Catherine McAuley College: St Mary's Home

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

The brutal homicide of 15-year-old Noongar Yamatji boy, Cassius Turvey, by a group of white men revealed the racial schisms in Western Australian society. Turvey was walking home from school in October 2022 when he was abruptly beaten to death.

On Friday, the Western Australian Supreme Court sentenced the three perpetrators. Twenty-nine-year-old Brodie Palmer and 24-year-old Jack Brearley were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

A third man, 27-year-old Mitchell Forth, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years behind bars.

This was an opportunity for the Supreme Court to send a strong message against racial violence. While the punishment of the men involved is clear, the role of race, and what legally qualifies as racially motivated crime, is muddier.

Wrong place, wrong time?

Racism has been front and centre of the public discussion of this tragedy from the outset.

Shortly after the 2022 attack, Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch said of the homicide:

it may be a case of mistaken identity, it may be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was met with strong condemnation from the First Nations community.

Rallies in solidarity with Turvey’s family were held across the country, with Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung, and Dunghutti activist Lizzie Jarrett declaring:

no black child is ever, ever, ever in the wrong place at the wrong time on their own land.

Racism at trial

Over the course of the trial, the court heard Turvey and his peers, a group of Aboriginal high school students, were approached by an angry group.

This comprised the three men convicted and a woman, 23-year-old Aleesha Gilmore, who was acquitted of homicide, and 21-year-old Ethan McKenzie, who with Gilmore, was convicted of other offences relating to the attack.

Turvey was chased and Brearly fatally beat him with a metal pole.

Earlier this year, the trial of the three perpetrators heard arguments by the defendants that the actions were not racially motivated.

Rather, the defence argued they were acting out of self-defence on the basis that Brearly had his car window smashed a few days prior.

In contrast, the prosecution brought evidence of a phone call that revealed Brearley was bragging about beating Turvey, stating that “he learnt his lesson”.

The prosecution argued the homicide was not a personal gripe, but a collective response.

The prosecution didn’t allege the attack was racially motivated, but it was open to the judge to consider this basis for the homicide.

At trial, 91 witnesses came forward. Witnesses gave evidence that the accused were using racial slurs.

This direct racism raises the issue of race as a motive in the attack, and is consistent with evidence of systemic racism in Western Australia.

The killing of Turvey comes after 14-year-old Elijah Doughty was targeted and killed in Kalgoorlie in 2016.

Both cases show white male motorists seeking revenge for alleged motor vehicle offences by taking aim at Aboriginal children.

This is reinforced by a penal system in which Aboriginal children are 53 times more likely to be detained than non-Aboriginal children.

What did the judge say?

On the morning of the sentence hearings, Cassius Turvey’s mother, who described her son as respected, bright, loving and compassionate, said the killing was a “racially motivated” and based on “discriminatory targeting”.

This sentiment has been echoed across the country, including by June Oscar, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, in 2022.

Chief Justice Peter Quinlan strongly condemned the attacks.

However, he stated the attack was not racially motivated, despite recognising that the perpetrators were “calling them n-words and black c—ts — you in particular Mr Brearley used language like that”.

He noted that it creates a “fear” of racial vilification:

it’s no surprise […] that the kids would think they were being targeted because they were Aboriginal, and the attack would create justifiable fear for them and for the broader community that this was a racially motivated attack.

This amounts to a message of general deterrence about violence and vigilante behaviour.

But messages to deter racial targeting and racial violence specifically were omitted from the public safety concerns expressed by the court.

Making racial violence invisible

Munanjahli and South Sea Islander professor Chelsea Watego, and colleagues, have remarked that the Australian psyche is more comfortable with an “abstract concern with racism; racism without actors, or rather perpetrators”.

This, they argue, sanitises racial violence and holds no one responsible.

The court demonstrated this abstract concern for racism.

This Supreme Court’s reasoning has set an impossibly high bar for racial vilification, and specifically racial violence, to be identified, denounced and redressed.

