CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
One of Naarm’s most innovative and adaptive social justice warriors has arrived at work with a smile this morning.
Sitting down in the living room of her gorgeous Brunswick terrace house, freelance-SEO-expert Aspen Petal-Murdoch (29) will be keeping a close eye on her retweets over the next few hours.
Because today is Melbourne Cup day. A chance to engage in some warm and fuzzy elitism by ridiculing one of the favourite past times of the Australian middle class.
It’s the one day of the year where she feels completely qualified to loudly join the chorus of left-wing Twitter, in solidarity with the Greens campaigners and thespians that dictate what is and what isn’t okay in 2021.
It’s an issue that she can speak her mind on without having to consider her own privilege or lived experience.
This isn’t like a Black Lives Matter march, or a Mardi Gras panel – this is actually a political hot button that Margot can offer her venomous opinion on without looking like she’s trying to steal the thunder from someone who is actually oppressed.
Because the optics are in her favour: The punters are drunk and dressed like bogans in general admission, the horses are beautiful and are being overworked throughout 3,200 metres they’ve spent their entire lives training to run – and everyday people in the suburbs have a reason to doll up and enjoy themselves.
It’s this kind of community spirit and joy that Aspen feels an uncontrollable desire to dampen – because people that look like they get their news from Channel Seven don’t deserve nice things.
The way Aspen looks at it, not even one exhausted gelding is worth the millions of hugs and cheers and giggles that are taking place in workplaces and country race clubs around Australia today.
She cracks her fingers, and begins preparing to draft up a few hot takes that, God willing, might get shared by one of those woke Triple J darlings who have spent the last 6 months comparing live sport to live music.
But first, she has to pad herself out.
When your entire online brand is based around moral absolutism, you’ve gotta make sure you can’t get called out for the hypocrisy of taking part in similar practices.
And man, isn’t she glad she decided to take a moment to revise her own life story.
“Phewww!” sighs Aspen, as deletes an eight-photo Instagram carousel of her causing permanent spinal injuries to a heavily sedated elephant with pus leaking from the cracks in the bone raw gristle under the poor animals concrete-battered feet, taken during an Island holiday in Thailand over the summer of 2016.
“Okay.” she says.
Aspen’s activates into animal rights mode. She reaches for the keyboard. It’s game time!
“FUCKING BOGANS!” she types.
