Pelican Edition 5, Volume 85

Ed iti o n 5 Vo lu me 85

S o un d / Fu r y

PELICAN

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Picture by Kate Prendergast

REGULARS 5 what’s up on campus 6 credits 7 editorials 9 advice corner 46 where’s pelly

FEATURES 10 protests 11 entitlement 12 swearing 13 punk 14 Korea 15 frightbats 16 anger 17 women 18 floating 20 surplus

SECTIONS 21 politics 26 film 30 music 34 books 36 arts 40 culture

NEED HELP? THE UWA STUDENT GUILD STUDENT ASSIST OFFICE CAN HELP WITH FINANCIAL, ACADEMIC AND WELFARE ISSUES CONTACT US TODAY: ASSIST@GUILD.UWA.EDU.AU

UWASTUDENTGUILD.COM/SUPPORT

WHAT’S UP ON CAMPUS Enactus, AIESEC and OxfamUWA present: The Amazing Race Been itching for a competitive yet exciting event that promotes awareness of social justice, gives prizes to the fastest team and lunch for all contestants? Join us for a day of puzzles, popularity contests and mildly strenuous exercise. So take out those dusty running shoes that have been sitting in your closet for past year and join us on the 16th of August in Perth City. Teams will consist of 4 people and will cost $60 per team. Check out our facebook event: Enactus, Oxfam and AIESEC present The Amazing Race.

What would we do without language?

The UWA Linguistics Society is for all ☺ language lovers Come and play word games, follow our series “ULS Talks TED” and participate in our exciting linguistic projects around campus!

You can also follow news and events at our Facebook page: https://www. facebook.com/uwalinguisticssociety UWA Amnesty International The UWA Amnesty International group meet

fortnightly on the Reid Lawn (or Reid café if it’s raining) at 1-2pm on Tuesdays.

If you’re interested in human rights in Australia and internationally, do come and join us.

Find out more at https://www.facebook. com/AmnestyUWA UWA Society for Creative Anachronism

UWA) for bible studies, public meets and other fun events as well as prayer meeting ons Wednesdays!

Follow us on Facebook (Overseas Christian Fellowship (OCF) Perth 2014, or email us at perth1@ocfaustralia.org Under the Rug Launch Event

Known as the College of Saint Basil the Great, we are part of the international Society for Creative Anachronism, dedicated to recreating activities of the medieval world. We uphold the values of chivalry and honour and practice armoured combat, rapier fighting, archery, sewing, costuming, dancing, music, feasting, cooking, brewing and armouring. Join us for College Training on Oak Lawn from 5pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays to learn about swordplay, dancing, get ideas for garb and costumes, or even just to chat about history.

Overseas Christian Fellowship OCF is an interdenominational student ministry that seeks to spread and share the good news with international student in our university.

We are a fellowship (not a church or small group) that meets regularly on Fridays (7pm, Social Sciences LT @

Under the Rug is a fantastic new art competition open to all students and staff, run by Students Passionate About Mental Health. We want you to show us what your experience has been with mental wellbeing on campus. By entering, you’ll be in the running to win our grand prize of $1500!

Come down to our launch for free morning tea, and have a chat with us to find out how to enter! Thursday 31st July, 10.30am – 12.30pm, on Oak Lawn.

Find our more at www.undertherug.org.au UWA Italian Club Our ever popular coffee and conversation event has returned once again!

Join us at UCafe for a fantastic opportunity to practice your Italian language skills and meet new people, all over a delicious cup of coffee, Italian style of course!” https://www.facebook.com/UWAItalianClub

ALUMNI ANNUAL FUND GRANTS NOW OPEN! Grants of up to $30,000 are available for innovative projects or activities that aim to enhance the UWA student experience.

Apply today at www.uwa.edu.au/aafgrants 5

CONTRIBUTORS CONTENTS IMAGE Alice McCullough CONTRIBUTOR IMAGE Richard Moore DESIGN Kate “Reliably Sound” Hoolahan ADVERTISING Alex “Medea Manager” Pond Karrie “Clutch” McClelland EDITORS Wade “Sturm und Drang” McCagh Zoe “Bird Noises” Kilbourn

SECTION EDITORS ARTS: Laruen “MOMA” Wiszniewski BOOKS: Elisa “Extensively Experienced” Thompson CULTURE: Lucy “Ice Queen” Ballantyne FILM: Matthew “Disaster Artist” Green MUSIC: Simon “Death Grip” Donnes POLITICS: Hamish “Fiscally Sound” Hobbs

CONTRIBUTORS Mason “This is no Bridget Jones ”Rothwell (Words) Kate “Fight for your Right” Oakley (Words) Jasmine “The Youth” Ruscoe (Words) Tom “Like a Sailor” Rossiter (Words) Richard “Underground” Moore (Words, Illustrations) Anna “Manolo Muse” Saxon (Words) Somayya “Zombie-army slayer” Ismailjee (Words) Dennis “Rabid Gander” Venning (Words) Chloe “Al Beyoncécino” Durand (Words) Alex “Fathomlessly Shallow” Griffin (Words, Illustrations) Samuel J. “More like Michael J. Fox, amiright” Cox (Words) Leah “Doling out the Truth” Roberts (Words) Jacques “Ferocious” Ferroche(Words) Bridget “805 Kilometres ” Rumball (Words) Hugh “Björk” Manning (Words) Jaime “Duck Hobble” Slays-Dragons (Words) Wills “Nu-metal Colossus” Pritchard (Words) Shaughn “Leper” McCagh (Words) Liam “The South Shall Rise Again” Dixon (Words) Caz “Southern Belle” Stafford (Words) Rahana “Comment Section” Bell (Words) Kat “Viral Sensation” Gillespie (Words) Holly “No Chvches in the Wild” Jian (Illustrations) Callum “Crump Street” Green Kieran “K-Patz” Rayney

WANT TO BE HEARD? LET PELICAN BE YOUR MEGAPHONE AND LET’S GET LOUD! CONTRIBUTORS Are you mad as hell, and you’re not going to take this anymore? Do you know what the sound of one hand clapping is? We’d love to hear about it! Pelican is always calling out for new writers, artists, and contributors to help run an 85 year old (and counting) student magazine. You can get in contact with Pelican through our Facebook page, through our email at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, or you can come and find us on the 1st Floor of the Guild Building. We host monthly Writers Nights during semester in the Guild Council Meeting Room, so keep a look out for our Facebook event and come down for free pizza and lots of giveaways!

Get angry, get involved!

Picture by Richard Moore

COVER IMAGE Jessica Cockerill

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed within are not the views of the UWA Student Guild or the Pelican editorial staff.

For advertising enquiries, contact karrie.mcclelland@guild.uwa.edu.au

WANT TO BUY TEXTBOOKS ON THE CHEAP? KEEN TO GET RID OF YOUR OLD ONES? TRY THE SECONDHAND BOOKSTORE! LOCATED IN GUILD VILLAGE NEXT TO THE GUILD VILLAGE CAFE 6

offer applies to large pizzas only

PREZITORIAL Hendo’s on holiday this month, but he’d like to use this opportunity to make a public service announcement about the importance of wearing appropriate safety equipment around the multiple construction projects going on around campus.

Remember kids: When construction work is happening Hendo’s no clown!

He wears multiple safety helmets on site In order to protect the crown!

Hendo says do like the Wu-Tang and protect ya neck!

WADITORIAL

It was about 1pm in downtown Tunis when we first heard the noise of car horns. At first, it was just a single car on the nearby highway, the frantic honking somewhat muted but still reaching our offices. But then it grew to two and three horns, slower and more deliberate. Then cars started rolling through the side streets blasting out all other sounds, before expensive new SUVs and beat up utes brought traffic to a standstill, with shouting men hanging out of windows and waving the new Libyan flag. I don’t speak Arabic, but it was obvious even to foreigners like myself what was happening. Gaddafi had been captured.

We quickly abandoned hopes of completing any more work for the day, rushing out to the neighbouring cafes to watch France 24, drink tea, smoke cigarettes, and try to process what was happening. Not long after, media reports began to confirm that he was dead. My Croatian roommate and I left work early that day to get back to our suburb, which was heavily populated with Libyan refugees before the streets became chaotic. We knew we would get little sleep that night, our street echoing the sounds of the cafes and shops which steadily built to a roar as the sun set and the streets filled. The last horns fell silent around dawn.

I got to see many other incidents of great sound and fury living in North Africa, moments of joy and sorrow, unity and chaos, including Tunisia’s first free elections a mere three days after these events occurred. Several societies across the MENA region had overthrown decades of repressive rule that year, and they were exercising their newly acquired freedom to be heard for the first time. Here in Australia, many of us take such freedom for granted. Though Pelican is a small, modest, and often juvenile magazine, it’s also an independent publication and a platform for young people to have their say. Many of our contributors in this edition have done just that, including pieces critical of the current government, legal system, and our society in general. One only needs to look at the trial of Peter Greste to know that, in many parts of the world, such actions are dangerous, illegal, and often harshly punished. It’s up to each of us to appreciate how valuable these freedoms are, and to exercise them regularly.

ZOETORIAL

The video starts this footage is in black and white, with Eamon and his girlfriend enjoying the trip, then in colour, outside the pizziera, Eamon and his girlfriend sitting together, when the couple kiss together, she starts crying while Eamon is singing, her teardrop came out her eye and make a plop. Eamon is in a bad mood, then rips the picture into shredds and threw the wine bottle at the camera. Eamon stands near back next to the Brooklyn Bridge, singing. The girl continues crying, Eamon gets angry and throws the pizza on the floor, he falls out with her and walks away.

The video begins with Frankee while she phones the phone on the bed while the girls phone, Eamon arrives in his Mercedes-phone. While Frankee is in a storpy mood throwing toys and objects through the window. Frankee shows the girls for the photo album of the past, she singing in the beach of New Jersey. When she and the friends go out for a nightclub to find a new boyfriend. Frankee shreds the picture of Eamon and her into 4.

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PELICAN ADVICE CORNER Wednesday July 2nd Alcohol units 3 (v.g.), cigarette 13 (suboptimal but fortunate in light of Mindy Project finale emotional ordeal), weight 20st 3lb (feels like after weight of emotional trial).

10:30am Hmph! After years of honest, brave and pioneering journalism have been lambasted by one Mr Richard Finch for showing up fifteen minutes late to morning meeting! Had the nerve to ask if I’d had to wait for the cafe down the road to actually make another chocolate croissant rather than simply buying one from the deli down the road. V. disgusting behaviour from man who simply does not understand the tiresome burden of sisterhood. Was, in fact, late to meeting as ran into Jude at Starbucks who had pressing need for advice that one could quite understandably consider crisis critical to global feminist movement.

Found out quickly from a sobbing Jude that her boyfriend Vile Richard had, instead of proposing at dinner as she suspected last night, brought along another woman and proposed a threesome.

“Am I not desirable anymore Bridge? If he really loved me he wouldn’t want another woman! Maybe this is the only way forward for me to find love.”

Jude, extraordinarily talented and beautiful businesswoman that she is, in crisis feeling a stupid male has the ability to decide her worth in the world!

Immediately placed on feminist cap in manner of Simone de Beauvoir and Beyonce and set up about resolving this situation.

“It’s not you, it’s Vile Richard, Jude! Men these days are a product of a time when the entire world told them that women were only put on this earth for them and that’s why they’re so bloody selfish! And women would let them because they didn’t have important feminist Instagrams to tell them about equality and male privilege!”

Whole crisis lasted a full forty five minutes during which I had no choice but to order two lattes and four chocolate croissants as means of cultivating warm, open environment to help restore Jude’s self-esteem. Walked out of door with clear instructions for her to follow Beyonce and Lily Allen on Instagram (as well as DesignSponge so she could see the wall-hanging I want for my birthday) and play Chaka Khan on the walk to work.

12:03pm Was in the middle of researching fascinating segment for Sit Up Britain! on why celebrity perfumes outperform normal perfumes, and how it is that celebrities seem to understand key elements of scent (it is because as celebrities they meet many people and thus have far more aromatic experience than normal people such as you or I), when I received a phone call from a panicked Tom. “Bridge! You look so thin! How’s work?

Oh, you simply have to help me, Li’s invited me on a mini-break!”

Li, Tom’s latest serious squeeze (having lasted three weeks) has been regularly suspected of emotional fuckwittage with Tom, simply keeping him around for the sake of having nobody else.

“That’s fantastic, Tom! What, do you not know what to wear?”

“No, Bridge, it’s just that it’s the same weekend as Shazzer’s birthday. I told him I had it on but he said he simply can’t do any weekend, and that if I wasn’t going to make time for him then I was just not committed enough. What am I going to do, Bridge?”

Hmmm, tricky. Li had previously stood Tom up on most dates, only to text him late at night thoroughly intoxicated to get Tom to come around for a shag. Li, clearly showing no actual regard for Tom, has managed to hold his stake in so firmly due to his complete lack of interest.

“You can’t miss Shazzer’s! We’ve booked the restaurant and you can’t possibly be thinking of abandoning your dear friend for some repulsive, manipulative man you’ve known for three weeks and eighty shags!”

“Yes, I know Bridge, it’s awful of me, but I’ve tried to get him to do another weekend and if I don’t do this one he’ll leave me! What if he’s the one, Bridge?”

“Tom, this man has stood you up and committed many of the great relationship sins! He’s a bastard who is just using you for sex late at night when he’s exhausted all of his other gross carnal options, and isn’t worth the time of day from a lovely man like you who could get any lower-level soccer player he wanted.”

Instantly Tom’s tone shifted and I suspected in the back of my mind that this entire time he’d simply wanted me to validate him before doing what he already knew he had to do.

“Oh, you’re right, you’re so right. Thank you darling, you are as wise as you are thin.”

He then immediately began asking if it was possible to get a second nose job as he feared his first one had gone all skewy over the years. Both vaguely puzzled if nose jobs could ‘wear out’ over time – perhaps the rubber loses shape? Will have to do some research over time.

10:45pm Mmm, am four glasses of wine into this episode of Ab Fab with Shazzer, and have been informing her all about the flaws in the latest article on Will & Kate I saw in The Sun. Am beginning to think am perhaps not all bad at this advice stuff, and will poss. pitch regular advice segment to Richard tomorrow morning. Will ask Mark’s advice first though.

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MORE FURY, LESS NOISE

by Kate Oatley Protests. Australians love them! But has anyone else been getting the feeling they just aren’t cutting the mustard anymore?

It’s clear for most to see that the recent student protests against the budget haven’t achieved their aim of re-regulating university fees, even though protests went state-wide and attracted nationwide media coverage.

As I questioned the effectiveness of protests to actually achieve their aims, one answer displayed itself in neon lights: we aren’t doing the right sort of protest.

Let’s explore.

Protests are arguably one of the easiest ways for ordinary humans to vent their frustration and attract attention to an issue. The willingness of protesters to be arrested and create a lot of noise usually attracts the attention of the media. They raise awareness to problems – be they social, political or economic – and they disrupt the norm to force their message to be heard.

Not all protests are the same, though, and unluckily for us the most effective form is now rarely used: mass protest. From the 1960s Civil Rights movement, to the more recent mass protests in Pakistan, Egypt and the Philippines, and even (unsettlingly) the Nazi Party’s original mass protests, history shows that for good or evil, genuine mass protests are quite effective. This type of protest continued with the 1970’s ‘Hippie’ protests, with an effect so colossal the core ideology of society changed. Mass protests quite literally stop traffic in the streets, because “sometimes it’s important to show that all is not well”, to quote Martin Luther King.

But gone are the free-loving days of the 1970s, and with them, genuine mass protest. Today, we have what Naomi Wolf aptly calls, ‘Disneyland Activism’: protests that have a lot of noise but not a whole lot of action. As protesting became victim to over-regulation, peaceful protest replaced

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mass protest. The nature of mass protest meant that it was usually illegal, resulting not from violence so much as from active dissent and refusals to leave when told.

The countless layers of systemic barriers that have been implemented around protesting in contemporary society – having to get a permit to protest, for example – discourage most from organising a protest and, for those that do get through the maze, mean that even if the media covered the protest globally, nothing would change. Protests still serve their function as a communal venting session and retain the appearance of democracy in action, but the control the government has over protesting robs it of the impact it could have had on its target, had it been a technically-illegal mass protest. So why are protests ineffective?

Because the regulations around protests render them so.

The effectiveness of protests relies on the intent of the protests, whether the protest aims to engage the relevant people and enact productive change, or alternatively is more concerned with making noise, determines the outcome of the protest before it even begins.

Peaceful protests, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, end up falling into the latter category because, as Republican political consultant Chris Sinclair comments, “attention becomes noise if nothing gets done,” and as the word “peaceful” suggests: nothing gets done. Peaceful protests comply with regulations and rules, unlike mass protest, and as such they don’t pose too much of a threat to the people or bodies they are aimed at.

Perhaps this is because peaceful protests have a different kind of intent to mass protest. While mass protests physically force change to occur and will meet with the relevant people to see this change happen, peaceful protests aim more to show dissent and dissatisfaction with an issue and effectively guilt-trip the target to change. The recent BBC silent protest against the seven-year imprisonment

of Australian journalist Peter Greste in Egypt, for example, does not aim specifically to free Greste, but rather shows a collective dissatisfaction with Egypt’s justice system and the treatment of journalists overseas. Re-enacted in several places globally, this silent protest aims at jolting an uninterested Egyptian Prime Minister into action through guilt rather than force.

Peaceful protests can be effective when used in the intended way to achieve the intended aims, as in the BBC’s case. Today, however, most protesters use peaceful protest to try and force the sort of change that can only be achieved through mass protest. Peaceful protests against the Western Australian shark cull, although it is an ongoing issue, did not attempt to meet with Barnett, but rather form a collective voice against the cull, employing guilt-inducing methods in an attempt to change Barnett’s mind on the issue. Note that, with Barnett labelling the trial a “success” and planning to implement it permanently, it has had little effect on the changing of government policy.

This leads me to ponder, will student protests against the budget ever be successful? As yet, it has fallen under the accursed fail of the peaceful protest and is being stoutly ignored by the Federal government. However, the size of the student presence on the streets to protest this issue is the largest since Howard, and arguably the largest Australian protest – student or otherwise – since the Iraqi war, which allows the effect of this protest against the budget to have real potential to succeed if handled the right way. History has proven the merit of the regulation-shunning mass protest in situations such as these, in which tangible change in policy is demanded through clear aims.

Perhaps a change in strategy is in order.

