Pelican Edition1 Volume 86

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RE GUL ARS EDITORIALS . . ...........................................................................................................................5 SOCIAL PAGES .........................................................................................................................6 FRESHER DIARY ......................................................................................................................6 FRESHER DAN: SCIENCE MAN . . ............................................................................................8 CHOITUS WITH CHLOE ..........................................................................................................9 CALENDAR ...............................................................................................................................21 MATILDA BAY MUSINGS WITH T-FID ..................................................................................33 RETRO PELI .. ............................................................................................................................46

FE ATURE S THE PELICAN FRESHER GUIDE............................................................................................10 BONUS : HONOURS GUIDE . . ...................................................................................................13 HOROSCOPES. . ..........................................................................................................................14 GRADUATE JOB CRISIS . . ..........................................................................................................15 GLORYHOLES...........................................................................................................................16 NAMELESSNESS........................................................................................................................17 CHARLIE HEBDO.. ....................................................................................................................18

SE C TIONS POLITICS . . ..................................................................................................................................22 FILM.. ..........................................................................................................................................26 MUSIC.........................................................................................................................................30 LITERATURE.............................................................................................................................34 ARTS...........................................................................................................................................40 LIFESTYLE. . ...............................................................................................................................44

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CONTRIBUTORS PELICAN IS UWA’S STUDENT MAGAZINE, SINCE 1929.

Editors Kat Gillespie Lucy Ballantyne Section Editors Politics: Brad Griffin Film: James Munt Music: Hugh Manning Literature: Kate Prendergast Arts: Emily Purvis Lifestyle: Morgan Goodman Contributors Megan AnsellJade Bates* Tom Beyer* Kevin Chiat* Lauren Croser*Chloe Durand* Tristan Fidler* Caitlin Frunks* Elysia GelavisAriana Gomez* Ash Gould* Daniel Hu* Alice McCullaghSamuel Montgomery* Richard Moore*Kate Oatley* Catherina Pagani*Wills Pritchard* Leah Roberts* Thomas Rossiter* Mason Rothwell* Bridget Rumball* Thomas Rydll* Harry Sanderson* Anna Saxon* Laurent Shervington* Caroline Stafford* Natalie ThompsonDan Werndly* Emily Wise*

Design Kate Hoolahan Cover photography James Gillespie Advertising Karrie McClelland The University of Western Australia acknowledges that its campus is situated on Noongar land, and that Noongar people remain the spiritual and cultural custodians of their land, and continue to practise their values, languages, beliefs and knowledge.

Disclaimer: the views expressed within are not the opinions od the UWA Student Guild or Pelican editorial staff, but of the individual writers and artists.

To get involved with Pelican, like us on Facebook, email us at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, or drop by the office (it’s right next to the Ref !)

*Words -Art

Background Image by Caroline Stafford

offer applies to large pizzas only

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FROM THE PRESIDENT Welcome to my first president’s brief of the year. As Guild President my minimum obligation to Pelican is writing this, upon threat of having someone else turn me into a caricature of myself for the month. If things start to get weird, let’s blame that.

My term as Guild President, starting on December 1st last year, has already been filled with firsts. First meeting filled with only middle aged white dudes, first contact from a PerthNow journo, and first informal complaint about Red Flag, to name a few. I’m also the first woman Guild President since 2010, when I was a fresher, and with the first woman duo Pelican editor team since forever, I’m keen to see Pelican soaring to new heights this year.

If you’re a newbie at UWA you’re going to have a lot of firsts this semester. First Guild coffee, first library fine… if you were pretty straight laced in school, probably your first late assignment. If you’re returning to us for another year, I hope that your year is filled with plenty of “firsts” as well. Hopefully those firsts are not parking tickets and are more on the “first above average date”, “first cronut” and “first all-nighter on an essay that actually paid off ” range. But, if your first is the need to appeal an assessment mark or apply for special consideration, come visit us and we’ll help you out.

For more poorly veiled attempts to promote the Guild between lame jokes and campusbased references, stay tuned to my president’s brief each edition. xoxo Lizzy

FROM THE EDITORS I first started writing for Pelican as an naive fresher with a terrible haircut. From the outset, I hated it.

I was looking for friends, but I found a group of overgrown boy-men who wouldn’t stop talking about the beat generation. When they got bored of Ginsberg, they’d move on to comparisons of penis length and girth. It was pretty uncomfortable to be an eighteen year old girl at your average Pelican meeting that year, especially when you had gotten sick of talking about Jack Kerouac by midway through high school, and when you felt like the only way to get published in the magazine was to give someone a hand job midway through a darkened screening of The Room. Still, I enjoyed the atmosphere in the office a lot more than I enjoyed attending ECOMS barbeques, and as I wasn’t nearly sexually experienced enough to impress anybody with a limp wristy effort, I guess I just had to write articles instead.

And look at me now, mum!

With all due respect to the men I’ve met and occasionally wanked off while writing for student publications over the course of this endless, expensive degree, it is a profound pleasure to know that this year, two incredibly intelligent and beautiful women are at the helm of this ridiculous magazine. If you have any interest in writing, art, photography and comics - or if you are simply looking for the right kind of people to hang out with (for example, people who enjoy long arguments about the coherency of Drake’s discography over tinnies and $5 pizza), then know that you are absolutely unequivocally welcome in the Pelican office, regardless of your gender or interest in Canadian rapper songwriters.

