Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kath Albury, Professor of Media and Communication and Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society, Swinburne University of Technology
Gay and bisexual people in Australia are being targeted in violent attacks facilitated through dating and social media apps.
A recent investigation by the ABC revealed several hate crimes involving Islamic State sympathisers bashing gay and bisexual boys in Sydney, including some they had met on Wizz, which markets itself as an app for connecting young people, including minors.
This is just one of many examples. As of October 2024, Victoria Police had arrested 35 people in relation to similar incidents in which offenders had used fake profiles on Grindr and other dating apps to connect with gay men, before assaulting them.
So what do dating apps do to vet users? Could they be doing more? And how can users protect themselves?
What do dating apps do to protect users?
As anyone who has used a dating app will know, it’s very easy to set up an account. Generally all you need to do is to enter your email, password and date of birth. Then you’re free to make your profile and start looking for a match.
This can make it easy for offenders to set up fake profiles to target unsuspecting victims.
A number of dating apps (including Grindr) are signatories to the Australian Online Dating Code of Practice. The code commits apps to adopting a range of measures to mitigate the risks of “online-enabled harm” for users, such as prominently displaying reporting mechanisms and implementing processes to block or remove harmful content.
Wizz is not a signatory, but requires users to verify their identity by uploading a selfie, which is then assessed by AI age assurance software. Age assurance technology has well-documented shortcomings which allow some users to circumvent it. As of December 2025, Wizz has been included in Australia’s social media platform restrictions for people under 16.
In response to previous attacks, Grindr started providing pop-up safety messages for users, warning them of the risk of violence and providing tips to stay safe.
Could dating apps do more?
There have been suggestions apps should make users provide 100 points of ID to verify their profile.
But this brings with it new risks, especially for minority communities. Researchers have found that marginalised groups – including Indigenous women and LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to be targeted by technology-facilitated abuse.
As recent breaches of online chat platform Discord’s identity data have shown, these groups have good reason to distrust increased data collection and surveillance on dating platforms.
Additionally, while platforms having databases that contain the “real names” of users may make it easier for victims to report crimes after the fact, they cannot guarantee would-be violent offenders will not misrepresent themselves on the apps.
While many apps in Australia (including those that are signatories to the code of practice) already cooperate with law enforcement agencies and share relevant data if a crime is committed, there is less transparency about whether they have consulted with marginalised users – including survivors of online abuse – about what they need.
How can LGBTIQ+ users protect themselves on these apps?
As this shows, most current initiatives focus on responding to online-enabled harm, not prevention. Online platforms also don’t possess tools to moderate people’s conduct once they meet offline.
For example, it’s advised to have a short video call with a person you intend to meet in real life in order to help you confirm their identity. This is especially important as perpetrators of hate crimes can create profiles that seem legitimate.
There are also guidelines for checking in with friends such as sharing your location with a trusted friend when you go to meet a new person, and reporting abuse to the police or Crimestoppers.
It is important to emphasise that members of minority communities are not responsible for hate crimes, and individual risk mitigation can never be foolproof.
Recent Australian history demonstrates that where discrimination and exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people is normalised in public life, offenders are empowered to rationalise and normalise violence.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
For information and advice about family and intimate partner violence contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732). If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, contact 000.
As kids, many of us are told that if we go outside with wet hair, we’ll catch a cold. And as adults, we might spend an extra few minutes drying our hair before stepping out.
Many tall buildings in Anglo countries don’t label the 13th floor, while buildings in East Asia often skip floor four.
If a player I barrack for is having a winning streak, and a commentator mentions it, I might feel like the player is “jinxed” and their winning streak will end.
These are all common superstitious and traditional beliefs (that used to be called “old wives’ tales”). And no matter how science-literate our society is, they persist. Let’s look at why, and whether there’s any harm in them.
Origins in older belief systems
The belief about catching a cold from wet hair has roots in ancient Greek and Chinese medicine. Health was based on balance and harmony, with the temperature of our bodies and our environment playing important roles.
Now we know viral exposure is the crucial factor.
Some recent research does show the respiratory tracts of mice appear more vulnerable to viruses in colder environments. But even if we’re more vulnerable to viruses when cold, it doesn’t mean wet hair is specifically risky.
Why do superstitions persist today
The psychology of “sense making” – how we make sense of the world and our lives – helps explain our behaviour. Throughout human history, people have come up with explanations for the origins of the universe, their lives, and why things are the way they are.
Some claim the drive for sense making is a fundamental motivation, similar to hunger or loneliness. But having a drive to explain the world doesn’t guarantee our explanations will be accurate.
The knowledge we draw on at any moment typically isn’t rigorously based on evidence and sound logic. It’s more like little puzzle pieces, stored in disorganised piles in the backs of our minds.
We may keep some pieces from science class in one corner, alongside a pile of information passed down from our grandparents. When we need to explain something, we quickly try to put those pieces together.
How science and the supernatural can fit together
We can be quite creative in how we assemble information, in ways that are totally incompatible with science.
Research from rural South Africa a few years after the peak of the AIDS crisis revealed how human minds do this. Before public health education to fight the spread of the HIV virus, people often believed AIDS was caused by witchcraft.
After these education programs, the idea of a sexually transmitted virus did not supplant the role of bewitchment. Instead the two fit together. Someone might believe witchcraft caused the attraction that lead to sex with someone carrying the virus, for example.
The researchers called this “explanatory coexistence” because scientific explanations (the virus) and supernatural explanations (here, witchcraft) happily coexist in our minds.
When it comes to catching colds, while I know a virus causes the cold, my knowledge doesn’t go much deeper. So it may not be too hard to convince me of some phoney but science-ish explanation or treatment.
Early in the COVID pandemic, for instance, people took the idea that bleach and sunlight can kill bugs and wrongly applied this to COVID. Myths that drinking bleach or sitting in the sun could clear a COVID infection spread among family and friendship groups, as well as social media.
We trust others to form our beliefs because we believe they may know more about that topic than we do, whether they be doctors or our grandparents. Anecdotes have a big influence on our judgements, even when we are presented with evidence to the contrary.
Should I rein it in?
To work out if it’s a problem to mix scientific beliefs with the supernatural and superstitious, we have to consider what behaviours it leads to.
There’s no harm drying your hair before going outside or getting mad at a sports broadcaster after your team blows their lead. There may be safety benefits in avoiding walking under ladders, or opening umbrellas indoors.
If it’s just a bit of fun, like doing tarot readings at a party, it’s not something you need to worry about. But if you won’t go on a date with someone you really like because you’re a Scorpio and they’re a Gemini, it might be worth rethinking your position.
Interrogating your beliefs – and why you believe something – is a good way to start. By understanding what you don’t know and trying to fill your knowledge gaps with credible sources, you will improve your collection of puzzle pieces, and develop better ways of fitting them together.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 25, 2026.
What is a ‘cancer gene’? How genetic mutations lead to cancer Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Diepstraten, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) An estimated 170,000 Australians were diagnosed with cancer in 2025. Many people know the causes of cancer are partly genetic. But how do your genes, which contribute
Extreme weather is transforming the world’s rivers. We need new ways to protect them Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Tonkin, Professor of Ecology and Rutherford Discovery Fellow, University of Canterbury In the summer of 2022, extreme heat and unprecedented drought drove parts of the world’s third largest river, the Yangtze, to dry up. The impacts for hydropower, shipping and industry in China were severe, immediate
AI companies promise to ‘fix’ aged care, but they’re selling a false narrative Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Barbosa Neves, Senior Horizon Fellow, AI and Ageing, University of Sydney Australia’s Royal Commission into Aged Care found a broken system. Now, technology companies are promising artificial intelligence (AI) will fix everything, from staff shortages to older people’s loneliness. This is known as agetech, an industry
How ‘smart’ rainwater tanks can help keep platypus habitat healthy Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Russell, Research Fellow, Urban Stream Geomorphology, The University of Melbourne A growing number of new housing developments feature a little known but powerful bit of tech: smart rainwater tanks. That’s where the rainwater tank next to each house is fitted with a little computer to open
Trump’s plan for strikes on Iran carries major risks – and the US military knows it Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University As the US continues to assemble military assets in the Middle East and Europe ahead of a possible strike against Iran, Donald Trump is running up against two problems that have plagued American presidents before him. The
Michelangelo hated painting the Sistine Chapel – and never aspired to be a painter to begin with Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Swartwood House, Associate Professor of Art History, University of South Carolina When a 5-inch-by-4-inch red chalk drawing of a woman’s foot by Michelangelo sold at auction for US$27.2 million on Feb. 5, 2026, it blew past the $1.5 million to $2 million it was expected to
Pauline Hanson’s no ‘good’ Muslims comment shows how normalised Islamophobia has become in Australia Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ali Mamouri, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies, Deakin University One Nation leader Pauline Hanson made headlines last week following an interview with Sky News in which she suggested there are no “good” Muslims. The comment was outrageous by any measure, but the response relatively muted, reflecting a
Ivermectin was touted as a cure for COVID, now it’s being tested for cancer. But what can it actually treat? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University Ivermectin was originally celebrated as a revolutionary treatment for parasitic disease in humans and animals. It has since evolved into a focal point of misinformation and heated debate. During the early part of the COVID pandemic, it was
Climate change is drying out the ‘forgotten rivers’ that keep the Murray-Darling alive. We need a new plan Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Avril Horne, Research fellow, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne If you stand beside Seven Creeks in Victoria or Spring Creek in Queensland, they might seem small and unremarkable. But these creeks flow into the mighty Goulburn and Condamine Rivers, and punch far above their
Victorian public school teachers want a 4-day week trial. What could this mean for schools? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Longmuir, Senior Lecturer – Co-leader Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab, Monash University When we think about jobs you can do from home, you may not immediately picture a school teacher. But as Victoria debates a new right to work from home, the state’s teachers
China’s dancing robots are a wake-up call for Australia on policy and productivity Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marina Yue Zhang, Associate Professor, Technology and Innovation, University of Technology Sydney Chinese state television rang in the Year of the Horse with humanoid robots doing kung fu, comedy sketches and mass choreography. They made complex martial arts choreography look easy. Social media was flooded with memes
Brontë’s Heathcliff wasn’t white. Jacob Elordi is. Is that a problem? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ellie Crookes, Lecturer in English Literatures, University of Wollongong The race of Heathcliff, the brooding antihero of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, is a much-discussed element of the classic tale. Brontë variously describes him as “a little lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”; “that gipsy
New police powers to ‘move on’ rough sleepers only mask NZ’s deeper homelessness problem Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brodie Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in Housing and Health, University of Otago The government’s plan to empower police to “issue move-on orders as a tool to deal with disorderly behaviour in public places” will effectively apply to people as young as 14 who are experiencing homelessness and
‘I am the enemy of death’: Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is a remarkable tale of survival Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Kevin, Associate Professor in Australian History, Flinders University Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged
The Palestine Chronicle: Roger Fowler’s legacy – a Palestinian tribute The Palestine Chronicle New Zealand activist Roger Fowler, a longtime Gaza solidarity organiser and Palestine Chronicle contributor, who died last Saturday, leaves a legacy of principled resistance. Roger Fowler was a beloved figure in the global solidarity movement and a steadfast advocate for justice in Palestine. He leaves behind a legacy defined by courage, compassion,
West Papuan filmmakers expose Merauke rainforest destruction in ‘siege’ doco Pacific Media Watch A world premiere of a new documentary revealing the devastation of rainforest in the southeastern part of West Papua is one of two films being screened in Auckland next month. Billed as “Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua”, the programme is showing the heart of a hidden Pacific conflict and will be
Science knows of 21,000 bee species. There are likely thousands more Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James B. Dorey, Lecturer in Biological Sciences, University of Wollongong It’s a question that has sparked the curiosity of scholars and bee lovers for decades: how many species of bees are there in the world? This might, at first, seem like a silly question. But it is
How Tourette’s causes involuntary outbursts – and what people with the condition want you to know Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Licari, Senior Research Fellow in Child Disability, The University of Western Australia Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson has explained he left the British Film and Television Awards (BAFTAs) ceremony early on Monday night, aware his outbursts were causing distress. Davidson was attending the ceremony to support
High-speed rail from Sydney to Newcastle is a step closer. But what about Sydney to Melbourne? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Laird, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Wollongong The federal government will spend A$230 million towards a high-speed rail line between Newcastle and Sydney, promising the project will be “shovel ready” for a final decision on construction in 2028. The government also released a partly redacted business
Punch the monkey isn’t the first lonely zoo animal to capture our hearts – or raise troubling questions Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ruby Ekkel, Associate Lecturer in History, Australian National University For weeks, the story of Punch the monkey has tugged at heartstrings around the world. Videos of this lonely baby monkey at Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo have triggered global outpourings of empathy, grief and outrage. Abandoned by his mother,
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a 1955 play by Ray Lawler is as canonical an Australian play as you can get. On its premiere, it was credited with ushering a new era of assuredness in Australian theatre: telling Australian stories, with Australian accents.
