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Australia Story
Blackface Ghost Town
The events depicted below are based on real experiences I had in Australia from 2020 to 2022. The names of people and places have been removed. Not to protect them, but rather to accommodate the handful of names that have relentlessly built and pushed forward the same issues I am about to address. Think of…
March 10, 2023
Story
From Where, If Not Here? A Tale of Displacement
This piece was inspired by the many conversations of my travels. The distant coastline falls beyond the view of the pier from the boundary of the hostel. Behind the partition, hands are burdened with wrinkled beer cans and tobacco ciggies littered with weed. The drunken party promises of new-age nomads from the distant kitchen sound…
September 15, 2021
Feature
Fucking My Oppressors
Here I am, on my knees for a white man. Throwback to 50 years ago, and the context of this statement would have meant I was about to be beheaded, or shot, or whatever else occurred during the Vietnam war. But it’s 2020, and as the world slowly comes to terms with the breadth of its…
June 29, 2020
Feature
Prick Prick Boom
I was 12 or 13 years old when I had my left arm intentionally broken by racist, highly privileged white kids at the school I was going to. And by broken arm, I mean broken. I was in a cast for three months. Though I’d been bullied for years, at the time, I didn’t even…
June 5, 2020
Feature
So Your Grandparents Are Racist?
We might blame it on brainwashing from years of threats of the wooden spoon or slipper, but first and second generation Australians really need to stop listening to their racist families. My name is Jelena Zaric and if you ask me if I’m Croatian, I won’t be offended. I’m actually Serbian-Australian, but it’s an easy…
January 7, 2019
Editorial
I Hope You Catch Yellow Fever and Die
I’m not your fetish. I’m not easy for you to obtain, and I’m not an object of your affections. I am a Chinese girl with a dark complexion, green hair and a loud mouth. I am a Chinese girl who has spent most of her life living in the city of Brisbane, a predominantly white-populated…
November 11, 2018

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.