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Cake for Honi (Carmeli Argana, Christian Holman, Amelia Koen, Roisin Murphy, Sam Randle, Fabian Robertson, Thomas Sargeant, Ellie Stephenson and Zara Zadro) remember their friend and fellow 2022 Honi Soit editor, Khanh.
Former Honi Soit editor and reporter, disability activist, USyd student, and our friend Khanh Tran died on 25 February, 2025. Khanh poured more into Honi than possibly any other person in the paper’s 95-year history. From the date of their first byline in April 2020, to their last in March 2025, Khanh wrote more than 140 articles, a body of work that collectively set the agenda and purpose of this paper.
Khanh told stories with care and innate curiosity, allowing anyone who picked up Honi to be brought into the fold of campus life. Their interest in our university’s history was explored with characteristic morality, bringing forward previously untold truths and making campus accessible to everyone by archiving lesser known lore.
Without Khanh’s fight for a campus Disabilities Space — which started with a 2022 article and didn’t stop until they won — no such place would exist. Now, it is only apt that the space be named in their honour. This was arguably their greatest passion and most proud achievement.
But there is so, so much for Khanh to be proud of.
We edited Honi with Khanh in 2022, after a particularly arduous election campaign during lockdown. During these months of campaigning, Khanh’s passion for a brave, inclusive student publication became clear. Honi had given them so much — a place to cultivate their interests, a community — and they wished to return the favour, to help set the tone of its history.
Khanh lived so many storied lives before landing in the Langford Office, down in a mouldy basement on City Road. It seems like some act of fate — and they were a dedicated person of faith — that after growing up in Vietnam, studying in Scotland, and eventually moving to Australia, Khanh and Honi were lucky enough to find each other. And we are all so lucky that they did.
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Mama Bear is how Khanh described themself.
Uniquely calm and unwaveringly loyal, Khanh never struggled to be a dedicated and generous editor. They remained kind and patient with each of us, even though editing Honi inevitably puts pressure on the relationships between its editors.
We recall a heated argument about our ticket’s colour scheme early on, in which Khanh appeared steadfastly neutral, only to reveal they were red-green colour blind. This characterised so many of our Honi fights — Khanh: serene, unflappable and never a pugilist, there to remind us never to get too cynical and to focus on what matters.
Not once did they raise their voice with us. It was only years later that we heard tales of them ever shouting—at a UTS student councillor in Vietnamese, because “it was a more direct language”.
Khanh’s reliably warm and irreplaceable presence at each pitch meeting, layup, and drink at the pub will be sorely missed, even the time when everyone else ordered beer, and they ordered Frangelico.
Khanh was always in your corner, even when you weren’t.
They gave without ever asking for anything in return, whether it was shouldering more than their share of the workload, or gifts from overseas.
Khanh also worked harder than anyone we know. But when it came to Honi, it never seemed like work for them. Their relationship with Honi was reciprocal: it drove them and they drove it.
This drive was indispensable to our editorial team. Khanh’s willingness to write every news story and draw an abundance of art allowed the rest of us to pursue our passion projects and long-form pieces — which, of course, Khanh somehow still found the time to do.
Most of us would stumble into the office late on a Sunday morning, fresh off the bender. Meanwhile Khanh would somehow always be there first, drinking a weak mocha with extra chocolate, laying up news to the Breath of the Wild soundtrack.
From the start of layup at 9am to the 5am finish line, when the rest of us were falling like dominoes, Khanh was still going. None of us could have edited without them. All we can hope is that they knew how we felt.
Khanh was generous in all respects, and that extended to their staunch activism at the University. Reflecting on their activism, we are struck by how rarely they focused on their own struggles, even though much of their politics was personal. They supported and championed solidarity, and believed so genuinely in celebrating difference in order to build a collective.
In their first editorial as editor-in-chief, Khanh expressed this through their reverence and pride for their Vietnamese heritage:
“Wherever you are on your own adventure, storms will come by and attempt to force us to surrender. Strength, however, lies in numbers and complements the individual as a Vietnamese proverb goes:
Một cây làm chẳng nên non, ba cây chụm lại nên hòn núi cao.
One tree is but an infant but three make the highest mountain.”
Khanh’s connection to Vietnam was palpable, and something they shared generously. They frequently reminisced about their time writing for Saigoneer, and brought their encyclopedic knowledge and passion for Vietnamese food, scholarship, style and society to Honi.
Their boundless generosity manifested in many other ways, too. They were an ardent internationalist and felt strongly about justice for international students. This permeated their approach to Honi, from breaking news, to their feature articles, to the multilingual section.
Khanh could strike up a conversation with anyone. They instinctively befriended everyone from bartenders, to parents, to the chief adjudicators of the world debating championship, with whom they bonded over a shared affection for the Jesuits. They were never insular.
