Category: Tharunka 70

Martin Sharp was one of Australia’s most iconic artists of the counterculture generation, known for his acerbic, satirical pieces that transgressed the limits of obscenity laws during the ‘60s. He was the joint founder of Oz Magazine, helping form a visual style emulated by many, and he would go on to repaint Luna Park’s iconic…

Although her hair’s turned silvery grey, Wendy Bacon’s beaming smile still sweetly creases her eyes. With age comes wisdom, and perhaps this is most palpable when she admits to Tharunka having a very western view on anti-colonial issues instead of defending or denying its existence like a handful of fragile Whites today. Bacon confessed, “even…

Tharunka recently sat down with Ken Burke, ex-solicitor of the Student Union and “ageless student disentangler” as the Sydney Morning Herald once reported. We spoke about his many interactions with the student paper. He started with the union on the 21st of April 1974, and worked continuously for it and its successors up until 2020,…

Nearly 20 years ago, a bright-eyed Anthony Levin ran for the Tharunka editorship. It was on a progressive-left ticket, and really only because one of his friends asked if he was interested. He got the position, alongside Alex Tyrell, and together they edited one of the most conceptually interesting years of Tharunka in its history.…

Did you hear about the time that UNSW students kidnapped an alligator from Taronga Zoo in 1964, and stuffed it into a cricket bag to be later collected from Kensington campus for a ransom? Or how, in 1961, a team of 20 UNSW students broke a world record by pushing a scooter non-stop from Melbourne…

For such a commitment to the anniversary of Tharunka, it’s a bit ironic that there isn’t actually much information on how it began. When we started this project, there wasn’t much that we could find about the origins of the newspaper. Looking through archival records, and old magazines, you get the big picture of how…