Barney and Roo work as cane cutters for seven months of the year. In the off-season, they travel to Melbourne to spend time with working class women Olive and Nancy.
This summer, in the 17th iteration of the layoff, Nancy has unexpectedly entered into a conventional marriage. This causes the remaining characters to reconsider their own roles in this unique ménage à quatre.
Daringly, Lawler figured these layoffs as periods of sustained pleasure and emotional fulfilment for the men, while also highlighting Nancy and Olive’s agency and independence in their paradoxically proto-feminist act of electing to be their layoff gals.
The “doll” of the title does not refer to the women, but to a novelty item first purchased at the Luna Park fair ground. Each year, as a sign of his renewed commitment, Roo bestows one on Olive. The uncanny kewpie dolls eventually festoon the living room of their shared boarding house, more characters in the on-again, off-again performance of domesticity.
In the mid 1970s, Lawler wrote two additional plays – prequels to the Doll, crafting a trilogy of stories set over 17 years: Kid Stakes, set in the first summer of their relationships, and Other Times, set at the conclusion of the second world war.
The Doll remains the most popular of the three plays, and is typically staged alone. The trilogy of works have not been staged together since 1985, but now Red Stitch Theatre is playing them in repertory, including a marathon Saturday session that lasts nearly 11 hours (with breaks).
A kewpie doll is bestowed every year, to eventually festoon the living room of their shared boarding house.Chris Parker/Red Stitch
The fact that the plays were not written in chronological order, and the two ealier-set plays came 20 years later, underscores Lawler’s interest in memory, how we sustain ideas over time and how we contend with loss and change.
The same quartet of performers play the characters as they progress through the cycle, a unique acting challenge. Here Ngaire Dawn Fair, playing Olive, and Emily Godard, playing Nancy (and, in the final part, Pearl), do an especially fine job of ageing before the audience’s eyes.
The revival is well-plotted, lavishly acted, beautifully lit and features stunning costumes.
I had the experience of seeing the three shows run together on a sunny late summer day in Melbourne, where the audience spilled out onto a lawn and garden surrounding the theatre, almost as if we were stepping into the Carlton back garden the characters enter when they leave the stage.
Spending that length of time together with other spectators creates a strong feeling of camaderie and led to good-natured jokes at times about how hard we, the audience, were working, and whether or not we would be able to bear up.
The nature of work
Across the three works, Melbourne itself is a central character: its pubs, restaurants, parks and beaches. The city serves as a resource that sustains the interior lives of the characters, albeit without providing for their material needs (at least in Roo and Barney’s instance).
Instead, the characters in the play rely on an infusion of outside capital – eerily prescient from the perspective of our era of drastic cuts to arts funding. And so the central element of a play comes into view: its relationship to work.
Barney and Roo are itinerants, performing the role of husband or suitor but without also adopting that of provider.
The work that the men do in the cane fields rhymes with the experience of jobbing actors or musicians, who can’t rely on steady employment. Actors know firsthand the experience of unreliable, precarious work and the havoc it wrecks on relationships.
The violence and raw emotions of the final play are all the more striking thanks to the time we’ve spent with the characters.Chris Parker/Red Stitch
And yet, the characters in the Doll have somehow found a way to build enduring connections and find meaning and satisfaction in a world that is always subject to change.
The trilogy invites us to think not just about our relationship to the period it depicts from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, but about temporality and timescapes more generally.
By the time we reach the ultimate play, the violence and raw emotions it showcases are all the more striking thanks to the time we’ve spent with the characters.
The audience viscerally shares in the sense of brokenness and interruption Nancy’s departure has caused, and keenly feel the disillusionment and uncertainty of the characters left behind.
If anything, the 70 years that have passed since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s first performance should serve as a powerful vindication of the optimism felt by the younger characters in the play.
But Australia’s sustained postwar economic miracle and its growing artistic and cultural legacy aside, The Doll Trilogy at Red Stitch comes at an ambiguous and fearful time. Climate change threatens the health of the cane fields that Roo and Barney rely on, and rapid technological advances threaten to put us all out of work.
Lawler’s plays, by reordering the social contract – especially around marriage and work – suggests that the old model might not be worth mourning much. In that respect, these old classics offer a strikingly bold vision for the future.
The Doll Trilogy is at Red Stitch, Melbourne, until April 11.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Diepstraten, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)
Many people know the causes of cancer are partly genetic. But how do your genes, which contribute so much of what makes you you, change what they do and cause a cancer?
Where do these “cancer genes” come from? And are they ticking time bombs?
Cancer is caused by DNA mutations
DNA is called the “instructions for life”, but what does it do? Your cells can read DNA like an instruction manual, and use those instructions to make proteins. The section of DNA with the instructions for a particular protein is called a “gene”.
A cell is like a tiny machine, and proteins are the cogs and gears that keep everything running smoothly – that is, keeping your cells healthy and functioning normally. There’s a protein for every job in a cell.
But what happens if there is a mistake in the instruction manual – a DNA mutation?
Incredibly, cells have proteins whose job it is to identify and fix DNA mutations. But if a DNA mutation can’t be repaired, a cell might make too much or too little of a certain protein, or maybe a protein that doesn’t actually work.
So, a common pathway to cancer is when a protein responsible for fixing DNA mutations is itself non-functional – its gene is mutated.
One of the most famous (or infamous) of these repair proteins is BRCA1. If you have a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, and your cells stop making BRCA1, other DNA mutations you get won’t be repaired properly. If you got another DNA mutation, you’d be stuck with it.
One mutation might be manageable, but maybe you get another. And another.
And then, one day, a cell that started with a BRCA1 mutation has ended up with a mutation in a gene that makes it divide faster than all your other cells, as well as a mutation in a gene that would normally kill the cell if it started being abnormal.
Now your cell can’t die, can’t stop dividing, and keeps getting more mutations – it’s a cancer.
While the genes involved can differ, this example illustrates how most cancers arise. Accumulated DNA mutations, acquired either over time (ageing naturally leads to some DNA mistakes) or from carcinogen exposure (such as UV radiation, dangerous chemicals, cigarettes and alcohol), push a cell over the edge.
There are two main kinds of DNA mutation: those in the cells that produce eggs and sperm (germline), and those in any other cell type (somatic). It’s an important distinction, because only germline mutations found in eggs and sperm will be inheritable – that is, able to be passed on to children.
Inheriting a gene mutation
If you have bad luck, and a BRCA1 mutation spontaneously occurs in a regular cell, that’s still only one cell with a BRCA1 mutation. But what if one of your parents had a germline BRCA1 mutation, and you inherited it?
In this scenario, every single cell in your body would have one copy of a busted BRCA1. (Your cells have two copies of every gene – one from each of your parents.)
Of course, every single cell will also have one copy of functional BRCA1, which can still repair proteins. But still, over the trillions of cells in your body, the odds of something going wrong will be much bigger.
For example, by the time a woman with an inherited mutation in BRCA1 reaches 70 years of age, there is a 65% chance she will have breast cancer and a 39% chance she will have ovarian cancer. In contrast, only 9%-12.5% of women with no family history of breast cancer will develop breast cancer by age 75.
Women with mutations in another DNA repair gene called BRCA2 face similarly poor odds.
Men with mutations in either gene also have higher cancer risks, particularly for breast cancer and prostate cancer.
Scientists have discovered dozens of “cancer genes” like BRCA1. Another example is a gene called TP53, which usually helps kill abnormal cells.
Inherited TP53 mutations are associated with perhaps the highest cancer risk. Inheritance of a TP53 mutation is the cause of Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which gives a person a 90% chance of developing some kind of cancer by age 60.
What can we do about these cancer genes?
You can’t change your genes. If you inherit or acquire a mutated form of a so-called cancer gene, you simply face a higher risk of developing certain cancers than someone who does not.
The best thing you can do is lead a healthy lifestyle. Don’t smoke, avoid alcohol, exercise regularly, eat a balanced diet, and stay safe in the sun.
If you have a family history of cancer, you should consult your doctor. They can direct you to genetic testing and counselling if necessary.
If you do have an inherited genetic mutation, you may be advised to participate in cancer screening programs at an earlier age than the general population or, in more extreme cases, undergo preventative surgeries. As with all cancers, catching them early, when treatment is most effective, is key.
