little bitch in the big city. Words by Sienna Sulicich
Moving to Adelaide was not fun. I knew close to no-one and spent most of my time at the start locked in my room wallowing in my own self-pity. The city is actually rather bleak and kind of ugly, not really the soul-inspiring stuff I was looking for. Although I never really enjoyed my home-town either. The bush is a strange place, full of conservative cowboys who want to knock you up by nineteen and hold you hostage, forcing you to make them banana bread and wash their lead-soaked socks for the rest of your life. Maybe it’s not all that bad, but I definitely didn’t feel like I fit in with my platform sneakers and candy-pink hair. I never realised how lucky I was growing up in the bush until I moved to the city, and then I finally missed it. I mourned my home-town like a widow; the smell, the culture, the familiar faces all washed away. Yeah there were drugs and thugs and drama, but it looked a bit maternal if you squinted hard enough and drank just the right amount of liquor to warm your heart. My first day at university was confronting. It’s not like I’d never seen a television before, I had just never seen that many in the one room before. At first I was in awe, thinking about how amazing it was that 28
we had access to all this technology. I didn’t even have to turn my head to look to the front, and every room had enough chairs and desks for each person and then some (my high school didn’t, sometimes people had to sit on the floor or on semibroken tables stuck together with ancient gum). The awe I initially felt quickly turned to anger when I started to meet people. Why were these kids so strange? Why does it matter what high school I went to? Suburb? What the fuck is a suburb, I live in a house? There were no private schools back home, just two high schools (which is actually a lot considering the population). Most kids ended up attending both schools anyway, because we didn’t have enough staff at either to hold senior classes like chemistry or software engineering. You would have to haul ass in-between schools or show up at ungodly hours before school started to take a class off-timetable. The teachers were pretty decent, there just weren’t enough of them. It was a weird mix of elderly teachers who taught my parents or first year university graduates sent out from the city with a pocket full of government cash to sweeten the deal. If a teacher was sick, well, that was it. We had a couple substitutes for younger
