Long running Australian literary journal Meanjin closes December 2025
5 September 2025
The final issue of the eighty-five year old quarterly magazine, will be published in December. The Melbourne University Press, which funds the publication, says the decision to stop production of the journal was made on financial grounds.
A veritable potpourri of Australian authors have written for Meanjin in the past. The move, as one author says, will be a blow to the present and future of Australian literature.
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Australia, Australian literature, literature, writing
A train station comes to Woollahra NSW: there goes the neighbourhood
3 September 2025
Woollahra, a suburb in Sydney’s east, is soon to have a train station. At first pass that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But the story is as long as the rail line is winding. Proposals to build a station in the affluent suburb are over a century old.
Then, in the 1970’s, as the Eastern Suburbs train line, AKA the T4, was being constructed, foundations for a station were laid. But work came to an abrupt halt when residents, unhappy at the prospect of a train station in their backyard, succeeded in stopping construction.
The partly built station sits between the stations at Edgecliff, and Bondi Junction, where the T4 line presently* terminates, a kilometre or two from the beach at Bondi. But with the housing situation in Sydney reaching dire proportions, the NSW State Government has revived plans to build the station, and then construct much needed high-density residences in the vicinity.
News of the station, and apartment blocks, has no doubt come as a double blow to locals.
Woollahra is far from apartment building free — an array of beautiful art deco style medium-density residences span Edgecliff Road — and the prospect of high density blocks will be causing alarm to some. But the reality is Sydney needs more residences, and it is unreasonable to expect all of these be built “somewhere” in the west of the city.
Or “the western side of ANZAC Parade”, a quip sometimes uttered by those residing on the eastern side of ANZAC Parade. ANZAC Parade being a major roadway running from inner Sydney through to La Perouse, at the southern end of the eastern suburbs.
Some Woollahra residents will argue the presence of high-rise dwellings will be at odds with the “character” of the suburb. Woollahra is possessed of houses built in the nineteenth century, quiet tree-lined streets (one or two rather steep), boutique shops, and a village-like ambience. It is a place many people would like to call home. The building proposals will bring significant changes.
Spring Street, Bondi Junction, NSW, at dusk. Photo taken June 2021. Note the construction crane in the top right hand corner.
But such is life in the big city. Change is constant. Bondi Junction — where we stay when not on the NSW Central Coast — situated right next to Woollahra, has undergone a tremendous transformation in the last decade, particularly along parts of Oxford Street. While always a mixed commercial/retail and residential precinct, numerous high-density apartment blocks now line Oxford street.
Of course Bondi Junction, being a retail centre, and public transport hub, with the aforementioned T4 train line, and numerous bus services, seems an ideal place to build residences. That’s not to say everyone in Bondi Junction is happy with the prospect. Many feel the suburb has been over-developed. But again, housing shortages in the region have compelled governments to act.
Yet the “residential-isation” of Oxford Street, and surrounds, has not always been a bad thing. Bondi Junction is at once a quiet residential suburb, after the shops close, in the midst of a bustling commercial centre. People walk their dogs along Oxford Street in the evenings, a sight that would not have been seen ten years ago.
Despite this metamorphosis, perceptions of Bondi Junction have not changed.
Either within the eastern suburbs, or elsewhere in Sydney. As far as other residents of the eastern suburbs are concerned, the junction is “ugly”. Meanwhile people outside the eastern suburbs think Bondi Junction is full of rich snobs. But nahsayers of the junction are looking at the wrong suburb when identifying ugly, or seeking to point out “rich snobs”.
But I digress. I’m not saying high-density residential blocks in Woollahra, full of dog owners, will bring about any sort of catharsis to existing residents who are going to be subject to possibly decades of disruptive construction work. They had all of that in Bondi Junction, and will probably continue to, but the world did not end.
Whether we like it or not, high-density accommodation is one of the solutions to the shortage of housing, and is something everyone in Sydney needs to get used to.
* there were proposals to extend the train line to Bondi Beach, but residents rallied to oppose the idea.
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Australia, current affairs, politics, Sydney, trends
Mastodon might struggle to comply with social media age verification laws
1 September 2025
Sarah Perez, writing for Techcrunch:
The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users’ ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored. That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.
Mastodon is a decentralised social network that allows anyone with the inclination, and access to a reasonably robust server, to establish their own instance, or chapter.
Mastodon is the sum of its many parts, and is not structured like X or Threads, whose operations are run from a single, centralised, point. I have no idea how many Mastodon instances there are, but the number would not be insignificant.
Compliance with age verification laws will be down to individual instance administrators. It’s not something the Mastodon head office could do, because there isn’t one, as such.
This doesn’t mean members of Mastodon instances operating in jurisdictions where age verification laws apply, will be able to forgo confirming their age. Indeed, age verification will be a necessity if the instance they belong to is to continue operating.
