Sydney Morning Herald

2023 - 1 - 19

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Fifty metres beneath Bondi, a stench that stings your eyes may help ... (The Sydney Morning Herald)

What was once dumped into Sydney's Harbour and off beaches as raw sewage now holds Sydney's secrets. We take a trip through the sewer in the latest ...

“The common rhetoric in London is that people have drunk water that filtered through seven sets of kidneys because sewage goes into the river and the next town extracts it. And while people might grimace at the thought of drinking sewage-sourced water, he points out that, to a degree, we’re already doing it. “I was a scientist at Sydney Water and I knew instantly, oh, Ian, you’re in the plume.” Fat, oil and grease rise to form a half-metre layer of scum, which is skimmed off and sent to “digesters” on top of the plant. At the top of a set of metal stairs, there’s a crack of sunlight. The political will to discuss recycled wastewater is low while dams are full, says Wright. Some consume seafood from the area including abalone and crayfish. A 2018 Sydney Water pollution report estimated 2000 people use the water contaminated by the outfalls for swimming, diving and spearfishing. The deep water outfalls transformed Bondi and Sydney’s other iconic ocean swimming havens. A torrent of raw sewage rages past at a rate of 1800 litres per second just below the grate we’re standing on. The surface is so silky you can peer down at your reflection, wavering from ripples set off by bubbles of toxic hydrogen sulphide gas. More than 150 million litres of water, fragments of COVID-19, particles of cocaine, heroin and antidepressants, and enough chemical energy to power thousands of homes flows through here each day.

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The office manifesto: 10 simple rules for workplace happiness (The Sydney Morning Herald)

Most jobs are not so bad, it's just the unnecessary hurdles that are put in our way that make them so.

A quiet word to the loud: It’s difficult to chide a co-worker for the way they yell into their phone. And the employee of the month certificates. But not when it’s to the whole office. And yet – cue a choir of angels - once forced, the middle-aged man will be thrilled to do this work. No emails at night: The best employees have a full life. I vote for a return to the self-effacing “general manager”, the most senior manager among a team of managers, all with the modest but necessary task of balancing the expectations of staff, customers, community and owners. The middle-aged man may need to be led to water, but once there, oh will he drink. Unless compelled, the middle-aged man will often leave the dishwasher duties to others. The middle-aged man dishwasher detail: Can tasks really be allocated to one gender, and one age group, in this equal opportunity world of 2023? Sure, it would be expensive, but compare it to the current situation: day after day, groups of employees standing around a dead machine, pushing buttons at random, getting madder by the moment, their work sitting uncompleted. All it took was for somebody to say “congratulations, you’re the new boss.” It was meant as a noun but heard as a verb. At the start of the working year, I offer 10 modest proposals for making office life more tolerable.

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Board games are terrible. Please don't make me play them (The Sydney Morning Herald)

In this column, we deliver hot (and cold) takes on pop culture, judging whether a subject is overrated or underrated. Kishor Napier-Raman ...

Look closely, and you start to see the infantilization of adulthood everywhere. Getting my arse kicked by The Guy Who is Good at Board Games (who always takes things a bit too seriously) is anything but. Billed as a wholesome way to break the ice with new friends, or reconnect with old, the affair is usually suggested by The Guy Who is Good at Board Games. For reasons too complex and inscrutable for this brief rant, adulthood has become overwhelmed by a culture of infantilization. For the love of god, never ask me to play a board game with you. There’s a kind of weird hyper-capitalist puritan logic to the whole thing. Previously he worked as a reporter for Crikey, covering federal politics from the Canberra Press Gallery.Connect via Slowly, those childish interests began to become culturally dominant and commercially very lucrative. [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/24/board-game-popularity/), article, we are living through a “golden age” of board games. Do “friends” really have nothing to say to each other? The simple pleasure of a glass of wine with friends must be accompanied by something more wholesome and virtuous, a “productive” use of one’s brain. The nerds have well and truly won.

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Sarah Ward felt like an unsolved puzzle. Killing off Yana Alana helped (The Sydney Morning Herald)

You probably know her as the self-obsessed chanteuse whose outrageous performances amassed cult-like adoration. From Spiegeltents to the Sydney Opera House, ...

The valley spirit cannot fall because it lies so low and yet it is the source of all and to it all things flow. The work was created in collaboration with a group of children from Rainbow families, whose imaginations were allowed free rein in devising a show celebrating identity and community. “That was a transitional point where I went: I’m really interested in creative producing. There was no need to have a farewell.” But actually it wasn’t a failure, it was a rebirth.” “I was flogging a dead horse.” “It was only in my early 30s that I started to go: OK, I’ve got the border of the puzzle. “It was only in my early 30s that I really began to understand what friendship and community was. “It was a really hard two years,” she says now. Between the Cracks in 2013 saw Yana Alana at her peak, winning a Helpmann and two Green Room awards and touring to five-star reviews around the country. The Cronulla race riots of 2005 were no surprise to her, “because growing up on the beach there, there was a lot of anger towards anybody that wasn’t white. “But in order to do that he becomes particles in the air.

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Heartbreak High's Thomas Weatherall shines in his playwriting debut (The Sydney Morning Herald)

This is a hypnotic monologue written and performed by Thomas Weatherall in his Belvoir debut with the Sydney Festival. Blue seems to be the dominant colour of ...

She is a former arts editor and writer of the SMH and also an author. This is an impressive debut by a talented young artist who writes and performs with a freshness and vulnerability. He hopes his play opens a discussion about the subject. But the use of water inset into the stage, like a watery grave, was less successful and felt unnecessary. The stark white evoked blinding summer sun and the sterility of a medical facility. In realising the work which he wrote as part of his 2021 Balnaves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fellowship with Belvoir St he has an ideal director in Deborah Brown, with her dance background.

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