Week 23/2025: Creative and critical

This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.

Week of 2 June 2025

An interesting week.

This happened in Parliament.

ISLAND

The Menzies Institute for Medical Research, which is part of the University of Tasmania’s medical faculty, runs a project called the ISLAND Project through the Wicking Dementia Centre.

It’s a long-term project looking at risk factors for dementia and how various interventions and behaviour changes might affect people’s risk of dementia.

ISLAND open to any Tasmanian resident aged 50 or above, and they invite you to do a range of surveys and cognitive tests as well as taking part in educational activities such as their Understanding Dementia and Preventing Dementia MOOCs. (These are, I think, open to anyone anywhere in the world. You don’t have to be part of ISLAND to do them.)

They also occasionally offer participants access to selected free courses at Utas, with the stated aim of reducing dementia risk through later-life education. According to the information I received, the preliminary results from the last time they offered this program in 2020 have shown a reduction in dementia risk for participants, so they’re offering it again this year.

One of the courses offered is the Diploma of Arts in the English and Writing stream, and this seemed like a good opportunity to do some formal study in a field I love. So I did the relevant assessments, sent in an application and got accepted and now I’m a first-year uni student again.

Yay!

Because of the way the course is structured, I’m expecting it will take me four years to finish it, doing one subject per semester.

Creative and critical

On Monday I handed in my final assignment for my first subject, which has the rather fancy title of Creative and Critical Reading. It covered techniques of close reading, formal analysis, and creative writing through studying a variety of formats: short stories, novels, creative non-fiction, poetry, film, and television.

I’d been a little unsure if I wanted to commit to a uni course. It’s a lot of work. So I talked myself into it with the agreement that I’d commit to just one unit and reassess after finishing it. But I really loved it. It was a great intro unit and I learned many things, possibly the greatest one being that poetry is nothing to fear. I thank guest lecturer Graeme Miles for this revelation.

The final assignment included three short essays covering the formats we looked at in the last half the course. I chose to write a creative non-fiction piece, a poem, and a critical analysis of a TV show. (If you were following my “what am I watching this week?” question over the last few weeks and noticed I said Stranger Things season one, well, that’s why.)

And now that’s done, I can take a breather and catch up on some of my other reading and writing activities before the start of semester two. I’m looking forward to learning more.

Summary of the week

What are some positive things this week?

I went to the library for a meeting and I remembered my library card so I could pick up a book that was waiting for me.

Some art installations around town. (There’s some little winter festival going on at the moment, apparently.)

I love this one, which is part of Creative Hobart’s InsideOUT program.

It’s called WritersBLOCK/ReadersBLOCK by Lucy Christopher. The installation is the InsideOUT cubes set up outside the Hobart Bookshop, for a writer to have two hours of uninterrupted writing time and a reader to have two hours of uninterrupted reading time.

There’s more information here. Lucy invites observers to share their thoughts with her about what their own blocks to reading and writing are, and how they felt about reading and writing after seeing the exhibit. I’m still thinking about my answer but I have to say I’d be happy to sit in a cosy little cube like that and read, undisturbed, for two hours. Or write. And I think I’d be more inclined to actually write if I were in there because people could see if I wasn’t working.

Habit tracker

Existing habits

•  Go outside first thing (7 days): 6/7
• 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 3/7
• Hip exercises (5 days): 4/7
• 2 walks or bike rides or a combination (6 days): 4/6
• Long walk (1 day): 0/1
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 5/7
• 9.00 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 6/6
• Evening routine (6 days): 4/6

New habits

• Fill water bottle in the morning (5 days): 5/5
• Carry a notebook with me when I walk (6 days): 5/6
• Mid-day journalling (7 days): 5/7
• Thinking time (4 days): 5/4
• Read aloud (7 days): 7/7

What did I learn this week?

I learned about the oarfish (Regalecus glesne).

It’s a fish that few people have ever seen alive because they are deep water species, living between 150 metres and one kilometre under the surface.

One washed up on Ocean Beach on the west coast during the week. The ABC reported that it is the longest bony fish species in the world. Some people call it the ‘doomsday fish’, and it’s linked to stories of sea serpents and natural disasters.

According to Dr Neville Barrett from Utas’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, they can grow up to eight meters long.

Dr Barrett is reported as saying scientists don’t know how long they live but it would have to be at least 20-30 years to grow to eight meters. He said most deep-water species are long lived. For example, the orange roughy can live to 120 years.

CSIRO ichthyologist John Pogonoski (an ichthyologist is someone who studies fish) says there are two species in Australia, one in southern Tasmania and one is tropical. The CSIRO has one in its collection, which was found in 2013 and measured 2.2 metres.

That’s cool.

What did I notice this week?

I was on Sandy Bay Road near Utas and four plovers flew overhead screeching. Plovers usually hang out in pairs so I wondered what they were up to.

A couple of days later I saw a group of three on a building site where I usually only see two.

What was the best thing this week?

I went to my acting class on Wednesday and now I have a lot more lines to learn, which is great because it’s allowing me to build a character for myself. But it’s a lot of lines!

What am I reading this week?

• The Lemongrass Project by Janet Richardson
• Into the Woods by John Yorke
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• What is Poetry? by Michael Rosen

What am I listening to this week?

• Spacemakers Podcast Season 3
• Spacemakers Podcast Season 1

What am I watching this week?

• Masterchef Australia
• Stranger Things Season 1
• Resident Alien
• Doctor Who ‘Kinda’
• Stranger Things Season 2