YOUNG PEOPLE THESE DAYS

by Jasmine Ruscoe

If you’ve watched the news any time in the last 10 000-or-so years, you may have noticed that young people get picked on a lot. Often, our world-views are different from those of our parents and grandparents. What we see as acceptable – like jazz music or, heaven forbid, drinking coffee at the same counter as the opposite sex – is often rejected by traditional views, and the people that hold them. These people are our politicians, our media owners, and our employers. They have more power than us – politically, economically, and socially – and they use that power to construct a generation of scapegoats. Young people today are stereotyped as lazy, apathetic, rude, selfish, and – a new favourite after the release of the 2014 budget – “entitled”.

YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY ARE STEREOTYPED AS LAZY, APATHETIC, RUDE, SELFISH, AND – A NEW FAVOURITE AFTER THE RELEASE OF THE 2014 BUDGET – “ENTITLED” I’m not going to discuss the fact that many of the people who are raising the cost of tertiary education, and telling us to suck it up, got theirs for free. I’m not going to point out the screaming Catch-22 that if

we don’t protest these changes, we’re lazy and apathetic, but if we do, we’re rude and demanding and doing it wrong.

There are plenty of people pissed off and concerned about these things, some of whom you can hear from in the politics section of this magazine, so instead, I’d like to talk about why I can’t find a job. There are several reasons; I’m not just going to moan, “woe is me, the system, blah blah” – but in case you are interested, youth unemployment hit a 12-year high this year, at 13.1%. This doesn’t include people who have given up job-hunting, or who are working one paid hour a week or more. Can you pay rent on one hour’s work a week? No. You can’t. Not even if you get full minimum wage - which, by the way, people under the age of 21 do not.

Fortunately for me, I have a family who is willing to let me bum around home until I’m 25, so I don’t have to pay rent.

Or for food. I don’t even have to pay for the car I drive. But some people do.

Lots of them in fact. How do they do it?

Honestly, I don’t know. Is it their grades?

Well, I walked out of high school with straight As and I haven’t got anything lower than a distinction at Uni so far, and I was turned down by McDonalds three times. Is it that they’re willing to do crappy jobs and I’m not? No. I’ve cleaned up vomit. I’ve had to work overtime and skip breaks. I’ve had onion rings thrown at me. I’ve been talked down to and yelled at in ways that, if directed at a dog in my presence, would probably have earned the speaker a slap. I worked a job for eight months that had me in tears at the end of nearly every shift, and I only left on the promise of another job. A promise that fell through approximately two months before my potential boss told me they couldn’t hire me – and even then, I was only told because I got on their tail about it. I can’t get away from the feeling that I would not have been treated like this if I were older, because for some reason, the amount of respect to which a person is entitled apparently depends on their age.

I’VE CLEANED UP VOMIT. I’VE HAD TO WORK OVERTIME AND SKIP BREAKS. I’VE HAD ONION RINGS THROWN AT ME. Ah, entitled! There’s that word again: 2014’s new dirty word, used to condemn young people for feeling like we deserve things. Do we deserve to be able to buy a house without a $150 000 deposit? I think so. Do we deserve a rate of mental illness lower than 1 in 4? Yes. But we do not have these things. Instead, we have an older generation who wants us to let them make decisions about our futures -- because “they know best”, and “one day we’ll understand” – but who turn around and tell us that, for goodness’ sake, we’re adults, and we should be taking some responsibility for our own lives! We have potential employers who don’t want to risk the time and money it will take to train us, or to investigate or implement our ideas. We have politicians who ignore us, and even vilify us because we scare their voters. We have media who prey on these fears, and who encourage the idea that no one needs to listen to us because we are recklesslydriving, binge-drinking, dole-bludging Internet addicts. Anything we have to say, from defending our clothing choices to speaking up about global warming and human rights, is all too often passed off as a stunt, or a fad, or typical teenage rebellion. And heaven forbid we attempt to defend ourselves against any of these accusations. It’s almost like we think we’re entitled to a voice or something.

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THE SOUND OF FURY

by Tom Rossiter Whether as a result of our convict heritage, or a desire to distinguish ourselves from those prudish Brits, Australians have embraced swearing with fucking gusto. This national love of swearing is incredibly widespread, Kevin Rudd once got a much needed popularity boost for his public use of the word ‘shitstorm’ back in 2009, as people felt he was more ‘down to earth’ than they had been lead to believe by his personality. And whilst fines for swearing in public do exist (up to $500), Australians continue to be some of the sweariest people in the world.

Picture by Zoe Kilbourn

The ‘true’ swear words change with time. First, we had words that invoked blasphemy or heresy, then, with the advance of the Victorians, we learnt to be ashamed of our bodies, and ‘swear’ words became those related to our ‘private parts.’ Today, the only true swear words are the ones that were used to describe, ahem, specific racial or social groups (their power is evidenced by the fact I feel uncomfortable to even type them).

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I believe the reason these words make us uncomfortable, is because of the hatred that they have been stewing in for generations. We see the hatred they are used to express, and feel as though this hatred will somehow taint us if we use these simple, if awful words. And this disinclination feels infinitely more justifiable than any hatred of the word ‘crap,’ one is a physical process, the other was used to dehumanise and aid the persecution of human beings. So let’s stop using ‘gay’ as an all-purpose negative adjective, okay, 12 year olds?

AUSTRALIANS HAVE EMBRACED SWEARING WITH FUCKING GUSTO. But not all swear words are used to express hate, some are damned pleasurable. Really, this pleasure comes from their irresistibility, that one memory everyone seems to have of an authority figure forbidding them from using the ‘letter hyphen word.’ The joy of swear words lies in their ability to relieve anxiety, pain and stress. When I encounter some form of serious trouble, my usual first course of action is to steadily chant ‘fuck’ under my breath.

And even the harshest swearing critic cannot deny that they themselves, having hit their thumb with a hammer or bounced a shin off a coffee table, feel immensely better after muttering, at the very least, ‘shit.’ Despite this, some people still insist we refrain from swearing, shit-spewing dicks that they are, these people don’t understand the subtlety or the elegance of the common swear word.

Now, I’ve never seen any survey results, but I would guess that many Pelican readers are Arts students (I know I am).

And for an Arts student to understand the negative reactions some might experience in response to swearing, we must compare it with something they are familiar with. People who dislike swearing view it in the same vein that you or I view basic errors in grammar.

That twitch you get when you see a misplaced or absent apostrophe is the same feeling your mother gets when she hears you yell ‘COCK.’ When I see improper use of ‘you’re’ or ‘than’, I immediately have to ask myself how that person could be so careless? Are they doing this just to shock me? Is grammar some kind of freaking joke?

Well I was raised better than that, thank you very much.

Swear words offend because of the social taboo around surrounds them, because of the inherent layer of ‘They can’t say that!’ Once you start hearing them regularly, they lose much of their power to offend. The Australian overuse of swear words, in particular, has given us very thick skin (eardrums?) for swear words, and as a result of this, our swear words have become less useful in expressing passion. Continuing to draw at these wells has dried them up. Like oil tycoons, we, as a people must investigate unexplored linguistic fields to discover new, and better swear words. And I personally am more offended by the ‘words’ ‘expresso’ and ‘pecifically’ than any swear word. Even words that grate on the ear disgust me more than most swear words. ‘Moist’ is a good example of this, perhaps the most instinctively repellent word there is. So, if you find yourself in need of a swear word, why not try giving that old chestnut a miss, yell ‘MOIST’ at the top of your lungs. Then you can really spread the pain around to everyone within earshot, that’s sure to make you feel better.

PUNK: A SECRET HISTORY

by Richard Moore

I am in a bathroom at a punk show when he shoves me on his way out, sneering through his matted beard: ‘Doin’ your hair, ya little faggot?’ and I’m growing tired of this. With no place in mainstream culture, alternative scenes should be our last refuge but growing hostility and violence on the borders makes these spaces dangerous as well, it has been like this – say the older punks around me – for years. A friend asks me why I persist with it, and the answer is the same it’s always been: because punk’s secret history is my last refuge in the past.

Punk, finding its origins in a few short years between 1972 and 1978, is better known today for the American hardcore scene that rose from its ashes, one of hyper-masculinity, violent pits, and eartearing sound. Even the bands which survived England’s punk exodus are idols of white male heterosexuality: the Clash with their studied sneers and posturing, the Sex Pistols with the blood of a blinded girl and Nancy Spungen on Sid Vicious’ hands. But the origins of punk look different.

“I never knew there was a law against sounding vulnerable,” Pete Shelley, founding member of Manchester’s Buzzcocks and out bisexual, says of the movement in an interview with the Quietus, close to the spirit of punk.

Reacting to the 1970s music scene, dominated by Gary Glitter, Rod Stewart, and Led Zeppelin, punk squirted its way through the cracks of the New York art scene off the backs of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Transvestite band the New York Dolls staggered easily into this scene, with the Ramones, Television, Detroit black protopunk trio Death and all-female band the Runaways hot on their platform heels. Malcolm McLaren, future manager of the Sex Pistols, was not far behind, managing heroin addicts the New York Dolls for a short time before their inevitable selfdestruction. Meanwhile, young punk

Lance Loud, already famous for coming out as gay on reality TV in 1973, wrote to Andy Warhol on the regular. Theresa Kereakes, editor of Lobotomy Magazine along with Kid Congo Powers, Pleasant Gehman and Randy De Troit jokes on her website, “In retrospect, is it OK to joke that Lobotomy was run by 2 fags and 2 hags? Nobody’s sexuality mattered to us...” Easily visible in the scene now were figures like Jayne County, Stonewall veteran and transsexual activist, and Elton Motello with their gay punk anthem ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’. On the dark, closeted periphery the Germs frontman and addict Darby Crash gathered a legion of groupies held in perpetual platonic dependency such as Hellin Killer and Trudie Plunger, as Crash kept his homosexuality secret until after his suicide by heroin overdose in 1980, his grave spat on by his worshipping fans. In England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s history of punk rock, Jane Suck, a lesbian music writer daunted by the male aggression of the 70s music industry and turning to speed for recourse, admits: “Once I started injecting I didn’t have to worry about my sexuality. I became asexual, I think many people were, it was an incredibly asexual movement.”

A female punk scene quickly erupted from the stage set by New York. Jade Zebest, LA punk and editor of magazine Generation X, says in an interview with the Bags singer Alice Bag: “I think that the equality of the first female punks was due, in part, to the role that gay men played in early punk... they were not seeing women as sexual objects but as equals... which was unusual in the 1970’s Rock World.” Of course some female punks have remained in the public consciousness: Patti Smith screams over her mad poetry and Joan Jett plays on mainstream radio while Vivienne Westwood continues to parade the catwalks in 2014. But there’s a bigger picture to female punk than they’re given. Dinah Cancer of 45 Grave, Vox Pop and Nervous Gender notes to Bag, “We girls fought hard for our spots.

The punk scene has been and still is an All boys scene.” All-female bands like the Bags, the Go-Gos, and the Speed Queens abounded in the US, while in the UK plastic goddess Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex roared out anti-sexism riot ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’ and the Slits, grimy adolescent girls, howled ballad to female oppression ‘Typical Girls’ on tour with the Sex Pistols. In Germany, Nina Hagen tore through addict opera punk ‘TV Glotzer’. At Vivienne Westwood’s heels were dominatrix model Jordan and actress Helen Wellington-Lloyd, and the Bromley Contingent, the Sex Pistols’ most visible fans named by Caroline Coon, punk journalist for Melody Maker, boasted a female majority, including Siouxie Sioux, Soo Catwoman and Debbie Juvenile. Then there were photographers, hair stylists, writers, compilers; Ann Summar, Valiant Heather Ferguson, Lydia Lunch, Mia Zapata and Cosey Fanni Tutti to list a few.

With the mainstream success of the Sex Pistols, it wasn’t long before punk was demonised as aggressive, violent, perverted, obsessed with chaos, but it was its rebranding as destructive and male that did the most damage – including the swift erasure of any punk who wasn’t actively appealing to the straight male audience the music was marketed towards. So punk is dead. We are not.

Something else will come. Until then, it’s our secret history.

SECRET HISTORY PLAYLIST Personality Crisis – New York Dolls Jet Boy, Jet Girl – Elton Motello Survive – The Bags Rock ‘n’ Roll Victim - Death Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) – The Buzzcocks Oh Bondage Up Yours! – X-Ray Spex Fuck Off – Jayne County and the Electric Chairs Muscleboys – The Mumps Typical Girls – The Slits Going Down – The Germs Confession – Nervous Gender Knives In The Drain – Lydia Lunch

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VIOLENT SOKO

by Anna Saxon Do you know the name of president of South Korea? I don’t. But I do know the name of every member of K-pop band Girls Generation. Do you know the estimated size of the South Korean military? I don’t. But I do know that a few years ago Seoul University successfully cloned a super cute dog called Snuppy. I can’t help but notice that we know a lot more about the scary nuclear communist Koreans than we do about their peaceful Southern cousins. I’m just a white girl who watches a lot of K-dramas, but I think we might be seriously underestimating South Korea as a global threat. Just because they don’t have a despotic Great Leader who fires up his nuclear weapons at the drop of a roll of kimbap, that doesn’t mean that South Korea is the happy capitalist proto-America that everybody seems to think it is. Here’s a list of things that I think should be setting off alarm bells for the international community about South Korea.

1) Kpop: A Little Too Catchy?

Last week, it was confirmed that PSY’s Gangnam Style music video was the most watched YouTube clip in the world in, like, ever - two BILLION views. I know people love a wacky Asian film clip, but that is next level. And yet, nobody seems surprised.

In recent years, K-pop has expanded from Asia to take over Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Australia in what was called the second ‘Hangul Wave’ (Not to be confused with the Third Wave. OR SHOULD IT BE?). Reigning Girl Group Supreme, Girls Generation, made their national US debut with an appearance on ‘The Late Show with David Letterman” and “Live! With Kelly” last year. These guys are well and truly global - PSY was just the tip of the iceberg. Now, we know what our good buddy Kim Jong Un would be doing with all this global press - trying to control the minds of the weak capitalists.

But what about Girls Generation? What’s their agenda? Not just to “bring the boys out”, surely - unless ‘the boys’ are the Allied Forces? Are their songs just full of

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subliminal messages? The dances look suspiciously like semaphore - I don’t trust them. Question K-pop. QUESTION EVERYTHING. 2) iRobot While everyone is worried about NoKo’s lame 1960s military technology, nobody’s been keeping an eye on the robot revolution going on in South Korea. In 2010, the South Korean government launched its “R-Learning” program to fill schools with automated assistants like Engkey which uses voice recognition technology to help students with their speaking skills. In addition to Engkey, preprimary school teachers can use Genibo, a robotic dog that teaches dance and gymnastics BY ITSELF, as well as iRobi, which keeps track of which kids are in class and asks them how they’re feeling.

Creepy.

However, not all Korean robots are just friendly tutors who want to help you get execute the perfect star jump. In 2012, a prison in the city of Pohang became home to the world’s first robotic prison guards. These beauties come with 3-D depth cameras and two-way wireless communication systems that allow correctional officers to speak with the inmates. Most are controlled remotely, but they can patrol cell blocks on their own by following navigational markers. By susing “pattern recognition algorithms” the robots can also identify illegal or dangerous activities, such as gang fights, and then call for human backup. Fortunately, the machines aren’t armed and cannot touch the inmates - unlike the SGR-1. Deployed in 2010, this guy patrols the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Unlike its prison guard brethren, the SGR-1 is packing some serious firepower, including a 5.5-millimeter machine gun and 40-millimeter automatic grenade launchers. The SGR-1 can’t fire without human permission, but it’s pretty clear that the scientists who invented this droid have never seen Robocop. They already have robots replacing human jobs. Soon

their robots will be coming over here, stealing our jobs and marrying our women they must be stopped!

3) Baseball used to control the masses.

Perhaps taking their cue from Kim Jong Un and his basketball obession, South Korean officials figured out that baseball could be used as the tool of an oppressive military dictatorship. After staging a coup in the late ’70s, General Chun Doo Hwan declared martial law in South Korea. Chun was constantly having to crush revolts and murder protesters, even shutting down all the universities in South Korea to prevent dissent. When none of those strategies worked, Chun established the Korean Baseball Organization in 1981 as a way for people (especially young men) to let off steam. By encouraging people to put down their picket signs and pick up a bat, Chun was hoping to divert attention away from his regime. A former defense minister was appointed as the baseball commissioner, six teams were created by governmentfriendly businesses, and Chun started improving his image by throwing the first pitch at every game. People eventually got sick of him anyway, and he and his cronies were thrown into prison. But SK baseball is still run by a combo of government and corporate interference. I’m no sports fan, but I can’t help but shudder to think what the Australian government might be distracting us from with Aussie Rules. Don’t you see? ALL SPORT IS MILITARISTIC OPPRESSION. SoKo just let the secret slip.

It all makes so much sense.

While North Korea distracted us with nuclear threats and biographies co-written

by Dennis Rodman, South Korea has been quietly becoming increasingly mechanised, organised and (in Girls Generations case) harmonized. Wake up and smell the kimchee, guys - SoKo is wealthier, smarter and has cooler robots than most of the western world. Forget about Kim Jong Un, it’s Snuppy the South Korean clone dog we should really be worried about.

THE TIM BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

by Somayya Ismailjee If News Ltd newspapers’ job is to consistently lower the standard of political debate in this country, then they’re succeeding from every angle.

Reading a News Ltd opinion column is like waking up in a parallel universe where welfare recipients, Muslims, and other minorities are the ones trashing this country from above, the last century or so of scientific progress never happened, and rich white men are a persecuted minority whose rights are being diminished. Last week, it was like waking up in the Middle Ages as well. “CROWN OUR CRAZY QUEEN” sneered the title of a blog post by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Blair. The post featured a poll asking “Who is Australia’s craziest left-wing frightbat?”, listing several prominent Australian feminist writers, all women, and describing them as “unhinged hysterics”.

Pathologizing female emotion to discredit it is a tactic as old as time itself, something Tim Blair was clearly aware of when he followed in the tradition by describing outspoken feminists as “hysterics” and “frightbats” with “psychosocial behavioural disorders”.

Back in Victorian times, women who protested angrily at their treatment in society would be institutionalised in mental hospitals. It was a way of dismissing their outrage and asserting control over them. So brazen was Blair that he also went as far as calling women “hysterics” - hysteria, deriving from the Greek: ‘of the uterus’, was considered a biological disorder until the 1950s, establishing the cause of female emotion as a disease of the reproductive organs.