It wasn’t until my 21st birthday that I realised my life was in transition. On the day, I hastened to add a particularly extravagant gift from my parents to that little spot where one hides their most precious and valuable possessions in case of burglary (buried in a bag of uncooked rice, usually). That’s when it became apparent that things were in flux; that the only two items of value I own are weed, and diamonds.

Your first year of uni is one of the weirdest transitions you’ll ever make. You know there’s something you’re meant to be doing, but you’re never quite sure what it is; you get drunk at house parties on the weekend but you’re too young to go to the tav; you probably wear a toga at some point. The learning curve is steep, and you’ll almost definitely declare your ATAR to someone under the misapprehension that they care at all. It can suck. But it’s worth it, because you’ll change and grow more than you thought you could.

Pelican’s changing too – your student rag shouldn’t stay the same for too long. Kat and I are working our little tushies off to make Pelican the beautiful, inclusive space it should be. For those of you in your first year – consider the Pelican office your between-classes crash pad, and this magazine yours for the moulding. Let us help navigate those tricky transitions. We’re excited to meet you.

Lucy

Pelican was not the first student newspaper to be produced by an Australian university, but it was the second – if you write for us, you’re participating in a long grand tradition of irreverence and flagrant self promotion. Lucy and I hope that you enjoy our first effort, and we also hope to see you around campus soon.

Kat

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lican CLUB SPOTLIGHT: pe ion. nt Guild’s official publicat Pelican is the UWA Stude gazine ma nt second oldest stude Founded in 1929, it is the for e on r, eight editions a yea in Australia. We produce ly years, rsity semesters. In its ear each month of the unive students its g y broadsheet, kee pin the Ol’ Bird was a weekl p. ssi go campus news and up to date with the latest ferent erienced a number of dif Since then, Peli has exp fledg ed lyful its current state as a incarnations, leading to artwork s, iew lumns, features, rev magazine with regular co and film , style, politics, music and six sections: arts, life literature. w Pelican begins for each ne The process of creating just rs, ito ed contributors and edition with a meeting for er ov d ite inv ideas. Everyone is to start chucking around rk wo d up to the office an the coming week to come runs a ou ab t awkwardly. Pelican on articles or just hang courage en to , that first meeting workshop the week after missions. sub ir te and work on the contributors to collabora du. a.e .uw t to pelican@guild Contributions can be sen eat or n’t wo line, and the editors au by the ascribed dead . rag nt de led tog ether your stu sleep until they’ve cobb in t ou ng we find time to ha Somewhere in that mess, e to the right of the main entranc the office (enter to the guild the of er, and make fun Ref), get to know each oth tog ether. ght be the voice of your Join if you: think you mi generation.

Shrug ged Avoid if you: read Atlas

Underneath their clothes, which STAR guild councillor’s body is covered completely in scales?

Which two very smart and very good looking student editors recently moved in together, shirking off all warnings of ‘you’ll hate each other by the end of the year’?

Which Pelican section editor inexplicably dislikes Drake?

Which beloved member of guild staff is alleged to have stolen hundreds of thousands of guild dollars?

Which student representative responds to the question ‘what have you been up to today?’ with ‘trying to save education’?

Which naive freshers refused to pose for Pelican vox pops? (Hint: all of them) It’s wedding bells for this campus glamour couple… oh, wait, those are just photos of a holiday in Bali.

and liked it.

mailing ild.uwa.edu.au to join the Email us at pelican@gu n itio ed for our next meeting list or better yet, hit up ook ceb Fa the ary (look out for two on the 25th of Febru event.)

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BLIND ITEMS

SOCIAL PAGES

THE FRESHER DIARY · PART ONE In which we ask an anonymous UWA fresher to diarise their experience as a shit-scared first year.

accounting firm, which was oddly comforting – my parents both work on the Terrace, so the chrome furnishings and ticket machines feel like home.

Dear Diary,

I’m looking forward to O-Day – there’s a bar, right? I’ll probably join heaps of clubs. My brother started a Commerce degree last year and he is pretty high up in the Young Liberals. He reckons it’s really important that I get my name out there ASAP, so I’ve already bought tickets to the first Leisure, ECOMS and DESI parties. Just need to get super fucked and probably fingerbanged a couple of times and I’ll get a secretary position on a committee, no problems. That’s just good business, you know.

Just got my official letter of confirmation from UWA – was pretty confident with my ATAR, so I wasn’t surprised to be admitted into the course of my choice.

I was voted most likely to succeed in my class at St Mary’s after all, although they might have been referring to my chances of scoring at leavers. I sure proved them right in that regard! Daryl from Christchurch, if you’re reading this, did you see my Snapchat? Waiting for your call, bae.

This summer has been amaze!!! I’ve achieved a lot in terms of my Instagram presence. Leavers was like a massive highlight. The squad went down to Dunsborough – was really hard to choose where to stay, as like most of our parents own houses down there. We ended up partying at Sarah’s parents’ place because it was closest to the Zone and there was a crew of cute alternative Shenton boys staying next door. They were listening to Triple J like, the whole time. It was like… where’s the T. Swift? They were pretty generous with their Midori, though.

So far my only experience of UWA has been enrolling at Student Central. It was pretty slick in there, like I didn’t even have to talk to a single annoying member of staff.

