Whittlesea Eagles Cricket Club secretary Blair Meaney was faced with the possibility of the now 160-year-old club closing its doors for good in 2023.

The club situated in Melbourne’s northern suburbs is one of many local clubs across the country battling to survive, as grassroots cricket faces declining participation and volunteer shortages.

The AF Walker Recreation Reserve is Whittlesea’s home ground. Officially listed in 1866, the reserve became the permanent home of the Eagles and hosted cricket matches for generations. This year, the cricket club celebrates its 160^th anniversary.

But in recent years, the Eagles have struggled to stay afloat due to diminishing participation and a lack of administration. Meaney is a former president of the club, and the club’s current secretary.

“[There was] too many players getting big money offers from other clubs, and no one was interested in jumping on the committee to help out,” Meaney tells upstart. “And the guys wanted to spend their summers doing other things, not cricket.”

The club was running smoothly in the early 2010s, with multiple senior and junior teams, including a veteran and women’s team, but those numbers declined across the following decade. The issue came to a head in the 2023-24 season, when Whittlesea didn’t have enough players to field any senior teams.

“I spent a lot of time talking to numerous players about coming to play for Whittlesea,” he says. “We worked our arses off trying to do everything we could to keep the club going.”

Nicholas Papadopoulos played both senior and junior cricket for Whittlesea. He joined the club in the summer of 2017, but his stay wasn’t long. Initially he enjoyed playing at Whittlesea, but he felt his opportunities during his junior cricket spell were limited.

“I only bowled a couple overs during each game, and I never had a bat,” he tells upstart.

After feeling left out in his junior team, he later joined the senior side, regularly playing alongside his dad in the men’s second XI. But he says his experience still left him uncertain about his future at the club.

“I’m paying all this money just to play twos, when I should be experiencing all this from playing in the juniors.”

Papadopoulos left the club five years ago and says parts of the club culture frustrated him, including being teased by his junior teammates.

“They would tease me for not being able to play cricket and not being good at it, even though I hardly played.”

Whittlesea isn’t the only club to experience these challenges. Some clubs have managed to find ways to ensure their future.

Clayton Hawkins is the former president of the Wynyard Cricket Club in Tasmania. During his time at the club, Wynyard struggled with low senior player numbers and volunteer shortages. One solution was merging with nearby Myalla Cricket Club.

While Wynyard had a strong junior participation base, they lacked enough seniors and volunteers. Myalla were the opposite, with strength in their senior core, making the merger idea attractive to both sides.

“We were struggling to make money because we weren’t competitive on the field,” Hawkins tells upstart. “Also, when you’ve got lots of kids, kids cost money to put on.”

The decision to merge was made in 2020, forming the Wynyard and Districts Cricket Club. This created a strong participation base across juniors, seniors and volunteers.

“The club is the second largest in the northern half of Tasmania by participation,” Hawkins says.

Migrant communities are playing an increasingly important role in sustaining local cricket clubs Hawkins says.

“We are seeing more people from the subcontinent lifting our sides, and I can only see that growing. I look at Melbourne, the amount of people from subcontinent backgrounds playing in competitions is huge, and I think it’s for the good.”

That shift has also been felt at Whittlesea, where many members of the local Sri Lankan diaspora have joined the club as players and administrators. The influx has sparked a sense of revival during the club’s time of need.

This culminated in a successful 2025-26 season for the club, as its first XI, with many of these new members, won the premiership at AF Walker Reserve.

“Grand final day was something you had to see to believe,” Meaney says. “The joy and excitement on all their faces when they won was unbelievable.”

It also became a family affair and united the Whittlesea community.

“To see the way they got around each other and involved their families was something that I have never seen before in cricket,” he says.

Similarly, the Eagles are investing more in junior cricket and currently have seven junior teams, including two premiership-winning sides.

“We’ve done a lot of advertising through schools and social media, looking for kids to join the club,” Meaney says. “The main goal of all this work is to bring the junior kids through to hopefully one day play senior cricket at Whittlesea.”