And to top off the trifecta of truly medieval misogyny, Blair’s smug, pathetic coinage of “frightbat” bears striking resemblance to when “dangerous” women would be accused of being other spooky creatures, a practice culminating in, of course, the Witch Trials.

Is it any surprise that, in our neoliberal age, anger too is a resource commodified,

privatised, and monopolised by a fortunate few? Today’s elites know that with the way power functions in our world, old-school smear tactics and the invocation of centuries-old stereotypes and tropes are a guaranteed way of silencing inconvenient opinions and truths and dismissing justified anger at unjust systems, backed by thousands of years of success. This is made much easier when the powerful have the might of the mainstream media behind them, allowing them control over such narratives.

Non-privileged groups have long known that daring to have an opinion and be angry about it comes at a cost that the privileged aren’t burdened by. Being a woman means frequently getting called “irrational” or “overreacting”. Having a uterus means when you’re angry it’s always PMS.. Non-white males have to be constantly on guard in a society that has already demonised them as being inherently more violent.

Women of colour, marginalised both by racism and sexism, know this, too.

In late 2013, prominent black feminist Mikki Kendall, largely in response to the racist and exclusionary nature of white, mainstream feminism, started the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen.

The hashtag exploded on Twitter and was reported extensively by mainstream media, appearing in a cover story in The Nation magazine entitled “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars”, a smear piece demonising feminists of colour like Kendall for expressing justified anger at being neglected by mainstream feminism and daring to use what platforms they have to demand accountability.

It was symbolic of the bigger ongoing struggle between prominent mainstream feminists with public platforms and marginalised feminists of colour calling for intersectionality and anti-racism, only to be consistently accused of bullying and being the “poison” making feminism “toxic”. In desperate attempts to protect their privileged position within the feminist movement, too many

white feminists resort to similar tactics used by sexist men to discredit justified anger at oppression.

Similarly, the portrayal of anger takes on a colonialist narrative when applied to non-white people in other countries.

When people in other countries display anger at Western nations, the tired racist trope gets trotted out that it is their backward culture and religion that fuels their “hate” - not centuries of imperialist violence and exploitation.

Not only is it used to demonise and dismiss legitimate fury, this particular line has been used for hundreds of years to also justify militaristic aggression to steal resources.

Society allows only one kind of anger, and that’s for those left in power by colonialism and its consequential structures of institutional racism and sexism to lash out at those on the receiving end. Who gets to have their anger taken seriously is directly proportionate to who gets to be taken seriously by society as a human being: the emotions of rich, old, white men are never put on trial, never questioned, never castigated in the mainstream media, always valued and always valid by default. You can be part of News Ltd’s zombie-army of medieval bigots and use your national media platform to unleash nonsensical, bile-filled rants against the poor, the disabled, the non-white, the Indigenous, and bully anyone who presents views outside your rabid neoliberal and neoconservative agenda and still be considered a serious political commentator. Dare to come from a non-privileged segment of society and be outraged at oppression, screw the point you’re trying to make: you are immediately painted as crazy, as uncivilised, as irrational. A frightening consequence of this can be self-censorship, where non-privileged people think twice before entering political discussions - exactly the aim of those in power. So own your anger. That elites are so frightened of it shows how powerful it can be.

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ANGER, FURY, AND GEESE

by Dennis Venning Right. I’m going to use “anger” and “fury” interchangeably because using only one word would get boring. I might chuck in a “go nuts” or two as well.

Darwin wrote a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, well after he’d written the super famous one about evolution.

In Chapter Ten he talks about anger and rage and annoyance—that’s how he bundles them together—and how they’re displayed in people and animals.

For example: ”Young children, when in a violent rage roll on the ground on their backs or bellies, screaming, kicking, scratching or biting everything within reach. So it is, as I hear from Mr. Scott, with Hindoo children; and, as we have seen, with the young anthropomorphous apes.”

DARWIN’S A BIG SCIENCE MAN AND HE’S THINKING ABOUT ANGER IN A BIG SCIENCE WAY Actually a lot of it is comparing white men to brown men, but anyway I’ll move past that because there’s a point I want to try to make. Darwin’s a big science man and he’s thinking about anger in a big science way. He’s looking for hard evidence: canines-bared-andnostrils-flared, that sort of thing. To put it another way, Darwin sees fury as a physical state, something that any animal with a good brain experiences and expresses. It doesn’t require any

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special gear: Homo sapiens gets angry, but so does pan troglodytes, elephas maximus, and anser fabalis, because anger means a collection of physical processes that you see when the goose runs full pelt at the chimpanzee.

Is that all anger is? Can we boil it down to adrenaline and constricted pupils, label it, and then check for it in the next rat we see? Obviously an animal can be aggressive—you can see when a duck goes for another duck and starts pecking away—and we can be aggressive too. I don’t think there was much going through Suarez’s head when he bit that Italian player. But something doesn’t sit right with me, just leaving anger as a physical state of aggression.

Anger seems like a complicated thing that’s in all of us. I did some reading for this article and found out about a long argument about whether it was like a kettle or a light-switch, so I won’t try a metaphor, but you know what I mean. Anger can be simple and ugly, sure—in fact I’m sure it’s like that more often than not. But anger can also be righteous, and purposeful, and maybe even beautiful, in the right light. Ducks can’t feel righteous anger, can they?

It’s a hard nut to crack: I can’t ask a moose what’s going through its head when it headbutts its neighbour. Am I anthropomorphising by saying that an animal can be angry, or am I being egocentric if I say that only us special humans get mad? I did some reading, and found out philosophers have argued about this for a while, though most seem to think that animals can’t be angry. Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Aristotle and friends all thought that because animals lacked reason, they could not be angry . This is actually reflected in more recent theories on anger, which understand anger as cognitive; that is, it requires (and can be controlled and directed by) conscious thought. Of course, other animals think too—it’s still a question of degree.

The best I might be able to manage, at least to solve the semantics, is to give up on the synonyms I started this piece with. If I box up the words to mean more specific things then I might at least get by with the definitional part of my brain a little calmer. So I’ll go with this: “anger” is for everybody. Not worms, maybe, mosquitoes are also out, but hey everybody who’s got a good nostril flare or fist clench going on, go for it. Angry elephants are a-okay. That leaves “fury” as the special one for all the human beings out there. “Fury” means you’ve got some serious thought going on, it can simmer and come out ten years later, icy cold. An angry mouse cannot create an elaborate, decadelong scheme to humiliate the guy who bullied them in high school; a furious human can. To conclude, I’ll just say this: you’re a fully operational, cognising homo sapiens, so if you didn’t like this article, please don’t get mad.

IS THAT ALL ANGER IS? CAN WE BOIL IT DOWN TO ADRENALINE AND CONSTRICTED PUPILS, LABEL IT, AND THEN CHECK FOR IT IN THE NEXT RAT WE SEE?

WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF? Exasperation, indignation and all things outraged.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

We’ve all heard it, often misattributed to Shakespeare by middle aged men who appear to begrudgingly acknowledge this real life trope about women and anger.

What is our cultural fascination with anger in women? The dramatisation and consequent stigmatisation of expressions of anger and resistance in women is something we’ve all grown up absolutely steeped in. One must only cast their eye to the solid stream of PMS and period ’jokes’ (callously assuming all women are assigned female at birth), the repetitive screen cliche of the angry black/ brown/ ethnic woman, and let’s not forget any joke which ends with “back in the kitchen, bitch.”

In fact let’s talk about that word, “bitch”.

A man can be angry; a woman is a bitch.

This dichotomy serves to make most women even angrier, and perhaps that’s somewhat the root of this concept. It’s cyclical, it’s self-serving and it traps women in stereotypes with very real social effects.

Going back to the times of Greek myth, it is expected that women are going to have anger, fury, and rage to express. It seems, however, a healthy medium or portrayal thereof rarely ever eventuates.

Angry women are a joke, a stereotype, an annoyance. We are the Furies, the Sirens, the Succubi, Medusa, Medea, Maleficent.

Why can’t we just be angry?

From what I can sense of the world at the wise age of 20, a lot of the anger intrinsic in being a woman stems from being damned if we do, damned if we don’t. Dress sexy, you’re a slut. Dress conservatively, you’re a prude. Come across as masculine, you’re a dyke and a hard-ass. Come across as feminine, you’re a push over. Don’t want children? You’re barren of mind. Do want children? You might get fired.

People with small minds often cite feminism going too far as the source of this dilemma. Personally, this makes me angry. You know feminism actually hasn’t gone far enough when women are actively encouraged distance themselves from the

word, let alone the concept, lest they look too angry. Feminism has done wonders at revealing truths about inequality, forcing us to think critically about why things are the way they are. And when you’re born into a world where your gender alone is the reason for a pay gap averaging out at almost $900 000 over a life time in Australia, a one in four chance of sexual assault from a man, a one in two chance you will be stalked or harassed by a man, and a political and corporate climate that has you “knocking on the door” to higher ranking positions but never actually crossing this thresh-hold, you tend to get angry.

My brother, a very insightful and educated man, has stated that being a woman is something of a “multiplier” to the marginalisation found at the intersection of other things like race, ability, and sexuality. For example, we as a pair of full blood siblings share the same genetics and approximate looks. Thick, spirally, dark hair and a skin tone somewhere between Al Pacino and Beyonce.

or silence our voices to get ahead.

This pisses me off.

Perhaps most of the anger in identifying as a woman comes from knowing you’re bargaining with the world from a place that can be too easily be perceived as weak.

In a world where fighting like a girl is an insult and being told to man up is a way to encourage strength, women live their lives as the butt of some global joke.

I remember that after disembarking from one of my social justice/ lefty feminist rants to my brother last year I promptly apologised, knowing that one of our friends had commented that I seemed really angry about a lot of this “stuff”.

I was ashamed and frustrated, having been taught that anger was a source of weakness, a point of ridicule. He turned and told me what no one ever tells women who feel shame in speaking up.

“You are angry. You should be angry. There is so much to be angry about.”

As a man, he is rarely confronted about his ethnicity. If he is, it is generally among friends who have known him for a while and seem legitimately confused by our French surname, Italian cultural knowledge, and pan-global physicality.

On the other hand, I have been harassed on the street, quizzed beyond the point of absurdity by intrusive counter staff, and approached by violently drunk strangers.

I’m poked and prodded and pulled aside in public. I’m asked where I’m from over and over, and no one seems satisfied that I’m Australian. This is because there is an exoticisation and a fetishisation of women of colour.

We have pornography dedicated to us, we’re something different and unusual. We’re a challenge, a conquest, a tick on the scorecard of others. There are even more stereotypes about women in ethnic minorities having angry or combative personalities and once again we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We either express our anger and face scrutiny

Picture by Jess Cockerill

by Chloe Durand

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TALES FROM THE TANK: Darkness, Dolphins, Drugs, and a Journey into the Depths of the Mind (in East Perth)

by Wade McCagh I’m late. I’m wedged motionless between cars on The Esplanade on a grey Friday mid-afternoon, where ongoing construction work has reduced three lanes into one. I look down at my phone in the passenger seat and try to divine how to get to my destination from the malfunctioning Google Maps app, the screen cutting in and out erratically adding to my rising dread. I berate myself silently for not leaving earlier for this appointment, my eyes constantly glancing at the dashboard clock, every minute that ticks over fuelling the stress rising up through my torso. I’m definitely late.

I’m on my way to a small business called Beyond Rest, where I will undergo a two hour floatation session in an isolation tank. I will float naked, nearly completely submerged in magnesium sulfate infused water continuously maintained at skin temperature, completely encapsulated in darkness and removed from all external stimuli inside of some sort of futuristic pod. I have never done this before, and I’m not sure what I expect will happen. Will I become terrified and claustrophobic? Will I hallucinate fantastic images and colours, or even reach the reported out-of-body and flying experiences some users have reported? Worst of all, will I just lay there, bored, waiting for the clock to wind down?

I have no idea, and the possibilities race around in my head, keeping me on edge.

Mercifully, the traffic begins to move, and minutes later I arrive at the place. I park around the back and begin to rehearse my apology for my tardiness while suppressing the anxiety I feel about the unknown journey to come. I step through the door into a cosy reception area, where a young, vaguely hippyish looking man sits behind a desk. I assume this is Ben, the owner of this establishment and the guy I spoke to over the phone earlier when making the reservation. He sets me at ease immediately, brushing off my profuse apologies about being late with a simple “happens all the time here”, before inviting me to take off my shoes. “Once you’ve done that, follow me.”

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--I’m not sure where I first came across the concept of sensory deprivation. I believe it may have been during a documentary about Carl Lewis, who practised visualisation techniques in an isolation tank in preparation for the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

But since that inception point, the idea had a certain enduring allure, and this obsession kicked around in the back of my head for several years, with no outlet except for the occasional medical journal article reading binge on various studies.

I should point out at this point that I consider myself a rational and scientific person, with a healthy disregard for alternative medicines, therapies, and anything that sounds too good to be true.

On first glance, Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) seems to promise everything to everyone; decreased stress and cortisol levels, enhanced creativity and problem solving abilities, joint, muscle, and back pain relief, decreased blood pressure, increased immune function, faster physical healing and rehabilitation, reduced anxiety and insomnia, an aid to weight loss and a cure to addictive behaviours such as gambling and smoking, the list goes on and on.

I’m not a doctor, but it all seemed like some sort of miracle cure that deserves a heavy dose of cynicism. But my research into scientific studies certainly seemed to back up many of the claims, and allow some of the others to at least be plausible.

Perhaps I’d been drinking the Kool-Aid for too long, but I was baffled why, if isolation tanks were scientifically backed and supposedly as wonderful as advertised, hadn’t they taken off? After all, they’d been around since the 1950s. My confusion leads my research towards the inventor of the isolation tank, Dr John C. Lilley, who can be described as eccentric at best, and like some sort of L. Ron Hubbard figure at worst. He invented the tank in 1954, wrote 19 books, lived to be 86, and made contributions to a range of scientific fields.

Perhaps his career, and the source of much

of the cynicism around this technology, can be succinctly summarised by the introductory sentence of his Wikipedia page: “He was a researcher of the nature of consciousness using mainly isolation tanks, dolphin communication, and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination.”

--Ben leads me down a hallway and into a spartan, all-white room, where I finally find myself in front of the tank. My first impression is that, with the roof-like door open, it appears much like a giant monochrome hippopotamus skull. He gives me a quick rundown of what to do, before wishing me well, and exiting.

I spend a minute standing in front of the tank, looking at the circular UV light at the back emitting a calming blue aura that bounces off the water. It reminds me of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that’s when I decide I better start before I start to get second thoughts about this experience. As I shower, I notice that the tank has begun to play what I would describe as ambient rainforest sounds. It feels a little sinister, like the tank is calling out its siren song to tempt voyagers to their doom, but I’ve been told repeatedly its impossible to drown in the tank and so I supress the thought.

I approach and then slowly raise my leg and delicately place my foot into the tank. I’m surprised that it doesn’t feel warmer, even though I realise that it’s supposed to be equal to my external temperature. I climb inside and appreciate how large the space feels, with enough room for me to spread my limbs about comfortably without hitting the sides. I have to get on my knees to reach the door, at which point, I take a deep breath and close the lid.

The tank is still being lit by HAL as I attempt to assume a prone position that feels comfortable. Eventually I lean back and submerged my ears under the water, the sounds of birds and an acoustic guitar amplified through the water, until a small circle of my face is all of my head that remains above the surface. After about

three minute, the light suddenly cuts, and I’m enveloped by complete darkness. Not long afterwards, the music quickly fades to silence.

This provokes a little jolt in my pulse, which I’m acutely aware of, as it is now the only sound I can hear. I spend some time listening to the blood flow around, which momentarily feels like its roaring past my ears before settling into a more subdued but constant noise. It becomes hard to gauge time surprisingly quickly, but I’d estimate I spend the first 30 minutes focused on my heartbeat and my breathing.

I’m waiting for something spectacular and unknown to happen, but that moment never fully arrives. I’m keen to experience the reported floating sensation, but that is prevented by my regular positions adjustments and the occasional frustration of suddenly making contact with the sides as I float around oblivious to my proximity to the walls. The closest I get to something miraculous occurs somewhere around the 45 minute mark (I guess), when I experience the faint eruption of lights and colours in my peripheral vision. I’m not alarmed by this, as I used to experience the same thing as a child lying awake at night in my bedroom unable to sleep (I’ve subsequently learned in researching this article that this effect is known as the “prisoner’s cinema”).

This hasn’t happened for years, and I’m immediately happy that I’ve experienced something unusual, yet disappointed that the effect is so weak and doesn’t reach the intensity of my previous experiences.

I go through periods of mental tranquillity but never more than a few minutes at a time, and this is probably because I continue to move around trying to find that perfect position. I notice that my skin has a feeling of slickness, due to the salts in the water, and for a while I feel like some sort of six foot koi in a dark and peaceful pond.

Other such random thoughts erupt from nowhere. My thoughts fixate for a time on the idea that this is what it must be like to be dead, in a coffin six feet under, and it doesn’t feel so bad.

Mostly though, I just float, relaxed but not

in some sort of transcendental way, thinking about various things, enjoying the isolation and the solitude. Its nice to know that I’m not going to be disturbed by anything, that I’m shut off from the outside world in my own little cacoon, free to roam my mind or just lay there and float. The music starts up earlier than I expect, indicating I’m reaching the end of my two hours, and I just linger there in the dark, enjoying that isolation for a few more moments. Then the light comes on, I open the door and climb out, sans miraculous butterfly transformation.

--After I shower and dress, I sit down in the ‘relaxation room’ in the front of the building and talk to Ben for about half an hour about floating and his experiences in the industry.

He gives me the rundown on what has occurred physically, mentioning that two hours in the tank is about the equivalent of eight hours sleep. That’s probably the best way to characterise the immediate feeling I have, like I’d just woken up after a good night’s rest. I ask him about people’s reaction to his business and why he thinks the tanks seem to fail during the initial wave of interest in the 1970/80s. He attributes it to some negative reactions to Lilley’s drug experimentation, the 1980 sci-fi horror movie Altered States based around taking hallucinatory drugs in sensory deprivations tank, and the wrong marketing strategy aiming at high level business executives. As we talk about Lilley and the drug culture surrounding flotation’s early days, he hands me a few of his books, one of which I immediately notice includes a blurb from Timothy Leary and various accounts of floating experiences by names such as Jerry Rubin and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

We end up taking a lot of the business and marketing side of the enterprise and I’m interested to find that contrary to all the counter-culture associations, the business operates much like a gym, open for long hours with a constant stream of clients. Ben reveals that a large proportion of their initial customers were MMA enthusiasts, which surprised me.