Everything was computerized, it was like, welcome to the future! It was actually kind of like being in a bank or

Campus Rant

by Tom Beyer

As an Arts Student who has been known to take units based in the business school, I’m continually outraged at one key piece of infrastructure missing from UWA. I am talking, of course, about a subway on campus.

I believe that an underground train system would be invaluable addition to the Crawley campus. Regularly I’ve been late to 9am lectures in Wesfarmers because it takes a good fifteen minutes to walk there from Stirling Highway. If we had a subway, I could simply hop on the train and be there almost instantly!

If we really dream big, we could even expand the train network to the satellite campuses. Imagine integrating the Nedlands, Claremont and QE2 students into campus life

One of the boys from next door on Leavers has been texting me, he says we should go to The Tenth State for a coffee once uni starts. His name’s Taylor and he’s sooooooooo cute. He keeps saying I have to try a cronut - what is that??? I hope it’s not like, a weird sex thing. I mean, he did go to Shenton.

The only thing killing my vibe right now is that basic bitch Felicia - she got assured law too. We’ve been straight up frenemies since year six, when she got prefect and I didn’t due to political reasons that Dad refuses to talk about. It’s so typical that she would follow me to UWA, like, why is she obsessed with me??? If she tries to sit next to me in lectures I s2g.

Alright gotta go, mum’s picking me up for tennis practice - she’s just charging up the electric car in the Reid Library carpark.

Love ya bitch!!!!

G xoxoxoxoxxxxooo

and giving the rest of us a chance to explore the quaint and peculiar world that is ALVA. It would also add flexibility to the classes students can take. I know of people un-enrolling in units because they have backto-back lectures on opposite sides of campus. With a subway, you could have a 10am class in the business school and an 11am class at QE2!

What’s more, an underground train network on campus would surely assist in the universities push to be a top 50 worldwide university by 2050. Imagine how much more efficient we’ll become in our research by minimising time walking between buildings!

Some readers might be bold enough to suggest I’m being melodramatic, or would argue that a bicycle or skateboard is a far more cost effective method of transport. But my blunt response to critics is, to borrow the new UWA advertising slogan: Aim Higher.

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: n a d r reshe

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n a m e scienc

60 SECOND SCIENCE Actually important stuff that happened while you were busy being an Arts student Dragon Takes Flight The first spacecraft launch of 2015 went off without a problem as SpaceX’s Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station on the 12th of January. The Dragon Spacecraft carried a payload of essential food, water and other scientific cargo after the initial payload was destroyed in the Antares rocket explosion last year. The Dragon capsule will return to Earth with a new payload, full of waste and other used scientific equipment.

Bicentennial Fly A group of researchers working on fruit fly genetics have uncovered and activated a gene that extends their lifespan by around 50%. The gene works by destroying damaged cells in the body so they can be replaced more quickly. Now a bunch of flies that last nine days instead of six doesn’t sound like a great thing, but this gene is also present in the human genome, so if the impact is proportional to the organism’s lifespan then this could mean big things for regenerative medicines.

HIV lite Since the first recorded incidence of HIV in 1959, a lot has changed. How we fight it with drugs and other alternative medicines, and how we perceive its transference and infection, for example. Now it seems the virus itself has been changing.

According to a study published by the University of Oxford

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the HIV virus is evolving to become less virulent, meaning its slower to replicate and so takes longer to become AIDS. This also extends the period of time people with HIV can live a symptomless and reasonably regular life. Even more recently, scientists have been able to delete the HIV DNA from the genome, leading to hopes of a cure in the near future.

Too Cool for the Holocene Now is the age of Man. Although this idea has been present for some time, geologists are now beginning to agree that we have left the Holocene and entered the new age of the Anthropocene, or the age of man. Our legacy isn’t a great one so far though, the change is observed around 1945 when the ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere changes drastically due to the detonation of nuclear weapons and the presence of microplastics increased significantly in sediment layers.

No Point in Phoning E.T. Past SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) techniques involved looking for distinctive patterns in radio waves being emitted from distant stars, to discern if they are forms of communication, i.e. an interstellar episode of The Simpsons, but today scientists are questioning the point of that technique. Mainly because if we did detect a radio wave that was from another planet, it would have been sent so long ago the life on it, or even the planet itself may have already been destroyed.

UWA FACT Every night, the Vice Chancellor submerges his body in a claw-footed bathtub filled with money and watches the latest Parks and Rec

Choitus with Chloe But It Was Just the Tip (of the Iceberg): Why First Time Sex Doesn’t Need to be a Huge Deal ‘I think I’ve lost my mojo.’

It was hard not to laugh. Thankfully I kept silent on account of my being slightly disappointed, and completely mortified.

The Akon playlist blasting outside the closed door filled the silence. Had I just killed an erection during my first time?

Did he just use the word ‘mojo’? Was it at all appropriate for someone to have left ‘I Just Had Sex’ on repeat for the past five minutes? Was this really going to be my virginity loss story?

It was. As it happened, it was awkward and terrible.

Afterward, it was awkward and sad. When he instead decided to date my friend instead, it was infuriating and... awkward.

Now? It’s hilarious. One thing you will probably (hopefully) learn about your first sexual experience is that comedy truly is tragedy plus time. I personally never placed big tickets on my virginity, but I never anticipated losing it the way I did. It was the first week of the first year of uni: who really knows their head from their ass at that point? Despite my initial nonchalance about the encounter, as Akon rhapsodised about how he had just had sex (yes, we get it) and it felt so good (bloody braggart), I searched for that ‘changed’ feeling.