As the club heads into its 160^th year, Meaney knows that nurturing and celebrating their history has never been so important.

“At the moment, the future looks bright, though I know this could easily change at any point.”

Article: Thomas Stewart is a third-year Bachelor of Media and Communications (Sports Media) student at La Trobe University. You can follow him on X at @ThomasStew26182.

Cover photo: Members of the Whittlesea Cricket Club in front of AF Walker Recreation Reserve clubrooms. Photo by Blair Meaney.

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The Australian Government launched the National Road safety strategy in 2021 to tackle the increasing number of road deaths. It aimed to halve road deaths and reduce significant injuries by 30 percent by 2030. To do this, it adopted an approach, which recognises human fallibility, vehicle safety and a shared responsibility on the road. This strategy, which works towards eliminating all road deaths by 2050, has been dubbed as “Vision Zero” worldwide.

Is Australia on track to meet the target by 2030? According to the CEO of the Australasian College of Road Safety Dr Ingrid Johnston, we are not moving in the right direction.

“The honest answer is that the current trajectory is not good enough,” she tells upstart.

“Meeting the strategy would require a faster shift from awareness campaigns and fragmented interventions towards systemic measures that are known to work: safer speeds, safer roads, safer vehicles and sustained enforcement.”

Dr Johnston also says that The National Road Safety Annual Progress Report from 2024 has not been released, despite it being a requirement of the strategy. This leaves Australia “without a clear national implementation framework”.

Besides the Fatal Five, there are other hidden dangers that Aussies should be aware of when hopping into the driver’s seat.

One is maintaining appropriate distance, with a lot of cars braking when they are too close together, removing buffer space to avoid collision. Senior Program Manager of the Monash University Accident Research Centre, Jerome Carslake, acknowledges this as a hidden cause of road accidents.

“If you go out there and you look around, it’s very normalised for people to sit less than three seconds behind the other person,” he tells upstart.

“These people sit right up close to each other, which then means if something goes wrong in front, there’s no chance to wash out.”

Another factor that contributes to issues on the road is emotional responses. While our vehicles get us from A to B, they are also another space for our thoughts and emotions from the day to ruminate. A lot of what we think about during the day comes with us into the vehicle and can snowball into something worse from a minor inconvenience on the road.

“If you’re by yourself, what might have been a molehill becomes a mountain, especially as you get tired and fatigued,” Carslake says. “There might be the pressures of driving and other sort of chances that you ruminate on it.”

“As you get increasingly tired, your brain quite often goes down a negative pathway. Then that flows into how you’re driving as well, which can make you far more aggressive and distracted at the same time.”

Norway is the world’s leading example for road safety, according to the European Transport Safety Council. The northern European nation was awarded the prestigious Road Safety Performance Index award in 2025. Norway’s population sits at 5.66 million people compared to our 27.2 million, but has been successfully working towards Vision Zero since 2001. The number of road-related deaths decreased from 275 in 2001 to 49 in 2025.

When comparing our road safety record to Norway’s, there are some important things to bear in mind. Australia is vast with a larger number of rural communities, where the road safety standards are lower and less regulated. Norway has a very low population density and is among the world’s wealthiest nations with a $1.9 trillion sovereign wealth fund. As a result, they can enforce a thorough five-step program to obtain a driver’s licence that costs $4000-$7000 Australian dollars.

Despite the difference between the two nations, Dr Johnston says there are some components from Norway’s strategy that Australia could implement. The blood alcohol limit for drivers in Norway is 0.02 percent and the maximum speed limit on the most common roads is 80 kilometres per hour. Others include lower speeds on high-risk regional roads and busy areas, more median separation and roadside protection, and removing older cars that don’t have adequate safety features.

Norway has adopted Safe System thinking, and Dr Johnston believes Australia can too.

“Australia already knows a great deal about what works,” she says. “The challenge is less about discovering a hidden silver bullet and more about implementing proven measures at sufficient scale, consistency and urgency to reduce road trauma.”