Apparently UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a major promoter of floatation and has

single-handedly powered a small revival in interest. Aside from that, large sections of the clientele are young FIFO workers, which makes a lot of sense given the havoc that lifestyle causes on sleep patterns. He’s optimistic that floating will take off here, mentioning the rapid growth of over 300 centres in Germany in recent years.

I meet Nick, Ben’s brother and the other co-owner, in the lobby after our interview.

He’s wearing a Fear and Loathing tee shirt which strikes me as the sort of caricature detail I’d imagined before coming here, but he’s also clearly business minded and makes sure to mention that the business offers an internship style program for uni students who can’t afford a membership.

He too seems optimistic about the future, with plans to expand out into a franchise.

Perhaps I’m still feeling the positive vibes from my float, but I’m persuading by their confidence and I believe they’ll succeed here in Perth.

--With the benefit of several days’ worth of reflection, what is my verdict on floatation?

On the physical side, my back and neck definitely feel better and less tense. I got to sleep easily in the following days, and I notice that I can’t muster my usual stress and anger of an approaching deadline to get cracking on this story. Its like my ability to stress has been muted, even when I wilfully try to work myself up. The only negatives are the excess salt residue in my hair and ears, which isn’t painful but takes a few washes to fully remove.

Will floating give you the psychedelic trip or Zen master like tranquillity you desire?

No, not immediately anyway. It also won’t destroy your mind or leave you like some sort of spaced-out vegetable. I’d confidently say that it will definitely help relieve most people’s stress and anxiety, and its an experience I’d recommend everyone tries at least once. I know that I’m going to try it again, and its reassuring to know that when I get overwhelmed with assignments and deadlines during semester, escaping to the solitude of the tank is only a 15 minute drive away… depending on the traffic.

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BUDGET FETISHISM Taking a taxi when I don’t need to is like dropping $20 on breakfast; I feel violated by my own decadence. Nothing depresses me more than the sight of a barista wielding a plate of organically sourced eggs. I might just be tightfisted because I don’t value my time very highly and prefer ninety minutes on a train to twenty in a taxi, but for me, personal budgeting is generally a process of absolute masochism, punctuated by periods of irrational largesse. (If you ever want to know a good place to buy books online, check my blocked websites list on Chrome.) However, since I’m not a government, extending my own frugality to the way Our Representatives spend on our behalf doesn’t ring true for me; rather, the furious sound of budget surplus fetishism might be the most worrying note floating in our collective political register.

The last Labor government lived and (partly) died by a promise to return the budget to the pre-GFC glut that Australia enjoyed during the Howard years. Despite the Rudd government going into debt to prevent the worst of the economic calamity abroad from reaching these shores, the very notion of Australia going into the red was cause to redefine ‘economic management’ into a pissing contest over the size of one’s rainy-day savings; check any headline from the last six years. There are a lot of decent reasons why a budget surplus can be considered a positive thing. It means the government has dosh for a rainy day, as well as security to borrow against and plan ahead with. It also suggests that future tax burdens can be reduced, and that the country is a safe bet investment and lending wise -- however, this isn’t such a problem when most deficit laden governments worldwide still have a triple-A credit rating, including Japan (public debt: 233% of GDP). Ultimately though, the economic cycle is just that – a state of variable flow -- and prosperity requires flexibility from everybody; not

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least the government. If you want to know where standing still gets you, ask the gold standard.

It’s generally taken for granted that a budget surplus means everyone is better off and that the government deserves a big pat on the back, but the numbers don’t lie. Last year, an IMF study suggested that the greatest periods of profligacy by a government in Australian history came during the Howard years, especially as the surplus ballooned in his tenure’s final years. The country also experienced a sharp growth in income inequality over this period. Surpluses have great symbolic power, but the fetishism that dominates the public debate over spending is a problem. In everything dwells ideology, and the chorus of busting the deficit isn’t simply about the fun stuff like economic pragmatism or intergenerational equity.

At best, a government is a perfectly altruistic service provider that allocates collected resources in the best possible way. The dominance of surplus fetishism masks a more pernicious shift in the public debate; that we aren’t citizens, but rather investors in a government that should be forecasting itself in the black and getting off our back otherwise.

The notion that we are not citizens with a collective responsibility to one another for our shared destiny – something which is oriented, shaped and enacted through the mechanism of the budget -- but rather generous benefactors is triply damaging. Moreover, our rights to the bounty of government (and our influence on where it goes) become contingent

on how much we’re tossing into the bucket. Democracy only thrives on accessibility, and twinned with the new hysteria over taxes, a new style of what government emerges; a body that doesn’t engage citizens with their collective responsibility through taxes, nor support and contribute towards improving their collective lot through spending.

This year’s Liberal budget shouldn’t have come as a shock, because it represents this, and as such is a complete redefinition of what government should do in Australia; it’s no longer a provider of welfare or education, nor is it a leveler of inequities, be they borne of circumstance or history. It’s worth noting that the estimated 2017-18 level of unemployment in the budget’s forward projections was exactly the same as the level it was when the budget was released, and set to rise for the years between. The economy – and each of us -- will suffer for the surplus, if it comes, and even if the government saves, we’ll be paying for it.

Picture by Alex Griffim

by Alex Griffin

#RIOTCLEANUP

by Samuel J. Cox The clash between police and young rioters depicted in Romain Gavras’ savage cinematic vision for JAY Z X KANYE WEST’s ‘No Church in the Wild’ pays tribute to a power struggle that has become all too familiar. It could very well be a depiction of the 2011 riots that saw the destruction of property, looting, and arson brutalising parts of London. Leading to the arrest of over 3, 000 people, upon many of whom the criminal justice system meted out hasty and harsh sentences, the carnage stretched from Battersea to Brixton, and Croydon to East Ham, before spreading into other cities, such as Birmingham and Manchester. Three years on, do we really understand anything more about the powerful social forces underlying these riots?

When we consider the causes, there is no convenient soundbite. While the riots were not race related, the proximate cause was the death of ‘well-known gangster’, Mark Duggan, an Afro-Caribbean man whom a police officer shot and killed on August 4 during an arrest. As in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, local concerns regarding the circumstances of the death were not addressed (indeed his death was only deemed lawful just this year), and a resulting protest in Tottenham organised

by Duggan’s friends and relatives soon turned ugly.

Spanning from August 6 to 11, there were many theories about the structural and cultural issues responsible. A posturing David Cameron blamed the riots on a ‘broken society’ in ‘moral collapse’ (as the Conservative Party’s campaign theme was ‘Broken Britain’), and rambling curmudgeon/historian David Starkey laughably singled out the ‘negative’ influence of ‘black gangster and rap culture’. I’m sure if one bothered to look, you’d even find someone who blamed it on violent video games.

If Jesse Pinkman taught us anything, it’s

that people don’t just break bad. The riot was an unfocused outpouring of anger by predominantly young men who were rejecting the grim future that was laid out for them. In 1968, Martin Luther King billed riots as ‘the language of the unheard.’ Many criticised those who lashed out and participated in the destruction of their already deprived neighbourhoods, yet this was indicative of how disconnected and isolated they felt from their community. Civil disorder of this scale is a consequence of a deeply divided society. The most convincing argument is that the Government’s austerity measures in response to the global economic crisis were too hard to swallow when contrasted with the massive expenditure for the 2012 Olympic Games. Cuts to services, high unemployment, and reduced education funding limited the ability of lower socio-economic areas to ever improve their circumstances.

The political Far Left have suggested that the capitalist system is to blame, and that the estimated £200 million worth of property damage incurred pales in comparison to the criminal behavior of those responsible for the Global Financial Crisis. Council plans to revitalise areas affected by the riots have been labeled ‘Band-Aid solutions’ that fail to address the deep inequality that is inherent in capitalism.

Billing the event as an eruption of class conflict, commentators of the Socialist Alternative ilk have been disappointed that it did not lead to the collapse of capitalism and liberal democracies the world-over, but undoubtedly remain optimistic.

The riots lacked a clear political message, but the violent clashes with police were an embodiment of persistent anger about the perceived absence of respect and neutrality in the Metropolitan Police Service.

In the aftermath, they were further criticised for having ‘abandoned the streets’, with a view to catching culprits afterwards using CCTV footage.

Alternately accused of brutality and laxity in recent years, it was argued that attempts to check and soften the Met (such as Sir William MacPherson’s 1990s report into institutional racism and the rebranding of the force as a ‘service’) have resulted in an unduly tentative approach to policing the streets. In an authoritarian turn, the Met have since demanded the government supply them with water cannons to help ensure the future rule of law. Now a political tool in the machinations surrounding the contention of Tory leadership, celebrity Mayor Boris Johnson expedited the purchase of the weapons as a sign of his support for the police before Home Secretary Theresa May (one of his rivals) had ruled on whether they could be used.

She later rejected the Met’s demand and emphasised the need to police with the ‘consent of communities’, rather than through militarisation.

June saw the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and with the recent protests sweeping across the Arabic and Western worlds (see the Turkish riots, the Arab Spring, and Occupy movement) it is worth pausing to reflect. The London riots are interesting because the distance of time gives us the opportunity to examine whether they ultimately signified anything. For a city with an ancient, complicated and beautiful history, these five days of chaos and fury really made no sound at all.

The political instability focused media attention and generated discussion on racism, poverty, and exclusion, but there has been limited long-term impact.

In looting white goods, the rioters undermined any cause by acting exactly as they complained the government treated them: as consumers. Yet when a society is largely based on consumption, it is unsurprising someone might seize this opportunity to get a new pair of Louis V’s. Personally, I just wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school.

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A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT: CRISIS POLITICS AND THE BUDGET DEFICIT

by Hamish Hobbs Budget Deficit: two of the most fearsome words in a politician’s dictionary. In the wake of the fall of the Labor government, a riotous tale has been woven by the Abbott government to try to shore up their political lead. It tells of the excesses of past Labor governments, racking up a near insurmountable debt. It poses a country on the brink of bankruptcy and a resplendent Joe Hockey riding in on a white horse named fiscal austerity to save the day.

Everyone understands what a budget deficit means on a basic level. It means that the government is spending more than it is gaining in revenue. Like dealing with an old lady addicted to the pokies, the solution seems intuitive: spend less and the deficit will go. But this approach conceals a whole raft of questions which should be being asked about Australia’s “budget crisis”.

First things first: a government cannot go bankrupt in the way an individual can. A government deficit is not like a household debt because, amongst other things, governments can print money.

A government running out of money is as ridiculous as Beyoncé running out of tunes. The idea of a ‘budget crisis’ is one which is being manipulated by the Abbott government; even the phrase is being used in a strange and vaguely inaccurate context. A budget crisis is usually used to refer to a situation like the USA where a stalemate in the legislature actually prevents the budget from being passed; a time when government services are on the brink of shutting down. What Abbott is referring to is actually just a run of the mill, everyday budget deficit.

This is not to say that a deficit doesn’t have some down sides. The shortfall of funds has to be filled from somewhere, and this can create some problems. If the government chooses to borrow money to finance the deficit, this effectively takes investment money away from the private sector. So government spending comes at the cost of some private sector production.

How you feel about this depends on how

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much you like the private and public sectors: Macbook vs Medicare. On the other hand, if the government simply creates more money to pay for its debt it provokes inflation, and high inflation tends to make the economy less productive.

Clearly both of these alternatives have potential problems, but what they do not constitute is a budget crisis. A budget crisis does not occur whenever a budget is in deficit. It doesn’t even occur when a budget is consistently in deficit.

Australia’s budget has been in deficit for 70 of the last 84 years, and few would argue we have been in a fiscal crisis all century. A crisis only occurs when the debt level is so great that people start to fear that the government will no longer be able to pay for its debts, sparking a crisis of confidence. This is patently not the case for Australia. Firstly there is the tried and tested fact that relative to our international peers, our debt is very small. Secondly there is the essential fact that our debt has increased rapidly since 2007 for a well understood and transitory reason: We had a financial crisis. Looking at Australia’s finances now and saying we’re in a budget crisis is like looking at someone panting for breath after they’ve run a marathon and telling them they really need to get into shape. Government debt always increases in periods of financial crisis. When a crisis hits, consumer spending and investment decline rapidly, causing decreased tax revenues, and the government has to step in both to protect the newly unemployed and to try to stimulate the economy. As the economy recovers, our budget will move back towards surplus.

Now, there is another problem in the Australian economy. The problem is a long term structural deficit which is looming as our mining boom comes to an end and our population ages. We’re running out of the rocks that we got. It is right to be taking precautions for this coming strain on our government’s finances. However, once again, this is a matter of timescales. If this is a crisis, it’s got to be one of the slowest crises in history. We need to act, but not

in the mad rush of stifled political debate that was this year’s budget.

What Abbott’s government is doing is manipulating this transitory increase in debt to conduct a fear based campaign to support its own policy agenda. A story was even floated that suggested Australia risked having its AAA credit rating revoked

by Standard and Poor’s because of its reckless spending. This was another blatant attempt to fear monger and justify the Liberal’s sweeping cuts. An employee of Standard and Poor’s had to go on to explain to numerous news outlets that, actually, Standard and Poor’s feels that “provided deficits remain relatively small and we see the government committed towards balance over the medium term and debt remains comfortably low, then there’s not immediate pressure on the rating”. He thinks our deficits are “relatively small” and “there’s no immediate pressure on the rating”. That sure sounds like a budget crisis to me.

What the Abbott government’s tale obscures is all of the personal political choices which Abbott and Hockey are making. Behind the mask of budget salvation, they are preaching a particular ideology, one of a reduced welfare state, a fossil fuel driven economy and a profit driven university system. The real goal for public discourse right now is to make sure we don’t let that be the end of the conversation. Cutting welfare is not the only approach to reducing deficits; we can also increase taxes, reduce corporate concessions or decrease military expenditure. Any budget process is always political, and never a technical necessity.

Every choice being made is one which bears discussion. In the end, as is always the case with economic rationalisations of political choice, ideology is being concealed within the numbers. There’s nothing wrong with ideology, but there is something very wrong with ‘crisis’ fear mongering which conceals and protects Tony’s ideological choices from any rational debate.

STUDENTS AND THE BUDGET: HOCKEY’S A DANGEROUS GAME TO PLAY

by Leah Roberts Even Kim Kardashian’s wedding couldn’t keep the youth of Australia distracted for long when the 2014 Australian budget was announced. By now we’ve all heard the waves of public outrage over broken election promises and harsh cuts thanks to the Facebook spam on our newsfeeds.

As university students we’ve also heard about the cuts to upper education and the increasing price of our degrees.

However many other policies that aren’t just about education will affect uni students, sneaking up on us like yet another gruesome Game of Thrones season finale.

Any university student is familiar with the struggle to make ends meet, especially when living out of home.

Relying on 69c Mi Goreng and as many free sausages sizzles as possible for daily sustenance is just a fact of student life.

Programs such as New Start and Youth Allowance give us the financial safety net that makes a commitment to 3 years studying full time as a student seem possible instead of the dumbest thing ever. The Abbott government’s planned reforms mean that now people will have to wait up to 6 months before being eligible for New Start payments. Aside from the obvious concerns, many also fear that this will lead to an increasing rate of youth homeless. To add insult to injury, under Abbot’s reforms individuals on Newstart would be required to “work for the dole” for 15-25 hours each week.

These Newstart reforms are combined with similarly harsh changes to Youth Allowance. Under the reforms, 22-24 year olds would only be entitled to Youth Allowance, which is a smaller payment than New Start, and may not even be eligible for even this payment because it is paid relative to your parent’s income.

The age of independence would be increased to 25 – meaning that even if you are living out of home and receiving no money from your parents, you can still be found ineligible because of your parent’s income.

The changes to the Medicare policy have already been well publicised. At some point we all need to go to the doctor and now each trip will now cost an extra $7, an amount equal to some student’s entire daily food budget.

Medicare rebates will also be frozen for 2 years which means that if the cost of an x-ray increases you will still receive the same rebate that you do now. So you had better just plan ahead and break your bones now people. These cuts aim to save money, but fail to factor in the cost to public health and the increased health system burden of delayed diagnoses

RELYING ON 69C MI GORENG AND AS MANY FREE SAUSAGES SIZZLES AS POSSIBLE FOR DAILY SUSTENANCE IS JUST A FACT OF STUDENT LIFE. Cuts to scientific organisations as well as the public service will also have severe long run impacts for student employment. Organisations affected include CSIRO, NCTO and Institute of Marine Science. Science students need to get ready for a local job competition battle reminiscent of our WA Derby, with a whole lot of shouting and a whole lot of disappointment.

For Arts students, a large proportion of employment opportunities are from the Public Service. In this sector 16,500

jobs are slated to be cut across 4 years while 230 programs and 70 different bodies are abolished. Even the hyperemployable medical students will be affected, with the removal of guaranteed public funding for public hospitals.

Combined with the deregulation of university fees, these cuts make a student’s economic outlook insecure and uncertain.

Perhaps the subtlest and most dangerous reform is the changing way student HECS debt will work. Instead of having to pay no real interest, meaning students don’t have to worry about an ever growing student debt, student debt will now accrue interest at a rate linked to the bond rate. This rate could be as high as 6%. To give some idea of the magnitude of this change, a $30 000 dollar debt left for 20 years without paying it off would turn into a $100 000 dollar debt under an interest rate of 6%. What’s more, this form of debt repayment harms the poorest students the most. The lower your income, the longer it takes you to pay of your debt and the more interest you have to pay.

For example an individual who takes a career break to raise a child will pay significantly more interest. This effect alone is expected to result in women paying on average 30% more interest on their degree. One of the most worrying things about the HECS reform is that if it goes through as Pyne’s office currently plans, it will affect everyone. It doesn’t matter if you enrolled before or after the changes take place, everyone is going to start paying interest in 2016.

Of course, we can hope that many of these reforms will be thrown back out of the senate. However, all in all, when our economic future comes down to a balance of power battle between our budgie smuggling overlord and the captain of the Titantic 2, it’s a scary time to be a student.

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SLACTIVISM OR SMACKTIVISIM?

by Jacques Ferroche The 2014 Liberal Government Budget definitely ruffled some feathers throughout all cadres of Australian society, the cuts impact the lives of students, pensioners, researchers, and the sick in order to evade an eminent “budget crisis”. These announcements prompted student protesters to take to the streets, raising their tattered flags in opposition to the cuts and organising several marches around the country. People wanted change and recognition that they disagreed with the government’s actions, but the question is, did they get it and what have the people up the top done about it?

