Updated April 29, 2026 — 6:11pm,first published 5:15pm
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Rachael “Raygun” Gunn has taken a swipe at the state of higher education in Australia after the Olympian’s redundancy from Macquarie University earlier this year became public.
Gunn came to global prominence after the 2024 Games, where her kangaroo hops, contorting and Australia tracksuit failed to garner a single point from the judges as breaking made its Olympic debut.
Australia’s Olympic breakdancer Raygun celebrates with teammates ahead of the Paris 2024 closing ceremony.X
Gunn took a voluntary redundancy from the university’s Faculty of Arts in February, saying she had seen “the writing on the wall”.
“We need to have a serious conversation about higher education in this country,” she told the Herald on Wednesday evening, saying she was concerned about the student experience, the psychosocial hazards facing staff and the spending on buildings, consultants and executive pay.
“I’m very worried for my colleagues. I don’t think that things are getting better for them,” she said.
Gunn has been working on a number of projects including public speaking after she left the university in February.
Rachael Gunn, known as B-Girl Raygun, failed to garner a single point during her performance.nna\KCampbell
Her Olympic debut rapidly became a meme and then the biggest story of the Games – an Australian dancer-turned-professor whose bizarre stylings saw her eliminated at the first stage of the competition.
“I wanted to do something artistic and creative. How many chances do you get in a lifetime to do something on the international stage? It was important to me, from that sense, to do the performance that I did,” she said at the time.
Gunn may well be the only female Australian breaker to ever dance at the Olympics, as the event has not been included on the schedule for Los Angeles 2028.
“I wanted to make an impression in a different way,” she told reporters after her event.
“My chances were always very slim, but I still worked my butt off to try to represent the best that I could.”
Raygun competes at the Paris Olympics.AP
Gunn’s significant research output included papers titled “Nocturnal Paradox: How Breakdancing reveals the potentials of the night”, “Re-articulating Gender Norms through breakdancing” and “The ‘systems of relay’ in doing cultural studies: experimenting with the ‘Body without Organs’ in b-girling practice.”
Gunn had been at Macquarie since she completed her undergraduate degree more than a decade ago; she had been lecturing on media and cultural studies for five years.
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Gunn’s redundancy comes as the university’s arts department makes wide-ranging cuts, which vice chancellor Bruce Dowton told a parliamentary inquiry earlier this month were not unfairly focused on the faculty.
“A number of things were taken into account as we move towards proposing changes … funding model changes, regulatory environment, international student downturn and so on – but also the reality that the demand for courses in the Faculty of Arts has changed,” he said.
The chair of the inquiry, Dr Sarah Kaine, raised concerns about “sham redundancies” within the Faculty of Arts.
In 2024, Gunn again made headlines when she demanded $10,000 from a Sydney comedy club set to stage Raygun the Musical.
Macquarie University said it was unable to comment on “confidential employment arrangements”.
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