Here’s a heads up: you might not feel it. That’s not to say that sex never leaves you feeling changed or that you should lower your expectations to the ground for your first time.

Au contraire; enjoy these early days as you fumble through expressions of physical intimacy. As mother says, it puts hairs on your chest.

The learning curve is gradual. If there is some sort of change as a result of sex, you may feel it over time. You’ll probably realise, as you go through life and the bedpost perhaps becomes gloriously whittled by experience, that losing your virginity is not the only first you’ll ever experience when it comes to sex. There are other big firsts to look forward to.

The first time you try something new. The first time you give and receive a new kind of pleasure. The first time you come so hard you cry a little bit. The first time you’re completely honest with your partner(s) about exactly what you want. The first time you get it. First times are around every corner in sex and in life so don’t freak out if you don’t get something ‘right’ the first time. Who gets anything right the first time anyway?

The first time I tried to straighten my hair I did half of it with the straightening iron turned off. The first time I held a baby it screamed at me and I cried. The first time I smoked a cigarette I passed out cold and had to be carried out of a bar by bouncers. Because of these experiences I’m a slightly better rounded human being who can do things like style her hair, smoke like chimney, and even occasionally be around babies. Because of my first time, I quickly realised what it was that I really wanted and needed for a quick roll in the hay to be toe curling, neighbour-disturbing fun, and hint: it’s not ‘Mr Mojo Rising (and promptly falling thereafter)’.

In the end, there’s really very little you can do to get sex truly wrong your first time. Make sure everyone is aware and consenting, make sure you have protection if you need it, and endeavour to communicate. Allow yourself room to breathe, time to think, the kindness to realise that choosing to explore doesn’t cheapen you or determine your future. Go forth and make some hilarious, cringeworthy moments of your own, my callow sexual explorer. You may even just find your own mojo along the way.

Here’s another heads up: after your first time, you are probably just as clueless about sex as you were before.

UWA FACT UWA has a vast secret underground carpark that only business school students have access to. The password is “deregulation”

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I GET OLDER, BUT FRESHERS STAY THE SAME AGE The Pelican guide to your first year as an undergraduate Words by Kat Gillespie

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FRE SHER GUIDE

Welcome to UWA! This is Western Australia’s most elite university, as signified by the limestone buildings and rectangular ponds. You’ve picked up a copy of Pelican, already proving yourself to be someone of merit. To stay on track for the next three (to ten) years, heed this unsolicited advice.

MY PARENTS TOLD ME I HAD TO GO TO UNIVERSITY AND NOW HERE I AM

You can view uni as a somewhat less restrictive extension of high school. A comfortable, oddly lawn-centric place, where you can hang out with the same people you’ve swapped saliva and sandwiches with for the past twelve years of unspoken mutual resentment. Alternatively, you can get a life. This is the option that Pelican wholeheartedly recommends.

Throw caution to the wind, throw your school uniform out the window, and start throwing mild to wild parties with people you’ve never met and with whom, perhaps out of fear or lack of appropriate footwear, you would never usually socialise. It’s time to begin lying about your alma mater (swap St Hilda’s for Applecross), it’s time for a dramatic image makeover (try a haircut and some hip new glasses), and it’s time to stop talking about exam results and leavers (unless you got a really high ATAR, that is – people generally love hearing about that, and you will be a big hit at the Arts Union Sundowner).

ALONE AND FRIENDLESS IN A SEA OF TINY, BEIGE-COLOURED CLASSROOMS

Already, you’re frowning. Those school pals provide a warm safe comfort zone of shared experiences. These are the people who dangled shining bags of cask wine over your head on the beaches of Dunsborough, and that means something, surely.

If you take this attitude, you’re probably quite dull, and there may be no helping you. However if you are keen to network with the Future MBAs Of The Golden Triangle, or to develop a painful crush that extends from your first week of uni to a lonely night in third year where your crushee is drunk and lonely and pityingly reciprocal, or to find someone who takes great lecture notes and will send them to you in neat PDF format on the first day of study week, try this fail safe friend-making technique: Approach someone (preferably someone standing in a corner by themselves, whose high school clearly didn’t produce enough high achieving students - they are vulnerable and open to new friendship experiences) and tell them about how you wish you had gone to Curtin instead. They will no doubt share this sentiment, and a long conversation about

broadening units and incompetent lecturers and peacocks as a symbol of class privilege will inevitably follow. Remember that shared discontent is a fail-safe bonding technique, and you’ll soon have a bunch of jaded mates for life.

IN DA CLUB

UWA is really into Clubs And Societies. Whether they be faculty societies (Science Union), morally ambiguous party clubs (Leisure), or groups catering to a specific nerdy niche (University Dramatic Society), joining up with one is theoretically a great way to make ‘like-minded friends’. Be wary, though, that it is also a great way to meet literally the worst people ever.