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BEGAN WHEN THE UPPER CLASS REFUSED HIGHER TAXATION IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THE GOVERNMENT’S ECONOMY (SOUND FAMILIAR?) There are many theories about the development of social change; Hendrik Vollmer states that disruption and disaster lead to co-operation and coalition among people regardless of social standing, in other words everyone pulls together to combat the common enemy. Antonio Gramsci wrote that the capitalist society allows certain demands made by socialist groups and trade unions to be passed into the social sphere in order to maintain

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control, in a force-consent relationship.

Under this model, the capitalist leaders appear to be conceding control to their proletariat counterparts while actually just ensuring their continued authority by satiating society’s desire for improvement. For a little twist, Thomas Kuhn discusses paradigm shifts, a change in a set of basic assumptions (ie. the world is flat progressing to the world is round) in the realm of science. He states that a paradigm shift occurs when the current paradigm cannot explain a series of anomalous results and is thrown into a state of crisis, at this point the paradigm shifts. Once the paradigm shift takes place you cannot return to the previous paradigm.

Protests and strikes have been used by disgruntled and under-represented people for hundreds of years to try to bring about these changes, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Possibly the most famous historical protest is the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Outraged by British taxation without any governmental representation, the Sons of Liberty destroyed an entire shipment of tea in Boston Harbour. It may not seem like a big deal now, but this event sparked the American War of Independence, and by extension the French Revolution. This was effective because it made a statement; it was a rejection of their imperial overlord’s values and an assertion of a newly forming national identity. It also provoked a response, which is half way to producing change. The French Revolution began when the upper class refused higher taxation in order to improve the government’s economy (sound familiar?).

After months of deceit and back-door deals the royalty was overthrown and the tenets of liberty and equality for all men were instilled in the French constitution.

Now this form of protest was markedly more violent, considering the Reign of Terror followed this period, but at every point along its progression the King had no option other than to concede and approve the demands put forward by the

people, until the constitution arrived on his desk. This form of violent protest seems unthinkable today, when even just jostling and shouting down a government minister on university turf is presented as sheer barbarism.

So what does work today? According to Annabel Crabb students have fallen behind with the times and need to use more of that wonderful resource, the internet, to protest effectively. This critique seems valid on the surface, but underneath it becomes clear that it actually buys in to a deeply conservative mindset. Surely it says something about the effectiveness of the student protests that they sparked a feature length article by one Australia’s widely read columnists.

Without the ability to send in the military to quash the army of voices speaking out about its actions, this sort of response to protests is a soft power play. It produces an image of the student protester as a backwards hooligan shouting for the sake of shouting. You wouldn’t find an article in The Australian about a university student rationally expressing valid concerns about their future. The Hijacking of the Q&A program by student protesters, although downplayed by both sides of government, was an extremely effective means of protest. While only having a short amount of screen time they were broadcasted directly to an audience who was already reasonably politically aware, and the issue was discussed for weeks after it happened.

The government’s anti-protester agenda is obviously a form of self-preservation, but as the representatives of all Australians, shouldn’t they be listening what their electorate wants and passionately believes? To say that these current protests are being unheard is a mistake, but it’s difficult to tell yet whether the government is listening. It may simply be a case that compared to other voices, our voice is simply not loud enough. Judging from the current government’s response to climate change, however, I’d say we’re in for a paradigm shift.

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9/11, THE MOVIE: Destruction Porn on the Big Screen

by Matt Green

You’ve probably seen at least one of the seemingly endless Transformers film series, the latest of which has just hit the silver screen. Or maybe you caught the new Godzilla, or last year’s gritty (and just maybe, shitty?)

Superman reboot, Man of Steel? These movies all have something in common: destruction. Oh, and what destruction!

Skyscrapers are levelled, hapless civilians are engulfed in flaming debris, and it’s all just mindless fun, right? That is, until you think about it and what it really looks like. The truly astounding levels of destruction showcased in film through the last 15 years have an obvious historical reference point: September 11.

In many ways, 9/11 was an event designed for television. Looking back, it had everything: wanton levels of destruction, to one of the world’s most recognizable skylines, no less; rolling 24-hour news coverage; countless slowmotion replays, from every conceivable angle; empty conjecture from socalled ‘expert’ analysts, barking out their basest insecurities to no one in particular. A dejected President trying to make sense of it all, looking at the same time courageous and completely out of his depth; an almost hilariously low-rent video confession from the terrorists responsible; immediate calls for full-scale retaliation, and the rest is history. The sheer level of confusion and misinformation was something the news revelled in. In one infamous moment, Sky News anchor and journalistic nadir-on-legs Kay Burley exclaimed that, “If you’re just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack!” I remember it all pretty vividly (my family was living in Texas at the time), and I especially remember thinking: this is exactly like a fucking movie. But to be fair, that was the only image you could see on

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television that week (literally every channel except Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon dedicated full coverage to the attacks), and, at a time like that, what could you do but watch TV? People really underestimate the importance of TV screens in day-today life. A mate of mine recently made the point that they’re effectively the fireplace of the 21st Century: when you enter someone’s house, you look for the TV to get your bearings, and it’s intensely discomfiting when you find there isn’t one (you don’t know where to sit, which direction to position your body, etc.). TVs are put in the living room for a reason; they’re reassuring, warm, and importantly in times of crisis, familiar.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that 9/11 was perhaps the ultimate aweinspiring moment of televisual power, and that was the whole point: Osama was counting on us to watch and rewatch, each time taking in the message: “Look at the terror you have brought upon yourselves.” That we should think it was more like a movie than actual reality is a scary thought. An even scarier thought is that we might have wanted to see it happen. Baudrillard went so far as to suggest that, “In the end, it was ‘they’ who did it, but we who wished it.” To be clear, Baudrillard was implying that Westerners felt guilty that their prosperity was built upon a global pyramid scheme that placed them on top, and the developing world on the bottom, and so they secretly expected it to all come falling down.

The sheer scale and unpredictability of 9/11 provided, in Baudrillard’s words, a “shock of the real,” that could satisfy these purported feelings of guilt. It might be a bit of a stretch to claim that, deep down, we all wanted to see the Towers fall, but we kept watching, didn’t we? Why does anybody play Jenga, if not to see Jenga? (Funnily enough, jenga translates from Swahili, meaning “to build.”) In the same breath,

why do we gloss over the destruction prevalent in modern action films, without stopping to think of the probable body count?

Destruction porn refers to a specific aspect of action/superhero/disaster/ monster films, whereby any/all of the following tropes occur: buildings fall down, or are severely damaged; recognizable landmarks, tourist attractions, or heritage sites are obliterated in the fracas; swathes of intentionally faceless citizens, unrelated to the plot or the main characters, are killed in one fell swoop; an almost unnecessarily impressive array of explosions, VFX, and stunt work; the military, in all their bombastic swagger, are called in to restore peace, save the day, etc.; the military, in all their bombastic swagger, totally underestimate the severity of the challenge facing them, and fail; an unassuming hero, almost always a young white male, has to protect his family at all costs; inexplicably, he succeeds. Destruction porn is inherently formulaic, and forms a central component of the Hollywood summer blockbuster cycle. Big blockbusters are inevitably backed by big budgets, and are expected to recoup their outlay, and then some. For instance, Disney released John Carter, with a budget of $250 million, in 2012; although its box office run brought in $289 million, it was considered an almighty bomb, and heads rolled. Last month, Transformers: Age of Extinction, on a budget of $210 million, made $100 million on its opening weekend in the US alone. Since then, it’s become the all-time highest grossing film in China, and has already recouped its budget in that market alone (note: a significant portion of the film take place in China, while Paramount conducted an extensive marketing campaign there).

Similarly, this year’s Godzilla pulled in triple its budget, and Marvel has been

absolutely raking in the dough, with The Avengers grossing $1.5 billion alone.

Studios back these films expecting huge cash cows, and destruction plays a huge part in that expectation. Let’s face it, it’s not like they have much going for them in the screenwriting department.

Maybe that’s a little unfair. Destruction in film has a decent history of serving as allegory for more serious issues.

Take Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla, released in 1954, less than 10 years after the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its proudly anti-nuclear stance was reflected by the titular monster, an unintentional by-product of American weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean. Godzilla’s scaly, abnormal skin was intended to resemble the lesions and burns scars of bomb survivors.

The film also clearly referenced the plight of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, which was exposed to nuclear fallout from US weapons testing on Bikini Atoll, earlier in 1954. Interestingly, these references were excised when the film was translated for American audiences. As the Godzilla series grew in popularity, it was gradually dumbed down, camped up, and politically neutered; nobody wants to think about radiation poisoning while they’re eating microwave popcorn.

Nowadays, destruction in films has become an expected feature of the show, and regularly falls victim to two disturbing trends: fetishisation, and banalisation.

First up, fetishisation. I’m not talking about the stylisation of violence that you find in Tarantino movies, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I’m talking about the literal sexualisation of violence, especially in relation to these films’ depictions of women. I’m talking about Michael Bay. Bay, director of the Transformers series, along with The Island, Pearl Harbour, and Armageddon, is (without exaggeration) the most notoriously terrible filmmaker working

today. His films are laced with blatant product placement, racial stereotypes, staggering levels of violence and destruction, and drenched in casual sexual objectification of women.

Bay has openly admitted his main demographic as a director is teenage boys, so naturally the women in his films are always, without fail, scantily clad and utterly superficial.

The opening shot of the third film in the series, Dark of the Moon, was a lingering close-up of model-cumactress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s bum, slowly following her up the stairs.

Rosie H-W had replaced Megan Fox, who was similarly introduced in the second film, implausibly straddling a motorbike. In the latest instalment, Mark Wahlberg’s character regularly comments on the length of his daughter’s skirts, with the camera leering menacingly beneath her. Bay is so lacking in tact that he can’t even address his critics without reinforcing their criticisms. What’s more sinister, however, is that Bay consistently uses film to equate women with objects, in particular, cars. Whether it’s Fox in her dubious role as a Hooters-style mechanic, or one truly disturbing scene in Dark of the Moon where Rosie H-W is literally compared to the car she’s standing beside, you can clearly receive Bay’s message, which is: PHWOAR, EY? It should come as no surprise, then, that Michael Bay got his start directing ads for Victoria’s Secret.

That Bay has shifted to casting models, rather than actresses, in his films says it all.

Fetishisation of the military is another underlying trend of destruction porn.

Hollywood has long served as the propaganda wing of the militaryindustrial complex, and it makes plenty of sense. The general premise of these films is simple: the imminent threat of annihilation necessitates a reversion to primitive gender roles, with the alpha male on top, and women either

marginalized as damsels-in-distress or omitted altogether. The apocalypse is no place to waste time talking about our feelings, we have to do something!

Even this year’s Godzilla, which I enjoyed, wasn’t much more than an advertisement for military service, with the aim brainwashing young men through boot camp and propaganda (see: Full Metal Jacket).

Another important thing to realize is how boring these films are. There are no consequences, at least not anymore. Initially, after 9/11, Hollywood was anxious to avoid referencing the attacks; the first Spiderman film was pushed back a year, with a number of scenes that depicted the Twin Towers either edited or omitted entirely. This sensitivity to New York could still be picked up in The Avengers. Think about it, in that climactic final battle, how many civilians do you actually witness dying? Zero. On the other hand, less discreet films have emerged that do away with all subtlety and let loose. Where The Avengers tries to imply there is no body count, Man of Steel simply ignores it; Metropolis is practically levelled and no-one bats an eye! White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen were two destruction films released in quick succession, focusing on terrorist attacks on the Oval Office. In Godzilla, it’s San Francisco that takes the brunt of the damage.

Transformers has (so far) obliterated L.A. (twice), Chicago, and now, Beijing.

They can destroy as many places, incinerate as many people as they like, and it’ll just be sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That it has become so familiar to expect destruction hints at the underlying paranoia Baudrillard is on about. Really, it just makes me want to stay indoors. Maybe I should just catch a movie instead?

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FILM REVIEWS to repeat its already tired formula with this pretty dim affair.

22 Jump Street Directors: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller Starring: Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Ice Cube I caught the 2012 reboot of 21 Jump Street on a long haul flight back when it came out and I enjoyed it! From memory, it was semi-witty and generally pretty funny. It also smartly recognised its unmistakable purpose as a remake... to cash some fucking cheques (and to be fair, it worked in and didn’t feel that insulting to watch). Of course, the huge success of that reboot means a sequel was inevitable, and 22 Jump Street aims

This instalment sees the return of Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in their roles as undercover buddy cops, who are so forgettable I can’t even remember their names. Horatio... and... Rupert? ...yeeeeaah. Together they (again) go undercover as part of the Jump Street Program (the premise of the original show), this time as undercover ... wait for it ... not high school kids ... college kids!

Under the direction and supervision of sociopathic program director Ice Cube (can’t remember if he was in the first one, but he seemed rather inept to be a CIA director... or maybe that’s how they like it!), these two idiots bumble and stumble around picking up key clues on their way to discovering who the drug dealer is! On the way they join a sorority and get drunk! They make friends with stoner twins who annoyingly finish their sentences in some dumb-fuck ritualised way of communicating hipster-style. Oh yeah! Horatio and Rupert experience

however, is crotchety old men, a category that both Alan Partridge’s creator Steve Coogan and his best mate Rob Brydon most definitely fit. And so it is I went to see The Trip to Italy.

The Trip to Italy Director: Michael Winterbottom Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon I’ve never really ‘got’ Alan Partridge. Much to my dismay, he seems to have fallen back into favour recently with the release of his feature film Alpha Papa (ew) and is suddenly the height of popular sentiment again. I always thought maybe it’s because I’m not British, or just a few years too young, but the madcap shenanigans of the fictional chat show host just never managed to get me going. What I can’t say no to,

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It’s a sequel to the 2010 feature The Trip, and like the original, edited from its original format as a BBC TV series. Surprisingly, despite being entirely lifted from thirtyminute episodes, both films work beautifully as full-length features. The action is fluid and jokes roll off both Brydon and Coogan’s tongues effortlessly. The pair’s friendship and mastery of their craft means seemingly improvised scenes land so perfectly it beggars belief. There are moments of laughout-loud funny.

The film follows Brydon and Coogan playing fictionalized versions of themselves travelling around Italy to review restaurants. Along the way, they become preoccupied with the idea of following in the footsteps of the great romantic poets, visiting the Italian homes of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Vistas of

a little bit of homoerotic tension, have a few LOLs, before eventually (somehow) stumbling upon the real villains of the piece, the Russians! All I know is that if an operation like this went down in the real world, that department would be shut the fuuuck down.

Here’s the main problem with this film and the central bit of decent criticism I can offer: It’s just plainly clear that everyone involved was either pressured into making this sequel or was offered a huge wad of cash and attempted to cover this up by making it clear throughout the film how shit sequel films normally are. There are references all over the place. For example, the credits sequence plays on this gag for a solid 3 minutes with movie posters and clips of the next 30 Jump sequels. It just feels like any decent material was used in the first one and this was the inevitable money grabber. It’ll probably make a goddamn fortune.

2/5 Callum Green

the coastline off Santorini and back streets in Rome are so visually arresting, it’s hard not to be enraptured. This is probably for the best, as in the film’s quietest moments there is a dark humour that is so subtle, it could go unnoticed.

In suitably romantic terms, the whole film is tinged with an intense melancholy as the friends contemplate success, failure, family, ageing and ambition. I was relieved to find that the sequel is not quite as dark as the first Trip, though I still gasped more than once.

My one big issue with The Trip to Italy is the way it dealt with Coogan and Brydon’s relationships with women. Much like in the original, affairs are on the menu, and the men do spend considerable time ogling women. In one scene, the pair lament that young women now see them as ‘uncles’, rather than sexual candidates. I was left wondering why women over 40 were off the table. I blame Partridge.

4/5 Lucy Ballantyne

dirty Guy Pearce) is a lone nomad, stopping for a drink at an incredibly dingy ‘pub’ in the middle of a deserted outback town. When a trio of outlaws fleeing a violent crime scene steals his car, he goes about getting it back, whatever the cost. We find out quickly that the there is a whole lot of personal value in that Holden Commodore for Eric.

The Rover Director: David Michôd Starring: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy David Michôd writes and directs in this postapocalyptic flick set in the Australian outback.

The Rover opens in a dystopian outback setting “ten years after the Collapse”. What exactly this entailed is left mostly ambiguous, with some references alluding to an economic disaster. Regardless, it appears that society has effectively crumbled and is now ruled by outlaws, a mysterious paramilitary police force, and the US dollar.

Eric (played by a pretty much unrecognizably

Under the Skin Director: Jonathan Glazer Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Adam Pearson Jonathan Glazer has largely made his name directing innovative, avant-garde music videos for the likes of Radiohead, Massive Attack and Jamiroquai (to pick a couple: “Virtual Insanity” is mind boggling, and “Street Spirit” might just be my all-time favourite). His latest feature film, Under the Skin, is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 science-fiction novel, and was selected to open Perth’s Revelation Film Festival this year. It’s beguiling, bizarre, and at times incredibly upsetting. It’s also (just quietly) the best film of the year. In it, Scarlett

His hunt for the thieves leads the protagonist through some beautifully shot scenes of desolate country towns and desert. When he encounters an abandoned member of the gang, Rey (Robert Pattinson), Eric finds a way retrieve his car, befriending and manipulating Rey. The unlikely duo encounters some serious complications on the road before coming face to face with the people who have wronged them.

den/child brothel and a short-tempered, (sorry) caravan-dwelling, arms-dealing dwarf give the film a consistent otherworldly feel.

Michôd does a decent job of creating a modern Western. All the themes are there: the wilderness, lawlessness, the lone hero who roams the countryside, hunting down criminals for their unforgiveable crimes. However, the film isn’t tired in this respect, providing more grit and violence than you’d expect. The Rover is slow going, and at times not particularly compelling. Pattinson is a proficient actor, if not a little over the top at times, but his rendition of a certain Keri Hilson song reminds us he is a far better actor than singer. At times, there are half-hearted efforts to delve into the complexity of the ‘rover’, Eric, but this was superficial, and the focus was clearly on his actions.

The movie is a series of localized events that are used to either demonstrate just how bizarre the world is, or just how ruthless the protagonist is. Despite the sense of desolation reinforced throughout, the quality of the film is in the interactions between Pearce’s character and those he meets. Depictions of bizarre social groups and settings, including an opium

The Rover is an enjoyable film, and worth watching through to the end, but is best enjoyed in the cinema, on the big screen.

