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 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

years while seniors just made do (which usually resulted in my mouthy ass being forced to play teacher). There were no real SSO’s either – support staff to assist – so confident kids helped out instead. I graduated with about a dozen kids who were not fully literate. When seniors would do their final year exams, I remember going to their exams with them to read out the questions and scribe their answers down as they spoke them to me. They slipped through the cracks, and there were not enough of us who could help them all, every year. I could handle using a maths textbook from the 80’s that had hundreds of dicks in it, but I couldn’t handle seeing that.

So walking into a room full of televisions made me very pissed off (little did I know that pretty much most of the classrooms are like that). It’s not fair that I’m here and all those other kids back home are not – kids that will struggle to read their own children a bedtime story in the future.

My anger simmered, but I choked down my guilt and tried my best to make it through my first semester reasonably unscathed. Until I was in a philosophy class (which I absolutely loathed) and we were discussing the importance of education. A random dude said ‘well, yeah education is important but it’s pretty much equal across Australia so it doesn’t matter as much here’. I saw red. I had to fight tooth and nail to get here, let alone the kids back home who had no chance whatsoever to go to university, and here we were discussing the politics of education in a room full of private school kids who’ve never really lived a day in their life? Maybe I was a bit harsh, and I still am, but fuck it breaks my heart every time to see such blatant ignorance. So, I calmed my ass down and explained how the education system is where I was from. He said he didn’t believe me. I don’t know why he would think I would lie to him about something like that. I think maybe city kids are often trying to oneup each other with first-world-problem sob stories to validate their interest in humanities (just a theory). I’ve snapped only a handful of times and each time I felt more and more alienated by the institution I so gleefully signed up for. As a humanities and arts student, we do discuss a lot of serious issues in classes which are obviously very important. Sometimes though, it just feels like a bunch of middle class, white city kids talking about other people’s problems; race, poverty, unionism, access to education, access to healthcare. Again, maybe I’m just cynical, but sitting in a room full of private school kids chanting about race relations and poverty, sucking each other off for being so caring and forward-thinking, feels fucking gross. I’m not blaming the university, or the students – these issues need to be talked about, it just seems so unfruitful (you’re not starting a revolution Jessica, you’re preaching class consciousness and socialism to a room full of greenies).

You city folk ain’t all bad. There are some beautiful, genuine people I’ve met in Adelaide that manage to warm my cold, cynical soul (truly a hard task). Just smile a bit more, or even say hello when you cross the street. Think about why you’re at university, what do you want to achieve? I’m not sure what I want to achieve, but I would love to help someone, who never thought they would make it here, feel a little less alone. I want to fight for something. Talking in white, academic circles is not enough.