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When the eyes of the world…

…are not fixed on you, your actions, even your grin – apparently this is when you move closer to the real you.

It’s quite the concept and possibly comforting if you’re at peace with what stands out in the solitude.

But, if you’re not?

She looked like a rough sleeper. Perched on a grimy bench. Restless energy. An ill-fitting dress. No shoes. And I only caught a glimpse as the light rail I was riding zipped past her scene-making.

And she was absolutely the star of a scene I couldn’t ignore. 

Her fingers were flying over an imaginary keyboard. Typing. Typing. In fury. Frustration. Her accidental mime so descriptive, I could tell just by the way her hands sliced through the air, that she was forcing a typewriter’s carriage right and left, right and left, left, left!

Were the words not coming? Her thoughts tormenting?

It was a painfully fascinating tableau, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her in the few seconds it took for my tram to coast by.

She was lost in her own world. Oblivious to life unfolding. In her mind, no one was watching because she was totally alone…

Trapped in the cliché of writing a masterwork in a cabin somewhere? The supernatural satisfaction of art completed, eluding her? Was she was battling her muse, her mania or both?

Maybe the question isn’t, who are you when no one is watching, but…

Who are you when you are not seen?

© Phyllis Foundis 2026

For over 50 years…

…the Sydney Opera House has hosted folks who have brought indescribable magic to our planet.

Prince bewitched the ivories like a purple-cloaked wiz during his last ever Aussie tour. Dame Joan Sutherland flooded the Concert Hall with her supernatural trills. A Pope. A Dylan. A Mandela. Titans of spirit and art brought their messages of love, hope and beauty to this legendary place.

But on March 8, ugly will descend on the House.

Those famous Sails are set to be sullied by speakers spouting performative vitriol designed to divide, agitate and tar all men on Earth with the same grubby brush.

The Feminist Festival is returning for its 14^th year of shock value rhetoric.

Billed as ‘…15+ thought-provoking conversations and events’, the Festival will explore the ‘issues that matter to women and their allies.’

Lovely. Let’s keep fuelling the battle, ladies, because that’s what the world needs now. More sensationalised blah starved of nuance.

One of the talks will focus on raising boys to avoid Andrew Tate-ish rabbit holes – assuming that all our sons are gullible alt-right-leaning zombies. Another event, Heterofatalism, will highlight the ‘rising belief that heterosexual relationships are flawed’ and ‘blow the lid off the embarrassment of boyfriends’.

Steering this chat will be a writer who boasts about sucking the oxygen out of any room she’s in and an academic who pens op eds titled, Boyfriends are cringe.

We’re in a crisis.

Our sons and brothers are being bombarded with an unrelenting narrative that paints them all as ineffectual, incompetent, embarrassing, predatory misogynists.

It’s a disturbing sideshow of inequality. And tickets are selling fast.

© Phyllis Foundis 2026

Scribes and their word swords…

…are quite the feared species these days. Actually, scratch that. Writers, with a ferocity of courage and views to match, have always struck fear in the hearts of folks allergic to truth-telling – or divisive rhetoric.

Whether it’s spitting facts or disrupting ‘em, it’s a wordsmith’s obligation to tell it like it is – or, at the very least, how they may want it to be.

This week a writers festival flopped after 180 writers called bullsh**t on the decision to oust a fellow author from the event because of her views. The BBC summarises the festival implosion beautifully here.

But this Phylosophy isn’t about delving into the politics behind the writer’s clumsy removal or the subsequent quasi-apology that she received along with an invitation to attend the 2027 Festival instead (!). 

The focus here is on what the festival fracas did so well. In just a matter of days it managed to detonate an entire echo chamber of small minds who had the temerity to believe they were better, smarter, wiser than a bunch of storytellers, basically.

I have intentionally left out the name of the author and festival here. Not because I want to be mysterious. If you know anything about Australian current affairs, you’ll know who and what I’m talking about. 

I’ve stripped back the details to reveal how unreal the whole thing was; 

A high-profile arts festival kicks out a writer because they didn’t agree with her views.

This should’ve been fiction not non.

© Phyllis Foundis 2026

Apparently, I don’t.

Or at least that’s what our mates at Meta would have you believe.

Today I discovered that my accounts on Instagram and FB have been suspended. What?! Did the Geek Gods decide to save me from my scrolling sins in favour of more worthwhile pursuits IRL?

Um, no. These e-deities don’t trade in altruism, my friends. In fact, the reasons they gave for pausing my access to digital slop was something so alien to who I am and what I share online it concerned me – for 90 seconds.