Johansson plays an alien, who has taken the form of a beautiful young woman, scouring the streets of Glasgow in a rusty old van, hunting for young men to seduce and eventually devour. Once they get back to her flat/spaceship, she lures them into a pit of black ooze, never to be seen again. Talk about a sexual predator.

not be more of a fish out of water. Scarlett’s alien makes a point of avoiding large crowds; she’s much more comfortable alone, where no one can see her.

However, it would be a little simplistic to label the film a mere case study in modern celebrity; what it’s really about is empathy. With each encounter, the alien learns a little bit more about the world around her, and begins to question the purpose of her (ambiguous) mission. This culminates in a poignant sequence where she picks up a man with facial neurofibromatosis, a condition causing tumours to grow uncontrollably on his face. Her interaction with the man (played by Adam Pearson, a non-actor with the condition, cast specifically for the role), has enormous bearing on the course of the film, causing her to flee to the Scottish countryside, where things take an even more unexpected turn for the weird.

With a central role in Spike Jonze’s Her, and the lead in Luc Besson’s upcoming Lucy, 2014 is the Year of Scarlett; and here, her performance carries the film. Interestingly, Johansson really did drive around Glasgow in a van picking up unwitting strangers; the majority of the men she picks up are random passers-by, captured through hidden cameras. Johansson pulls up, rolls down the window, and turns on the charm, whether it’s asking for directions, offering them a lift home, or bluntly flirting from the get-go. Because it’s genuine, at first it comes across as sort of funny and charming. That is, until you find out what eventually happens to the poor devils... At that particular moment, several of the audience members (myself included) gasped audibly.

The decision to cast Johansson, one of the most recognizable women in the world (wearing a wig), and to transplant her into the drudgery of urban Scotland is surely deliberate. She could

3/5 Kieran Rayney

Under the Skin is a sci-fi flick steeped in the traditions of the genre, with obvious debts to the likes of Alien and Kubrick’s 2001. Throw into the mix breathtaking cinematography, and a deeply unsettling score by Mica Levi, and the result is a film that feels genuinely frightening, otherworldly, and above all, subversively new.

5/5 Matthew Green

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I WOULD WALK 500 MILES

by Bridget Rumball Of all the countries in the world, Scotland is perhaps one of the most susceptible to the infamous ‘one hit wonder.’ It has produced some of the most memorable karaoke-worthy hits in living memory, with notable examples being Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), Sandi Thom’s I Wish I Was A Punkrocker and (of course) The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles). These songs managed to reach #1 chart positions in multiple countries including Australia, and are perpetuated throughout popular culture, TV and the screen- so much so that they become the only Scottish songs that any international listener distinctively knows, defining the country’s music as being poorer in quality than it is. From independent groups to UKacclaimed rock bands, new Scottish sounds are being trapped by the musical identity that previous national one hit wonders have created- preventing them from becoming successful in the international circuit.

This so-called ‘500 Miles Effect’ has been occurring in Scotland for years, stunting the worldwide growth of more talented artists.

For alternative group Primal Scream, it took two albums before Screamadelica made the international spotlight- and even still, only managing to chart for a week on the UK Mainstream Rock charts, despite later being named one of the best albums of the 1990s by the UK publication NME. Likewise, popular indie outfit Mogwai have continued to receive praise within the scope of Scotland and the UK, with their highest charting album Happy Songs for Happy People reaching a peak of #23 on the UK charts. However, it seems that this success doesn’t translate trans-continentally, with the critically named ‘Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock’ barely scratching at #182 on the US Billboard 200. Lead singer Stuart Braithwaite goes as far to say that ‘the music scene in Scotland is fiercely independent, very strong and varied, [but lacking in] something to give the whole country a platform to market itself and its culture internationally.’ This something

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is credibility- being able to escape the cultural stereotype of ‘one hit wonders’ that bands such as The Proclaimers have created, and being able to redefine Scotland’s sound as something to be proud of.

However, there is clear evidence that the 500 Miles Effect has continued throughout Scotland’s contemporary music community.

One particular example is Frightened Rabbit, a steadily growing indie rock band whose recent album Pedestrian Verse was a critical and commercial success- within the UK. Internationally, the group have been unable to gain huge album sales or lock in any large gigs, despite performing on American TV and playing smaller festivals such as Laneway and Splendour in the past. Lead singer Scott Hutchison expressed a similar sentiment to late 90’s group Belle and Sebastian, in that ‘the folks who book festivals in Australia really don’t like us, as nobody wants to put us on’. Similarly, independent Scottish label Comets and Cartwheels has been an integral part of a brewing alternative scene, with little external recognition. Signed bands such as There Will Be Fireworks are incredibly talented, write and produce all of their own work and push boundaries of their genre, even having their recent album The Dark, Dark Bright heralded as ‘the album that all bands of Scottish ilk have been trying to make’. Yet Fireworks, along with a host of other small, independent groups, consistently fail to be signed to a major UK record label, let alone perform and distribute their music internationally.

It is worth mentioning that any 500 Miles Effect is not simply a genre-specific problem, where niche-y indie/alternative bands such as Frightened Rabbit and There Will Be Fireworks are prevented from defining themselves and making it big outside of Scotland and the UK. Every genre imaginable is accountable under the Scottish stereotype, regardless of how well produced or inventive their music is.

Take Biffy Clyro- a band nominated for 17 prestigious British music awards and

headliners of major UK festivals such as Reading & Leeds, with almost every released single making the UK Singles Chart (the highest being Mountains at #5 in 2008). The three piece even managed to sell out a 20,000 capacity concert at O2 Arena- however, outside of the comfort of Britain, Biffy has only experienced three charting singles worldwide, and the band is (as of yet) unable to sell out Perth’s 2,000 capacity Metro City later this year. How does a well-defined Scottish rock band move from playing an entire stadium of fans in the UK, to playing to a half-hearted crowd everywhere else in the world? The 500 Miles Effect is to blame yet again, with the international sector refusing to notice genuine, up-and-coming Scottish bands in lieu of another, Proclaimers-style one hit wonder emerging.

Naturally, there have been some exceptions to the rule in terms of internationally-reaching Scottish groups.

The world’s highest paid DJ of 2013, Calvin Harris, was born in in Dumfries, and Franz Ferdinand were formed in Glasgow. However, these successful acts have managed to associate themselves with other music scenes, as opposed to redefining the Scottish stereotype.

Critics have bracketed Franz Ferdinand alongside England’s Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs, whereas Calvin Harris mostly disguises his accent behind wellrenowned singers like Rihanna and Ellie Goulding. Maybe if these artists stuck with their roots rather than becoming more nationally ambiguous, they could help prove to the world that Scottish music is defined by more than what preceded it.

Recently, there’s been a resurgence in distinctively Scottish bands redefining their nation’s sound. Although only being formed in 2011, synthesised electropop outfit Chvurches are a prime example of how bands can grasp hold of their national identity and make it successful. Led by the pint-sized Lauren

so your band will be more acceptable on radio.’ This unwillingness to hide such a strong national identity has helped somewhat in projecting Scotland back onto the global music radar, by proving that Scotland can output better quality tunes than what popular culture and doomed ‘one hit wonders’ have assigned them.

Despite this headway that bands such as Chvurches are making, Scotland still has far to go in terms of defining its own industry. Long term artists such as Paolo

Nutini and Belle and Sebastian continue to have moderately sustained success on global charts, whereas smaller groups, like Twin Atlantic, The Twilight Sad and There Will Be Jetpacks fail to break free from underneath the glass ceiling of stereotype that previous cheesy one hit wonders have created. For the benefit of both Scottish and international communities alike, we can only hope that people begin to acknowledge the nation’s new musical identity- whether it takes 500 miles, or another 500 more to achieve.

Picture by Holly Jian

Mayberry, the group have managed to commandeer regular airplay slots on most commercial international radio stations with hits such as ‘Recover’, ‘Gun’ and ‘The Mother We Share’. Like most of their kind, the band were not initially spotted amongst the woodwork of struggling Scottish bands- however, the ability of Mayberry to utilise the bands ‘Scottishness’ ensured a record deal with American label Glassnote, and the release of their first EP. She notes herself that ‘singing in your accent should be a badge of honour- I don’t think it’s something you have to bury

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SOUND / FURY MUSIC REVIEWS The Powers That B pt. 1, niggas on the moon.

Death Grips, Self-Released, Free Download The ever surprising Californian experimental hip hop group has come out of nowhere once again with niggas on the moon, an album that features Icelandic electro-queen Björk on all 8 tracks. This release is the first half of the double album The Powers That B, with the second half jenny death expected to arrive later in 2014.

Like previous releases this album combines the outsider electro of Flatlander with the abrasive, deranged rhymes of MC Ride. However, on this release the third member of the band, drummer Zach Hill, seems have been replaced largely by hyper-fast, glitchy samples. His absence is sorely missed as I feel his drumming was the main thing tying the band to more conventional song-writing, and without him this album has a tendency to devolve into a weird mess of samples.

Björk is also less present than I would have expected, but I suppose I should never have expected a collaboration between these two artists to have resulted in anything resembling a conventional hook’n’verses vocalist/ MC setup. Instead Björk’s presence here exists mostly in vocal samples, and provides most of the melody for these tracks.

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The highlight track for me here is probably ‘Say Hey Kid’, where Ride tones down his vocals to calmer, comparatively over-articulated level that lends the track an almost satirical bent. The fragmented beats take a backseat here as Ride delivers a surreal critique of white middle class life: “happy’s perfect/perfect’s tame/tame and cashmere go together”.

I feel that, while the constitutive elements of this album, particularly Björk’s contributions, are solid, the whole thing suffers from its lack of structure.

The sampling feels a little directionless and random, with not much in the way of clear melodies or song structures, and Ride’s rhymes, apart from the aforementioned track, feel like they lack focus. Death Grips have just delved too far into the world of weirdo electronica for me to follow, and more than anything this just made me want to go back and listen to The Money Store (2012) again.

6/10 Hugh Manning While 1 > 2 Deadmau5 Mau5trap

far? Possibly.

Is this the best music Deadmau5 has made so

while (1<2) is potentially Deadmau5’s most accessible album to date. Influences from Trent Reznor’s NiN minimalist industrial sound can be heard quite prominently on this album, offering a new twist to both Nine Inch Nails fans and Deadmau5 fans. A newcomer to deadmau5 may be instantly swept away with this harmonic and suspenseful album. Devoted fans of deadmau5 may find some of these tracks quite familiar as they held a spot on this producers Soundcloud before being taken down early 2014 and remastered into a magical part of the whole 1<2’

experience. When I first listened to this album I gathered my highest echelon of friends and sat together in a dark room watching the visualizer spin and twist in a beautiful dance oscillating and ambulating to the music. I can attest to this album as being quite an experience that should not be passed up if given the chance. Whether you are studying by yourself in the library watching the ducks hobble around or driving to your nearest drug house to pick up a quart, while (1<2) is the music of journey and retrospection.

4.5/5 Jaime Slays-Dragons Ultraviolence Lana Del Rey Interscope Leaving aside the fascinating and important questions about feminism, appropriation, and masochism that surround Lana Del Rey, there’s still a pretty big fly in the ointment; to listen to a LDR record is to get less than half the idea. Ever since the advent of MTV, a lot of people have been excited about the idea of the video album, and while Beyoncé last year fully committed to the concept, Ultraviolence is that rare artpop album where the music is almost fully dependent on the world of imagery constructed around it – and almost irrelevant without them.

Watching the video for “West Coast” is to fall into an unreality so irresistible it’s hard to find a way out. Yet, without the visuals, the song pales, and the rest of Ultraviolence only ever skims across the glossy, duochrome surface of LDR’s fathomlessly shallow ocean.

Sure, the songs here are stronger than on Born to Die, but this record is buying a book of postcards instead of watching the film, forgoing depth for bloated, empty gestures at an ubiquity she can’t reach without her visual presence.

Her pout and her top-down cabriolet hover ominously over these songs,

communicating what she can’t. Truly, she’s one of the most gifted auteurs this century has thrown up so far, but don’t confuse that with great record-making.

If pop music is the signifier trumping the song, so be it; as Nietzsche might have said: stare long enough into the abyss, and LDR will whisper back.

2.5/5 Alex Griffin The Hunting Party Linkin Park Warner Bros I’ll say from the outset that I really wanted to be positive about this album. Linkin Park were hands-down my favourite band from ages 9 through to 13, and finding even one thing I still like about this band may have validated my then musical taste. Describing the rationale behind Linkin Park’s latest release, The Hunting Party, co-vocalist Mike Shinoda had this to say: “ I wanted to hear this certain kind of music and I couldn’t find it,”. He really shouldn’t have bothered looking, because on closer inspection, the sound in his head turned out to be remarkably bland and produced beyond all recognition. The opening track “Keys to the Kingdom” really sets the tone for this album, combining dime-a-dozen overdriven guitar leads and Chester Bennington’s over-performed vocals emphatically delivering some grating lyrical clangers. There’s one more thing: auto-tuned chorus lines that recur annoyingly often throughout The Hunting Party’s12 tracks. Hateful. But even auto-tune isn’t enough to topple this Nu-Metal colossus that somehow managed to survive long after many of its stablemates were mercifully put out to the pasture. It is the incongruity between Shinoda’s pursuit of a more punk/nu-metal sound and Bennington’s pop vocal and synth melodies that

are the most significant downfall of this release. This combined with a lack of any solid lyrical content make the album feel by the numbers and I can’t really say there’s much of an experience to be had with listening to The Hunting Party in its entirety. If there’s one pearl we can find within this thematically inconsistent sea of mucus, it’s Rob Bourdon’s drumming performance which manages to hold together the two competing stylistic directions, with some often interesting uses of time signatures and tones. If I were feeling generous, I would also say that the track “Drawbar” featuring Tom Morello is a good interlude, amidst otherwise unremarkable guest features that punctuate The Hunting Party. If nothing else, this album will be broadly regarded on the whole as a return to form for Linkin Park; a stylistic nod to the successes of Hybrid Theory and Meteora that have now been with us for more than a decade. But if you’re like me, and are looking to salvage something from your childhood love for this band, The Hunting Party will offer you little comfort in the same way that saying “At least it’s better than their previous three” doesn’t redeem Linkin Park’s efforts.

0.5/5 Wills Pritchard Lazaretto Jack White Columbia Inspired by a collection of poems, songs and short stories written by a nineteen year old Jack White, Lazaretto, the second solo offering from the Nashville based owner of Third Man Records has something for fans old and new. A combination of the distinctly piercing shrieks of White’s guitar combined with the blues and roots influences featured heavily in his

first solo album, the album further showcases the man’s innate talent for capturing conflicting emotions that play on a recurring theme; this time, coming to terms with isolation, both voluntary and not.

Evident in the title track (lazaretto being the Italian term for a lepers’ hospital), a heaving ensemble of drum, bass, distortion and strings, White explores the journey of the lone-wolf, a man learning to live with his self-inflicted solitary lifestyle, both loathing and desperately trying to preserve it.

Somewhat shying away from the monster riffs that defined his early sound with The White Stripes (and side projects The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs), tracks like “High Ball Stepper” and “That Black Bag Liquorice” tease older fans with tension building progressions laced with a sort of slicked-back coolness from a forgotten era, a reflection of the vintage individualism White exudes in person.

Perhaps a comparatively disappointing step away from his older work, Lazaretto contains enough originality, intrigue and plain weirdness to stand up by itself. A unique, self-indulgent exploration of blues, roots and rock influences, White is ever unafraid to pursue his own sound. And while it may not be the sound that first captured early fans his music, it’s hard to argue with an artist who produces music as varied and starkly unique as Jack White.

3.5/5 Shaughn McCagh

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BOOK REVIEWS Foreign Soil Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is fairly new to the Australian writer’s scene, but she is fast making a name for herself. In Foreign Soil, Clarke delivers an anthology of short fiction that largely centres around groups of people who live on the fringes of Western society. Tales of migrants and racial and sexual minorities explore issues that solicit discomfort in the reader, and which – parallel to reality – often do not have a happy ending.

I read Foreign Soil in short bursts, one story at a time. I did this because while the narratives were incredibly engaging, they also simply made me sad. Clarke’s use of language is unpretentious but sophisticated, and her characters beg to be understood not just within the confines of the fictional worlds in which they are ostracised, but by the reader as well.

Perhaps my favourite story is the one that appears first in the anthology: David. It cuts between suburban Melbourne, where a second generation Sudanese teenager takes her new bicycle home, and the Janjaweed massacre in Darfur. Using the two-wheeler as a clever motif to draw a connection between contexts which we engage with every day, and those which we normally only see on the seven o’clock news, Clarke reels the reader in from the beginning. She had me crying by page 15.

Foreign Soil feels like the kind of book that we should all read. And yet, it never appears too preachy in its exploration of difficult themes, and the language is fluid enough to be appreciated by a wide audience.

Best bit: Feelings of empathy.

Worst bit: Feelings of guilt – but perhaps this could be a best bit too...

Ned Beauman is a little scary; he’s from ‘85 and has already had two books which won or were listed for some solid awards: Boxer Beetle and The Teleportation Accident. I’ve read the latter and it was pretty solid, and Glow is no disappointment. To compare, Glow has a far tighter plot and more of an agenda, compared to TTA’s fun, pouty meanderings. I’m loathe to degrade his previous work by conceptualising Beauman as maturing as an author, though some might. I’d simply say that his fun and sharp style persists through his works that explore different themes.

Going in, I could sense I was the target audience of Glow; drugs, clubs, London youth, abductions, and a mysterious corporate sheen piqued my interest, and kept me churning through pages. The style resembles a caffeinated, and articulate, though nonpsychedelic William Gibson. While it contained mild elements of science fiction, little suspension of disbelief was required to follow the plot (though some dialogue bordered on the thoroughly enjoyable intelligent but fanciful style).

Glow didn’t do much discussion of important questions in my mind despite exploration of immigration, third world labour, and corporate crime, but did keep these geopolitical issues in the reader’s view throughout the book; it’s no philosophical novel but it does leave you reminded of the godawful shit that goes on overseas to make the products we love. In this way, it manages to be both engaging to a casual reader while still containing social commentary that may persist as niggling doubts of global and corporate politics. It does this without framing the issue as a black-and-white issue of glorifying revolutionary thought and decrying the present; shades of grey are preserved. If Beauman could be said to be advocating any specific position rather than remaining critical, it is that human lives are more important than ideology.