The judgement seems to relegate racism to being an unfortunate and unintended incident of co-existence, rather than willed harm.

The failure to regard the racial slurs, the targeting of a group of Aboriginal children, and the killing of one of these children, as “racially motivated”, upholds the idea that white people’s racist treatment and crimes against Aboriginal people exist in a vacuum free of a long history of colonial violence, massacres and occupation.

Thalia Anthony receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Matthew Walsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In just four days, one-third of the population of Tuvalu entered a ballot for a new permanent visa to Australia.

This world-first visa will enable up to 280 Tuvaluans to move permanently to Australia each year, from a current population of about 10,000. The visa is open to anyone who wants to work, study or live in Australia. Unlike other visa schemes for Pacific peoples, a job offer in Australia is not required.

While the visa itself doesn’t mention climate change, the treaty that created it is framed in the context of the “existential threat posed by climate change”. That’s why when it was announced, I described it as the world’s first bilateral agreement on climate mobility.

The Australian government, too, has called it “the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world, providing a pathway for mobility with dignity as climate impacts worsen”.

The high number of ballot applications may come as a surprise to many, especially given there were multiple concerns within Tuvalu when the treaty was first announced. Even so, some analysts predicted all Tuvaluans would apply eventually, to keep their options open.

Grabbing the chance

The visa highlights the importance of creating opportunities for people to move in the context of climate change and disasters. The dangers of rising sea levels are clearly apparent, including coastal flooding, storm damage and water supplies. But there is a lot more at play here.

For many, especially young families, this will be seen as a chance for education and skills training in Australia. Giving people choices about if, when and where they move is empowering and enables them to make informed decisions about their own lives.

For the government of Tuvalu, the new visa is also about shoring up the economy. Migration is now a structural component of many Pacific countries’ economies.

The money migrants send back to their home countries to support their families and communities is known as remittances. In 2023, remittances comprised 28% of GDP in Samoa and nearly 42% of GDP in Tonga – the highest in the world. Currently, Tuvalu sits at 3.2%.

A long time coming

Well before climate change became an issue of concern, Tuvalu had been lobbying Australia for special visa pathways. Demographic pressures, combined with limited livelihood and educational opportunities, made it a live policy issue throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. In 1984, a review of Australia’s foreign aid program suggested improved migration opportunities for Tuvaluans may be the most useful form of assistance.

By the early 2000s, the focus had shifted to the existential threats posed by climate change. In 2006, as then-shadow environment minister, Anthony Albanese released a policy discussion paper called Our Drowning Neighbours. It proposed that Australia create Pacific migration pathways as part of a neighbourly response. In 2009, a spokesperson for Penny Wong, then minister for climate change, stated permanent migration might eventually be the only option for some Pacific peoples.

When combined with other Pacific pathways to Australia and New Zealand, nearly 4% of the population could migrate each year. This is “an extraordinarily high level”, according to one expert. Within a decade, close to 40% of the population could have moved – although some people may return home or go backwards and forwards.

How will the new arrivals be received?

The real test of the new visa’s success will be how people are treated when they arrive in Australia.

Will they be helped to adjust to life here, or will they feel isolated and shut out? Will they be able to find work and training, or will they find themselves in insecure and uncertain circumstances? Will they feel a loss of cultural connection, or will they be able to maintain cultural traditions within the growing Tuvaluan diaspora?

Ensuring sound and culturally appropriate settlement services are in place will be crucial. These would ideally be co-developed with members of the Tuvaluan community, to “centralise Tuvaluan culture and values, in order to ensure ongoing dialogue and trust”.

It has been suggested by experts that a “liaison officer with Tuvaluan cultural expertise and language skills could assist in facilitating activities such as post-arrival programs”, for instance.

Learning from experience

There are also many important lessons to be learned from the migration of Tuvaluans to New Zealand, to reduce the risk of newcomers experiencing economic and social hardship.