Their unmistakable signature style encapsulated this: full of colour and rarely weather-appropriate. They were vivid: lipstick perfect, nails painted (in the Honi office, probably), always looking straight into the camera even if you were trying to get a candid shot. When it comes to jorts, people say lesbians did it first. They’re wrong—it was Khanh.
But while they were so generous and outward-focused, Khanh also had a deep and often mysterious inner life, uniquely enigmatic in what they let on about themselves. For months we knew more about their encyclopedic knowledge of the Mecca catalogue than of their life pre-Honi, and by God did they have stories to tell.
Khanh was also a spiritually rich person. Having spent time as a Catholic seminarian and as a theology student at Heythrop College and Aberdeen, they had accumulated a mental trove of theology and a profound sense of faith.
They wrote movingly on the complexities of queer religious life and the varied ways Christianity is interpreted around the world. They believed strongly in the value of learning and thinking about faith. In their first editorial, Khanh quoted from a poem written by Soeur Mai Thanh during her novitiate: “Release the kite and bend the endless wind”. They added: “As a Christian, I also rely on my faith to help bend that endless wind.”
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For Khanh, activism and journalism went hand in hand. They were an all-rounder when it came to the causes they jumped head first into; increasing accessibility for disabled students on campus, ending exploitative private student accommodation, and increasing support for international students throughout Covid. They marched for the protection of queer and transgender rights, picketed alongside university staff during negotiations for better work conditions, and supported the encampment in protest of the University’s ties to Israel.
Honi Soit was Khanh’s greatest weapon. Their many investigations into managerial wrongdoing, and the ground-breaking articles that came out of their digging, are testament to that. And it was during their term as an editor that they appreciated firsthand the power of investigative reporting.
Among all the causes they fought for, the Disabilities Room is perhaps their proudest achievement. On 24 April, 2022, they published an article that detailed the years-long battle for a disability-friendly space on campus. It exposed the bureaucratic failures that had led to USyd being the last of the Group of Eight universities to implement a fit-for-purpose disabilities space. What started as a simple question and a few conversations with fellow activists became the spark to reignite a long-stalled campaign.
At the next SRC meeting in May, councillors voted unanimously in favour of a motion calling for a disabilities space. When the USU Board and its portfolio holders changed hands in July, their article became a pivotal resource for early development of USU’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP). In following meetings with USyd’s own DIAP Steering Committee, student representatives consistently pointed to Khanh’s article as a way to pressure the University to act immediately. With all eyes on the campaign, the University finally approved a $50,000 funding application for the implementation of a disabilities space that had been sitting on the back burner for a year.
Today, the Disabilities Community Room sits in Manning in its full glory. It has a dual structure, with a quiet zone designed to accommodate students with sensory needs, as well as a larger zone for socialising. From the weighted blankets on the lounge to the tea station on the counter, every corner of the room carries Khanh’s touch.
Outside of disability activism, Khanh was relentless in their critique of tertiary education, usually with an eye on standing up for marginalised communities. Khanh, for example, was an ever present voice for oft-neglected international students, a champion of causes aimed at improving their everyday lives. Among other things, Khanh wrote on the decreasing affordability of student housing, international student working conditions, and the campaign for international student concession Opal cards.
Most recently, Khanh spearheaded an exposé of ANU’s investments in companies listed by the United Nations as operating in illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Khanh published these findings in Honi at the height of pro-Palestine encampments taking place on university campuses internationally, providing additional fuel to protests occurring in Australia.
Yet Khanh’s Honi legacy far eclipses what is mentioned here – it is memorialised in the hundreds of articles and artworks dotted through Honi over the last four years. One only has to trawl through the website and print editions to get a glimpse of Khanh’s contributions.
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In one of Khanh’s earliest Honi pieces, a dedication to an old friend of theirs, they wrote:
“As overstated this may be, hope does exist. No matter how arduous the circumstances, reach out, speak to someone, a trusted friend. Get involved in queer circles and find a home in your community.”
Khanh, we’re so grateful we could find a home in you. We hope you found a home in us, a place to be your authentic self.
Coming together in the Langford Office to write this obituary, where Khanh spent more time than any of us, holds such weight. As time passes after editing Honi, the feeling of gratitude for the experience only grows and, selfishly, it has been an immense privilege to work together one final time in the place that meant so much to us, most of all Khanh. During the year we edited, there wasn’t a single occasion when one of us would come down and not find Khanh typing away. This time they aren’t here.
Editing Honi, things seem to become habitually quantified in 10s. There are 10 editors, 10 seats to book for dinner, 10 people to share a file with, 10 tickets to buy for Heaps Gay, 10 names to list off to make sure you’re not forgetting anyone. Often you get stuck on nine and wonder who you’ve missed, before realising you haven’t counted yourself.
Now we will only have nine seats to book for. But we will always count to 10.
