About 100 people attended a dementia awareness presentation in Preston, hosted by the Hellenic Women’s Federation of Victoria on Friday 23 October. Dementia Australia support specialist Christina Kominakis explained the difference between everyday forgetfulness and memory changes that may need medical assessment. Signs included repeatedly misplacing things and difficulty managing money. The presentation noted that such difficulties do not necessarily mean dementia, but persistent changes should be raised with a doctor. A raffle raised $300 for Dementia Australia.
Artist Diana Markosian will present her photography and film project Father at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne. The free exhibition runs from 21 November 2026 to 14 February 2027. The work traces her effort to reconnect with a father she had not seen for years, after travelling to Armenia to find him. Visitors can post letters through a vintage letterbox, and a short film titled Father will screen throughout the exhibition.
OpenAI has launched Locked Chats in ChatGPT, allowing users to protect sensitive conversations with a four-digit PIN, Face ID or Touch ID on supported devices. Locked chats move to a separate section and stay out of regular history, pinned chats and search results. They also have their own memory that does not feed into regular memory. The feature does not provide end-to-end encryption, change retention periods or remove information already remembered. Resetting a PIN permanently deletes all locked content. The rollout began on Tuesday and is not yet live for every user.
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Two young sisters, Min Luo and Fei Shan, have been playing piano for people with dementia after noticing a family friend with the condition calm down during their music. They now perform at aged care facilities, including an afternoon concert at Korongee Dementia Village in Hobart's northern suburbs. Resident Nick Dickens said the music eased his stress and brought back memories. Associate Professor Alison Canty said musical memory is often resilient to dementia and that music can release dopamine, improving mood and reducing stress. The sisters plan a concert to raise money for dementia research.
A new book documents women who endured violence during Indonesia's occupation of Timor-Leste. Among them is Maria de Fátima, who says she was arrested at Baucau's Hotel Flamboyan in 1975 and raped by Indonesian soldiers. She says she was abused for more than 20 years and had four children as a result. Her youngest daughter, Fernanda, learned only years later that her father was an Indonesian soldier. Timor-Leste's truth commission documented 853 cases of sexual violence, though advocates believe the real number is far higher. Survivors are still calling for a formal apology and reparations.
Meta's Superintelligence Lab has released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, the company's first frontier AI models. Meta says the larger models score comparably to rival systems on benchmarks and perform better on complex tasks such as coding. Muse Wonder will be sold through Meta's API at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Wonder Full will only be available to Muse Code subscribers. Meta highlighted a memory feature it calls active memory, which it says scores higher on the MemoryBench test than rival models.
Four exhibitions exploring landscapes, memory, environmental change and natural disasters will open at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery in Ballina. The shows bring together local and interstate artists. Rachel Dun's Fragile Mappings presents prints and artist books inspired by forests, coastlines and bushland. Kirsty Marshall's Emblems of Memory features paintings of everyday moments. The World Came Flooding In, by Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, uses virtual reality to share experiences of floods. All four exhibitions run from October 15 to December 17, with a launch from 5.30pm to 7.30pm on October 15.
Neha Kale's book Foreign Return explores migration, memory, and the concept of home. Kale discusses how migration is a deeply human experience often misrepresented in media, and how art can express what words cannot. She argues that home is not a possession but a relation, shaped by responsibilities to people and places. The book challenges reductive narratives about migrants and examines the tension between personal identity and broader political forces.