On the other hand, Carslake suggests that there’s a disparity between Norway and Australia’s culture on the roads. He says that Australia has a compliance system that relies heavily on rule enforcement, which results in a “backwards” culture on our roads. A Statistics Norway survey found that Norway is very socially connected, which fosters a collective-minded culture on their roads.

“A lot of people there, they understand the why,” he says. “You go into those countries, it’s very much about us. Whereas in Australia, it’s all about me. Me getting from A to B is far more important.”

Article: Ariana Cosatovic is a third-year Bachelor of Media and Communications student (Journalism) at La Trobe University. You can follow her on X at @arianacosatovic

Photo: Black Spur, Yarra Ranges NP, Vic, Australia by Diliff is available HERE and is used under a Creative Commons Licence. This image has not been modified.

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‘Tanking’ refers to when a team loses games or fields a non-competitive side on purpose to place lower on the ladder which in return gives them a chance at a higher draft pick.

A new “3-2-1 lottery” system which refers to the number of lottery balls each team will receive, has been designed to eliminate incentives for teams to tank and start prioritising winning over draft position.

Teams voted in favour of the changes, 29-1. The Memphis Grizzlies were the only organisation to vote against.

This system expands the lottery from 14 to 16 teams, decreasing the odds for teams that do not qualify for the Playoffs or NBA Play-In Tournament.

The seven lowest ranked teams will get three balls each giving them around an eight percent chance of winning the top draft pick, while the three lowest ranked teams will receive only two balls as punishment, giving them slightly lower odds of winning the top pick.

Although these three lowest ranked teams will only receive two balls, they will be offered protection as they are guaranteed to pick no lower than 12th. Two or one ball will be given to six teams that snuck into the previous season’s Play-in Tournament if they finished between seventh and 10th in their conference.

Additionally, no team will be allowed to win the first pick in back-to-back years and teams cannot choose from the top five in three straight drafts.

The new system will commence in the 2027 NBA Draft.

Author: Isabella Novella and Harry Smith.

Photo: Basketball going through a hoop by rawpixel is available HERE and used under a Creative Commons License. This image has not been modified.

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More than 70,000 fans had packed into Stadium Australia, riding every pass, every tackle and every near miss as the Australia women’s national soccer team fell just short of a long-awaited trophy. Across the country, watch parties spilled into pubs and living rooms and, for a moment, women’s football once again felt like the centre of the sporting world.

But as the noise faded and attention shifted elsewhere, a familiar question quietly returned: what happens next?

While major tournaments continue to ignite interest in the Matildas, that surge of attention has yet to translate into something more permanent for the A-League Women. For one of Australia’s most recognisable football voices, broadcaster David Basheer who has covered the game for decades, the pattern is familiar.

“On the national team, you get a sugar hit,” he tells upstart. “Every couple of years there’s a major tournament and Australia gets behind the team.”

That support is immediate and emotional, driven as much by national identity as it is by the sport itself. The FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 showed just how powerful that connection can be, turning the Matildas into one of the country’s most visible and celebrated teams almost overnight. The Asian Cup, held on home soil, only reinforced it.

Turning that moment into lasting engagement with the domestic game is a different challenge entirely.

“That curiosity about the domestic league is there,” Basheer says. “But that has not translated to full-blown support as yet, and that’s a very difficult transition to make.”

If the problem were simply a lack of interest, the explanation would be easy. But according to Fiona Crawford, author of The Matilda Effect and researcher whose work focuses on women’s football and sport culture in Australia, interest itself is not the issue.

“We know it hasn’t translated to the A-League Women,” she tells upstart. “We saw an initial bump in crowd figures, but we haven’t seen that sustained. It’s actually fallen away.”

The Matildas operate in a space of constant visibility, broadcast on free-to-air television, amplified across social media and supported by years of storytelling that has turned players into household names. The domestic league, by comparison, still struggles to be seen.

“I think the visibility is very poor,” Basheer says. “There’s a wider gap between the Matildas and the A-League Women than there is between the Socceroos and the men’s league.”

Even when matches are broadcasted, they can be difficult to access, played in smaller venues or scheduled in ways that make it hard for casual fans to engage. For many who were drawn in during major tournaments, the transition from spectacle to routine viewing is anything but seamless, Crawford points out.

