MALLORCAN YOUTH CULTURE BY BEN MORRIS

Ben Morris documents Mallorcan youth culture, exploring with Nina Cohen, what it is like growing up in and being in that stage of life where all ideas are exciting and possibilities are endless, on an island with such a schizophrenic personality.

PEOPLE OF NOTE: Gabrielle Penfold in partnership with Emma Lewisham

A modern woman in many ways (Penfold’s break, and subsequent momentum has been helped along by social media), the 27 year old is quick to affirm her reverence for tradition, preferring to sell her work by way of galleries rather than DM’s. Instagram has proved a seminal and ongoing asset to her commercial success, and yet, Penfold is adamant “I don’t want to be an influencer, I want to be an artist.”

SEX, LIES, AND RED TAPE BY GRACE O’NEILL

Instagram’s increasingly strict “community guidelines” have been slowly pushing sex workers and sex educators off its platform. It’s the latest Silicon Valley scandal to call into question who gets to decide which voices we see and hear online.

PEOPLE OF NOTE: Nathalie Morris and Carlos Sanson Jr

When we catch Nathalie Morris and Carlos Sanson—breakout stars of the breakout Australian dramedy Bump—they’re on the Pacific Highway, headed back from a four-day short film shoot on New South Wales’ South Coast. In person, the pair mirror the same easy chemistry that has made Bump such a blockbuster success. The series—a Stan original created by Australian TV veteran Claudia Karvan—broke viewing records within days of its January release. It was quickly renewed for a second season. The story hinges around a ‘will-they won’t-they’ love story between teenagers Oly and Santi (Morris and Sanson), who are in their final year of high school when their lives are upended by Oly’s cryptic pregnant—a phenomena in which women don’t know they are pregnant until they give birth.

STAND FOR SOMETHING – ZIGGY RAMO BY VANESSA SWEDÉRUS, RHYS RIPPER AND GRACE O’NEILL

Ziggy Ramo recorded his year-defining album, Black Thoughts, in 2015 — but he held on to it for five years, told by the music industry that an Australian public so in denial about their own racist past (and present) couldn’t handle its contents. On May 25th, as a global race reckoning began to take shape, he uploaded the album in full —it’s gone on to be dubbed the most important Australian album of 2020. Grace O'Neill spends an hour in conversation with the magnanimous rapper.

THE SOCIAL DILEMMA – YAN YAN CHAN BY PIERRE TOUSSAINT & GRACE O’NEILL

Social media gets a bad rap these days. Justifiably so, for anyone who has seen The Social Dilemma and then fallen into a dark hole of existential despair, convinced Facebook is slowly melting our minds and chipping away at the foundations of modern democracy. But our ‘social media = bad’ conversations tend to lack a little nuance. Grace O'Neill talks to Sydney Creative and Digital Influencer, Yan Yan Chan on the evolving dynamic that is social media.

THE LOST ART OF DIALOGUE BY GRACE O’NEILL

I still believe that the only way to real progress is to effectively out-argue the people we disagree with; I believe that treating straight white men as if they’re ‘the enemy’ is childish and unhelpful and I believe that many complicated social issues have been reduced to opaque good/bad binaries, and that this is driving people further along the extremes of the political spectrum. Grace O'Neill considers American politics, now.

HOME GROWN BY KELLY GEDDES AND LAURA AGNEW

“Prosperity is not a thing to grab, but an idea to cultivate; a mindset and a way of life”, Laura Agnew maps her path to Permaculture.

STATELESS BY NADINE VON COHEN

Imagine you’re a pregnant refugee with chronic pain and little to no English. You’ve spent the last seven years in a prison camp and all you know of Australia is the inside of a detention centre. Writer and refugee advocate, Nadine Von Cohen documents who she's fighting for.

THE BEST OF MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Curated by Publicist and Producer, Jess Carrera, SIDE-NOTE wraps up the best of MIFF 68½, the digital iteration of Melbourne's acclaimed International Film Festival.