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politics, social media, social networks, technology, trends
RSS is so awesome it made the front page of Hacker News
1 September 2025
Some Hacker News (HN) members were astonished that a relatively concise blog post, written by Evan Verma, spruiking the merits of RSS, reached the front page of the news aggregator recently.
There’s probably not too many people on HN who don’t use RSS, but more generally, uptake is not particularly high. On that basis, any publicity is helpful. Let’s keep encouraging the adoption of RSS.
What is RSS? Read all about it here.
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Blog publishing platform TypePad closing 30 September 2025
29 August 2025
TypePad is/was up there with the likes of WordPress.com and Blogger.com. TypePad stopped accepting new members about five years ago, so some warning, I guess, of what’s just happened was there. Still the four to five weeks notice they’ve given doesn’t seem like much, especially for long term, or prolific writers, who will have large databases they need to download.
And then find somewhere new to migrate to. If you’re a displaced TypePad writer though, do consider obtaining your own domain name, and a self-hosted solution to publish future work to.
TypePad was originally created by California based software development company Six Apart. In 2011 the company was sold to Infocom, a Tokyo, Japan, based IT operation.
Six Apart also created the once popular LiveJournal (since sold to SUP Media, a Russian company), and Movable Type, a weblog publishing system developed in 2001, and still going strong.
Another remnant of the early web going, along with dial-up internet access, which AOL, one of the last major providers of the service, said they would be shutting down, also at the end of September.
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Climate change, higher temperatures, impact on well being
27 August 2025
A MIT lead global study of posts on X, and Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, has revealed higher temperatures not only effect health and workplace productivity, but also — perhaps unsurprisingly — well-being and emotions:
A massive study of social media data revealed that individuals become significantly more irritable in extreme heat. The research implies that rising temperatures may directly affect the emotional health of millions of people around the world.
This during a recent late winter bout of unseasonably mild weather hereabout (though the tables are soon to be turned). I left the house yesterday morning wearing a hoodie, but had taken it off about two minutes later. Hate to think what summer’s going to be like, if winter is quite warm.
Mind you, with above average rainfall predicted for parts of Australia’s east coast, over the next few months, maybe temperatures will remain relatively mild.
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Australia, climate, climate change, weather
There are more guns in Australia than before 1996 gun buy back
27 August 2025
Collectively Australians own four million guns, about twice the number held in 2001.
This despite strict gun ownership laws introduced following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, bans on certain types of firearms, and a gun buyback program in 1996, which resulted in over six-hundred thousand weapons being destroyed.
Australians can still legally own firearms, but must satisfy a number of prerequisites to do so. These include showing a genuine reason for possession — which some people, farmers for example, might have — along with keeping guns stored securely when not in use.
Four million guns is a lot, and equates to about one gun for every seven Australians. While some people feel gun ownership is a right, and have no problem adhering to ownership laws, others in the community are concerned legally owned firearms might somehow fall into the wrong hands.
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Australia Post to stop shipping some parcels to the United States
27 August 2025
Australia’s primary provider of postal services, Australia Post, has suspended delivery of “low-value parcels” to the United States, on account of tariffs imposed by the US government.
Packages with a value of less than eight-hundred dollars (US), will be subject to tariffs as of Friday 29 August 2025. The move will be a blow to businesses, particularly smaller operators, who sell items online to global customers.
Australia Post will continue to ship letters, documents, and gifts valued at less than one-hundred-and-fifty dollars though. I assume these gifts will be exempt from any tariffs.
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America, Australia, commerce, economics
Young Australians not banned from social media, just delayed using it
26 August 2025
Australians under the age of sixteen will not be banned from having social media accounts, when laws change later this year. Instead, as the Australian eSafety commission points out, they’ll merely have to wait until their sixteenth birthday before being able to sign up for social media access:
It’s not a ban, it’s a delay to having accounts.
The incoming social media age-restriction laws will make students of semantics out of us all.
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Australia, current affairs, social media, social networks, technology
Mind blown: are these the best science-fiction/fantasy books of the twenty-first century?
25 August 2025
Singapore based Australian blogger, and science-fiction writer Skribe, recently asked his Mastodon followers to name one sci-fi/fantasy novel, written this century, that has blown their minds. From those suggestions, he drew up this list of seven titles:
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, published in 2020
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson, published in 2010
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, published in 2013
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published in 2015
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, published in 2021
- The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, published in 2015
In a since closed poll asking people to vote for the title they considered the best, I went for Piranesi. Mainly because it was the only novel from the list that I’d read, but also because British author Susanna Clarke’s tome compelled me to write at length about it afterwards.
Long story short, Piranesi is about someone of the same name, who finds themselves mostly alone in a house of epic proportions. It can literally take days to move from one part of the multi-level structure, to another. The house itself is a character in its own right, and as I read through the story, I almost felt as if I was there with Piranesi, so vivid was Clarke’s description of the sprawling abode.
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