Tiarney Miekus
Tiarney Miekus is an editor at Art Guide Australia and a Melbourne-based writer whose work has also appeared in The Age, The Australian, un Magazine, Meanjin, RealTime, Overland and The Lifted Brow (Online). She is the producer of the Art Guide Australia podcast.
All essays by Tiarney Miekus
A Common World
I didn’t necessarily like school but I understood what it wanted from me. My year level had 330 students, yet I managed to graduate as dux and received an equity scholarship at the University of Queensland which quite literally changed the material conditions of my life. I didn’t like telling people at university where I went to school or that I came from a single parent family that lived on welfare. I didn’t understand how some students talked so easily with lecturers. Class preparation was googling how to pronounce things like ‘Michel Foucault’. But this was water to tread, for the moral was that you never complained. It would be ungrateful.