In the summer of 2022, extreme heat and unprecedented drought drove parts of the world’s third largest river, the Yangtze, to dry up.
The impacts for hydropower, shipping and industry in China were severe, immediate and well-documented. Less visible were the ecological consequences for the many species that depend on the river.
The Yangtze is not an exception. Around the world, rivers are no longer changing gradually.
Rather, they are being increasingly transformed by extreme climatic events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves. Our newly published global review finds these events are pushing ecosystems beyond their limits and eroding biodiversity and core functions.
In bringing together global evidence, our research sets out a roadmap for how science and management can respond to these mounting ecological pressures.
When impacts cascade
Because rivers are connected systems, impacts rarely remain localised. Extreme climatic events can send impacts cascading through entire river networks, affecting communities far from where they begin.
Recovery is often uneven and incomplete, with some species lost and communities permanently changed, especially where rivers are fragmented and species cannot escape to refuges or are lured into traps.
The consequences can be profound: extreme events can push ecosystems past tipping points, after which full recovery is unlikely and systems may follow new paths instead of returning to their past states.
In some cases, even the most ambitious restoration efforts of recent decades may struggle to reverse biodiversity loss if the frequency of extremes continues to rise.
Our review also shows that when extreme events happen together or in sequence – known as compound events – their impacts can be catastrophic for people and river biodiversity.
Whether that’s a flood following a drought, a drought and heatwave operating in unison, or a flood falling on saturated ground, the impacts of these compound events can multiply.
The Yangtze drought and heatwave collapsed plankton communities, while in New Mexico in 2011, wildfire followed by heavy rain damaged water quality in the Rio Grande far downstream. Repeated extremes were shown to have altered invertebrate communities in Alaska’s Wolf Point Creek for more than a decade.
In Europe’s Rhône River, a major heatwave in 2003 brought an increase in invasive species, which was amplified by damaging floods that followed. In California’s Klamath River, a wildfire and intense rain in 2022 led to widespread river failure and a long fish kill zone.
Importantly, the severity of ecological impacts aren’t always proportional to that of the event that causes them. Instead, it is the order of events and existing stresses that often drive outsized impacts that are hard to predict and manage.
Dead fish lie in the Oder River during an environmental disaster in 2022, thought to have been caused by an algal bloom.Patrick Pleul/Getty Images
Moving from reactive to proactive
While extreme events are stretching the resilience of river ecosystems, they are also exposing gaps in the science needed to design lasting ecological solutions.
Right now, studying the effects of these events is challenging for researchers because they tend to strike without warning. As a result, the evidence base remains limited and also unevenly spread around the world.
For water managers, this creates real uncertainty about how to prepare river biodiversity for extreme events.
One common idea is to protect safe havens, such as cold streams, deep pools or shaded tributaries, which can offer species short-term relief from heat and drought.
Because of this, safeguarding these refuges is widely seen as a key part of river management. Nevertheless, questions are emerging about whether these refuges will persist or remain viable during extreme events.
Simply put, compounding extreme heatwaves and drought not only warm rivers, but also undermine the processes that create thermal refuges for freshwater species.
But better preparation for extreme events will require more proactive approaches, guided by adaptive frameworks such as the widely-used “resist-accept-direct” strategy.
A mix of nature-based solutions and hard engineering will be needed. Approaches that restore connectivity and protect groundwater recharge zones are increasingly seen as some of the most effective ways to tackle the linked ecological challenges ahead.
Whatever tools are used, the bigger shift must be from local, reactive fixes to catchment-scale, resilience-focused strategies that anticipate extreme events rather than respond to them after the fact.
Rivers support billions of people but remain among the least protected parts of the natural world, and we urgently need to prepare them for a more extreme future.
Australia’s Royal Commission into Aged Care found a broken system. Now, technology companies are promising artificial intelligence (AI) will fix everything, from staff shortages to older people’s loneliness.
This is known as agetech, an industry projected to reach a global value of A$170 billion by 2030. But its promised “fixes” obscure what is actually breaking aged care.
In our new study, we analysed how 33 agetech companies selling AI for aged care in Australia, East Asia, Europe and North America market their products, including monitoring tools and companion robots.
We found their websites, promotional materials and product descriptions depict aged care as inefficient, understaffed and overwhelmed by a growing ageing population. Older people are too frail or too many. Care workers are overstretched. Human care is flawed.
Yet our research shows these narratives distract from structural problems and reinforce ageism, even as Australia’s new Aged Care Act commits to a stronger focus on dignity and autonomy.
Before we accept AI as the cure, we need to understand what we are being sold.
The cure on offer
The companies we studied claim AI will predict falls before they happen, detect health changes humans miss, eliminate incompetence, and deliver “unprecedented” improvements in safety and quality.
It sounds revolutionary. But it is also a carefully constructed narrative. In the marketing materials, aged care is consistently framed as a failure of efficiency and public delivery.
Promotional images show older people sitting passively, struggling with mobility aids, or being reduced to body parts attached to monitoring devices. They are represented through statistics: fall rates, malnutrition prevalence, hospitalisation risk.
According to the companies, older people are incidents waiting to happen and data sources to be mined. One company promises to transform intimate daily activities such as showering into “trackable metrics” for “optimal care”.
Care workers fare no better. Their labour is “time-consuming” and “error-prone”. With AI as the solution, care workers become the problem: well-meaning but unreliable, requiring technological oversight. Several companies market systems that track staff movements and automatically report delays to managers.
The rise of techno-solutionism
Agetech companies selling their wares paint the aged care sector as fundamentally broken, plagued by rising costs and inefficiencies.
By contrast, AI systems – featuring 24/7 monitoring, predictive analytics and automated alerts – are presented as objective and inherently superior.
This narrative reflects techno-solutionism: presenting social problems in ways that make technical fixes appear inevitable.
The aged care crisis stems from decades of social and political choices about how we value care and ageing. The royal commission documented this in detail: systemic neglect, regulatory failures, a funding model that incentivises cost-cutting over quality, and pervasive societal ageism.
AI solutionism frames the crisis as technical rather than social or political, burying the fact that broader reforms are needed.
Care staff must learn new systems, interpret data, and respond to constant notifications and false alarms. They suddenly have to oversee technologies that need ongoing calibration and maintenance.
Studies show this increases worker stress, as staff juggle care responsibilities with tech troubleshooting – all with limited training and time. Much of this labour remains invisible.
Alongside this, the relational aspects of care – noticing subtle changes in mood, building trust over time – get marginalised because they can’t be easily measured or automated.
Older people suffer the consequences. When care is organised around efficiency metrics and cost reduction, residents become problems to be managed rather than people with diverse histories, preferences and needs.
No single tech will fix this
Aged care faces serious challenges. It does need repair – but the fixes must take many forms, most of which have nothing to do with AI.
These include staff ratios that allow proper time for meaningful conversations, helping residents feel less lonely. Wages that reflect the value and complexity of care work. Funding models that prioritise dignity, agency and authentic participation in decisions about care.
Regulatory frameworks must hold providers accountable for quality of life, wellbeing and inclusion, not just compliance metrics. Aged care should also include community-based models that keep older people connected to neighbourhoods.
The best role AI can play is through supporting care practices that include and empower older people and staff, centring their voices and experiences.
If we let AI companies define what is broken, we also let them define what repair looks like. That may leave our systems more profitable, but far less caring and humane.
The authors acknowledge Naseem Ahmadpour, Alex Broom and Kalervo Gulson from the University of Sydney for their contributions to the research project.
A growing number of new housing developments feature a little known but powerful bit of tech: smart rainwater tanks.
That’s where the rainwater tank next to each house is fitted with a little computer to open and close a valve that releases water. Software can tell the valve to open to let some water out when, for instance, a storm is coming and you don’t want the tank to overflow. Or, it can keep it closed when you want to capture rainfall to boost household water supplies.
Our research is investigating new ways to network smart tanks together. When the tanks are part of a network, a computer program can keep track of what every tank is doing, and which ones need to release water and where.
Our project is implementing this smart rainwater tank technology to protect and restore stream habitats for platypus in Monbulk Creek, east of Melbourne.
We aim to scale up this ecologically-informed approach so it can be used anywhere, regardless of what species needs to be protected.
Smart water tanks have a small computer that controls a valve – the little grey box at the bottom – that controls release of water at key moments.Jess Lazarus, Author provided (no reuse)
Tanks for platypus
Our project, known as Tanks for Platypus, focuses on using a network of smart water tanks in Monbulk Creek to support local platypus populations.
Once widespread across Melbourne and surrounds, the iconic platypus is now listed as vulnerable in Victoria.
Reasons for this decline include urbanisation, changes to stream flows and habitat fragmentation and loss.
Platypus require water flow conditions that support waterbugs (their main food source). They also need space to swim and hide from predators.
The Tanks for Platypus project involves offering eligible residents in the Monbulk Creek catchment a free smart rainwater tank.
We aim to use these networked rainwater tanks and three urban lakes to provide more natural flow conditions for platypus. When finished, this smart rain grid will be distributed across both private and public land with the cooperation of local residents, schools and businesses.
[embedded content]
What we did
We have developed a new algorithm that manages how water is released from tanks into waterways, to improve the habitat for platypus and other aquatic life in Monbulk Creek.
We surveyed the creek in detail and simulated flow to map creek habitat. We mapped how much habitat is underwater and where water is deep enough for a platypus to be fully submerged under different flow conditions.
Smart rainwater tanks are being installed as part of a network.Jess Lazarus, Author provided (no reuse)
We can now use this information to guide our stormwater release and storage algorithms. For example, when water is not deep enough for platypus to feed and hide, our algorithm requests releases from the rainwater tanks.
During dry periods, supplementing creek flow with water releases from these tanks could significantly improve habitat conditions for platypus.
At times, just 1 megalitre per day (less than half an Olympic swimming pool) can increase available habitat by more than 10%.
This makes the water available when it’s needed and reduces the risk of flooding due to tanks overflowing during rain.
In fact, our algorithms can calculate how much water the tank should release before a storm. This means the tank ends up almost full after a storm, keeping rainwater available for residents.
When smart rainwater tanks are part of a network, a computer program can keep track of what every tank is doing, and which ones need to release water and where.Mats Bjorklund, Author provided (no reuse)
Where to from here?
We are now investigating how our designs and findings in Monbulk Creek can be applied more broadly, including in high-density housing and new urban developments.
One ecological objective might be, for instance, to reduce incidents where water gushes from overflowing tanks into waterways, eroding streambeds and banks, and potentially disturbing native species. Another might be to boost water levels in local creeks or lakes during dry periods.