A quick call to my very wise social media manager friend revealed the (somewhat) startling truth… 

An army of AI web crawlers are waging war on unpalatable / illegal / abusive content. But the busy bots just aren’t big on nuance. It’s just slash and burn, baby.

Oh no. What to do?? Nobody wants their scrolling thumbs put on ice while their feeds are assessed and, all digits crossed, approved!

But never fear, algospeak is here.

For those of you who don’t know (or care), this is a self-censorship method which essentially assassinates the English language for the sake of ‘free speech’. And, as a result, it’s spawned gems like s3x, 4buse, nip nops and pew-pew – which refers to guns not bad smells. Who knew?

I guess we should all breathe a sigh of relief and be grateful that our tech bro overlords are out to get those online bad guys!

Either that or our privacy is officially… forked.

© Phyllis Foundis 2026

Take a deep breath,

2026 has arrived – fresh with no mistakes in it.

Those last six words are borrowed from that iconic, innocent tome, Anne of Green Gables penned by L.M. Montgomery.

Then again… To err is human, to forgive divine according to poet, Alexander Pope.

So, what to do? Strut into the year with hope and starry-eyed optimism? Or accept that mere mortality is part of your earthbound contract and forgive yourself before January gets too old.

I’m choosing both – with an emphasis on being kinder to me. As the days inched closer to December 31, I pushed myself to tick off to-dos and wipe some imaginary slate clean so I could hit ’26 all gung-ho as the final firework studded Sydney’s midnight sky. Poetic sure, but ultimately an impotent strike for perfection.

So, I gave up on the lists and pressure for neat and tidy and let myself off the hook, rejecting all the ra-ra motivational talk of the season.

The antidote? Reading some of the most unassuming words ever written from the Pulitzer prize-winning pen of Mary Oliver in her book, Long Life.

“Here you are alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

The arresting simplicity of these tiny sentences is breathtaking – and even a little heartbreaking too. But I think they complement this year of the Fire Horse beautifully without any effort at all.

Befriend the present. Let those leftovers from 2025 go and harness the momentum this steed has come to ignite.

Let’s go. 

© Phyllis Foundis 2026

So that was Christmas.

Bows are unwrapped. Turkey’s unstuffed. Now what? 

Well, for me I gotta reflect on the last 24 hours because it’s so easy to get caught up in this season’s lust for perfection and high expectations. It’s also my antidote to the cloying desperation for making everything just-so this time of year. 

Was the grazing platter big enough? Did we take 1,000 photos flaunting the endless lunchtime spreads? How many grins did we share online to prove how loved up, happy or gifted we are at grilling that octopus? 

And was the most important mouth – the social feed – fed? 

Competing with performative Christmases is a fool’s errand. Where are the bickering in-laws and simmering grudges? Give me more cured ham than curated happy snaps, please.

My little family and I had a fantastically imperfect day yesterday. A booking mix-up had us enjoying a buffet in a venue that time forgot complete with patrons in festive fashion that ranged from loose activewear to jumpers that read: Ho, Ho, Holy Sh** I Need A Beer.

But we laughed until we cried when our conversations were drowned out by distorted Christmas music blaring from dusty speakers. And watched in wonder as my 95-year-old mother scored a kiss from the Greek club manager – she’d only just met. 

Just like Santa’s huge appetite for stale cookies and curdled milk, there is no such thing as perfection, but ‘pockets of perfect’? ‘Tis the season for sleighfuls of those.  

Merry Everything to you, friend. 

© Phyllis Foundis 2025

The festive stuff…

…is out in force this week. Bells, baubles, tinsel and… stress.

This week my beloved sunburnt country reels from a shredding of innocence we sometimes take for granted in our ‘…land of sweeping plains’. I mourn the souls – young and old – but choose not to give any more oxygen to intolerance and terror, here.

Instead, I want to continue embracing whatever semblance of innocence I can find. And if life’s slings and arrows mean ‘a simpler time’, pure and unsullied is harder to come by, then I’ll seek it out in the most obscure places. 

The other night I sat alone in my living room watching Wham’s Last Christmas video – with the volume turned up to, ‘soothe-my-soul-please-80s-scenes’. Not that cute people frolicking in the snow is a salve for sadness – but, for four minutes and 27 seconds, the innocence of that time, 40 years ago, was mine.

I look through countless old photos and linger on the younger faces, scenes and celebrations moments frozen in time. It’s hard not to wish for the joy that’s past. But I guess staying stuck in what once was means missing the beauty of ‘new’.