Ongoing monitoring and refinement of the scheme will also be key. It should involve the Tuvaluan diaspora, communities back in Tuvalu, service providers in Australia, as well as federal, state/territory and local governments.

By freeing up resources and alleviating stress on what is already a fragile atoll environment, migration may enable some people to remain in Tuvalu for longer, supported by remittances and extended family networks abroad.

As some experts have suggested, money sent home from overseas could be used to make families less vulnerable to climate change. It might help them buy rainwater tanks or small boats, or improve internet and other communications. Remittances are also beneficial when they are invested in services that lift the level of education of children or boost social capital.

Delaying a mass exodus

It is difficult to know when a tipping point might be reached. For instance, some have warned that if too few people remain in Tuvalu, this could constrain development by limiting the availability of labour and skills. A former president of Kiribati, Teburoro Tito, once told me migration was “a double-edged sword”. While it could help people secure employment overseas and remit money, “the local economy, the local setup, also has to have enough skilled people” – otherwise it’s counterproductive.

With visas capped at 280 a year – and scope to adjust the numbers if concerns arise – we are still a long way from that point. Right now, the new visa provides a safety net to ensure people have choices about how they respond to climate change. With the visa ballot open until July 18, many more people may yet apply.

Read more: Fresh details emerge on Australia's new climate migration visa for Tuvalu residents. An expert explains

Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and is the Director of the ARC Evacuations Research Hub at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney.

After 37 years at the helm, fashion industry heavyweight Anna Wintour is stepping down from her position as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.

It’s not a retirement, though, as Wintour will maintain a leadership position at global fashion and lifestyle publisher Condé Nast (the owner of Vogue and other publications, such as Vanity Fair and Glamour).

Nonetheless, Wintour’s departure from the US edition of the magazine is a big moment for the fashion industry – one which she has single-handedly changed forever.

Fashion mag fever

Fashion magazines as we know them today were first formalised in the 19th century. They helped establish the “trickle down theory” of fashion, wherein trends were traditionally dictated by certain industry elites, including major magazine editors.

In Australia, getting your hands on a monthly issue meant rare exposure to the latest European or American fashion trends.

Vogue itself was established in New York in 1892 by businessman Arthur Baldwin Turnure. The magazine targeted the city’s elite class, initially covering various aspects of high-society life. In 1909, Vogue was acquired by Condé Nast. From then, the magazine increasingly cemented itself as a cornerstone of the fashion publishing.

The period following the second world war particularly opened the doors to mass fashion consumerism and an expanding fashion magazine culture.

Wintour came on as editor of Vogue in 1988, at which point the magazine became less conservative, and more culturally significant.

Not afraid to break the mould

Fashion publishing changed as a result of Wintour’s bold editorial choices – especially when it came to the magazine’s covers. Her choices both reflected, and dictated, shifts in fashion culture.

Wintour’s first cover at Vogue, published in 1988, mixed couture garments (Christian Lacroix) with mainstream brands (stonewashed Guess jeans) – something which had never been done before. It was also the first time a Vogue cover had featured jeans at all – perfectly setting the scene for a long career spent pushing the magazine into new domains.

Wintour also pioneered the centring of celebrities (rather than just models) within fashion discourse. And while she leveraged big names such as Beyonce, Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Kate Moss, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, she also featured rising stars as cover models – often helping propel their careers in the process.

Wintour’s legacy at Vogue involved elevating fashion from a frivolous runway to a powerful industry, which is not scared to make a statement. Nowhere is this truer than at the Met Gala, which is held each year to celebrate the opening of a new fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

The event started as a simple fundraiser for the Met in 1948, before being linked to a fashion exhibit for the first time in 1974.

Wintour took over its organisation in 1995. Her focus on securing exclusive celebrity guests helped propel it to the prestigious event it is today.

This year’s theme for the event was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. In a time where the US faces great political instability, Wintour was celebrated for her role in helping elevate Black history through the event.