Elisa Thompson is choosing which of these stories she’d like her students to study

Best bit: Drinking after sex to try to inhibit pair bonding Worst bit: The alleged plausibility of establishing a narco-state

4/5

Liam Dixon is trying to read Pynchon, pity him 4/5

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Midnight Crossroad Charlaine Harris

Glow Ned Beauman

From the author of True Blood comes the next entry in the interlinked world of monsters and men Charlaine Harris is famous for: Midnight Crossroad. I approached this book truly ready to be pleasantly surprised. I really did - it had everything I liked and notably lacked the one thing Charlaine Harris is famous for, which I severely dislike in fiction: vampires.

Everything was going along fine. The plot is a bit tedious and full of a few too many loaded adjectives, but it at least had some interesting elements that I find fascinating: small incestuous towns, Americans, suspicious pawn shops, and decades-long racial feuds. Really, I couldn’t believe the same author that brought us the drawling, daisy-duke toting, vampire lovin’ Sookie Stackhouse actually brought us an interesting small town. And then I realized that everyone in this town was ‘not as they seemed’. And then I realized this book was heading downhill, fast.

Cue the arrival of the pawnshop employee “who only comes out at nigh”’ and is suspiciously pale (I wonder who he could be!), the witch, the reverend with a slightly different bible, mysterious deaths and a particularly skilled nail technician. Admittedly, I did suspect this tacky eventuality when the ‘fake’ psychic suddenly became very real, but I didn’t expect it would just dissolve to a highly sexed-up version of Mystery Inc. At least Scooby was loveable. I’m not feeling any love for Charlaine Harris. I would suggest this only to young persons with hidden vampire fetishes who just don’t know it yet.

Best bit: Nail technicians in small towns Worst bit: Mentally inserting bad southern accents Caz Stafford is going home in the Mystery Machine.

2/5

The Headmaster’s Wife Thomas Christopher Greene The Headmaster’s Wife was not what I expected. I’m not exactly new to the genre of teacher/ student relationships, and yet this novel still surprised me. At first glance, it seems pretty standard; Arthur Winthrop is the headmaster of an elite boarding school in Vermont, as his father was, and his father before him. He is comfortable in a position of authority that he has always intended to occupy. But Arthur’s marriage is ailing and he is drinking too much, and when a pretty new scholarship student catches his eye an illicit affair begins.

Jump to the future, and Arthur is found wandering naked in a snow-covered park – and this is not the most surprising element of the plot. I knew there was a twist coming (the cover gave that away), but I was not prepared for what occurred. Colour me impressed.

While Greene’s writing style is sometimes clunky – with a conversational tone alongside flowery language and a protagonist of largely upstanding character – this was not enough to detract from a stellar story line. Despite my extensive experience with this genre, I did not once feel like I was revisiting the corny paperbacks of my youth.

Aside from the plot, the real star of this novel is the characterisation. While I empathised with Arthur, his vices were just severe enough to make me feel uncomfortable for siding with him. Similarly, I found his love interest Betsy refreshingly commanding for a young, female student, but emotionally wrought enough for her character to remain believable.

The Headmaster’s Wife is an engrossing mix of intriguing characters, surprising plot developments and an interesting writing style. Well worth a read.

Best bit: A twist that just kept giving.

Worst bit: Some awkward turns of phrase that have you re-reading sentences for clarity.

Top Secret 21 Janet Evanovich

The Paris Review, Ed. 208 Each new Paris Review is pretty much a quarterly Christmas for anyone who knows their Barth from their Barthes from their Bartheleme(s), and part of the reason why it’s still an institution 62 years after kicking off is the brute fact that it never, ever sucks. No. 208 is no exception. In the fiction section, Zadie Smith zeroes in on the decline of a formerly-quote-unquote-outrageous NYC dancer through the lens of a broken corset, while Ben Lerner relates the story of two washed-up Iraq vets being hung out to freeze in Vermont with the grim, taut patience of an undertaker. One imagines Lerner pouring himself a stiff drink after every paragraph, which is probably a good suggestion for readers too. Aside from some superb poetry from John Ashbery and Frederick Seidel, there’s also a selection of never seen before photographs from the prematurely gone prodigy Francesca Goodman. Rounding things off is an unfinished interview with the curmudgeonly and sadly deceased Evan Connell, a man of the best and least words possible; he makes Hemingway read like a broken jukebox. The only question Connell gets interested in is one that gives him an opportunity to gripe over how George Plimpton (the founding editor of the PR) tried to rip him off at lunch one time about eight hundred years ago. The conversation is accompanied by a decades old picture of Connell leering intensely at his thengirlfriend’s chest in a seedy San Franciscan apartment. How not to love this?

Best bit: Frederick Seidel describing the Tea Party as ‘a rat being digested by a mouse’ Worst bit: yo inside back cover- selling Rag and Bone jeans using an Ezra Pound lookalike is at least three kinds of weird Alex Griffin is just on the phone to Plimpton sorry 5/5

Top Secret 21, the next book in the Stephanie Plum series

by Janet Evanovich, is nothing top secret at all. Having revisited this series after a long, long pause I understand why it’s still loved by tweens everywhere. It’s just the same plot stretched out in to yet another bar.

Stephanie is a bounty hunter, people underestimate her, and she accidentally gets caught up in the action and swoons between two male archetypes while varying Italian clichés go on in the background.

Admittedly there are some advances in the characters of these people, and things get impossibly even more strained in Stephanie’s love triangle. There is also some odd small-crime going on, which despite myself I found interesting and kind of funny. It’s like Law and Order in suburbia, which can be both comforting and banal. If you like that kind of thing enough to read twenty one books with the same plot.

If you’re a keen Evanovich reader you will notice a departure from her usual style of writing; she uses an elevated vocabulary and slightly more complex sentence structure, which I find quite satisfying.

Even if it doesn’t quite gel well with the style of writing, it gives the illusion that maybe Stephanie has grown up a little.

In my view this is an attempt to keep up with the original readership as they age.

Frankly, if you’re reading a Stephanie Plum book you’re not looking for something sophisticated, you’re looking for pot roasts at your nonnas house and a wacky romantic caper to turn your mind to mush.

Best bit: Realizing that Stephanie Plum really hasn’t changed Worst bit: Realizing you have.

Caz Stafford is too old for this 1.5/5

Elisa Thompson is an uncomfortable fan of this genre.

3.5/5

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GENRE INVESTIGATION REPORT: THE SOUTHERN-GOTHIC KILLINGS

by Liam Dixon We liked to think we had a nice, quiet town, on the edge of the swamplands.

Overgrown, a little run-down, sure; but with an honest, genteel core. A few people disappear, - well, kids run away, you know? These things happen. They probably just wanted a better life in the big cities up North where the prospects are better, or, y’know, maybe the ‘gators got them. Happens now and then.

BLOOD ON THE BAYOU But they didn’t stop; corpses started to appear, pale and drained. True Blood started to appear on supermarket shelves, and The Walking Dead began to appear on our streets. Were these isolated incidents of copycat behaviour on the vampire and zombie sightings we’ve seen up North in the past decades? We thought so. We thought wrong. Our quiet town became host to a hoodoo Coven in an American Horror Story, and - we don’t know if it’s related but meth dealers are Breaking Bad down in New Mexico and on our street corners.

Our cops thought they were Justified in Rectifying the situation, but they couldn’t stem the flow. They looked at the common elements of the crimes: The South, Drugs, ambiguous supernatural incidents, race relations, swamps, moonshine, weird families, violence and decay. We connected the dots and it was clear; the Southern Gothic had begun its killing spree. We had to release our True Detectives.

A GROTESQUE LINEAGE We searched deep in our archives. There were some cold cases from the early 1900s; water damaged but legible. Then we knew; this had happened before after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the traditional power structures and economy in the American South built on slave plantations was struck down, and what remained of those aristocratic families festered in the shadows, feeding

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on what it could glean from racism and decay.

Detectives William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor were on the scene and documented this progress, but could do nothing to stem the tide of The Sound and The Fury of the corpse of the genteel southern patriarch As I(t) Lay Dying. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and while they respectively did their best efforts, they could not stop the rot. Only as racism was fought and the American South developed a new economy, did the Southern Gothic slip away. The case went cold in absence of new evidence, and it got filed away and forgotten except as a fever dream in the stream of consciousness of literature.

THEY PROBABLY JUST WANTED A BETTER LIFE IN THE BIG CITIES UP NORTH WHERE THE PROSPECTS ARE BETTER, OR, Y’KNOW, MAYBE THE ‘GATORS GOT THEM. THE MAD CROSSING Our detectives have uncovered new evidence; the Southern Gothic never died - it went into hiding. Commissioner Cormac McCarthy found some circumstantial evidence of its passing

by The Orchard Keeper and into The Outer Dark. But this Child of God evaded capture, and chasing it on All The Pretty Horses he could find, and soon found himself past the Blood Meridian and into a place that was No Country for Old Men. He searched and found The Road back was cut off; the Southern-Gothic had doubled back, crossed the border from novels, dived into the Mississippi and swam into the main stream of media. We found out too late, and now we find ourselves where we are today; Southern Gothic is back stronger than ever, there’s nothing we can do to stop it and it’s making a killing. But why?

WHO’S TO BLAME? Only now does the true horror become clear; we suspect we still puppets in the hands of the faceless powerful. In our carelessness, we left the door open and gave the beast a way back into our lives; the Financial Crisis left the American South in a state of urban decay it had not seen since the depression; the cities were left depopulated and houses left empty to rot and collapse in the wake of mortgage defaults and the failure of manufacturing industries.

Only then did it become clear to us that the Southern Gothic Killings were part of something larger still; the banks and financiers caused its resurgence. The genre was a pestilence that rode on the back of failure and defeat, infecting the unhallowed ground it found there and tunneling its way back into the collective unconsciousness, of not only the American people, but around the world. They have caught our disease, and in their feverish ravings they are loving it and the high financiers now shovel money into the beast that rides upon our backs; newer True Detective and Rectify have seen much critical acclaim and renewal, with The Walking Dead, Justified and True Blood seeing continual renewal into 5th, 6th and 7th seasons, respectively.

The Southern Gothic will be tearing your eyes from their sockets for some time yet.

HOW TO BE AN ART WANKER

by Lauren Wiszniewski Emotion. Line. Tone. ART. WANKER. Chances are that if you have ever set foot in an art gallery, you have encountered someone who considers themselves an ‘art critic’. Perhaps I’m even guilty of if myself but sometimes it is hard to shed the high school art student within you. Yet equivalent to somebody who read a book once and wants you to ask them about it, the art wanker is someone to avoid.

Wanker has two meanings. The first is a person who wanks; a masturbator.

The second is a worthless fellow, a contemptible person, a jerk. An art wanker is therefore somebody who masturbates over pieces of art, a verbal foreplay exclaiming how precise the shading is on a painting of choice. This geometric shape sure turns me on. This doesn’t mean that you can’t appreciate and criticise art but it means that you need to do it in a way that doesn’t result in someone wanting to hit you across the head.

An art critic is a person who is specialised in analysing, interpreting and evaluating art. Professional art critics tend to have a thorough knowledge of art history and can identity the specific mannerisms of various artists. Sometimes art critics even become part of the art with Paul Signac once painting a portrait of Félix Fénéon. Fénéon, who coined the term “Neo-Impressionism”, has been immortalized forever in the Museum of Modern Art, even though his Wikipedia page is a total of four lines.

The thing about art critics is that they tend to not recognize the significant artists of today. Vincent van Gogh, once immortalized by TV series Doctor Who, is the go-to guy for Year 8 art teachers.

However when he was alive he was undervalued and unappreciated, with his work only known by a handful of people.

Now he is described by art critics such as Robert Hughes as an artist at the height

of his ability, completely in control and “longing for concision and grace”. For a guy who only started painting when he was 27, he is seen as an icon of the art world. Encouraging procrastination as well as debilitating mental disease since the 1800s! Others may be recognized but live their life in poverty such as Egon Schiele. Whatever the case, art is often not seen as good until its artist is dead. Which isn’t entirely fair to the artists themselves.

Art wankers thus tend to fixate on what is considered cool in the art world.

They can coo over the lines of Piet Modrian, shouting about his boldness and his great vision; while others just see horizontal and vertical lines filled with colour. Saying that you could have painted that is true in some cases.

Throw paint at a canvas and you can call yourself Jackson Pollock!

…EQUIVALENT TO SOMEBODY WHO READ A BOOK ONCE AND WANTS YOU TO ASK THEM ABOUT IT, THE ART WANKER IS SOMEONE TO AVOID. These types of people are not just limited to the art world. Often you meet people who claim they could be the next Salinger if only they could ever just sit down and write. Some film students drool over the works of Baz Lutherman, claiming that one day they will direct

big budget movies and be fawned over by the masses. Warning signs are people who quote Shakespeare or Joyce, Those Spark Notes sure come in handy, huh? Sometimes it’s people who claim that Morrissey’s solo albums are more “emotionally honest” than the stuff he did with The Smiths. They tend to be the people that you say hi to and are then trapped in an hour-long conversation with. Wankers just tend to be wankers, but sometimes they are just passionate people... passionate people with no working knowledge of social cues.

Identification can be tricky. Sometimes you think someone is perfectly normal.

It’s not like their last name is Wanker… or is it? Maude Walling Wanker (18821970) is an artist best known for her watercolours. She founded the Lincoln County Art Centre where she taught composition, design and painting. Similarities between her and your high school art teacher could be found. Jerry Wanker was a guitarist from Brussels, who played in several punk rock bands. Musicians are often assumed to be jerks.

Whatever the case, wankers exist and they are out there. Maybe one day they will find you, maybe they won’t. As you stare deep into the eyes of Mona Lisa, they may whisper gently towards you about the subtle modeling of forms and the atmospheric illusionism. Or maybe they’ll tell you about how it doesn’t compare to the other works of Lenoardo da Vinci, and how it has been over hyped and celebrated. They will disturb you and they will sometimes shout their opinions. If caught, you can do nothing but wait till they move on to their next prey. My prayers are with you that you will never encounter an art wanker, but I fear that for many of you, it may be too late.

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MUSE OF THE YEAR

by Anna Saxon Muses are pretty thin on the ground now days. Whether you blame the Internet, feminism, or the lack of good opium in modern society, the job of ‘Artist’s Muse’ simply isn’t as popular as it used to be. And hey, fair enough, being a muse might just be one of the most difficult and thankless jobs in history. Getting paid less than minimum wage to channel somebody else’s genius, usually while topless, is no cakewalk. Some critics argue that rather than beautiful women, the modern muses are amphetamines, caffeine and alcohol. I however am, in a way, a traditionalist. A ‘muse’ doesn’t have to be a voluptuous 18th century bombshell. Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Sophia Coppola, Ilona Staller, Gala Dali, Yoko Ono - who are these women if not muses? Did they not inspire and elevate the men who worshipped them? If Zelda Fitzgerald can be considered a muse, then I think the definition of the role in 2014 needs to be expanded. Like, really expanded.

How about Kim Kardashian - The Face That Launched A Thousand Franchises?

Who could forget Kim’s glorious cameo in her-now-hubby Kanye’s music video for Bound 2, but more importantly he’s written several songs about her, including ‘I Won’, which is literally about how she’s a “trophy” and has an “ass that (he) wants to dip in gold”. Since the beginning of their relationship, Kim has clearly influenced Kanye’s artistic decisions - pretty standard muse-like behaviour. Add to that the fact that clothing is designed especially for her, her reality show resurrected the stardriven reality television show genre, and George Kondo even made her a handpainted Hermes handbag with a naked ass woman on it, but I can’t help feel that Kim is a promising candidate for ‘2014 Muse of the Year’. If this were the 1780‘s, Kim would be in some kind of painting with fruit and a strategically placed shell.

Plus I can totally see Kanye burying Kim with his best lyrics, and then exhuming

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her body weeks later to get them back again because they’re just too good to let go of (Dante Rossetti actually did this to the body of muse Lizzie Siddal, there’s precedent).

IF ZELDA FITZGERALD CAN BE CONSIDERED A MUSE, THEN I THINK THE DEFINITION OF THE ROLE IN 2014 NEEDS TO BE EXPANDED. LIKE, REALLY EXPANDED. But wait! I hear you say - Kim Kardashian is about as mainstream as you can get; going along with your theory Anna, her ‘muse-dom’ is predicated entirely on her celebrity. She’s an icon at best! Surely there’s someone else we can use as an example? Well, now you’ve led me to one of my favourite subjects - porn.

Germaine Greer wrote an article for The Guardian in 2008 about ‘The Role Of The Artists Muse where she said, “Physical congress with one’s muse is hardly possible, because her role is to penetrate the mind rather than to have her body penetrated. The muse in her purest form is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind.” My responseHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,

good one Germaine. Tell that to Picasso who literally snuck his 17 year old muse out of school so he could bang her. Muses don’t have to be unobtainable objects (Kim, I’m looking at you) to be valuable; they can be sexualized and vandalized.

A great example is artist and photographer Molly Crabapple - no relation to The Simpson character who uses international porn star Stoya almost exclusively as her muse. When questioned about her choice, Crabapple explained “She’s a performer in her own right, a porn star and acrobat, an utter artist of her own flesh. Like the showgirl ambition monsters beloved of Lautrec, Stoya is muse and creator both.”

Stoya perfectly embodies those more forbidden aspects of a muse’s life, and would fit right in amongst the prostitutes and showgirls who made up a majority of artistic models before the turn of the century. Stoya inspires a multitude of photographers, and although I know it’s hard to believe, she is in more high demand as a model (both erotic and otherwise) than she is as an adult film star. Sensuality and passion were often an integral part of the symbiotic relationship between artist and muse (Dali and Gala anyone? YOWZA), and it is this intriguing sexuality which drives the art inspired by Stoya. In a different time, I can imagine Egon Scheile would have painted the porn star’s portrait. Probably in the style of ‘Friendship’, wearing nothing but a pair of socks and a dirty smile.

These modern muses may not be what the modern art world deserves, but they are definitely the ones it needs right now. Postmodern pop-culture is our Renaissance. Paris Hilton is our Zelda.

Our muses must conform to the needs of artists today, and while they may seem a little shallow or rough around the edges, Kim and Stoya are following in a grand tradition of beautiful, flawed, complex women whose images speak far louder than (Kanye’s) words.

