organisation, and then on top of that, my police check showed a spent conviction. Well, there have been some developments in relation to those things, and I am feeling a little bit better.
It was a long weekend just gone, and I sent them the email telling them that I was going to take legal action against them last Friday. That gave me three days to really contemplate what I had said and how ridiculous it was to suggest taking legal action against the them. Yes, I believe a person should always stick up for themselves, but I just thought, there has to be another way.
So first thing on Tuesday morning, which was yesterday, I sent them an email saying I had reconsidered my position and I wasn't going to take any legal action against them. I told them I had hoped to volunteer with them for a long period of time, and a "terminated" / "non-compliant" status against my name might make things difficult for me. They then wrote back saying that they had removed that status and that it had come about because I hadn't lodged a police check not because of anything else. So that was sorted.
I then took a big gulp and thought there was no time like the present to tell them that I had a spent conviction for texting whilst driving, which had come up on my police check. I told them that I was convicted in 2013 and that it should have been spent, so I had appealed it with CrimCheck. They wrote back, and they were actually quite good about it. But it was and still is so messy. If it's not one thing, it's the other.
So then, this morning, I got a notice from CrimCheck saying they were right to include my spent conviction because the legislation doesn’t apply when the applicant will be working with vulnerable people. So I contacted the organisation and told them the results of the appeal. Those results also got sent to them.
At the moment, it stands that they will assess my conviction and see if I am fit to volunteer with them. They said that disclosable court outcomes don’t automatically prevent someone from volunteering or working with them, and that it is only in rare cases the person is unable to proceed. So I'm hopeful.
The thought of not being able to make those calls again was very upsetting. As I’ve said before on here, I love it so much. I think I find out tomorrow if I am able to continue, but one thing I do know I will continue with and that is being a convicted criminal. I was so excited when ten years had passed, because I thought it wouldn’t come up anymore, I could stop explaining myself, and I would, in essence, be a free woman.
How wrong I was.
As Michael Jackson, who was actually a criminal himself, would say: I am a Smooth Criminal.
Last Friday, while all the emails and police checks were going down, I had a look on Facebook Marketplace and found some vintage phones which I thought would be perfect for my art project I’m putting together for SALA 2026.
Essentially, I’m going to buy as many vintage phones as possible and gild some, paint some in all different outrageous colours, include braille and Teledexes, and create some works of art.
On Friday, while I was sending and receiving emails on my phone, Mum was driving me all around Adelaide, from Oaklands Park to Salisbury Heights, to pick up phones.
Below, you can see four of the '80s push-button ones I love, and then below that, a more modern push-button phone.
But the primary reason I love cowrie shells is because everything in this world is phallic. Pens, guns, knives, cigarettes, baseball bats… and then CDs, clocks, tennis balls, buttons and the list goes on. We live in a phallic world.
The opposite of phallic is yonic, and I remember I once read that cowrie shells were considered yonic and I loved that about them. In particular, because they were used as currency.
We stopped and picked up the cowrie shells, and you can see them below.
But I still sent her a bunch of flowers when we got home to say thank you. You can see them below.
As well as phones, I’ve become interested in calculators that light up the numbers in that blue-green fluorescent glow. I’d love to put something together with a whole lot of them and then light it up. So today, along with two dial phones and a Teledex, I picked up a vintage calculator with the features I mentioned above.
The guy I bought it from was a little bit scary. I don’t mean to judge, but he came across as a drug dealer. The calculator was $20, and he was actually really nice—he even asked me if I wanted to go inside and test if it worked. I politely declined.
It works.
You can see a photo of it below, along with the other goods I picked up today.
It was always my plan to get studio space, initially to write, but it’ll be so good to make things in there too. There are studios at The Mill on Angas Street, so I’m going to apply there. I’ll just wait until November when uni finishes up, and I’ll only have my TAFE course, which goes through until December.
Until then, this house is going to get cluttered with phones, calculators and I want VHS tapes, old cameras, all sorts of things. I’m going to gild them, paint them, and pair them with letters.