Not without controversy

However, while her cultural influence can’t be doubted, Wintour’s legacy at American Vogue is not without fault.

Notably, her ongoing feud with animal rights organisation PETA – due to the her unwavering support for fur – has bubbled in the background since the heydays of the anti-fur movement.

Wintour has been targeted directly by anti-fur activists, both physically (she was hit with a tofu cream pie in 2005 while leaving a Chloe show) and through numerous protests.

This issue was never resolved. Vogue has continued to showcase and feature fur clothing, even as the social license for using animal materials starts to run out.

Fashion continues to grow increasingly political. How magazines such as Vogue will engage with this shift remains to be seen.

A changing media landscape

The rise of fashion blogging in recent decades has led to a wave of fashion influencers, with throngs of followers, who are challenging the unidirectional “trickle-down” structure of the fashion industry.

Today, social media platforms have overtaken traditional media influence both within and outside of fashion. And with this, the power of fashion editors such as Wintour is diminishing significantly.

Many words will flow regarding Wintour’s departure as editor-in-chief, but nowhere near as many as what she oversaw at the helm of the world’s biggest fashion magazine.

Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne has been affiliated with the Animal Justice Party.

Jye Marshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

My first boyfriend told me with some pride that he’d read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), and Shere Hite’s The Hite Report (1976). Though they had been selling in the millions, I hadn’t yet read either, and was keen to find out what he had learned.

He was only 16 at the time, the mid 1970s, and was a proto male feminist. He was also tender, in defiance of Erica Jong’s famous expression for spontaneous one-night-stand sex: “the zipless fuck”.

The boyfriend was a nascent sculptor and carpenter: his hobby was to collect roadkill and then painstakingly clean and reconstruct the animal’s skeleton after removing the flesh and skin. His airy bedroom accommodated possums, rats, cats, birds and a wallaby. Their skeletons shed eerie shadows across us as we lay on his bed. He was genuinely interested in how things are made.

Review: How To Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir – Molly Jong-Fast (Picador)

This is a core question in Molly Jong-Fast’s How To Lose Your Mother, which looks back from the vantage point of what she calls “the worst year” of her life. Her mother’s physical health and dementia are worsening, Jong-Fast is juggling a high-profile job as a political commentator (at MSNBC and CNN) with parenting three children, and her husband Max faces a series of life-threatening cancers. Then, she has to move her mother and stepfather (who also has dementia) into a nursing home.

At the book’s heart, though, is the question: How did my mother Erica Jong make me, and how have I struggled to remake myself?

Her book is also very much about caring for your ageing mother – and about fame, and what happens when you’re no longer famous – written by a funny, fast-talking daughter, who is also a political writer and public intellectual in her own right. Jong-Fast loves her mother fiercely, but is horrified by the way she was raised. The memoir is hilarious, moving and educative: Don’t, whatever you do, parent like this.

Fame made Erica Jong ‘very boring’

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like for the famous afterwards, this daughter’s portrait is almost excruciating in the ways it details the sense of loss Erica Jong lived with for years: a disfigurement even, a kind of dysmorphia. Why does the world no longer see me as I am – notorious, relevant, desirable, important?

Molly Jong-Fast watches it all:

Because she was, at the time, famous, people gave her a lot of leeway. But such allowances are a favour to no one […] Being able to get away with everything made her, in fact, very boring.

Erica Jong became famous aged 31, with the publication of the novel Fear of Flying. She gave birth to her only child Molly five years later in 1978 – then lived with declining fame for ever after. Fame encouraged Jong’s highly self-absorbed tendencies, her belief everyone – the public and her daughter – wanted to hear whatever it was she wanted to say:

Eventually, Mom would answer, but never the questions I asked. She always seemed to have a sort of stock answer […] she was always performing.

Jong published many novels and works of nonfiction over the next 30 years, and was constantly speaking and touring, but she never again achieved the impact of Fear of Flying. By the late 1990s, when Molly was close to 20 years of age and had gone AWOL on drugs and drink and was expecting to overdose any day, Jong was truly famous only among those who’d also experienced the excitement and hallelujah of the iconic second-wave feminist texts.