Algorithms could be programmed to meet these needs, as well as others such as providing water from the tank to the household water for toilet flushing and garden watering.
And those lucky enough to live near a waterway with platypus will also know they are doing their bit to look after a unique part of our Australian wildlife.
When a 5-inch-by-4-inch red chalk drawing of a woman’s foot by Michelangelo sold at auction for US$27.2 million on Feb. 5, 2026, it blew past the $1.5 million to $2 million it was expected to receive.
Experts believe it to be a study for the figure of the Libyan Sibyl, a female prophet who appears on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo painted the iconic frescoes from 1508 to 1512, but he first sketched out the overall composition and details in a series of preparatory drawings. Only around 50 of these drawings survive today.
This was an exciting sale for reasons outside that eye-popping sum. Held in private collections for centuries, the drawing only came to light after the owner sent an unsolicited photo to Christie’s auction house. There, a drawings expert recognized it as one of the relatively few remaining studies for the Sistine frescoes.
As an art historian who specializes in the Italian Renaissance, I’m excited about the sale not because of the money it fetched, but because of the attention it has brought to Michelangelo’s lifelong devotion to drawing, a medium he prized over painting.
‘Not my art’
Art historians know a lot about Michelangelo through the letters and poems he penned, along with two biographies written in his lifetime by intimates Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi.
In 1506, Pope Julius II put Michelangelo’s sculpting work on a papal tomb at St. Peter’s Basilica on hold, redirecting the funds intended for the tomb to the renovation of the basilica itself.
Michelangelo responded by closing his studio. He ordered his workshop assistants to sell off its contents, abandoned 90 wagonloads’ worth of marble and left Rome in disgust.
In 1508, Julius and his intermediary, Cardinal Francesco Alidosi, were able to lure Michelangelo back to Rome with the promise of a 500-ducat payment and a contract to paint the Sistine. Despite accepting, the artist went on to complain relentlessly about his new commission. He wrote to his father that painting “is not my profession” and told the pope that painting “is not my art.”
Sculpture, not painting, was central to Michelangelo’s identity.
In the Condivi biography, which Michelangelo approved and helped shape, the artist is said to have abandoned painter Domenico Ghirlandaio’s workshop around 1490 to train in the Florence sculpture garden of powerful arts patron Lorenzo de’ Medici. Michelangelo would later joke that he became a sculptor as an infant, thanks to the breast milk of his wet nurse, who was the daughter of stonemasons.
Beyond his enthusiastic embrace of sculpture and resentment over the Sistine – what he called the “tragedy of the tomb” – Michelangelo found painting in fresco to be backbreaking work.
Michelangelo griped about painting the Sistine Chapel in a poem he sent to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia.Wikimedia Commons
“I’ve grown a goiter from this torture,” he wrote to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia in an illustrated poem. “My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!”
“My painting is dead,” he concludes. “I am not in the right place – I am not a painter.”
A grand design
The caricature that accompanies Michelangelo’s poem shows not only a cantankerous and restless mind, but also his use of drawing to reflect its inner workings.
Michelangelo’s biographer Vasari famously used the term “disegno” to mean both a physical drawing and a work’s overall “design” or concept, giving the artist an almost godlike creative power.
This double meaning is reflected in the title of the hugely popular 2017 exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York”: “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer.”
Michelangelo created many drawings for the Sistine that reflected the different meanings of “disegno.” There were his sketches of models, along with his architectural renderings and schemes to organize the huge space. Then there were the full-size “cartoons” he drew to transfer his designs directly onto the ceiling itself.
Michelangelo also made many studies of individual body parts and gestures for the Sistine, including eyes, hands and feet.
In a drawing for the Sistine ceiling that’s now in the British Museum, various hands – perhaps modeled after his own – repeat across the right side of the page. Feet were especially important to the overall design of the human figure, and they stand at the intersection of Michelangelo’s interests in Classical art and human anatomy.
Contrapposto, or the Classical “counter-poise,” was the iconic stance for standing figures in paintings and sculptures. It features the trunk of the body centered over one leg with its foot planted, and the other bent with the foot perched on the toe. Michelangelo’s “David” stands in contrapposto, and even doctors today are impressed by the anatomical precision of the muscles and veins of each foot.
The Christie’s red chalk drawing of the foot was likely done from a live model, with Michelangelo showing the elegance of the Libyan Sibyl prophetess through her dramatically arched foot.
In the finished fresco, Sibyl’s body is a kind of elegant machine. The musculature of her extended arms, her coiled torso and her pointed toe all work in concert. This small drawing shows how the charged energy of a single body part could contribute to the overall “disegno” of the massive fresco.
While the process of painting the ceiling was arduous, the process of conceiving it through drawing was obviously rewarding for Michelangelo.
The finished fresco of the Lybian Sybil in the Sistine Chapel.Wikimedia Commons
Drawing as the linchpin
Despite the popularity of the Sistine frescoes, Michelangelo rarely returned to painting after completing them. In 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned him to paint the “The Last Judgment” on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. But only after Clement died later that year – and Clement’s successor, Pope Paul III, gave Michelangelo the extraordinary title of Chief Architect, Sculptor, and Painter to the Vatican Palace – did the artist begin work on the altar wall.
While many people today may think of the Sistine frescoes or Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” when they think of the Italian Renaissance, those artists did not think of themselves primarily as painters.
In a famous letter of introduction to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo elaborates on his many skills in creating fortifications, infrastructure and weaponry. He boasts about his ability to build bridges, canals, tunnels and catapults. Only after 10 paragraphs does he include a single sentence admitting that he, in addition, “can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and in painting can do any kind of work as well as any man.”
Like Michelangelo’s, Leonardo’s drawings show a voracious mind at work. They explore, rather than simply observe, everything from military machines to human anatomy. In 1563, Michelangelo would go on to be named master of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, which aimed to teach drawing and design as the underlying skills necessary for sculpture, architecture and painting.
Drawing, it turns out, was the art that unified the many pursuits of the “Renaissance Man.”
As the US continues to assemble military assets in the Middle East and Europe ahead of a possible strike against Iran, Donald Trump is running up against two problems that have plagued American presidents before him.
The first is civilian misunderstanding of war. Fresh from what he sees as quick and easy victories against Iran last June and Venezuela this January, Trump wants military options which allow him to damage Iran at little risk or cost. But unfortunately for the president, no such option exists. And there are reports – which Trump denies – that his top general has warned him about the risks involved.
Despite the damage it has sustained in recent conflicts with the US and Israel, Iran maintains formidable capabilities. It has the ability to harass and perhaps close key shipping lanes, launch missile strikes against US forces and allies across the region, and perhaps carry out terrorist attacks throughout the world.
Trump’s repeated threats to overthrow the Iranian government make it much more likely Tehran will use these capabilities rather than exercising restraint as it did when the US attacked it last year.
According to severalmedia outlets, Trump’s military advisors have informed him of these risks. The president is reportedly not taking the news well. CBS News reports that Trump is “frustrated with what aides describe as the limits of military leverage against Iran” and is pushing for options that will give him a painless victory.
These exchanges between the military and its civilian masters are reminiscent of the interventions of the 1990s. During the Clinton administration, the White House repeatedly pushed the Pentagon to come up with low-risk plans for engagement in Somalia and the Balkans. The president and his staff wanted to be seen as doing something about urgent humanitarian tragedies, but they also didn’t want to risk a political upset by getting American soldiers killed.
Top military officers, particularly the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Colin Powell, pushed back against the civilians. War entails risk, they told the White House, and American soldiers could die if risks were not weighed appropriately.
In his memoirs, Powell recalled his response to a question from Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright: “‘What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’ I thought I would have an aneurysm.”
As so often with Trump, he is pushing this dynamic of civilian ignorance meeting military expertise to extremes. The current build-up against Iran started not with a clear strategy or objective, but a presidential social media message promising Iranian protesters that “help is on the way”. His current frustration stems from the difficulty of translating that vague promise into an actionable military plan.
‘Help is on its way’: the US president urges Iranians to keep protesting against the regime: January 2026.TruthSocial
Pushing at the limits of action
The second theme that is shaping and limiting Trump’s options is imperial overstretch. However powerful the US military is, it has limits – and in recent years, it has been pushing against them.
In particular, the US has a critical shortage of key missile defence munitions such as Thaad interceptors and Patriots. These platforms would be vital in defending against Iranian retaliation, but the US has been burning through them in recent years by providing them to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. The navy has also run down its own stocks of SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles, which are vital for defending the fleet and other American forces.
The result is that the US lacks the munitions to sustain a long, high-intensity conflict with Iran. If it gets into one, it will have to draw missiles from elsewhere, leaving its forces in Europe and the Indo-Pacific even more understocked than they already are. And because the country has a limited production capacity of these missiles, it could be literally years until the US can replenish its stocks and be ready for contingencies in places like Taiwan.
An F/A-18F Super Hornet lands on the USS Abraham Lincoln, part of the build-up of US forces in the MIddle East.Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Daniel Kimmelman/U.S. Navy via AP
For a president who promised to avoid unnecessary overseas entanglements and put “America First”, this risk of overstretch is particularly ironic. But it is a function of Trump’s lack of serious strategic vision.
‘Strategic incontinence’
One name for it might be “strategic incontinence”. Rather than focusing on a few vital national interests and assigning capabilities accordingly, Trump seems to pinball between different regions of the globe without regard for whether the US has the capabilities to achieve his goals. He seems to tweet his way into commitments – too many of them – without asking basic questions about military capabilities or missile stocks.
Trump may still attack Iran. He has already put himself in a difficult position, engaging in a massive military build-up and threats of action before he knew whether he could follow through, or at what risk. For a president who is particularly concerned with avoiding looking weak, backing down now might be out of the question.
If Trump does attack Iran despite the warnings of his military advisers, it will be one of the riskiest military decisions that a US president has taken in a very long time. The geopolitical consequences and political price will be his to bear, but could affect us all.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson made headlines last week following an interview with Sky News in which she suggested there are no “good” Muslims.
The comment was outrageous by any measure, but the response relatively muted, reflecting a broader shift in political discourse.
Hanson’s comments have been reported to police – whether anything comes of this remains to be seen. But this broader shift allows for sweeping generalisations about an entire faith community to be voiced without triggering the same level of backlash or the invocation of hate speech laws that similar remarks about other minorities would likely provoke.
For Australian Muslims, the political atmosphere in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack is febrile. Mosques are receiving threats during Ramadan. Muslim men performing their prayers, during a protest, are being roughly handled by NSW police in public without serious consequences.