“You can’t follow a team that you can’t see,” she says.

Yet visibility is only part of the problem. During international tournaments, fans learn players’ stories, follow their personalities and invest in their journeys.

The A-League Women has struggled to replicate that connection.

“It hasn’t really found its personality,” Crawford says. “It hasn’t really elevated particular players or catered to the audience in terms of the content they’re after.”

Another factor is that many of the Matildas’ most recognisable names now play overseas, particularly in Europe’s top competitions. The attention generated by the national team increasingly flows towards overseas clubs rather than the Australian domestic league.

Instead of strengthening the league’s identity, the success of its players abroad can make it feel like a stepping stone, something to pass through rather than invest in.

“A lot of those top players came through the W-League,” Crawford says. “But we didn’t keep investing in it, or in the things around it, like visibility and full-time professionalism. That’s why we’re starting to see that gap.”

For Basheer, it’s about starting to tell the origin stories.

“Remind people where these players started, their first clubs, their journeys,” he says. “People want to know those stories.”

Beneath these challenges sits a more fundamental issue: the structure of the league itself. Limited investment, short seasons and semi-professional conditions continue to shape what the A-League Women can offer to players and fans.

“If players can’t be full-time athletes all year, the quality of the game is not going to be as good,” Crawford says. “And when the quality of the game is not as good, you’re not going to be able to attract and retain crowds.”

The issue may also be structural, she says.

“We’re kind of taking the A-League [Mens] footprint and then just doing it as a smaller, lower-budget version,” she says. “And that’s not really serving anybody at this point.”

For all the attention generated by events like the World Cup and the Asian Cup, the work of sustaining a league happens away from the spotlight. It is slower, less visible and far more complex than the surge of excitement that comes with a major tournament.

Basheer believes part of the answer lies in connection, not just at a national level, but within communities. Engaging multicultural audiences, particularly those represented during tournaments like the Asian Cup, could offer a way to build more consistent support.

“The Matildas are the shiny, exciting thing,” Crawford says. “But the hard work is actually in the day-to-day stuff, which is not glamorous.”

The Matildas have already shown what is possible when visibility, storytelling and investment align. They have captured a nation’s attention and, in many ways, changed the perception of women’s sport in Australia.

Whether that attention can be sustained is another question entirely.

Story: Rayan Rashid is a second-year Bachelor of Media and Communications student majoring in Sports Media/Journalism at La Trobe University. You can follow her on X at @rayanrashidd.

Photo: ALW Melb Derby at AAMI Park. Image by Author. This image has not been modified.

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Malmsbury reopened in April as part of the Victorian government’s tougher approach to youth offending, after its closure in 2023, bringing back a presence that the town was quietly learning to live without.

Before its closure, the facility housed 40 men and boys under the age of 22. It will now house 75 beds for lower-risk inmates aged 17 and over. First opened in 1958, the facility was closed following a slate of controversies around prisoner and worker safety and wellbeing.

Josh Jones, a Malmsbury local of more than 10 years, worked at the centre for six years in a range of roles, including as a youth engagement officer. For him, the reopening brings the stress that defined much of his time there back to the surface.

“It was an institutional space where you always had the threat of violence going on,” he tells upstart.

“Sometimes there were weeks where there were assaults on staff every day.”

For most of the town, the prison fades into the background and normal life continues, Jones says, except during incidents such as escapes.

“That’s when it has a greater impact, he says. “People have had their cars stolen. Some people in the town still think about that.”

Support for the prison in Malmsbury is strong, with some locals taking to Facebook to endorse the reopening. They emphasise the economic benefits and the difficulty of refitting the facility as reasons for the justice centre remaining.

Though, to some, the economic benefits are questionable.

Leonard Johnstone has owned the Merchants of Malmsbury cafe for 25 years and says business from detention centre staff dropped off around 15 years ago, following changes in management and staffing at the facility.

He says staff were once a regular presence in local businesses, but that connection had largely disappeared over time well before its closure.