Fear of Flying had ranked alongside Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Our Bodies, Our Selves by Boston Women’s Health Collective (1970), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976), Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories (1979) and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979).

Fear of Flying enjoyed a 40th anniversary edition in 2013, deservedly so. It’s a novel that embraces desire, politics, history, sex, marriage – the whole big mess – narrated with rapid-fire frankness and verve.

Molly, her mother’s only child, was sometimes kept close, alternately touring, partying and dining out with Erica and her lovers, literary friends and acolytes – or she was left in the care of her nanny, Margaret. One entire year, Molly and Margaret lived alone together while Erica and her ex-husband, Molly’s father Jonathan Fast, were elsewhere.

I wish I’d asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn’t ever want to spend time with me, but […] in her view, she did spend time with me – in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there …

Jong-Fast was made aware from the start that her mother wrote about her in her fiction and non-fiction; she had to tolerate strangers speaking intimately to her as if they knew her, based on what they’d read.

Jenny Diski and Doris Lessing: ‘less than perfect’

Reading this, I was reminded of Jenny Diski’s essays, first published in the London Review of Books, about her foster mother Doris Lessing, which she began writing only after Lessing’s death in 2013. Like Jong-Fast, Diski’s representation of her famous, very smart (foster) mother is compassionate and highly critical.

Diski had come to Lessing at the age of 15, when Lessing was quietly famous: The Grass is Singing (1950), Martha Quest (1952) and her masterpiece The Golden Notebook (1962) were already published.

Diski’s parents were shockers: her father was a drunk and violent, and her mother sexually abused her after the father left. She found her way into Lessing’s life in her house in Charrington Street, London. Lessing’s son Peter had moved out; in her escape from her marriage and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Lessing had left her older two children behind with their father. Allegedly, she felt an obligation to offer this very smart, underprivileged teenage girl a home.

Lessing’s caretaking of the teenage Diski took place during the height of British and American feminism’s rejection of the role of mothering – which still very much held sway in the theory and practices of the feminist movement Molly Jong-Fast grew up in.

In Diski’s representation, Lessing’s focus was on Diski’s potentialities. She was uninterested in the maternal, nurturing aspects of the carer relationship: those, Diski would have to do herself. Lessing provided her with shelter, meals and clothing, money to go to school with – and around the dinner table, intelligent conversations with politically active and aware adults.

It wasn’t enough for Diski, and she was less than the perfect ward. Surliness, sex, interruptions to her school studies, drugs, another breakdown: the young Diski was very much like the young Jong-Fast. Both got sober and became writers.

Diski disappointed Lessing, but Lessing didn’t abandon her. They continued with their mother/daughter, carer/ward relationship until Lessing’s death. After which, it seems on the face of it, Diski felt free – and driven – to write about her. Diski was diagnosed with terminal cancer that same year; another reason to put her experience on the record. The essays comprised her final book, In Gratitude.

‘Thinking about my mother hurts’

Similarly, Molly Jong-Fast is now writing about Erica when her mother is no longer able to read what she has to say.

My mother was unattainable, but I tried. I keep trying. Now she is slipping away and our story really is over. Just in time to try and make sense of it.

Jong-Fast shuttles between her early-morning work as a TV political analyst and podcast host, her mother’s nursing home and Max’s hospital bed. The evident, sustained care she gives to Max, her own children, to her mother and Ken, her stepfather, go a long way to relieving the occasional desire for more restraint I felt on reading the curated, raw critiques of her mother’s and her own suffering:

There is a pain in me. Pain like a low ache […] like part of me is rotting or sick. Thinking about my mother hurts.