Islamophobic incidents routinely spike in response to events thousands of kilometres away.
The question is no longer whether Islamophobia exists in Australia. The question is whether it has become normalised, tolerated in ways other forms of discrimination are not, and what this means for the country’s commitment to multiculturalism and liberal democracy.
From rhetoric to reality
The anti-Muslim rhetoric present within political discourse does not exist in a vacuum.
In the past month alone, close to or during the holy month of Ramadan, three threatening letters were sent to the Lakemba Mosque. During protests following events in Iran, extremist chants against Islam and Muslims circulated in Australian streets, such as calling for all Muslim clerics to be buried.
[embedded content]
Threats to mosques increased during the Ramadan period.
After the October 7 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, reported Islamophobic incidents rose sharply in Australia — doubling compared to previous years. Palestinians were particularly targeted.
The normalisation becomes even clearer when placed alongside the special envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism proposed last year.
The framework was criticised by some legal scholars and even Jewish groups for conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. That same framework underpinned legislative changes expanding penalties around certain forms of political expression.
Taken together, these developments point to a troubling pattern.
They reflect a logic of dehumanisation, homogenisation and collective blame. This involves treating a diverse religious community as monolithic and holding them responsible for incidents or international conflicts over which they have no control.
When rhetoric shifts, reality often follows.
Institutional gaps and structural concerns
Beyond individual incidents, there have been deeper institutional warning signs.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s February 2026 report identified systemic racism within universities.
It found more than 75% of surveyed Muslim students and staff, more than 90% of Palestinian respondents, and more than 80% of Middle Eastern respondents reported they had witnessed racism directed at their communities. These figures point not to isolated prejudice, but to patterns embedded within everyday institutional life.
Data from 2025 show a further increase in Islamophobic incidents following October 2023. This shows anti-Muslim hostility in Australia is no longer simply connected to a lack of cultural and religious literacy. Rather, it has become politicised, often intensifying in response to international developments and domestic political rhetoric.
The appointment of a national Islamophobia envoy was an important acknowledgement of the problem. Yet beyond a broadly framed action plan, there has been little visible, sustained effort to build public awareness, shape policy, or strengthen protections for Muslim Australians.
[embedded content]
Islamophobia envoy, Aftab Malik handed down his landmark report late last year.
Addressing Islamophobia, or any other form of racism, requires more than symbolic appointments. It demands consistent institutional commitment to protecting minority communities and reinforcing the principles of Australia’s multicultural democracy.
Islamophobia damages us all
Beyond isolated incidents, the deeper question remains: why does Islamophobia appear to be treated differently from other forms of racism?
Why can sweeping claims about an entire religious community enter mainstream discourse with comparatively limited consequence?
Why are Australian Muslims in particular so often held accountable for events by individuals taking place here in Australia or even thousands of kilometres away? Why are they repeatedly required to explain themselves, issue statements, or confirm their loyalty in order to be accepted as fellow citizens?
Few, if any, other communities are asked to collectively answer in the same way.
These questions matter because social cohesion depends on treating all citizens and groups with the same level of respect.
Australian multicultural democracy cannot selectively defend some communities while leaving others to navigate hate and hostility on their own.
When anti-Muslim rhetoric becomes normalised, it does more than harm one group. It erodes trust in institutions, weakens the credibility of anti-racism frameworks, and signals that equality before the law is unevenly applied.
Sustaining social cohesion requires more than a mere celebration of diversity. It demands vigilance in practice, ensuring all forms of discrimination are addressed with equal commitment, and political debate does not drift into the dehumanisation of entire communities.
The health of Australia’s multicultural democracy should be measured not by how it protects the majority, but by how consistently it protects all its minorities.
If you stand beside Seven Creeks in Victoria or Spring Creek in Queensland, they might seem small and unremarkable. But these creeks flow into the mighty Goulburn and Condamine Rivers, and punch far above their weight.
Small headwater creeks, at the beginning of a river network, act as the first source of water for bigger rivers. Headwaters deliver the first cool winter flows and the large seasonal pulses of water that trigger fish migration, setting the river’s rhythm. But they’re also the first to suffer from drought, heatwaves and water captured by thousands of small farm dams.
As the rivers of Australia’s largest system, the Murray-Darling Basin, experience a hotter and more variable climate, their headwaters are at the forefront of change.
This year, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority is reviewing the basin plan. The plan sets sustainable, legally enforceable limits on water usage, and rightly identifies climate change as a central challenge. Yet its new discussion paper pays surprisingly little attention to the vast network of smaller tributaries that feed the basin’s larger rivers.
We need attention on these “forgotten” rivers and streams, which are increasingly central to the survival of the Murray-Darling Basin as a whole.
The Seven Creeks river in Euroa in flood in 2010.Raoul Wegat/AAP
The Basin’s blind spot under climate change
The discussion paper focuses on the big-name river systems in the basin, such as the Darling (Baaka) River in the north and heavily regulated rivers in the south such as the Murray, where big dams, barrages and diversions shape almost every drop of water.
This omission reflects how the original plan was conceived, and then in released 2012. Environmental priorities were defined around “priority assets”, such as major river reaches, internationally protected wetlands and refuges for wildlife where environmental flows were expected to deliver measurable ecological benefits.
This made sense when pressure from agricultural water extraction was the major threat. But this leaves out a huge part of the basin’s story.
Threading through the Basin are thousands of kilometres of small, so-called “unregulated” rivers and headwater streams. Historically, they were assumed to be relatively healthy because big dams were absent. But climate change is overturning that assumption. With declining rainfall and hotter temperatures, even small reductions in runoff can dramatically affect their flow.
Worse still, thousands of small farm dams scattered across the landscape are reducing how much water flows through these waterways. More of these streams are now ceasing to flow for the first time, or remaining dry for longer. Climate change is amplifying every existing stress on smaller rivers.
If we are serious about preparing the basin for climate change, we can no longer overlook the springs and creeks which feed the system. These rivers are not peripheral – they’re central to its resilience.
How the warming climate is changing streams
Headwater streams may be small, but they form the ecological backbone of the basin’s rivers. These upper tributaries are biodiversity hotspots, supporting insects, frogs, fish and riverbank species dependent on regular flushes of water and cool, shaded habitats.
When these streams dry out, warm up or fragment into pools, these delicate ecological processes are disrupted. The effects stretch far downstream. Climate change is pushing these streams into more extreme boom–bust cycles, with longer, hotter dry periods punctuated by short bursts of intense rainfall. In small catchments, these shifts affect the entire flow regime: low flows become lower, and flooding becomes less reliable or arrives at the wrong time of year.
Headwater streams are known to be highly sensitive to changes in flow. Under a drier climate these disruptions will intensify.
An aerial view of the receding waters of Lake Pamamaroo, part of the Menindee Lakes system, in 2019.Dean Lewins/AAP
Can these changes be managed?
We can adapt to some degree. Rules limiting pumping from rivers during low flow periods, and better oversight of farm dams, can help keep water moving during crucial dry periods.
But when rivers are high, it’s a different picture. When river are full or even break their banks, it’s great for aquatic life. Fish move and breed, habitat is refreshed, nutrients moved downstream and wetlands rejoin the system.
Unregulated rivers lack the infrastructure, such as dams or barrages, to create or shape the big replenishing flows that ecosystems rely on, and climate change means these may simply happen less often.
If smaller rivers stop sending these floods downstream, larger rivers lose an essential part of their ecological rhythm.
Why this matters for the whole basin
What happens in the smaller creeks and rivers has a big impact. These small streams set the baseline conditions for the entire Murray–Darling system – from water quality and temperature to the timing of flows. When they falter, the effects are felt downstream.
The 2026 Basin Plan Review offers us a chance to revisit its original assumptions. Focusing on major rivers once addressed the dominant sources of environmental decline, but under climate change, risk is no longer confined to those places.
If the basin loses its headwaters, no amount of downstream engineering can compensate. Bringing these “forgotten rivers” into climate planning isn’t optional — it underpins our environmental, cultural and economic future. Give me two
Ivermectin was originally celebrated as a revolutionary treatment for parasitic disease in humans and animals. It has since evolved into a focal point of misinformation and heated debate.
During the early part of the COVID pandemic, it was touted on social media as a miracle cure for the virus, despite a lack of robust evidence.
The drug is a small organic chemical that can be extracted from the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis. This bacterium grows in the soil, and was first found near the grounds of a Japanese golf course.
It was first approved for use in animals in 1981 and in humans in 1987. It’s now available in various brands as tablets and creams you apply to the skin.
Assessing the evidence
Governments use human clinical trials to decide whether to approve a medicine for sale.
But clinical trials aren’t the highest level of evidence to inform best practice and guide decisions. For that, there are Cochrane reviews.
A Cochrane review brings together a panel of experts who collate and assess all the relevant evidence on a medication. It takes data from multiple clinical trials, and other studies, and evaluates it following clear and structured steps. It’s able to examine and critique study designs to identify bias and reject bad data.
Cochrane reviews are also regularly updated to take into account new information. The result is a summary that is considered the highest level of evidence to guide decision-making.
So what do Cochrane reviews say about ivermectin for different conditions?
Gut and lymphatic worms
Ivermectin is used to treat a variety of parasitic worm infections. These include the round worms Ascaris lumbricoides, Strongyloides stercoralis, Wuchereria bancrofti, and Brugia malayi.
The latter two worms cause the disease lymphatic filariasis (or elephantiasis) which causes severe swelling in the arms, legs, breasts and genitals.
When ivermectin is used to treat Strongyloides stercoralis, the Cochrane panel found it is better than albendazole and had fewer side effects than thiabendazole.
For Ascaris lumbricoides, the panel concluded ivermectin was as good as albendazole and mebendazole.
For treating lymphatic filariasis, a Cochrane review found ivermectin or diethylcarbamazine should be standard treatment in combination with albendazole.
Rosacea
The Cochrane review for rosacea evaluated 22 different treatments for this skin condition, including a variety of drugs, as well as light therapy, cosmetics and reducing the intake of spicy food.
It concluded that ivermectin applied to the skin was more effective than a placebo, and a bit better than the other standard medication, metronidazole.
Scabies
Cochrane has two reviews on the use of ivermectin for scabies. One specifically evaluated ivermectin and permethrin as treatments. The other evaluated all available treatments for scabies.
The first review concluded both permethrin and ivermectin were just as effective, regardless of whether the ivermectin was administered orally or directly onto the skin.
In contrast, the second review concluded ivermectin does work but topical permethrin appeared to be the most effective treatment.