ARTS REVIEWS

HOUSE ON THE LAKE BLACK SWAN THEATRE COMPANY

By Lauren Wiszniewski Perth was treated recently to the world premier of psychological thriller House on the Lake, written by Adian Fennessey and starring Marthe Rovik and Kenneth Ransom. Less like acting, more like reacting, the two create banter that enthrals the audience and encourages them to keep on watching.

Kenneth Ransom plays David Rail, a man who has woken up with no memory of

what has occurred. He can only maintain new memories for a limited time, with his doctor Marthe Rovik as Alice Rowe encouraging him to keep a journal. Over time it emerges that Rail’s wife has been murdered and that it is he who is the prime suspect. Trying to keep his sanity while clearing his name, Rail’s character demands strength and certain naturalism. With the threat of becoming repetitive, Ransom is able to take control of his dialogue. Rowe in turn falls into the rhythm of their hour and a half conversation.

Fennessey’s script is a pleasure, full of twists and turns that make the play a dynamic and exciting piece. The mystery is woven throughout, revealing itself in increments as it goes along, before eventually revealing what actually happened at the titular house on the lake.

Helped by director Stuart Halusz, the actors make the blocking seem simple and fluid. It is never unclear what is happening, despite the plot’s twists, due to the firm grip that they employ.

Held in the Studio Underground at the State Theatre, designer India Mehta has managed to construct a set that closes in the wide studio space. This makes the play seem more intimate; giving reveals more emphasis than they would otherwise. Almost claustrophobic, both the audience and the players on stage feel trapped in the story. Simple in design, the psych ward is clean and sterile with the murky waters and leaves seen though the windows an indication of the play’s title.

A two-way mirror continues this theme of reflection. But is what we see the truth?

Lighting adds an appropriate amount of suspense, and is used throughout the play to indicate changes in both mood and time. Combined with the other elements, the lighting becomes masterful.

Creating a dramatic pace that charges the storyline along. With a dense script and skilful actors, the play is a delight to watch. Keeping you guessing until the end, The House on the Lake, reminds us that nothing is ever as it seems.

MAN UP, WEAR MANOLOS

by Anna Saxon I’m furious about the fact that heterosexual men don’t wear high heels.

This is partially because I hate suffering alone and would love to spread some of the misery that is a full blown arch spasm in six inch peep toes, but it’s mostly because it’s completely hypocritical.

For years heels have come to represent feminine grace and sexuality. There’s a line in the Amanda Bynes film ‘She’s The Man’ where Viola says, disgusted “ ... heels are a male invention designed to make women’s butt look smaller... and to make it harder for them to run away”. Big fan Amanda, but you’re wrong. True, men did invent high heels - but for themselves.

As early as the 17th century, high heels were being worn by men in Persia as effective horse-riding footwear. When a soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively. A wave of interest in all things Persian passed through Western Europe and Persian style shoes were enthusiastically adopted by aristocrats, who sought to give their appearance a virile, masculine edge that, it suddenly seemed, only heeled shoes could supply.

As the wearing of heels filtered into the lower ranks of society, the aristocracy responded by dramatically increasing the height of their shoes - and the true high heel was born. Rather than femininity, high heels represented an essentially masculine energy. The idea of the ‘Dandy’ or the ‘Macaroni’ emerged - make up, beauty spots, elaborate wigs, ribbons and pastel outfits dominated male fashion; along with the open wearing of dueling swords and pistols on ones person. A guy in heels wasn’t likely to be a coward; he was more likely to stab you in the heart for calling him one. In fact, women’s adoption of the heel was started by a trend in the 1640s to make themselves look more manly, not less.

Until quite recently, shapely, welltoned calves and thighs were regarded as an absolute prerequisite for male

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attractiveness. Everyone knows what a good stiletto can do to your glutes, but men of the past swore by it. During the Georgian and Regency periods, men would stuff their stockings (yes they wore those too) with sand bags to make them look more voluptuous. That’s why you see so many paintings of famous men framed to show off their legs - George Washington wasn’t afraid to flash a little skin, nor Louis XIV of France who was often depicted wearing fabulous red platforms incredibly similar to the famous red soled Louboutin. Even Charles I of England had a little kitten heel added to his riding boots, naughty boy. Essentially, high heels were now just being worn to make oneself look more attractive to heterosexual women. Plot twist!

THAT’S WHY YOU SEE SO MANY PAINTINGS OF FAMOUS MEN FRAMED TO SHOW OFF THEIR LEGS - GEORGE WASHINGTON WASN’T AFRAID TO FLASH A LITTLE SKIN… High heels became a ‘Ladies Only’ item for a variety of reasons. In France, for example, high heels fell out of favour in the court of Napoleon due to their association with aristocratic decadence (that or Napoleon didn’t look good in a black pump, we’ll never be sure). In England, the more conservative fashions of the Victorian era regarded it as

indecent for a man to openly display his calves, or ‘Table Parts’ as they called them (probably). But hey, fashions come and go. The real question is why heels never came back into fashion for men - after all, if the 90s can, anything is possible. But the absence of heels in the modern male wardrobe can be laid squarely at the feet of institutionalised homophobia. Essentially, heels for men were never revived because by the early 20th Century, sexually provocative attire for men had come to be associated with homosexuality. Showing off a good thigh was no longer alluring to women apparently (wrong, by the way), it was gay. The resulting moral panic ushered in an era of drab, blocky, fully concealing menswear in which a well-turned calf simply had no place - a setback from which men’s fashion has yet to fully recover. The reason straight boys dress SO horribly is because they’re not over a 100 year old gay panic. While gay men and drag queens decided to wear the hell out of high heels, hetero men sadly turned away from their historical triumph in the ultimate, tragic ‘no homo’.

We did get them back for a brief shining moment in the Glam-Rock glory of the 70’s - when platform shoes full of goldfish were de rigueur for a night out at the disco, and David Bowie (the epitome of the modern Dandy) was seducing men and women alike with his incredibly shapely legs. Your own father probably wore a pair of wedges on a date, and dammit if he didn’t win your mother over that way. And a select few sub groups have figured out the secret of the modern heel since then - Goths, for example, some 90‘s ravers, old-fashioned butchers (I kid you not), but a majority of men still just don’t understand. You don’t need to be a Diva to rock a pair of heels.

You don’t need to be sexually attracted to footwear to pop on some hooker boots.

Admit that slight elevation in your shoes makes your legs and bum look great and go pick up chicks in some stilettos! Bring back mens heels! Bring back mens tights!

Let’s make masculinity dandy again. If Robert Downey Jr can do it, you can too.

KEYBOARD WARRIORS ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’… is the beginning of one of the most famous monologues in Macbeth. As a required text for my Year 11 literature class, it was a goldmine of symbolism and thematic material, everything that would earn you those ticks. But this speech has stuck with me over the years for more than just those enterprising reasons.

It is here that Macbeth expresses his realisation of the empty sound and fury of the human experience, and the insignificance of our actions. For me, it inspires some reflection, and not just because it’s Shakespeare.

It’s some pretty dark stuff, as far as morbidity and despair in literature goes. Macbeth really expresses the meaningless of life, its insignificance as part of the bigger picture. It hits home with those inner fears we all hold of a pointless life, of not making an impact.

It is the same fears that drive a writer’s desire to create lasting works of fiction, or some people to get involved in charity, or others to buy a souped-up Ferrari and discover their latent sugar daddy at the age of 45. It affects us all differently.

These themes have obsessed people down the centuries, from Shakespeare to Faulkner, to politicians like Tony Abbott. It manifests itself in philosophical musings, self-puffery, and the general natter of human experience. But if there is a prime contemporary example of sound and fury signifying nothing, it has to be the internet. There are sites devoted to every conceivable topic, and probably more that you haven’t even dreamed of. Look long enough and you will find pages for Llama jokes (not recommended, they are terrible) or political party fan let’s-rant-about-theopposition sites. If you feel like your life is missing something, you can even partake in gastronomic voyeurism- watching people in Korea live stream themselves eating dinner in enormous quantities.

Just like in reality, you are going to find people who seem to believe that their opinions are the apex of intellectual thought, colloquially known as keyboard warriors. If you are fortunate enough not to be familiar with this particular phenomenon, urbandictionary.com has a hilarious entry explaining them. The net has created the opportunity for the wide circulation of ideas, facts, and news. Not only that, it has given every Tom, Dick, Harry, Susan, Prisha, Mohammed, and Qiang the opportunity to comment on them. This can lead to a virtual explosion of competing positions. Don’t even start on the abortion debate, or gun control laws (why should there even be an argument over this?!). It has never been easier to self-publish your own opinion, regardless of its validity or how good it is.

While researching one day, I came across an article talking about how keyboard warriors have taken over the climate debate. Internet commenters and ‘feelpinion’ publishers have been blamed for muddling the science and degrading the research of experts with their denials and controversies. The irony of it was that the comments section was literally about ten times longer than the article itself. There were a number of people who had taken issue with sections of the article, each other’s comments, or felt the drive to continue the climate debate itself.

One person was of the opinion that NASA couldn’t really be a reliable source of evidence; because of course NASA is all about outer space, not climate science!

Let’s face it: we love a good

debate. And we all think our own argument is correct and true at the time of writing it.

So it can come as a bit of a shock when you get twenty replies attacking your premise, or presenting arguments that destabilise yours. John Stuart Mill said that the truth should not be afraid of being tested. But internet arguments can make you realise that some people are just dumb. And possibly, on occasion, you are too.

The overwhelming size of the internet makes the individual sites and opinions underwhelming in a way. With so many conflicting sites and egos and ideas, how can any one thing truly mean anything?

How can you hope to convince the world of your viewpoint, and is it simply pointless to engage in these keyboard battles?

Does anyone really have a monopoly on the truth? I confess I don’t know, and I suspect no one really does to be honest.

Regardless, we like to create a lot of sound and fury on the net. In the end, everything has meaning to you. So who gives a stuff what some guy across the world thinks.

Picture by Holly Jian

by Rahana Bell

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VIRAL VIDEO IDEAS, JULY 2014 LANA VS IGGY – TWITTER FEUD ILLUMINATI (4:04) Lana del Rey and Iggy Azalea sit silently in the middle of a quiet, indeterminate café. From opposite ends of a small table, both women sip flat whites while eyeing each other coolly. Around 1:56, Lana opens her mouth and makes as though to say something. She appears to think better of it, and the coffee sipping continues in silence for another two minutes. The video ends abruptly with a vevo pop up advertisement for Nicki Minaj’s new album.

TONY ABBOTT NEIGHBOURS GAFFE (2:03) Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott lists and discusses his favourite moments from beloved soap opera Neighbours. The treasured scenes from Ramsay St that he chooses to include are Toadie and Dee’s wedding, (pausing to acknowledge Dee’s tragic and mysterious ocean death, and that of Holly Valance’s subsequent career), Karl and Susan’s blissful second marriage in London (pausing to acknowledge with reverence Australia’s cultural ties to Britain), Steph getting dumped by Marc at the altar and discovering his and Flick’s affair (this is met with much head shaking), and Stingray’s shock death (which produces a single tear).

In a shock omission, Charlene and Scott’s classic 1987 wedding episode goes unmentioned. Following the video’s release, opinion polls tumble accordingly.

GRUMPY CAT TINDER (8:00) Grumpy cat gets a tinder account, and is clearly overwhelmed and uncomfortable with the experience.

Contributors to the comments section all agree that the cat’s face looks exactly like that of a grumpy human realizing that their potential conquest

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has not mutually swiped right and that this is just so, so cute.

GAME OF THRONES (JOHN STAMOS VERSION) (33:00) A recent Game of Thrones clip is made comical by the absence of the original audio track, which is replaced by that of an old episode of Full House from 1994.

The clip is made yet more amusing by the absence of the original video track, which has also been replaced by that of the same old episode of Full House from 1994. Things are better this way.

REAL HOUSEWIFE TATTOOS (NOT FAKE!!) (7:32) The Real Housewives of Melbourne reveal the various tattoos that they have historically procured on youthful trips to Bali. Successful Toorak attorney and fashionista Gina Liano surprises many as she exposes her left buttock to reveal the entire first section of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland tattooed upon it in ten point Times New Roman. Lydia Schiavello, now wife of a prominent businessman and member of the private jet set, unveils the initials of her childhood sweetheart are inked on one of her ankles. She alludes bitterly to the fact that ‘JR’, apparently an apprentice mechanic, could not keep her attired in the expensive Aurelia Costarella outfits that she was accustomed to.

HEY IT’S THE CAST OF ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK (25:00) The cast members of Orange is the New Black hang out, or participate in some

kind of activity together. Watch Girls.

Get pedicures. Play Cluedo. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. This thing will probably get a million hits regardless, people seem to be really into this show.

NEW STAR WARS! EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW (5:00) This poor quality, bootleg phone video depicts Harrison Ford in a trailer, practicing lines for the new J.J. Abramsdirected Star Wars sequel. A haggard looking Ford is seen mumbling the lines faintly to himself, pausing now and then to peer at the script in disbelief. Most of what he is saying is indistinct, but vague references to a series of apparently “cursed” numbers can be heard, as well as confusion over “timelines?” and “the others.” In apparent frustration, Ford flicks to the last page of the script to see how it ends. There is significant camera shake happening at this point, but it looks to be something along the lines of “Purgatory? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Picture by Zoe Kilbourn

by Kat Gillespie

CULTURE REVIEWS WINTERLAND

by Lucy Ballantyne There is nothing like an ice rink to bring out mankind’s most ugly qualities. As the most uncoordinated, unathletic and thoroughly disinterested child this side of the river, ice-skating held a total of about zero appeal to me. Year after year, some long-suffering parent would ferry a group of girls all the way to Malaga for yet another birthday party, where I would take the obligatory one circuit around the ring, clinging for dear life to whatever I could grab, other children included. After such, I’d retire quite contently to the bleachers with a hot chocolate and my dignity still in tact.

Two minutes in and there’d be some well-meaning adult sidling up next to me; “are you sure you don’t want to give it another go?”, “well I’ll just keep you company then”. Then the other kids: “COME ON YOU HAVE TO”. No, I don’t.

Given the cripplingly sad realities of

TEEN WOLF

by Samuel J. Cox “You can’t look at a glass half full or empty if it’s overflowing”. Kanye was talking about Kanye, of course, when he dropped that slice of wisdom, but it’s the perfect description for MTV’s Teen Wolf. Brimming with thrilling paranormal activity, the series charts the coming-of-age of ‘teen wolf’ Scott McCall (Tyler Posey), his sidekick Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), and his human ‘wolf pack’. Their home, Beacon Hills, becomes embroiled in supernatural turf wars (featuring hemicorporectomies and a Kanima) after McCall is bitten by a werewolf while looking for a girl in the woods.

After the heights of Geordie Shore seasons one to three, I never expected to get hooked on an MTV show again, but their reboot of this Michael J. Fox film turns up the heat. These,

adult life were yet to settle in, I was more than happy to be alone with my thoughts.

This lack of interest seems to have parlayed into adulthood, because the idea of ‘Winterland’, an ice-skating rink in the middle of the Perth Cultural Centre, inspired in me not much more than an ‘eh’. I still can’t skate, and it sounded twee and tacky. What Winterland has that the ice rinks of my youth do not, however, is a THEMED OUTDOOR BAR. Sign me up.

One sip of my hot chocolate laced with Kahlua and Butterscotch schnapps and I was totally caught up in the kitsch fun of it all. Winterland’s ‘The Lodge’ is furnished with plush old sofas, faux bear skin rugs and flat screens screening vision of roaring fires. Situated just in front of the State Library, it overlooks the ice rink where figure skaters perform daily.

supposedly, high-school students make for serious eye-candy, and, while it isn’t as stunningly brutal as Game of Thrones, Teen Wolf delivers its fair share of carnage.

Beginning in 2011, the brainchild of executive producer, head writer and show creator Jeff Davis (Criminal Minds), Teen Wolf doesn’t belong in the same discount bin as Twilight or The Vampire Diaries. The show probably only secured a second season on the strength of Dylan O’Brien’s acting, but has since matured into a darker and more sinister beast.

The CGI isn’t great (in fact it’s atrocious), but thankfully the glistening Adonises rarely go ‘full werewolf’. Instead they opt for claws, ridged brows and bristled jaw lines. It’s closer to Underworld than Twilight (although Twi-hards will leap to correct me that the Quileute tribe were shape-shifters), and though it’s obvious

Hot churros, pretzels, mulled wine and Sapporo on tap are all on the menu.

Goodbye soggy and wet, hello winter warmer edition of the Urban Orchard.

In spite of all of this, it’s not long before even just being in the general vicinity of Winterland reveals the ugly truth.

The environmentalist in me can’t look at the ice without seeing a massive and grotesque waste of power. The roar of the massive generators on each corner doesn’t so much take you out of the zone as slide the zone out from underneath you. The arts lover in me is even more disturbed to see that the generator is loudest at the entrance to PICA. Watching the homeless gather around the behemoth outdoor heaters from the other side of the bar’s fence lends the reinvigorating-urban-spaces movement a fat dose of reality. I always knew ice rinks were evil.

these wolves are fake, you can’t stop watching them.

Nobody’s perfect, and that’s true of Teen Wolf. If you look closely, some storylines just don’t hold up, and action is held as more important than character development in this mix of horror, drama and comedy.

With season four just beginning, it’s still fresh and exciting. The death of a major character last season has changed the group dynamic, and Scott is finally lording around Beacon Hills as a True Alpha (bow down, bitches). There are mercenaries, missing people and hunters from Mexico, while the writing remains self-aware, occasionally having a dig at the unlikely premise of teenage werewolves.

To the Teen Wolf haters, a word from Yeezus: “if you’re saying I’m wrong, it’s probably a good sign that I’m a genius.”

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FRINGE FESTIVAL

WEEK 4, SEMESTER 2. AUGUST 18 -22

路 E S TA B L I S H E D 1 9 1 3 路

P U B L I C A F FA I R S CO U N C I L

Picture by Alice McCullough

WHERE’S PELLY

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UWA Open Day. Sunday 10 August.

If you’re planning a global career, explore your postgraduate study options at The University of Western Australia. As a UWA postgrad, you’ll engage with like-minded, passionate peers and professionals, and graduate with an internationally recognised qualification from the State’s only university ranked in the world’s top 1%.

Come to our Open Day on Sunday 10 August for postgrad information sessions and displays; details on the professions such as law, engineering, architecture, teaching and medicine; scholarship information; opportunities to meet students, academics and industry partners; and details about how to apply.

To find out how a UWA postgrad degree can open up a world of opportunities, visit openday.uwa.edu.au/postgrad