Quintana Roo Dunne – Joan Didion and John Dunne’s adopted daughter – is mentioned in passing: as a girl whom Molly knew, who was also a lonely, alcoholic only child, and the child of writers and famous mothers. She was as lost as Molly but she was not a survivor: she died, aged 39, after complications from pneumonia, following a lifetime of struggles with her mental and physical health.

Unlike Jong, who spoke and wrote constantly about Molly, and Lessing (who, in Diski’s estimation, based a key character in her novel The Memoirs of a Survivor on Diski’s teenage self), Quintana rarely appeared in her mother’s writing. And when she did, it was after her death, when she was the subject of Didion’s Blue Nights.

But Didion could not or would not reflect on the reasons for Quintana’s suffering and early death: Andrew O’Hagan describes Blue Nights’ representation of Quintana as “strange, anaesthetised”. Indeed.

It is always harder for the mother to write of her own maternal grief, guilt and failings than it is for the daughters, the next generation, to write back. To tell how they were made by their mothers – and how they’ve remade themselves. In Jong-Fast’s memoir, there is the gratitude and the fury you would expect.

In her words:

I’m a writer, for better or worse. This is what I do. Yes, just like my mother […] it is my job to make sense of the past, of her life, our relationship.

Jane Messer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we spotted a blindingly fast flash of radio waves that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside our galaxy.

After a year of research and analysis, we have finally pinned down the source of the signal – and it was even closer to home than we had ever expected.

A surprise in the desert

Our instrument was located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara – also known as the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory – in remote Western Australia, where the sky above the red desert plains is vast and sublime.

We were using a new detector at the radio telescope known as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder – or ASKAP – to search for rare flickering signals from distant galaxies called fast radio bursts.

We detected a burst. Surprisingly, it showed no evidence of a time delay between high and low frequencies – a phenomenon known as “dispersion”.

This meant it must have originated within a few hundred light years of Earth. In other words, it must have come from inside our galaxy – unlike other fast radio bursts which have come from billions of light years away.

A problem emerges

Fast radio bursts are the brightest radio flashes in the Universe, emitting 30 years’ worth of the Sun’s energy in less than a millisecond – and we only have hints of how they are produced.

Some theories suggest they are produced by “magnetars” – the highly magnetised cores of massive, dead stars – or arise from cosmic collisions between these dead stellar remnants. Regardless of how they occur, fast radio bursts are also a precise instrument for mapping out the so-called “missing matter” in our Universe.

When we went back over our recordings to take a closer a look at the radio burst, we had a surprise: the signal seemed to have disappeared. Two months of trial and error went by, until the problem was found.

ASKAP is composed of 36 antennas, which can be combined to act like one gigantic zoom lens six kilometres across. Just like a zoom lens on a camera, if you try to take a picture of something too close, it comes out blurry. Only by removing some of the antennas from the analysis – artificially reducing the size of our “lens” – did we finally make an image of the burst.

We weren’t excited by this – in fact, we were disappointed. No astronomical signal could be close enough to cause this blurring.

This meant it was probably just radio-frequency “interference” – an astronomer’s term for human-made signals that corrupt our data.

It’s the kind of junk data we’d normally throw away.

Yet the burst had us intrigued. For one thing, this burst was fast. The fastest known fast radio burst lasted about 10 millionths of a second. This burst consisted of an extremely bright pulse lasting a few billionths of a second, and two dimmer after-pulses, for a total duration of 30 nanoseconds.

So where did this amazingly short, bright burst come from?

A zombie in space?

We already knew the direction it came from, and we were able to use the blurriness in the image to estimate a distance of 4,500 km. And there was only one thing in that direction, at that distance, at that time – a derelict 60-year-old satellite called Relay 2.

Relay 2 was one of the first ever telecommunications satellites. Launched by the United States in 1964, it was operated until 1965, and its onboard systems had failed by 1967.

But how could Relay 2 have produced this burst?

Some satellites, presumed dead, have been observed to reawaken. They are known as “zombie satellites”.

But this was no zombie. No system on board Relay 2 had ever been able to produce a nanosecond burst of radio waves, even when it was alive.