“It won’t make any difference to my business,” he tells upstart.

Johnstone said the prison can hurt business in other ways too, because the frequent media attention on the centre means the town is associated with a controversial prison when “it’s really quite a sweet little village”.

Johnstone isn’t the only one with concerns. Local Alison Caddick tells upstart she feels the town has become a cog in the government’s ambition to tackle youth crime.

“People thought that it could be an educational site or a new housing site or something like that, so I was looking forward to that for the social benefit potential it had,” she says.

The facility failed to sell during its two years of closure. The Macedon Ranges Shire Council turned down the opportunity to buy it in 2024 due to the tremendous costs of repurposing it.

Jones says that although there was hope for something else, in “my heart I just thought it would reopen at some point”.

Despite his concerns, Jones says his experience at the centre was complicated.

“It was the best of times and the worst of times,” he says. “I really liked the place and I really hated it at the same time.”

For now, Malmsbury will likely remain much the same: quiet, steady, and largely unchanged, even with the facility operating just beyond view. For a town that was learning to live with the centre out of sight, its return may once again be felt only in moments when it can no longer be ignored.

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“We can rule that out,” Farnham said.

“Because of the surgeries to my mouth and face over the past few years, singing on stage is not something I can consider again. It’s just not possible.”

The 76 year old was diagnosed with oral cancer in August 2022 and underwent a life-saving 12 hour surgery. The treatment left him with difficulty to speak and sing. His last performance was in February 2020. 

A tribute concert honouring Farnham has been announced with worldwide stars Celine Dion, Hugh Jackman and Keith Urban set to perform.

Jimmy Barnes, Tina Arena, Jessica Mauboy and many more will also perform.

“I’ve been incredibly lucky to spend my life doing what I love, and even luckier to have Australians embrace my music the way they have,” Farnham said.

“This [tribute concert] isn’t about me — it’s about giving something back and supporting a cause that means a great deal to me.”

The concert will take place 20 September at Rod Laver Arena, with the funds going towards Head and Neck Cancer Australia.

Photo: by Sean 917 is available HERE and is used under a Creative Commons license. This image has not been modified.

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The backpack, which was designed for children, features a large unicorn that is detachable and lights up. The plush toy contained button batteries. The ACCC claims that the backpack failed to meet Australian Consumer Law, as required warning labels were missing from the product.

Amazon has sold 41 backpacks to Australian consumers, and over 200 were held in fulfillment centres in 2022.

It is the first time an online marketplace has been taken to the Federal Court by the ACCC.

ACCC deputy chair, Catriona Lowe said that mandatory warning labels help keep children safe, especially younger children who are more likely to put small objects into their mouths, ears and noses.

“Button batteries pose a serious hazard for young children,” she said. “If swallowed or inserted, they can cause severe internal burns and injury, and in some cases death.”

“These mandatory warnings are there to help keep children safe and businesses must get them right.”

There has been a rise in cases of children swallowing button batteries globally, leading to 35 deaths. Manufactures such as Energizer have developed safety measures such as child proof packaging, warnings and blue dye to detect ingestion.

In 2025, consumer group Choice tested five major online stores including Amazon for compliance with button battery safety standards. Their findings were “highly concerning” with 17 out of 24 products tested failing to meet mandatory safety standards.

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In a press conference today, an AFP spokesperson said that the woman was alleged to have travelled to Syria in 2013 or 2014 to join ISIS.

She was then detained by Kurdish forces in 2019 before being placed in an internally displaced persons camp in Lebanon. 

The woman returned to Australia from Lebanon on 26 September 2025. 

So far, four of the “ISIS brides” have been charged with offences including slavery. Both charges carry a maximum 10-year prison sentence. 

Photo: by Highway Patrol is available HERE and is used under a Creative Commons license. This image has not been modified.

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He continues doing this, image after image, until he feels the algorithm is as good as it can get. When the algorithm is ready, he puts it to work, letting it detect land clearing across the country by giving it two images of the same spot taken a few months apart.

“Once it’s done this, it will create snapshots of the places,” he says.