Malaria
The Cochrane panel looked specifically at whether ivermectin could reduce transmission of the malaria parasite, rather than as a treatment.
Unfortunately there was just a single clinical trial to use as evidence. In that trial, residents of eight villages were given ivermectin and albendazole together, with follow up doses of just ivermectin. The researchers then looked at the rates of child infection over 18 weeks.
Even though the trial didn’t show ivermectin prevented infection, due to the high risk of bias in it, the Cochrane panel couldn’t conclude either way whether ivermectin worked or not.
River blindness
River blindness is caused by another parasitic worm called Onchocerca volvulus.
The Cochrane review concluded there was a lack of evidence either way to know whether it works to prevent infection-based visual impairment and blindness.
It evaluated the data from four clinical trials and two large community-based studies.
One of the reasons the panel was unable to make a firm conclusion was because it thought the drug may work differently against different strains of the parasite and in people of different ethnicity.
Cancer
There are no Cochrane reviews on ivermectin’s use for cancer because clinical interest in the drug for this condition is just starting.
There is a current clinical trial that is evaluating ivermectin in combination with antibody-based drugs for breast cancer.
Early results showed the combination of antibody drugs with ivermectin was safe to patients, but no efficacy data has been published.
COVID
The Cochrane panel rejected the data for seven clinical trials and included 11 other trials. Rejected trials included those which compared ivermectin against other drugs which were known to not be effective against COVID, such as hydroxychloroquine.
The review concluded there was no evidence to support the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID. In making that conclusion, it evaluated treatments that used invermectin or placebo in combination with standard care and whether treatment reduced death, illness, or the length of the infection.
The race of Heathcliff, the brooding antihero of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, is a much-discussed element of the classic tale.
Brontë variously describes him as “a little lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”; “that gipsy brat,” not “a regular black,” the offspring of the “Emperor of China,” and the son to an “Indian queen”.
But in her recent film adaptation, director Emerald Fennell has cast white Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role. What does this mean for our understanding of the story?
Few casting choices this year have divided audiences like Jacob Elordi as Fennel’s Heathcliff.Pierre Mouton/Warner Bros. Pictures
Is Heathcliff white?
Scholars, especially since the late 20th century, have debated Heathcliff’s racial identity without forming a consensus. They continue to examine the text for evidence.
He has been variously identified as Irish, a migrant fleeing famine; African, found at the Liverpool docks (then England’s largest slave trading port); or Romani, often shorthand for a racially ambiguous and “threatening” outsider.
I do not feel the novel invites us to identify Heathcliff with a fixed racial identity. The book’s strange, otherworldly and almost hallucinogenic nature resists clear interpretation.
In 19th century Britain, post-Enlightenment Europe and the United States, the concept of race was categorised and studied, and exerted a strong influence on government policies and popular culture.
People were placed into hierarchies of humanity to justify slavery, colonialism and genocide. This system of “scientific racism”, as it has come to be known, placed “whiteness” at the top.
But this notion of whiteness was different to the one we hold today, which explains Heathcliff’s racial “otherness” as being associated with Irishness.
Brontë’s novel, and Gothic fiction of the age more broadly, depicts race as something more malleable and fantastical.
In the case of Brontë’s Heathcliff, his racial identity seems to shift and morph, sometimes rendered supernatural and demonic in the eyes of other characters. His darkness and inhumanity is emphasised and seems to intensify in moments of brooding anger and villainy.
His complexion darkens and his eyes become, in the words of the maid Nelly, “black fiends” that glint and lurk “like the devil’s spies” with “a half-civilised ferocity”.
Heathcliff’s inhumanity, as tied to his non-whiteness, seemingly rises to the surface, as if the stain of his moral degradation seeps through his soul to appear on his face.
Critics of the casting
The casting of Elordi as Heathcliff has come under scrutiny.
Some readers and critics have interpreted Brontë’s book as a critique of British institutional racism in the late 18th century, when the novel is set, and the Victorian era (1837–1901), when it was written.
One such reading is that the novel links the oppression of white women to that of non-white subjects of the British Empire to critique social structures of violence, cruelty and inequality.
This reading sees the novel’s representation of female subjugation as a mirror image to the oppression that people of colour faced at the time.
Many critics of the film have said it isn’t an accurate adaptation, and misunderstands what Brontë’s text is really about. But an argument around “intent” is hard to make, since we can never really know what a novel “is about”. We can only guess.
And there are limitless interpretations of a text, especially one as strange and enigmatic as this one. As such, though race is a part of the original Wuthering Heights, assigning a singular, definitive meaning to the novel’s representation of race is complicated.
In Brontë’s novel, nothing is as it seems. The ever-shifting image of Heathcliff – at once appearing to be a lascar, a Native American, Spanish and Black – would be difficult to depict effectively on film.
Film lacks the imaginative malleability as the reader’s mind’s eye, which can hold all these descriptions of Heathcliff’s image at once, allowing this Gothic strangeness to occur.
Race in Fennell’s film
While Heathcliff is cast as white, Fennell casts people of colour in other roles.
Fennell’s film is not interested in the racial commentary many critics have found in Brontë’s novel. The characters in Fennel’s created world do not appear to engage with race the same way people do in our world.
American-Vietnamese actor Hong Chau plays Nelly Dean (a housemaid in the novel, but an illegitimate daughter to a nobleman in the film), and English/Scottish–Pakistani actor Shazad Latif portrays Edgar Linton, Cathy’s wealthy and respected husband.
The casting of Edgar, a man of wealth and status, as a person of colour undermines the intersections of oppression and race that existed at the time.
I think Fennell’s decision to ignore race is a missed opportunity to foster a more nuanced discussion of race in the late 18th century and Victorian Britain.
Hong Chau (left) plays housemaid Nelly Dean and Shazad Latif (right) plays Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton.Warner Bros. Pictures
While it would not have been common to find people of colour in the Yorkshire moors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain (including Yorkshire) wasn’t as white as is widely believed. Fennell had an opportunity to highlight this fact.
Instead, in the film’s casting of Elordi as Heathcliff and Latif as Linton, we see a reticence to engage with the question of racial oppression at all. While this doesn’t make the adaptation “wrong”, it adds to the film’s almost complete lack of depth.
Chinese state television rang in the Year of the Horse with humanoid robots doing kung fu, comedy sketches and mass choreography. They made complex martial arts choreography look easy. Social media was flooded with memes about “machines replacing humans”.
But the show was more than theatre. It was a prime-time industrial signal.
Beijing has long used the annual Chinese new year gala to showcase its technological ambitions, with previous shows highlighting drones, robotics and the space program.
This year, the gala put robots front and centre as part of an “AI plus” push.
[embedded content]
The timing was important too. China’s “Two Sessions”, the annual parliamentary and advisory meetings, are due in early March. At the meetings, China is expected to approve the 15th five-year plan (2026–30), a policy blueprint that sets strategic targets and steers funding and policy support.
The display also raised some urgent questions for China’s trading partners, including Australian policymakers.
AI that can move in the real world
China’s Lunar new year gala is a reminder the artificial intelligence (AI) contest is moving toward embodied intelligence. Embodied intelligence refers to AI-powered robotics, or AI systems built into machines that can move and react in the real world. A robot must balance, manage its power, work safely near people, and recover when something fails.
The Chinese government sees robotics and embodied intelligence as tools to help offset an ageing population and build “new quality productive forces” — its term for productivity gains driven by AI.
China’s strategy is based on engineering efficiency and building at industrial scale, using fast prototyping, reliable hardware, abundant training data covering different scenarios, and factories that can build at volume and speed.
The gala routines were designed to test that. The robots performed coordinated martial arts close to children and human performers, stressing precise movement and safety.
China has built an AI industrial ecosystem
One of the most important details of the night was not the choreography — it was the industrial breadth. Four leading humanoid robotics firms — Unitree, Galbot, Noetix and MagicLab — were showcased.
That points to competition inside a growing ecosystem: more than 150 humanoid robot companies have emerged in China, backed by billions in venture capital and government funding. Official reports say China had a total of 451,700 smart robotics firms in late 2024.
China’s robotics firms are pushing motion control to a new level of precision and agility, and the gap between lab demos and engineered products is narrowing.
But the robots still have limitations. Stage performances can be pre-programmed and rehearsed, but more complex settings require reliability, safety and cost-efficiency.
The founder of Unitree, Wang Xingxing, has been blunt about the gap. He said it is hard to build one “brain” that works in every household because homes vary so much. He expects earlier use in more fixed settings, such as factories and guided tours.
This matters for Australia
In contrast with the robotic might on display in China, Australia’s AI debate is much further behind, still centring on cloud-based large language models such as copilots and chatbots.
Australia already has an edge in using humanoid robots under special conditions. Mining technology companies such as Perth-based IMDEX and Adelaide’s Chrysos Corporation show that special-purpose robots can be used in harsh environments.
Australia should, nevertheless, notice that China is turning robotics into an industrialisation project —and doing so at speed and scale.
For Australia, this matters. Productivity growth has been weak for a decade. It also faces labour shortages in sectors where robots could be most useful: aged care, remote mining and agriculture.
The federal government is working on it. It has published a National AI Plan and a National Robotics Strategy. These are necessary policy foundations, but they are not, on their own, a strategy to build and deploy embodied AI and robotics.
China’s robots expose gaps in Australia’s policy settings
China’s fast move from robot demos to factory-ready machines exposes three policy gaps that now look urgent.
Standards: if Chinese-made robots enter the Australian market at attractive prices, Australia will need clearer rules for autonomous systems in workplaces, homes and public spaces.
Autonomous literally means the machine can act without a person directing every step. That raises basic questions: what counts as safe; who is responsible when something goes wrong; and how do you test systems before they enter industrial and home settings?
Procurement: Australia needs to consider screening guidelines for sensitive suppliers where robots touch data, critical infrastructure or vulnerable people. Screening means checking cyber risk, data practices and supply chain risks before any autonomous machines can be deployed in hospitals, ports or aged care.
Supply chain resilience: Australia has labs that have developed prototypes of advanced humanoid robots, but building them is slow and costly. Heavy reliance on imported parts means long lead times and less control. Australia can reduce risk by diversifying suppliers and building more local capability in key parts and services.
Playing to our strengths
Finally, Australia should choose its battles carefully. Rather than debating whether AI will replace jobs, a smarter strategy is to back specialised robots for tasks where Australia has an edge and clear application scenarios: mining, agriculture, aged care and remote operations.
The stakes are high not only for Australia’s productivity, but also for Australia–China trade relations in the AI age. Safety standards, data rules and supplier screening will become trade issues, not just security issues.