Note that all clubs and societies, and indeed the student guild itself, have some kind of governmental structure. Most of them operate in a super cliquey and competitive way, with ambitions running inexplicably high. If you’re just joining any arbitrary club in a desperate effort to meet people, it might be worth instead considering the less fraught option of bravely striking up conversation with fellow students (preferably ones with nice hair) in your tutes and lectures, and inviting them to continue the discussion over coffee afterwards. This way, you won’t have to choose sides during someone’s desperate race to become Vice President of the Electronic Music Appreciation Society, or join a confusingly aligned student political party, or debate the tenets of atheism. Note also that the student guild/fun police have cracked down significantly on all drinking events in recent years, and that student clubs are now more renowned for money laundering than they are for keggers.

ACADEMIC STIMULATION IN THE TIME OF THE RECORDED LECTURE

It usually takes about two years for this to sink in, so here’s a head start: classes are a whole lot more fulfilling when you prepare for them. Woah, woah, hoooold up. Bet you didn’t think that you were reading an article written by a big fat nerd loser, eh? Bet you thought that student media was all about shenanigans and sticking it to the Vice Chancellor. While Pelican does consider itself a ‘lighthearted, irreverent student magazine’, it nonetheless advises that you balance your quest to lose your virginity by second semester with some gentle but regular hours of light study.

There are some piss-poor lecturers lurking around UWA, but in a sea of uninspiring course outlines that haven’t changed since 1988 there are a few rare tropical fish - those written by young and hungry academics who still maintain some vestige of the passion they once had for their PhD subject.

Seek them out, and pay attention to them. While it’s classic masochistic fun to test the limits of just how little work one can do to pass a unit, and fairly laughable how little reading and attendance seem to matter when it comes to that final grade, you’re going to enjoy your time at uni 200% more if you do the readings and watch (in person, even) the lectures.

Also, degrees are getting pretty expensive, nowadays. May as well get some bang for ya buck.

UWA FACT For every international student enrolment the university receives, the university Dean treats himself to a fancy new hat

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FRE SHER GUIDE

THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY DEFINES ‘LADSY’ AS

The Tav provides a warm dark drinking hole for those lucky enough to have an early 18th birthday, but there are many places in and around campus to imbibe a sneaky lemonade.

The so-called ‘Goonzebo’, home to many a fresher event (these are as awful as they are essential) is a classic. It is situated by the picturesque Matilda Bay foreshore, but you will no doubt be distracted by other scenery in the form of that girl from your Communications tutorial with forthright opinions about Ariana Grande. You can expect the seagulls and sand to become blurry (with feelings of both tipsiness and inadequacy) within a short amount of time. The sunken garden is another fan favourite, and it would be a crime to graduate from this university without at some point having sat contemplatively by the reflection pond late at night, bevvy in hand. Attending classes while inebriated can be considered a rite of passage, but realise that it is actually really obvious to everyone involved when one member of the tute is hammered. If you’re hesitant to talk in a tutorial, though, a cup of courage could help.

SNOOZIN’

Officially, napping is not only frowned upon but actively outlawed at UWA, as rest is not in keeping with an ‘aim higher’ mentality. Unofficially, students have been kipping on campus since the late 1920s. There may come an hour when you have missed the last bus due to frantic last minute assignment writing. There may be an evening when an end of semester party leaves you incapable of procuring transport or

driving yourself home. Or there may be an afternoon where you have an inconvenient gap between classes that could be strategically filled with a light snooze. In any event, don’t bother trying your luck in any regularly patrolled areas. The arts common room may host some tempting couches, but it also forms part of the hourly campus security guard circuit during night time. If you need to sleep, you’re going to have to find a dusty and forgotten club room, or 24 hour study lab.

Look to those places on campus that haven’t been renovated since 1972 (not hard), and go from there.

SHOE REPAIR GUY

UWA implores its students to ‘seek wisdom’, and while on your vision quest to attain knowledge you might like to start with a campus cobbler as your spirit guide. Yes, guild village is home to a dedicated shoe repairsman, who apparently prevails against all odds to succeed in making his long-forgotten craft a viable business. Shoe Repair Guy harks back to a time where craftsmanship preceded Etsy stores and scrapbooking clubs, and his career success story is perhaps the only one you will encounter on this campus.

OFFICIAL TOILET GUIDE

If only when it comes to bathrooms, UWA provides its customers (sorry, students) with some real state of the art facilities. Whether you need somewhere to defecate, urinate, covertly cry silent stress-induced tears, or write the URL of your blog on a wall, you’re never far away from a clean and well appointed toilet stall.

If you need to perform a sneaky outfit check, try the undercroft toilet – you’ll pass it as you walk from the underpass towards Reid library. It has a deluxe full length mirror, and along with the mythical Sex Shower, it is one of this university’s best kept bathroom secrets.

If you’re after a VIP toilet experience with vintage retro furnishings, try Winthrop Hall – think huge mirrors, antique door handles, wood paneling. The kind of setting where you can crank out a really expensive looking, Group of Eightworthy number two.

The Reid Library staircases lead to some truly questionable toilets. Their colour scheme is universally a deep seaweed green, an immediate warning sign that these facilities should be considered a last resort. Meanwhile, the Science Library’s shiny new stalls provide an overall pleasant and dry wrench free experience.

TO CONCLUDE

A dry wrench free experience is perhaps the most you can hope for, dear fresher, as you embark on your tertiary education journey. Pelican wishes you well, and implores anybody who got all the way through this article to come by the office and collect your prize.