These snapshots are put up on ACF Investigates, an online citizen science platform where anyone with a phone, laptop or access to a library computer can go through images that were flagged by the algorithm.

Volunteers are given before‑and‑after images of an 18‑square‑kilometre section of bushland with a grid overlay. They’re asked to flag anything that looks like deforestation by clicking on the grid squares where they think it’s occurring.

In the late 2010s, around 58,000 hectares of Australian primary forests were levelled to the ground every year. That’s almost 70 MCG pitches worth of established, biodiverse forests that are crucial to the survival of native plants and wildlife gone.

And that’s just primary forests. If you add regrowth forest clearing into the mix, more than 400,000 hectares of forest were lost annually. Much of this deforestation goes unnoticed due to its sheer scale, but also because of where it occurs, according to Singh.

“It’s [happening] in the middle of nowhere,” he says.

Government data shows that most forest loss is occurring in regional New South Wales and Queensland, where livestock production is the main driving factor. According to the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the north‑eastern coast of Australia is one of the world’s 24 “deforestation fronts”, and the only one located in a developed country.

Because it’s mostly happening in remote and hard‑to‑access areas, Singh and the three other investigators at ACF rely on satellite imagery to identify deforestation. However, a team of four is not enough to go through the millions of images they need to analyse.

The volunteers play an integral part in analysing the enormous amount of imagery.

Citizen science or crowdsourcing is quite common in the conservation world. Dr Dietmar Wechsler, a climate measure researcher, has studied crowdsourcing in the context of climate change mitigation. This approach has grown in popularity over the last two decades.

“Technological advancements such as online platforms, smartphones, apps, and satellite observations has significantly contributed to this trend,” he tells upstart.

Wechsler says these types of projects usually produce high‑quality data, but it’s important not to make tasks too complicated.

One of the 1,500 volunteers is Zaynab Malik, a software engineer who heard about the project through a friend. She has started using the tool between meetings and when she would otherwise be “doomscrolling” on social media.

“I feel like it is a better use of time, especially if you’re not doing anything,” she tells upstart.

Malik has been involved with other types of volunteering related to climate action. She has participated in multiple creek clean‑ups around Melbourne. She says that type of volunteering requires a much bigger sacrifice of time and planning, and she appreciates the flexibility that ACF Investigates offers.

It’s the third time ACF have run this crowdsourced project. Last time, in 2024, 675 people scanned almost 5 million hectares of land. After careful review by ACF investigators, they found 90,000 hectares of cleared habitat. From those 90,000 hectares, ACF reported 76 cases of illegal land clearing.

In the current project, once 10 people have flagged the same image on the platform, it gets sent to one of the four investigators. This saves ACF hundreds of hours of work. The next step in the process is for Singh and his team to determine whether deforestation has taken place. If it has, they’ll investigate whether it’s unethical or illegal.

However, ACF was unable to tell upstart how many of those reports resulted in fines or other legal action against landowners.

“Because the department hasn’t publicised the outcomes in five or so years now,” Singh says. “But we do know that about a quarter of the cases the department is looking into are cases we’ve brought to them.”

This time around, Singh and his team are hoping volunteers can help them investigate 11.5 million hectares of land. So far, more than 1,500 people have completed over 83,000 tasks. By late April 2026, 73 per cent of the 11.5 million hectares had already been scanned.

“There is actually a decent chance that we might even have to close the project earlier because we’ll just end up finishing at this rate,” he says.

Malik is keenly aware of how voluntary efforts like hers make an overwhelming task easier.

“You can contribute five minutes of your time [and it] would save hours for [the investigators]. Then they can just go after reports of deforestation instead of checking if there was deforestation to begin with.”

Singh says the goal of ACF Investigates is not just to uncover deforestation, but also to encourage people like Malik and people with less experience in volunteering to participate and care about climate action.

“A lot of the people that we’ve seen using it this time around have never done anything like this before,” he says.

“[It] allows people to feel empowered even if they’re not actually getting up and standing in front of the bulldozers,” he says. “They’re playing a role, and every little bit helps.”

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