The Yarn

Eco-anxiety is the chronic fear of environmental doom.  While the American Psychiatric Association acknowledges its existence, it doesn’t classify it as a pathology. It’s a rational response to the world around us. And it’s especially prevalent among young people.  At best, eco-anxiety can motivate collective action. But it can also lead to paralysis and despair.   This week, we’re bringing you st...

Victoria’s coastlines are receding, inland waterways are flooding more frequently, and things are only expected to get worse.     This week, we’re bringing you two more interviews about The Citizen’s environmental reporting.  One about Gippsland abandoning fossil fuels in the face of a coastal climate crisis. Another about the beachside suburbs of Port Phillip unprepared for rising seas.    The ar...

Melbourne’s West has a pollution problem and residents are fed up with government inaction.    This week, you’ll hear about original reporting from students working on two separate projects — one looking into freight truck exhaust fumes, another investigating years of fires at a landfill near residential properties. Both issues are severely affecting local health.     The projects are part of a sp...

The moral panic about gender has been dominating conservative headlines lately, but gender nonconformity is nothing new.     The Hijra people of South Asia have been recognised as an additional gender for centuries, as have the Faʻafafine of Samoa, and the Femminielli of southern Italy.     This week, we’re bringing you three stories about people challenging gender norms just as they’ve always don...

There’s this word — “Solastalgia”. It describes homesickness when you’re still at home... because that home is changing in ways you can’t control.   This week, we’re bringing you three stories about our relationship to place. Places in flux and places that aren’t what we thought they were.   It’s the fourth episode of Breaking the Binaries, a series about the intersections that blend, blur, or bre...

Today we're bringing you another episode of News Bites, a series of live interviews showcasing the work of local journalists.   This week, we’re joined by Matilda Boseley, The Guardian’s TikTok queen whose videos often garner tens of thousands of views.  We’re also joined by Zara Seidler, the co-founder of Instagram-focused news service The Daily Aus. It’s one of the fastest growing news sites in...

Today, we're returning to our News Bites series. It spotlights the work of staff and students at the Centre for Advancing Journalism. This week’s guest is Lecturer and audio journalist Sami Shah. Sami got his start in a Pakistani newsroom. Since then, he’s moved to Australia where he’s hosted the ABC Melbourne Breakfast show and made radio documentaries on free speech and race for ABC’s Earshot se...

In medieval times, humans were confident they knew how the universe was ordered.  One fourteenth century illustration – known as the Great Chain of Being –  depicts God at the top of the heap, sitting amongst the clouds. Below him is a tier of humans. Below them , is a lowly tier of animals swimming, flying, or grazing.  And below them, plants and minerals.    But nowadays, we’re often humbled by...