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UWA FACT UWA’s first Guild President went on to become a successful gourmet burger entrepreneur

HONOURS GUIDE

Bonus: The Pelican Guide to Honours Words by Lucy Ballantyne Honours is kind of like the menopause of scholarship. It happens later in your university life – your last year as an undergrad – and it’s a massive adjustment. Uni life becomes something altogether different; your focus shifts, and you’re more likely to be found with a book than in a bar. Much like going through The Change, you struggle to sleep, moods vacillate with wild abandon and you regularly find yourself waking up in cold sweats. Everything is out of your control, from deadlines to bowel movements. It’s rough. And just like menopause, no one ever talks about it.

Yet, ask any academic on campus and they’ll say the same the same thing – nothing is as hard as Honours. No PhD and no Masters can compare to the rigorous pace of an Honours course; a year, as you’ll find out, is startlingly little time to both write a dissertation and keep up with coursework. Add to that lack of time a lack of resources and you’re starting to get close to a sense of what it’s like.

Pelican says no more to the forgotten Honours student. Read this guide as you embark on the hardest, but most instructive year of your university life, and let us light your way. Nobody else will.

1. Befriend your cohort

It’s 2 am in the Reid Library. It’s just you, and a rubbish bin full of Tommy Sugo takeaway cups for company. Honours is a pretty solitary year – my arts course only required three contact hours a week, and they all fell on the same day.

The rest of the week was spent in the library, staring at my computer screen, dreaming about the cold embrace of the grave. The antidote to this kind of loneliness is your peers. At the end of the day, the truth is that no one understands what it’s like except them. Get on first name basis, and bring tea and cakes to classes that are few and far between. You’ll be grateful when they offer to proofread your final draft, and for the ‘me too’ when you detail your inevitable breakdown the week before submission. Hold onto each other.

2. Start writing your thesis early

In my experience, the student who starts writing late doesn’t do so out of laziness. In fact, these students are often the most passionate. It’s a bit of a nasty habit to bring over from undergrad to try and nail down all your research before you begin to write. When you’re writing a dissertation, the subject matter is so big that you’ll simply never hold it all in your hands. Write early, and you’ll have time to stop and research when you hit bumps along the way. And nothing’s going to psych you out more than being six hundred words in when the rest of your class is halfway through. Stop researching; start writing.

Scrivener that allow you to have both your notes and your dissertation open in the same window. As a self-confessed Luddite, I handwrote my notes and the bulk of my thesis, and saw it come back to bite me in a particularly fraught couple of hours of slapstick comedy at UniPrint. Get a grip on formatting seemingly trivial things like your page numbers and table of contents – save yourself the stress. For those of you including any kind of images, expect a bizarre kind of nightmare scenario in which you waste precious hours trying to format them. If you can’t format the image in a word document without wanting to smash a third-floor library window, insert it into a single table cell - I’ve heard it works a treat.

4. Set up a workspace

When I was in my Honours year, fourth-years had access to UWA library postgraduate study areas. The desks in these spaces are bigger, cleaner and all have built in powerpoints.

But with UWA radically changing its course structure to accommodate more postgraduate degrees, these spaces are closing their legs to incoming Honours students. This isn’t the catastrophe it sounds like – desks in the PGAs operate on a ‘hot-desk’ basis just like the rest of the library, and it wasn’t unusual for me to leave my things on a desk in the wee hours of the morning to go and have a nap at home, only to return mere hours later to find my stuff had been removed by a library staff member. Library staffers were always lovely about returning my confiscated books, and I wholeheartedly believe the ‘hot-desk’ rule to be the diabolical plan of some lone wolf; a particularly cruel-hearted and passive aggressive librarian. If you can afford to avoid library desk politics, and arseholes that take phone calls from the seat next to you, do it. Set up a desk at home where there’s plenty of space and good vibes to help you through.

5. Remember: this is just as hard as it feels Some days Honours feels like the hardest thing you’ll ever do. It probably is. The Pelican Office is always open for tea and sympathy – we won’t forget about you.

3. Suss your word processing

There’s typing, and there’s typing. Move on from Microsoft Word and look into ‘project management’ programs like UWA FACT Winthrop Hall was built in 1988 according to the exacting specifications of Alan Bond

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HOROSCOPE S

First Semester of University – What Do The Stars Have To Say? Words by Mystic Mason AQUARIUS Jan 21 - Feb 19 Saturn is intersecting with Jupiter for Aquarius this semester, leaving you full of energy and open to taking on new ideas in a way that sets your creative drive on fire. Make sure to sit at the front of the class and arrive ten minutes early to rule your notebook. Really relish in this creative and energetic burst, because the way Jupiter is travelling for you, you’re probably dropping out in semester two.

PISCES Feb 20 - Mar 20 It’s a time of inquisitiveness for you with Pluto’s force playing strong for Aquarius. You’re probably going to be filled with burning questions during your first tutorial. Consider indulging in that classic Pisces inquisitiveness. For those Pisces with a Rising Taurus sign, your questions to your tutor may be perceived as stubborn or hard-headed, so try not to be too overbearing and remember to ease up after a while.

ARIES Mar 21 - Apr 20 Sorry, it doesn’t look good.

TAURUS Apr 21 - May 21 Your slow and steady nature and hesitance to commit to an idea without being 100% sure may be misconstrued by your classmates. Remember to reason solidly in class, otherwise you might be seen as the slow-thinker. Give others an ‘in’ to how your brain works, and the potentials for a Taurus as a debater might just be seen. Don’t join Socialist Alternative.