We think the most likely cause was an “electrostatic discharge”. As satellites are exposed to electrically charged gases in space known as plasmas, they can become charged – just like when your feet rub on carpet. And that accumulated charge can suddenly discharge, with the resulting spark causing a flash of radio waves.

Electrostatic discharges are common, and are known to cause damage to spacecraft. Yet all known electrostatic discharges last thousands of times longer than our signal, and occur most commonly when the Earth’s magnetosphere is highly active. And our magnetosphere was unusually quiet at the time of the signal.

Another possibility is a strike by a micrometeoroid – a tiny piece of space debris – similar to that experienced by the James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022.

According to our calculations, a 22 micro-gram micrometeoroid travelling at 20km per second or more and hitting Relay 2 would have been able to produce such a strong flash of radio waves. But we estimate the chance the nanosecond burst we detected was caused by such an event to be about 1%.

Plenty more sparks in the sky

Ultimately, we can’t be certain why we saw this signal from Relay 2. What we do know, however, is how to see more of them. When looking at 13.8 millisecond timescales – the equivalent of keeping the camera shutter open for longer – this signal was washed out, and barely detectable even to a powerful radio telescope such as ASKAP.

But if we had searched at 13.8 nanoseconds, any old radio antenna would have easily seen it. It shows us that monitoring satellites for electrostatic discharges with ground-based radio antennas is possible. And with the number of satellites in orbit growing rapidly, finding new ways to monitor them is more important than ever.

But did our team eventually find new astronomical signals? You bet we did. And there are no doubt plenty more to be found.

Clancy William James receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

A shift in the public’s expectation of government is under way and, as Menzies realised in the 1940s, any party seeking to win over voters must adapt to stay relevant

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The Liberal party is facing an existential crisis. In her address to the National Press Club on Wednesday Sussan Ley promised a fundamental review of the party which would go deeper than the review into its electoral performance being conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin.

On 3 May, the Liberal party delivered the worst election result for a non-labour supporting party since 1943, when the United Australia party won only 14 seats out of 74. Out of this crisis, a new political party was formed, the Liberal party of Australia, with Robert Menzies as its leader.

There are logistical challenges to hosting a month-long tournament in June and July but Football Australia is open to becoming the next host

The sight of thousands of Boca Juniors fans pouring onto the pristine Miami beach ahead of their Fifa Club World Cup opener against Benfica last week quickly went viral, with the white sands colloquially becoming known as “Boca beach”.

While the grand old Argentine club exited the tournament prematurely after a shock 1-1 draw with Auckland City’s collection of part-timers earlier this week, could Sydney’s world famous Bondi beach be next in line for the Boca treatment?

• Australia push lead past 200 on ther third day of first Test

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Travis Head has given Australia a fresh scent of victory in the first Test after delivering his second half-century against West Indies in Bridgetown.

It helped Australia reach lunch on the third day in an improving position. Having resumed on 4-92, the tourists shored up their position by reaching 5-181, growing their lead from 82 to 171.

A text by Chris Oliver-Taylor said he was going to ‘try and beat’ story in the Oz before publication. Plus: Daily Telegraph claims ‘exclusive’ on ubiquitous news

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There was another source of pressure on the ABC content chief when he hastily removed Antoinette Lattouf from air, the federal court has found.

Apart from a coordinated campaign by the pro-Israel lobby which had ABC management in a “panic”, there was the looming deadline of Rupert Murdoch’s broadsheet, a newspaper which is consistently hostile to the ABC.

Exclusive: New ANU research reveals those liable for extra earnings levy have 12 times wealth of other Australians

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Fewer than 1% of households with multimillion-dollar super balances could struggle to pay for Labor’s additional tax on retirement balances above $3m.

New ANU research also reveals that households liable for the extra earnings levy have 12 times the wealth of other households, including an average of $3.2m outside super and the family home. They also have more than two-and-a-half times the disposable income.