I’ve often heard that the magic of Christmas is only reserved for children and their belief in flying reindeers and fat dudes who fit in skinny chimneys. But us bigger kids deserve some of that fairy dust too.

So, dear friends … I wish you all the miracles of the season the biggest one being love.

© Phyllis Foundis 2025

‘Tis the season…

…to deck the halls and ban under-16s from social media. 

Yep. I’m doing a full-bodied leap onto the bandwagon that is a world-first for Australia’s meme-hungry teens.

Unless you’ve been living in a candle-lit cave furnished with plush velvet wingbacks and a library of first editions (lucky you), perhaps you missed the news that, as of December 10, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok et al are now in charge of keeping your young’uns off their apps – in Terra Australis, at least.

Anything that slows the rapid demise of growing brains is alright by me. And sure, the government’s very well-intentioned ban will have positive outcomes. But the whole affair stinks of nanny state and, something even more on the nose…

It appears that, in 2025, society has decreed that parents should outsource the tricky, sticky business of saying no and setting boundaries for their scroll-happy offspring.

Tech bros and politicians should do the grunt work of teen rearing instead.

Apparently, parents are far too busy navigating the cost of living and mourning the loss of that famous village it takes to raise children to worry about um, raising their children.

…because while polls showed 67% of Aussies supported the social media ban this week, one in three parents confessed they’re ‘likely’ to help their children circumvent it.

So, please. Let’s cut the tech titans some slack.

When it comes to the number of dumb parents enabling screen-drunk teens, it’s truly an embarrassment of riches for Zuck and his bros.

© Phyllis Foundis 2025

Maybe it’s an age thing...

…or the fact that my copywriter brain has spent millions of hours crafting different combos of ways to describe stuff over the years but – when you’ve written the same-ish sentences for decades you can get what I call, scribe fatigue.

Add the oily word salad of AI mediocrity to the world’s writing and I wanna eat my lashes just to try something new, ease the apathy perhaps.

Where are the dangerous words? The reckless descriptions of lust, political discourse, a roiling, angry ocean even on a polite summer’s day?

I wanna read and write words that arrest the norm, ya know? Collect powder-keg-laced verbs that detonate the droll and crucify cliches. See what I’m doing here? It’s not perfect. Probably even a little try hard too. No problem.

I’ll wear the criticism like a vintage McQueen and strut my stuff down that catwalk. Because in my own wordy way I’m fu**ing with the bots who make it their business to rot your neural pathways and mine.

Hand on my heart, all rhythm and some blues, this Phylosophy has been written in the spirit of scribe-y abandon. To write on the edge of what’s expected, to view expression like teetering on a tightrope, way, way up high, screw the altitude, look down, get scared. Embarrassed. Coy about my questionable turns of phrase.

Dance like no one’s watching. Write like no one’s judging.

Switch on the grey that matters and pluck something surprising outta your arsenal. Yes.

© Phyllis Foundis 2025

Every week I host Love Soul –

…a radio show I launched four years ago.

The show is an enormous labour of love that I share with the world’s greatest producer, Ohio born and bred, Joe Johnson.

Our playlist? A cornucopia of vintage grooves from soul titans including Luther, Prince, Stevie, Chaka, Maxwell, Earth, Wind and Fire.

It’s not that the new stuff doesn’t thrill. There’s just not much of it. But then I heard, Won’t You Decide – a full-fat funk track by Melbourne band, Mondo Freaks. So, I surrendered to the algorithm and up came, JusteFunk, all honey-soaked vocals, rhythm and blues. Who was this slice of soulful perfection?! 

Hm. All credits belonged to someone, or thing, called ia –  ‘discovered’ in a hot hardrive somewhere stuffed with (increasingly stale) chips. 

And the online chatter fires up, 

“If you like it, what’s the difference?”
“This is the future. Music has been revived.”

And this abomination… 

“It’s just as creative as practicing the guitar for thousands of hours and you get results a lot faster.”

Remember Milli Vanilli? This dreadlocked pop duo dominated in the late 80s with their moves, tunes and bike shorts. But when their fake vocals were revealed, out came the pitchforks.

But I guess gorging on bogus artists in 2025 is cool. 

Well, I’d listen to lip synching humans in spandex over derivative, lazy, pre-programmed slop masquerading as soul – any day. 

In the wise words of one Prince Rogers Nelson, “I like my funk concentrated”… not computer generated. 

© Phyllis Foundis 2025