Sadhbh Warren

My first thought today when I woke up in Sydney was “I slept in, I’m late”. My second was “oh, and the apocalypse is here”. There was an enormous dust storm last night and Sydney was blanketed in a thick red cloud of dust. It’s faded to a sullen yellow glow now, but at seven this morning the rising suns rays hitting the dust obliquely turned the city amber and red, like all the city was the outback glowing in the dawn. There are some great shots of it here . The million dollar views of Darling Harbour look out now on an outback dust-storm. Exasperated staff sweep tracks of red dirt from the floor and furnishings of shops and restaurants. Billboards look sepia through the fog, like relics of another time and place. The cars in the city are coated in grime, the corner offices of the financial district smeared with a film of dust. You forget how big, how dry this country is. You forget most of the cities cling to the sea, cowering away from the vast hot red and yellow plains of the centr...

Summer is coming, and I’m not ready. I thought I was in shape but according to a fitness assessment at the gym, that shape is a Stop-sign – stationary, large and bright red. I knew I should have got fitter before I went to the gym to get checked out. It’s like cleaning before the cleaners come; it doesn’t make sense but it’s a bit less embarrassing. So today I plan to start stage fourteen of the get fit for Summer plan. Stage one is persuading yourself it’s all hormonal and seasonal fat. Christmas dinner, Easter eggs, cold weather, water-retention, the running of the tides - all these are better explanations for why your fattest Fat Pants are gaping at the seams. Not that you ate too much and stayed on the sofa for the last three months. Or that you have been stuffing your face with chocolate and counting walks to the Thai place across the road as exercise, oh no. It’s not your fault; it’s winter weight! The first bit of Stage two is asking your partner or friend if you have put on a...

Stephen Fielding, Victorian Senator and the Federal parliamentary leader of the Family First Party in Australia, speaks out on the Punch about the mocking he over his disability. He revealed that disability – dyslexia - this week. He has frequently mispronounced words, including stating "fiscal policy" as "physical policy". He was questioned about the mispronunciation. "I'll make it quite clear: fiscal, F-I-S-K-A-L," he spelt. Journalists were quick to jump on the gaffe. The incident was a God send on a slow news day, and it appeared in every paper and every site. In the Senate, a Greens MP called out ''spell it'' as he tried to speak. Unwilling to take the roasting lying down, he wrote back, revealing what many people suspected; that he is dyslexic. He makes some excellent points. He argues that we shouldn’t mock people for their disabilities, that one disability does not negate their ability in other areas. There is nothing wrong wi...

Consider, if you will, the advert for Yves Saint Laurent’s new men’s fragrance, La Nuit de L'Homme . As befits a perfume advert, it is filmed in black and white and contains no actual information nor footage of the perfume. A mysterious man, well dressed, descends a staircase in opulent surroundings. Despite having a face that only a mother could love, and even then only if she was drunk and myopic, he turns heads. Young ladies of a groomed but conservative appearance stop dead and paw at him. They are slack-eyed and vacant, like zombies who have forgotten where the brains are. The man looks smug. The end. There are several obvious interpretations, to whit: this man deals drugs and the vacant-eyed ladies want them; this man has paid these beautiful women large quantities of cash in the past for sex, and they desperately need a new outfit. I’m going with option b – the young women last shopped in the eighties and wear satin polo necks, hair in a bun and pearls. Clearly in need of a ...

This writing lark is, quite frankly, not all it is cracked up to be. I am sadly lacking in freezing garret or a beret or any of the various French things ending in “et” I have been told go with the trade. I have been doing some research on what I can claim on my tax for 2009, being in the rather annoying situation of having outlaid more cash in the last tax year (some) than I earned (none). This means I am unlikely to be able to afford a garret or a beret in the near future, unless I can work out a way to claim deductions for writing that no one is willing to pay for. The Australian Tax Office is website is not being as helpful as one would expect. For a start, a search for publications on tax for unpaid writers is, ironically, unwritten. The words “freelance”, “writer” or “artiste, dammit” bring up no results. It appears that the Australian tax office only wishes to clarify matters for either that rarest of beasties, the employed writer. That and performance artists, presumably on the...

The real estate agent’s property pitch assures me, with the myopically deranged semi-perjurous optimism of someone who only gets paid if they sell this place, that Redfern is the new Surry Hills. No. No, it’s not. Redfern is an inner-city suburb of Sydney, just south of the city centre. It’s an inexpensive suburb, with local shops and small family restaurants that sell to people who usually don’t have much money to buy. It’s not full of students on the parents’ payroll. It’s Redfern. Redfern is also not, as I have seen claimed, the new Newtown or the new Erskineville. It is certainly not Strawberry Hills, despite frequent attempts to shove the boundaries on a map a few small, but extremely profitable, inches over. It is definitely not East Redfern, which does not have a postcode or appear on ANY maps but frequently does on property ads. Watching someone try to call their home address East Redfern is like watching Keeping Up Appearances’ social snob and secret ex-lowlife Hyacinth Bucke...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. If there is one good thing coming out of the Global Financial Crisis, the media agrees, it is that those cocky Gen Y bastards are getting the reality shock they deserve. The wheel has turned, and the first thing to get crushed beneath it will be their delusions of grandeur. Incoming Gen Z, born in the late 90’s, are already being touted as society’s saviors with more fiscal responsibility and a better work ethic - despite that fact that none of them have hit their teens. By contrast, Gen Y are “impatient, disloyal and demanding“ and have recently been exhorted to not be picky ”job snobs” in the new recession world order. Follow the minimum wage pay packet, not your overblown dreams, is the stern message. But what have Gen Y done other than be young and optimistic in a time of optimism? Being a snarky cocky know-it-all with little respect for authority and a desire to make your mark on the world is not new. An A...