The stars don’t say anything about that, it’s just good advice.

GEMINI May 22 - June 22 It’s a great time to make some friends in the first class of semester. Everyone is eager to forge new connections and not miss the boat in the coming months. Your fluid nature and ability to put your best face forward will come in handy this week. Be cautious about the second friend you make though Mercury’s passage suggests they’re about to join Leisure.

CANCER Jun 23 - Jul 23 Your time management skills are really going to be tested this semester. Ease up before diving head first into things and take a moment to remember your priorities. Your black moon is in transit with the third house - make sure to know where all the best toilets are on campus.

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LEO Jul 24 - Aug 23 You may have trouble handling your natural exuberance in this exciting new environment. Keep your urge to showboat in check - it won’t do you any favours amongst your new classmates. Forces acting on your natal sun suggest you’ll encounter another force vying for the limelight - if another student hits on the tutor you saw first, feel free to get salty.

VIRGO Aug 24 - Sep 23 You’re going to ace that surprise quiz in week two, but energies seem to be dipping in your personal life. Remember that your first year of uni is also meant to be fun, and make some friends without ignoring your old ones. You’ll find that keeping strong ties will pay off in the not-too-distant future; mainly when you need notes for PSYC1102.

LIBRA Sep 24 - Oct 23 In typical Libran fashion, first semester is a bit of a balancing act for you. You’ll have to find ways to adapt to the new situations vying for your time and energy. Consider what activities you can let slide and put on the back burner while you concentrate. Like the useless membership for Psychos you signed up for on O-Day. SCORPIO Oct 24 - Nov 22 Basically there’s something weird going on here with Chiron, and I couldn’t find where Mercury was on your chart but let’s assume it’s all good. It’s usually all good. Your class is gonna go great! Just try your best and make some new friends. Oh, when I looked on your chart Venus and Neptune overlapped and it looked a bit like a skull. I think that means good financial luck!

SAGITTARIUS Nov 23 - Dec 21 Network, network, network! It’s time to sow seeds and make yourself known around campus because you’ll be fully fucked and running for Guild by second semester. Careful, though, because it’s going to bite you in the ass when another hack steals money again to move interstate.

CAPRICORN Dec 22 - Jan 20 The transit of the wheel of fortune is in the house of personal growth right now. Coming to university may help you find your feet and really learn where your interests and priorities lie. Just say ‘yes’ to things for a little while and open yourself up to experience. You have to open the doors of opportunity for yourself, right now! You might as well, because UWA sure isn’t opening them for you.

UWA FACT The only place on campus where it is legal to fornicate is on top of the desk in the Pelican office

GRADUATE JOB CRISIS

e t a u d a r G t s Fir Crisis Job Words by Caitlin Frunks Images by the Federal Government Life is a continuation of scary first experiences, but we grow and we learn. Some things become less scary because we realise that actually, everyone has to do it eventually (see: driving). Finishing university and pretending to function as a grown adult is perhaps one of life’s scarier experiences.

The following is a compilation of many of the firsts I’ve experienced since graduation.

The first serious job application I spend the month prior to finishing university seriously looking for jobs in my field. The first few jobs I apply for are highly competitive and coveted grad programs for the Federal Government. I get ‘short listed’ for a couple of them (I have a feeling they are very long short lists), which means I spend many hours doing weird psychometric tests with questions like this:

I figure that a meeting with someone whose job it is to find people jobs might actually get me a job! I quickly learn that this is a very naïve idea. The employment officer sits me down in the eerily empty lime green office and explains that I appear to be a clever girl and probably don’t need assistance to find a job. Where is the secret catalogue of jobs at her fingertips? She’s not even going to help me? What a jip!

‘Come back in three months if you’re unsuccessful’. No way that I’ll still be unemployed in three months, I tell her.

First dole payment $72 to last me a fortnight. I call Centrelink to complain, but spend an hour on hold before giving up and accepting my fate. I get a letter the same day that explains my next full payment will be in a fortnight. Luckily I have already planned to piss off to Albany and sit around on my Mum’s couch all week (while applying for jobs, of course!). I skip the week’s rent and hope my landlord won’t realise (he doesn’t). I come home with a purse full of pity money from my mum.

First overwhelming wave of worthlessness I spend a lot of time lying on the living room floor face down listening to Cat Power. I sleep in till 11am to avoid having to fill up more empty time. My gym membership expires, so I stop exercising. My life feels a lot like a George Michael Bluth GIF. First TV series I watched in <48 hours VEEP (no regrets, great show).

First ‘real’ job interview This pulls me right out of my funk. I spend hours trawling op shops for a blazer that fits and is not the top half of 80s power suit. I get so excited that I have an interview that I show up a full week early! It’s probably the most embarrassing moment of my life. I come back the next week and do the interview and aptitude test and sit through a lot of videos about the company.

and this:

First rejection of job So they offer me the job! I’m happy! But they spend so long between the interview and the job offer that I’ve actually already decided to do something else.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling a lot of emotion for this Windows 96 desktop background.

First job rejection ‘We thank you for your application, however…’ So these start rolling in for some of the jobs I applied for, but most jobs don’t even acknowledge my application, let alone inform me that they’re not interested.

