The Best Stuff We Wrote in Australia in 2019

We published a lot of stories this year. Hundreds of them. Every day that wasn't a weekend, we published stories, week in, week out. And now it's December and everyone is saying "December! Where did the year go??" we have a very accurate record of exactly where our year went.

In many ways our year began in February when a friend of a friend of ours found a dead shark floating in a tank of chemicals in an abandoned wildlife park in Melbourne. We got him to take some photos and write about it, and you guys seemed interested so we wrote about the chemical shark again and again. Then there was a bit of investigative journalism, looking at how the sign for Sydney’s Parramatta Road had ended up bolted to a power pole in Lebanon. And then, later in the year, we did a full retrospective on Red Mitsubishis, which were a kind of pinga that got people very high (and then very angry) in the early 2000s.

Anway, rather than just describing everything we wrote, you should scroll down and read it. Because it's been a big year, with a bunch of very big, weird, suitably-2019 stories.

You might remember this article from when we were just describing it a moment ago. You should read it.

Earlier in the year, we also published this. Marty Smiley, who some of you might know from The Feed, was visiting his Lebanese relatives when he heard that some larrikin had stolen the sign for Sydney’s Parramatta Road and reinstalled it in Lebanon. Marty then went on a mission to get to the truth, and discovered the real story of how the sign had ended up halfway across the world.

If you were getting high in the 90s you might remember these. They were extra-strong ecstasy pills, embossed with Mitsubishi's three-pronged logo and distributed (allegedly) to Australia's party demographic by the infamous Carl Williams. They were a favourite among ravers, that somehow, by the early 2000s, had become a scapegoat for anyone with a "just say no" approach to drugs. One of our favourite writers, Sam Nichols, penned this retrospective on Red Mitsubishis, looking at where they'd come from and how they became a tool for conservative fear-mongering.

As an outlaw biker turned staff writer, Mahmood has access to stories no one else does, which means that he's always busy. In VICE Australia's editorial department, we're always like "where's Mahmood?" and for most of the 2019 the answer was "working on his podcast." Finally in October, his longform examination of a forgotten gang war in Western Sydney dropped and Mahmood's absence made sense. Over nearly five and a half hours, Mahmood explores the story of the Darwiche-Razzak family conflict—a Romeo-and-Juliet style tragedy complicated by honour codes, politics and drive-by shootings. We've embedded the link to the article here, but you should really listen to the show because it's goddamn enthralling.

Okay so this story might be set in the Netherlands, but it was written by a guy from the Melbourne VICE office so it's basically Australian. The article is about some people who had sex in an MRI machine in order to see what sex looks like inside the female reproductive tract. But more importantly, it's about how hard it is to apply scientific inquiry to sex, mostly because of entrenched squeamishness within society.

China's increasing determination to monitor its citizens and crush every case of suspected dissonance is made terrifyingly real in this story. VICE staff writer Gavin Butler spent an afternoon with Chinese artist Badiucao, who described how he's been stalked here in Melbourne, and his house has been mysteriously broken into. For anyone who feels that Australia is immune to the long arms of the Chinese state, this article is an uncomfortable dose of reality.