I HAVE MEASURED OUT MY LIFE WITH COFFEE SPOONS BY VICTORIA PEARSON AND ANNA POGOSSOVA

There is a semi-deflated black orb gathering dust on a shelf in my home that taunts me whenever it veers into my eyeline. Its pearlescent sheen and accompanying yoga mat are silent and still, but may as well be shrieking and shaking with the force at which I’m confronted by their daily cry: We have been abandoned. Victoria Pearson considers how history will remember our time.

SENSE OF AN ENDING BY GRACE O’NEILL

Even for women who hadn’t bought a magazine in years – and of those, we know, there are many – there was a sense of something ending on Tuesday. In one deft manoeuver three of the final stalwarts of the Australian fashion magazine landscape were wiped out. Harper’s BAZAAR, ELLE, InStyle. Gone, gone, gone. Grace O’Neill laments our loss.

ESSENTIAL WORK BY DEREK HENDERSON & GRACE O’NEILL

If there’s any kind of creative legacy that marks this moment we’re in, we hope it’s this one: a return to something delicate, understated and familiar.

A Place To Call Home by Michael Brunt

Farmland hugs the cliffs that wrap and wind their way around the impending shore. Your nostrils are greeted with the distinct, rare blend of cow manure and sun-dried seaweed. The breeze picks up and you know you’re home. Photographer Michael Brunt explores the blueprint of identity in 'A Place To Call Home'.

MADE UP BY DEREK HENDERSON AND MATILDA DODS

Make up, and the beauty industry when subtracted from narratives of both mass consumerism, and oppressive beauty standards, contains the potential for rebellious lightheartedness. The personal is political, but that does not mean that either can’t be fun. The new identity of the beauty industry is fun, embracing its inherent frivolity and its revolutionary potential as a political force.

THE TIME BEFORE BY PETER VAN ALPHEN

There is nothing like the sweet, latent promise of good times; the tickle of butterflies in your stomach, the extravagant ideas about where the evening will take you, or with whom.

SHE’S LIKE THE WIND BY DIVYA BALA AND LEVON BAIRD

Once, summer meant endless feverish days bookended by the briefest winks of velvet night; a humming cicada song over a metronomic percussion of ice cubes against sweating glass; salt waves that washed overhead like a pulse and the echo of heat from every side and from below.

IN HONOUR OF UNCELEBRATED LAST TIMES BY LAUREN BRUMLEY

When habits vary or trends fade, we’re not always aware of the change. Tastes may shift, but there is still a finality to them. We just may not notice the transition.

Playing With Fire by Luke Shadbolt & Eli Murphy

All things begin, end and begin again in fire. From the earliest dawning of humankind’s consciousness, fire has represented the most powerful and unrelenting source of change known to us.

Who Wears The Pants? by Matilda Dods

Remember This Feeling by Divya Bala

Possession is symbiotic, the things we have, have us. There’s an intimacy that binds, that is forged as they live with you, against your skin.

The Space Between Us (I hope you swipe what you’re looking for) by Noelle Faulkner

If love is a blanket of darkness that, despite dilated pupils, constricts our sight into a single-track tunnel, floods our brains with stress hormones and turns us into a dizzy mess of preoccupation and restlessness; then intimacy is the light switch.

The Language of Love by Matilda Dods

There is a sweet and sticky awkwardness of falling in love that never truly leaves, even after the days of high school and asking your parents’ permission to go out with your boyfriend. Like an ice cream melting down your fingers, sugary trails to be licked off hands and wrists, leaving behind a sticky residue.

Limits of Control: Memo from the Deep End by Noelle Faulkner

How do you know you’re alive? Heartbeats? Breath? Pain? Love? Fear? Moments? Evidence left on your flesh? Risk? G-force? Caffeine? Existential dread?

Alive

Edition N°2 ponders the vast notion of being ALIVE.
What it means to be ALIVE seems to be just as elusive as the meaning of life itself.

In This Day and Age by Tatiana Farley

Punk rock prodigy Patti Smith astutely observed, “Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself.”

Breath Becomes Air by Bree McDonald

We are, as Australians, intrepid by nature. Our location fuels our wanderlust, forcing our creative industries to be bold, to be heard. Our cultural isolation lending innovation and leading to world-class equivalence.