Ashton's Guide to Starting a New School
Ashton Chung changed schools in Year 5. Within two terms, he'd made friends, sat NAPLAN, and worked out the 8-8-8 rule. Here's his advice — unsolicited wisdom from someone who has actually just done it
My Big Fat Greek Dilemma
Peter Koralis showed his grandmother a photo of a White-Asian girl at Easter. She had one thing to say. This is the essay about what followed — on intergenerational difference, Greek-Australian identity, and the guilt of wanting your own life
Crazy Rich (not) Hot Asian
She told him he looked good — for an Asian. Xinyu Liao spent the next week thinking about what that meant. This is the essay that followed: on internalised racism, Asian masculinity, and what it would look like to redefine all of it at once.
1.5 Meters Apart, Please
Thomas Tran wrote this in 2020, when the streets were empty and the toilet paper was gone. Three years on, it reads less like a personal essay and more like a document — precise, historically literate, and a little bit furious
Perpetual Parmesan
A Modena kitchen. A restaurant closing for the night. A child who hasn't eaten, a rolling pin, and salami arranged in the shape of a B. Ken Mai writes a life worth living — and you feel every detail of it
Civic Duties
Son doesn't want to be at home tonight. He doesn't want to be at Mr Stonebowl either. What he ends up doing instead — quietly, without explanation — is one of the most tender things you'll read this year.
In Nature's Arms, Then Ours
A Year 10 student sets a dying man to rest in nature's arms, retells the Irish Famine in free verse, and traces industrialisation's violence through rhododendrons and tar. Alex Leung's zine In Nature's Arms, Then Ours moves from reverence to ruin — and knows exactly what it is doing at every turn.
See, the thing is
David Truong went to James Busby High School. 80 of the 120 students who started graduated. About 15 made it to university. This is the story he has never told publicly — and the one that explains everything about why Foci exists.
The Uncurated Generation.
Born in 1997, David Truong occupies the narrow seam between millennial nostalgia and Gen Z fluency — and uses that vantage point to ask what is actually happening to the generation coming of age in 4K. From DIML videos to run clubs, this is a sociological read of a generation finding belonging in the spaces between.
Leyla: The Architect of Her Own Path
Leyla Alameddine walked into Foci's classroom certain she was good. Within minutes, she found herself at the bottom of the barrel. Five years on, she's a law student, a deliberate rebel, and one of the more honest voices we've sat down with.