To build robots with embodied intelligence at scale, the scarcest resource is not lithium or computing power. It is time.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Longmuir, Senior Lecturer – Co-leader Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab, Monash University
When we think about jobs you can do from home, you may not immediately picture a school teacher. But as Victoria debates a new right to work from home, the state’s teachers are asking what this might mean for them.
The Victorian teachers’ union wants the state government to trial a four-day work week for teachers and work-from-home provisions. Last week, Australian Education Union Victoria branch president Justin Mullaly told 9 News:
[a trial] would provide some real flexibility for staff in our public schools so that they might attend on site for less and be able to have access to some work from home.
However, their job also involves a significant amount of work away from the classroom. This is called “non-contact time” when teachers do administration tasks. This could include planning lessons, assessing student work, communicating with parents/carers, and meeting with colleagues. Many of these tasks could be done from home.
Victorian government school teachers are generally required to be at school for the whole 38-hour work week, even during non-contact time.
In high schools, non-contact time is allocated through timetabling. For example, a teacher may have third period on Tuesdays off for administration work. In primary schools, non-contact time typically occurs when their students attend specialist classes such as physical education, art and music with other teachers. These could be combined into a whole day, to give teachers an entire day away from the classroom.
In both primary and high schools, non-contact time can be scheduled, so different teachers are off at different times during the week.
What does a 4-day week look like?
A four-day week for teachers could involve timetabling non-contact time, so that on one day of the week teachers are not required to be on-site at the school.
The current suggestion is for a trial, so there might be several ways this could be tested. It might be that on the fifth day, teachers work from home for all or part of the usual working hours. Or it could be that they work extended hours on other days and then have all or part of the fifth day off.
This is not unprecedented. In the United States, a reported 2,100 schools across 26 states were running some form of a four-day program in 2025. There are already schools running four-day programs here in Australia, including a NSW private school where some students do four days of face-to-face learning, and one day remotely.
There has been little research into the impacts of a four-day week on teachers. But one US district claimed a strong improvement in attracting teachers with applications for positions increasing by 360% after the introduction of a four-day teaching week.
What might be the impact on students?
Research on four-day weeks is largely based on US studies, where students usually attend the school for four days. However, some studies suggest student achievement (or academic results) remains stable when overall teaching time is maintained, which appears to be what is proposed for Victoria.
If teachers were working from home, students would still attend school for five days and teachers would still engage with families in similar ways.
In 2024, we surveyed more than 8,000 members of the Victorian teachers’ union. We found 65% believed a four-day working week would support them to better deliver high-quality education.
But in our survey comments, some teachers expressed caution around how a four-day week would be implemented. Their concerns included logistical issues (including timetabling), and the potential of further pressure on students and staff, if current curriculum requirements were compressed into four days. This shows why a trial of flexible arrangements is needed.
As all workplaces modernise, more flexibility could work for teachers – and symbolise greater trust in the profession. But we need more work and research to inform how it can work best in Australian schools.
Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged and unconscious.
On that first day of knowing, in November 2020, she was a few months shy of 68. Her memoir explores the aftermath of that knowing, but also rewinds to her parents’ courtship, her childhood and youth and each stage of her adult life. It reveals how her husband’s crimes forced her to recast her entire adult life to-date – and its relationship to her childhood.
Review: A Hymn to Life – Gisèle Pelicot (Bodley Head)
I moved between reading Gisèle’s chapters and daily reports of the Epstein files. As I read, recent charges were laid against men in Germany and Greater Manchester who also drugged and raped their wives for over a decade.
I wondered: what are the effects of this avalanche of revelations about the shadow lives of men – the wealthy, the famous and the seemingly ordinary? (Gisèle’s rapists were described by philosopher Zoe Williams as “a perfect randomised cross-section of society”.)
How is this public accounting of the thousands of documents, images, videos and testimonials to be processed, by survivors and non-survivors? When does the status quo, the structures of power that enable such abuses, give way to rage and its transformative potential?
The Pelicot case became an international story when Gisèle realised facing the 51 men police had been able to identify and charge (including her husband) in a closed court would rob her of support – and the opportunity to shift the burden of shame from victim to perpetrators.
Her decision to make the case public was an act of solidarity with other survivors – and a declaration of self worth that became increasingly audible as the trial proceeded. Have her actions nudged us closer to a tipping point?
When I reviewed the memoir of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, a year ago, I asked: is sexual abuse under chemical submission a new frontier in our understandings of intimate partner violence?
The Pelicot case intersected with more established understandings of drink spiking and date rape. But this sustained injury – perpetrated in the final decade of a 49-year marriage, worsened by access to online communities of predators – revealed a distinct new hellscape in understandings of gendered violence, particularly domestic abuse.
In a terrible irony, Gisèle writes:
I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships.
Gisèle has been intermittently estranged from her two eldest children, David and Caroline, since November 2020. They are now tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s 2025 book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in part makes a case for activism as a form of survival. In the aftermath of the revelations about her father, Caroline established #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), a movement to raise awareness of sexual assault under chemical submission.
Her mother’s new memoir, far from going over familiar ground, offers a different story of survival.
Gisele Pelicot’s new memoir offers a different story of survival from her daughter Caroline’s, published last year.Guillaume Horcajuelo/AAP
A legacy of trauma
Gisèle Pelicot was born in 1952 in West Germany, where her father was serving in the French army and “history’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us”. When she was five, they moved to rural France to be close to her mother’s family. Gisèle was nine when her adored mother died in their family kitchen, after years of being plagued by brain tumours.
Her brother and father never recovered from this death, but she resolved to pursue happiness as her mother had done in life. “I was a steadfast tin soldier of joy.” Gisèle did this with determination, in the face of limited schooling and her grief-stricken father’s jealous and cruel second wife. She described meeting Dominique at the age of 19 as “love at first sight”.
Dominique grew up within an oppressive family, where his efforts to protect his mother from his, domestically “all-powerful”, father’s violence failed. He suffered his own humiliations at the hands of the patriarch, too. The man had an incestuous relationship with a foster child taken into the family aged five, which became “official” when she was 25, after Dominique’s mother died.
Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. But he felt safe with her. Their instant attraction was fortified by this sense of refuge. Building a family was how they would heal; at least this was the pact they made.
Caroline was born in 1979 into this marriage, the second of three children and the only daughter. Her mother’s career trajectory with France’s main electricity company had afforded the Pelicots’ upward class mobility. Dominique, an electrician and a real estate agent, was in and out of work. Occasionally he brought the couple to the brink of financial ruin, but they were buffered just enough by the stability of Gisèle’s employment.
On the whole, the Pelicot children enjoyed secure, loving childhoods focused on their opportunities to thrive. Each forged meaningful careers in adulthood, married and had children. Both Caroline’s and Gisèle’s memoirs depict comfort and security in the lives of Gisèle’s adult children and grandchildren, even as the shock of Dominique’s brutal betrayal begins to reverberate.
‘Inside an enormous shredder’
One of the great achievements of this book is Gisèle’s capacity to describe – with coherence and nuance – the singularity of her position. This includes her needs, which she finds must take precedence over those of her children if she is to survive.
She writes of her older two children:
They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that.
The determination to be happy that took Gisèle into the relationship with her then-husband is transformed into a determination to survive as she surveys the wreckage inflicted by his abuses and seeks a way out. During the years she was drugged, Gisèle felt like she was losing her mind.
Her memory failures, blackouts and exhaustion instilled in her a deep fear of brain tumours and the inheritance of her mother’s fate. As she comes to terms with the true source of these struggles, she writes “I am the enemy of death”. She must chart her own course, and she does so instinctively.
Gisèle recoils at the idea of her well-meaning children, Caroline, David and Florian, taking ‘possession’ of her life.Guillaume Horcajuelo/AAP
In the immediate aftermath of the revelations, the children’s fury and desire to destroy all traces of their father as they prepare to remove Gisèle from the scene of Dominique’s most recent crimes will make sense to many. But its effect on Gisèle was to return her to a state of desolation, familiar from childhood.
She describes arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with her children after her final night in the home she had shared with Dominique in Provence:
mostly I had the feeling of being inside an enormous shredder. My children had lives to go back to. I had nothing […] It was the old fault line beneath my feet; it had been there all along and now it was opening up again, swallowing everything that I held dear.
Through her efforts to control the pace of her confrontation with Dominique’s countless betrayals, a chasm opens between Gisèle and her eldest son and daughter. Her children, she writes, were “unable to distinguish their father from the poisoner and rapist”, whereas she tried to separate her memories of the husband she’d loved from her new knowledge of the one who had violated her.
Through processes of splitting apart, quarantining and dismembering her images and understandings of who Dominique was in their marriage, she holds at bay the full tsunami of deeply knowing what has been done to her.
She takes the time she needs, insisting on being alone, seeking solace in friends old and new rather than her children, to integrate the full force of her new history. That these decisions are integral to her survival is clear. Their impact on her family reminds us of the weight of the mother-load.
‘Unbearable incestuous gaze’
In her own memoir, Caroline vividly evokes the horror of learning, within days of her father being detained, that he took photographs of her asleep in her underwear. She is currently pursuing a separate case of chemical submission and rape against him, crimes he has repeatedly denied. Enduring the uncertainty around the nature of her victimisation has been a feature of Caroline’s experience.
As Gisèle processed the catalogue of Dominique’s abuses, for which there was clear evidence, her response to her daughter’s distress left open the possibility her daughter had not been raped by her father. This attempt at offering solace and some way for Caroline to hold onto memories of her father’s love was an extension of Gisèle’s splitting and dismembering of him for her own protection. “I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it,” Gisèle writes.
For Caroline, this felt like dismissal.
I found Gisèle’s account of the tensions in the relationship with her daughter more explicit than in Caroline’s memoir. Where Caroline expresses frustration with her mother’s early reluctance to give up all feelings of care for Dominique, Gisèle conveys a sense of the limits of her own ability to readily respond to a child whose emotional expression had always been more voluble than her own.
In a recent New Yorker essay, Rachel Aviv quotes Caroline’s August 2025 description of Gisèle as failing to fulfil her maternal contract. Aviv wonders if the terms of the contract had ever really been settled and suggests this disagreement took on new weight as the two women grappled with Dominique’s crimes.
Aviv reads this as two clashing versions of feminism: a daughter’s expectation she should have maternal love that affirms and consoles her, versus a mother’s choice to prioritise her own emotional integrity and agency in order to express the values of a wider feminist movement.
But this oversimplifies feminism and the narrative we can assemble from the various accounts of daughter and mother. Dominique’s harm has extended to undermining relationships between his victims, the origins of which were love and protection.