I want to share a bit of a letter I wrote to my brother a little while ago. It was in letter format, but I sent it as a message. I had just sent him a copy of a letter I wrote to the editor of The Advertiser about some pro-Palestinian protesters who were being labelled as a security threat. I closed that letter by saying that we were turning a blind eye to genocide.
I asked my brother what he thought of it. He didn’t respond. So I sent him another message, asking again what he thought. Still, no response.
Later, when we were talking, I asked him in person. He said he didn’t want to talk about it with me. And honestly, I found that to be the ultimate slap in the face. Because what he was really saying was: You don’t know what you're talking about, and I'm not going to lower myself to the level of an idiot like you to explain anything.
I pushed him a bit, and he broke. He said the Palestinians in Gaza deserve what’s happening to them because they voted for Hamas. He said if he were in charge, he’d do much worse than block aid to Gaza. He was absolutely ruthless. He made Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich look merciful. He wasn’t just cold, he was genocidal. Then he asked me what I thought about October 7.
I told him Hamas acted in resistance. And I really, really regret saying that because I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. What I meant was: the situation is a pressure cooker. With decades of oppression and apartheid against the Palestinian people, something like October 7 was tragically bound to happen.
But let me be clear: Hamas is a bloodthirsty terrorist organisation with no regard for human life, and I completely condemn everything they did on that day. Unfortunately, my brother took that moment to fuel his tirade against Palestinians even further.
So I said we should agree to disagree, before it turned into a big fight. He agreed. The next day, I sent him this message:
I know you’ll probably say you don’t want to talk about it with me, which honestly feels incredibly patronising and condescending. It’s as if you’re suggesting I don’t know what I’m talking about or that it’s not worth your time to engage. But I do know what I’m talking about. I have two roles within a human rights organisation and I have been following the situation closely, from both sides.
I’ve always respected your opinion as one of authority and reason on almost everything, until now. On this particular issue, you are wrong.
The notion that Palestinians in Gaza deserve to be killed because they voted in Hamas is not only factually flawed but also rooted in a dangerous disregard for human rights.
First, it's critical to recognise that over half of Gaza's population was under 18 during the last elections in 2006. These children and teenagers did not vote for Hamas. To suggest they deserve collective punishment for decisions made before they even reached adulthood is both morally bankrupt and in direct violation of international law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly forbids collective punishment. Article 33 states that "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed." This is not a matter of political debate. It is international law. To justify the bombing of civilians based on political representation would require us to apply the same logic everywhere. Should every American be bombed for voting in leaders who authorised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Should every Australian be held accountable for its involvement in military operations in the Middle East? Of course not. We recognise the difference between government decisions and civilian populations.
Moreover, many who did vote for Hamas did so out of desperation, not out of a thirst for violence, but for basic governance, survival, and resistance against blockade and occupation. When people are stripped of rights, besieged, and left with no options, political choices are often survival choices. To equate that with deserving death is a grave injustice.
Finally, human rights are not conditional. The right to life, safety, and dignity does not evaporate because of political affiliation. It is a dangerous road when we start to believe that the political choices of a few justify the slaughter of entire communities. This is not justice; it is a justification for genocide.
To support collective punishment is to abandon the principles of human rights entirely. We should be better than that.
He did say that. He said that all Palestinians deserve what is happening to them now, that they voted in Hamas, and then he went on a rant about how he would do so much worse than the Israeli government.
The point is, he’s just some colonial dickhead. But he gets ahead in life. While I’m apologising to a community service organisation for threatening to sue them, while my police check returns a spent criminal conviction, and while I rent his house with my mother, he’s sitting there as the CEO of some scientific company, in his beautiful house in central London, with his two just as beautiful children.
The downside is his wife is dull but she is also successful in life. She’s a partner at some big international company.
Why is it that arseholes get on in life? I have tried so hard to do the right thing. I’ve failed a lot, but I get up again and I keep trying.
I honestly don’t know why I bother.