The feminism of the two women is varied by the impacts of the injury. Their solidarity is marred by the monumental and distinct tasks each has faced in rising from his wreckage.
Gisèle’s account of the tensions in the relationship with her daughter are more explicit than in Caroline’s memoir.Michel Euler/AAP
Aviv draws on French anthropologist Dorothy Dussy’s observations about the taboo of incest in this case. The court evidence demanded confrontation with countless taboos but still “the injunction to remain silent about incest” remained. It surfaced in the back stories of a number of the perpetrators, though – and was part of the violence of the chief perpetrator’s family of origin.
Yet, while he admits to the crimes committed against Gisèle, Dominique cannot admit to sexualising his own offspring, even when directly confronted by his children in the court.
Last year, Caroline referred to her mother’s psychological and emotional incapacity to recognise incest to help explain the mother–daughter rift. We can’t know if the daughter sees this as the central driver of their estrangement, or as one of many ways she has to understand it.
A Hymn to Life suggests a more complicated relationship between Gisèle and the spectre of her ex-husband’s abuse of Caroline and other members of the family. At one point she refers to his “unbearable incestuous gaze”.
Tragedy and unexpected joy
One senses the awareness each woman has of the potential for these struggles to overwhelm everything else. Their published accounts give us a means to digest the extent and complexity of the harm Dominique has caused. The fracturing of this once-close family is the tragic collateral damage that compounds the original injury.
At the same time, Gisèle’s memoir reveals that in the lead-up to the trial, she met (through a friend) and fell in love with Jean-Loup, a widower she calls a “very beautiful person”. Her description of this burgeoning relationship will give joy to the many awed by the story of her endurance and survival.
Gisèle repeatedly describes her ex-husband’s quest to possess her sexually: expressed as an element of desire within their shared sex life. It had annoyed her but seemed normal enough – before that day at the police station, when it took on a far more devastating meaning.
Coverture (puissance marital in French law), a medieval legal doctrine making a woman the legal property of her husband after she marries, has a long history in laws governing marriage. As new cases of men drugging and raping wives emerge, with their long tentacles into online communities of men exchanging techniques, images and sexual access, it seems coverture, overturned in marriage laws in the 19th and 20th centuries, has gone underground.
Outside of marriage, the possession and commodification of girls’ and women’s bodies still turns them into currency: perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Epstein files.
The government’s plan to empower police to “issue move-on orders as a tool to deal with disorderly behaviour in public places” will effectively apply to people as young as 14 who are experiencing homelessness and who “obstruct” access to businesses, beg or sleep rough.
Critics have called the policy unworkable and “draconian”, particularly the provisions for NZ$2,000 fines or up to three months in prison as penalties for breaches.
While the approach may move people out of central business districts temporarily, it won’t tackle homelessness in the long term. In fact, the focus on those who are visibly sleeping rough obscures the true extent and nature of homelessness in New Zealand.
Rough sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg. On the night of the 2023 Census, there were 112,496 people experiencing homelessness. The most common form of homelessness was living in uninhabitable housing, followed by sharing accommodation.
New Zealand is also an outlier internationally in that more than half of those experiencing homelessness are women. This is in large part because New Zealand defines and measures homelessness comprehensively as:
[…] living situations where people with no other options to acquire safe and secure housing are: without shelter, in temporary accommodation, sharing accommodation with a household, or living in uninhabitable housing.
Homelessness among women, and mothers in particular, also occurs because our welfare state doesn’t provide sufficient support to prevent homelessness. Homelessness is systemic; quick-fix “solutions” like move-on orders don’t solve anything.
Housing first
There are many different ways to tackle homelessness but there is no evidence to suggest simply moving people away will do anything to address the problem.
Despite the Census data, there is very little research, policy or funding focused specifically on the needs and experiences of women experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for housing support services to provide appropriate accommodation.
However, one successful model New Zealand has adopted is called Housing First. Initially championed in the US, it starts with the idea that the complex issues that lead to people experiencing homelessness are best addressed with permanent housing as the starting point.
Then, once people are housed, staff provide ongoing intensive and specialist support for any other needs a person may have. To obtain housing, clients don’t have to meet any strict behavioural criteria such as sobriety, which is often a requirement in “treatment first” models.
Instead, housing is treated as a human right.
In partnership with The People’s Project, New Zealand’s first Housing First provider, we have evaluated the outcomes of about 400 of their first clients to see whether this approach works in New Zealand. Our findings repeatedly show it does.
In our newly published research, we examined the demographic differences of the women in this cohort and found they were much more likely to be younger than men in the group, Māori and have dependent children.
Findings after five years
In the fifth year after being housed and supported by The People’s Project, circumstances had improved noticeably for these women.
Most striking were their health-related outcomes. There was a statistically significant drop in hospitalisations; 65% less than in the one year before they were housed.
Their pharmaceutical dispensing increased significantly by 14%, which suggests they were able to access healthcare earlier and get the medications they needed in a timely fashion.
Once people have been housed, one of the first things The People’s Project does is to enrol them in a general practice clinic and help them sort out any ongoing health issues they might have.
While not statistically significant, other healthcare results showed a promising decrease across all forms of mental health related events and a drop in emergency department visits.
Overall, access to permanent housing has improved health and wellbeing.
When examining justice sector outcomes, we did not find any statistically significant changes for women in the cohort; although there was a drop in offences and charges.
What we did see, though, was a significant drop in police offences, criminal charges and major events for the men in the cohort.
What about poverty?
We also looked at changes in incomes, both from wages or salaries and social welfare benefits.
For women in the cohort, their incomes from wages and salaries rose by a significant 101%, and a 19% increase from benefits.
Over the years, we have heard repeatedly from our community partners about how hard it is for people to navigate the social welfare system and to know what financial support is available to them.
A key role of Housing First providers across the country is to help make sure their clients are getting the correct financial support they are eligible for.
However, despite these great improvements in income, the women were only earning about $20,000 per year; not enough to raise a thriving family. Most of these women (84%) had children.
As the saying goes, raising a family takes a village, and for women experiencing homelessness, the support from Housing First providers can contribute to that village. However, no amount of support can fully ease the impact of living in poverty.
To support women and their children, we need better policies to prevent poverty and homelessness in the first place, alongside increased and targeted funding for successful models such as Housing First.
New Zealand activist Roger Fowler, a longtime Gaza solidarity organiser and Palestine Chronicle contributor, who died last Saturday, leaves a legacy of principled resistance.
Roger Fowler was a beloved figure in the global solidarity movement and a steadfast advocate for justice in Palestine. He leaves behind a legacy defined by courage, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to a cause greater than himself.
Born in New Zealand, Roger dedicated much of his life to amplifying the voices of the oppressed and building bridges of solidarity across continents.
As coordinator of Kia Ora Gaza (Aotearoa New Zealand), he played a central role in grassroots efforts to challenge the inhumane blockade of Gaza and to bring aid and hope to its people.
Under his leadership, Kia Ora Gaza organised and supported international aid convoys and solidarity flotillas aimed at breaking the siege and delivering humanitarian assistance to besieged communities.
The most significant international moment connected to those efforts was 2010, during the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which sought to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
Solidarity networks across the world — including activists in Aotearoa New Zealand — mobilised politically, financially, and logistically around that initiative and subsequent flotilla attempts in the following years.
Inspired countless others His determination and moral clarity inspired countless others to act with purpose and humanity in the face of injustice.
Roger’s voice was both passionate and principled. Even as his health declined, he remained a familiar presence at solidarity rallies across New Zealand, uplifting crowds with his words and his spirit.
To his friends and fellow activists, he was not only a colleague but a guiding light, a man of “great integrity and character with passion for justice”.
Beyond activism in the streets, Roger was also a thoughtful and committed writer. Through his contributions to The Palestine Chronicle, he brought stories of international solidarity to wider audiences.
His work illuminated both the daily struggles of Palestinians and the global networks of activism that stand with them.
In these difficult times, Roger’s work will continue to live on in the movements and projects he helped build. His life stands as a testament to the enduring power of solidarity, conviction, and the belief that ordinary people can make extraordinary differences.
The Palestine Chronicle family joins his loved ones, friends, and comrades in mourning this profound loss, and in honoring a life devoted to justice, dignity, and the freedom of Palestine.
A world premiere of a new documentary revealing the devastation of rainforest in the southeastern part of West Papua is one of two films being screened in Auckland next month.
Billed as “Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua”, the programme is showing the heart of a hidden Pacific conflict and will be presented live by celebrated Papuan journalist and Jubi News founder Victor Mambor.
The two films are “Pesta Babi — Colonialism in Our Time” and “Sa Punya Nama Pengungsi” (My name is Pengungsi).
“Pesta Babi” (The Pig Party), directed by Cypri Dale and Dandhy Laksono, is being premiered at the Academy Cinema, Auckland CBD, at 6pm on Saturday, March 7.
Filmed under siege and a draconian media ban, the filmmakers offer a rare and urgent glimpse into indigenous life in Merauke, where Indonesian bulldozers have been systematically destroying their pristine rainforest home.
This film is co-produced by Jubi, Ekspedisi Indonesia Baru, Greenpeace, Yayasan Pusaka, and Watchdoc Documentary.
The second film, “Sa Punya Nama Pengungsi”, directed by Yuliana Lantipo is set against the backdrop of escalating government violence and the displacement of an estimated 100,000 Indigenous Melanesian people from their lands.
“My name is Pengungsi” is centred on the story of two Papuan children born in the midst of the conflict. Both are named “Pengungsi”, which in English means “Refugee”.
Films talanoa The films will be followed by a Q&A/Talanoa with Mambor and fellow Australian-based West Papuan journalist Ronny Kareni and hosted by Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and deputy director of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
The twin-film festival is part of a weekend West Papua Solidarity Forum programme at the Auckland University Old Choral Hall, 7 Symonds Street, on Saturday, March 7, and on Sunday, March 8.
Organisers of the film screenings are West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau West Papua is the western half of New Guinea island and has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963. The independent state of Papua New Guinea is the eastern half.
Organisers of the film screenings are West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau. The group notes that more than 500,000 civilians have been killed in a slow genocide against the indigenous population, according to human rights agencies.
Basic human rights such as freedom of speech are denied and Papuans live in a constant state of fear and intimidation.
Foreign journalists have generally been barred entrance.
Traditional ways of life are under threat as huge tracts of rainforest are cut down to make way for Indonesian palm oil and food estates, the world’s largest gold mine and ever-increasing transmigration from Indonesia, making Indigenous Papuans a minority in their own land.
“Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua” . . . the screening poster. Image: APR