First unemployment services meeting I was on youth allowance for my entire degree, so I don’t have any qualms about continuing to bludge on government money. However, in order to receive newstart payments, I have to attend a job seeker meeting at an employment agency.

I’m actually pretty happy to go, because after many fruitless gumtree and seek.com.au searches I am rapidly losing hope that there are any jobs available, let alone ones in my field.

First radical life change My aunty and uncle need a governess for their three kids on their cattle station in the Upper Gascoyne. So I pack up my stuff, put it all into storage, and start my life as I now know it.

First full time job I provide the primary care for three small kids, including their schooling (they do school of the air). Sometimes we muster cattle. I drink a lot of beer. Through the eyes of a foreigner, my life is probably the quintessential Australian experience.

My journey to this point has made me thankful that I didn’t get any of the jobs I applied for six months ago. I don’t really want a nine-to-five office job, so I don’t know why I applied for so many. My eyes are open to new and exciting opportunities. Next week I have an interview for a job in Japan. Life after graduation can be scary and tumultuous, but ‘I’M A GROWN ASS WOMAN’ and I’m gonna do what I want, not what I feel society expects of me (and yeah, I’m probably never gonna pay back my HECS).

UWA FACT University by-laws explicitly state that it is only okay to have a hot affair with your tutor if they wear a tweed suit

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GLO RY HOLE S

GLORY HOLE ETIQUETTE Words by Thomas Rossiter

Glory holes. Pomegranate sized apertures drilled between toilet cubicles, booths in adult bookstores or installed privately through bedsheets or mattresses.

For a long time, glory holes were the domain of the gay community, the impersonal nature of which aided their need for anonymity (particularly in times and places where homosexuality was illegal), but as VICE squads grew wiser to popular locations, users moved; erotic bookstores came to be a popular choice. Unfortunately, as gay culture came into conflict with straight culture, glory holes were appropriated, and now are commonly used by heterosexual pairings. Despite the stigma, glory holes are widespread, and come with their own private language; a language I will attempt to translate for you now.

To those who question the usefulness of this article to the layman, I propose a hypothetical. You are sitting in a toilet, noticing to your fascination and eventual horror the hole in the cubicle wall next to you. A glory hole. Desperate to avoid an erect penis shoved in the face, you try desperately to think of something that will prevent this eventuality. And it is here, frightened poopers, that I come to your rescue. Simply place the elbow or palm of the hand over the hole, ensuring it is completely covered. This is the universal glory hole signal for ‘no thankyou.’ But I would be doing my readers a disservice to assume that all of them were desperate to avoid an erect penis shoved in the face, so from here on, we will focus on how to solicit this behaviour.

Should the similarly excited reader find themselves in this same hypothetical, but wishes to solicit the erect penis of a stranger, they can use one of the following signals to indicate their intent. A hand to the hole, placed so the hand and fingers are visible, indicates willingness to perform what is colloquially known as a ‘hand job’ while the placement of open mouth to the hole, typically with tongue sticking out, indicates willingness to perform oral sex. Other, general signals to indicate your interest in another party include tapping your foot in a way that will be both visible and audible to your neighbour. Verbally propositioning your neighbour

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is not recommended, but can work, depending on the progressiveness of your local community and the location of the glory hole. This is not to be attempted in public toilets, but is a relatively safe bet in an erotic bookstore.

To the adventurous reader, some information on the different types of glory holes is also a necessity. Some, as mentioned, are simple holes bored into the partition separating cubicles, some have duct tape or sponges to reduce chafing, some are larger, to allow the testicles to present themselves alongside the penis (I understand that the polite thing to do in such a situation is to ensure these testicles do not feel ignored). The ideal width for a glory hole partition is roughly a quarter-inch, any larger makes its usage difficult, but much thinner reduces the level of anonymity of the users. More complex glory holes include a type of brace for the facilitation of anal copulation.

These allow the ‘bottom’ to secure themselves on one side, whilst the ‘top’ embraces them from behind, and there are sections that place the ‘top’ on a platform, raising them to make oral sex with the ‘bottom’ easier.

Other glory holes of the crudely constructed kind can have uncomfortably sharp edges. This is a particular annoyance in areas that do not encourage glory hole operation, as sudden discovery from an unwanted party means that the ‘top’ needs to quickly withdraw his penis from the hole, risking cuts or abrasions. The other health risks of glory hole use are STD related—the use of glory holes was one of the reasons the AIDS epidemic spread so horribly. Anonymous sex, while exciting, carries many health risks. This is something of a problem for the glory hole community. Knowledge of the other party involved can eliminate the risk of potentially lifethreatening STDs, but somewhat defeats the point. Despite the risks, the users of glory holes are many and varied, and gloriously spread all across the world.

We hope that this guide has proved useful, and that our readers can now proceed without embarrassing themselves in glory hole related situations. Whilst I do not know of any glory holes in the Perth area (though an internet message board assured me there is one in Swinger’s sex shop, Subiaco), I will consider my work done—and proudly too— if I should soon discover one in the Arts or Guild toilets.

Seek wisdom, students of UWA. Seek wisdom and glory.

UWA FACT Ex-Wolfmother frontman Andrew Stockdale can regularly be spotted at the Tav on a Wednesday afternoon

NAMELE SSNE SS

NAMELESSNESS Words by Catherina Pagani

There is a particular solemn beauty about fleetingly meeting someone, and farewelling them, and realising that you will very likely never see each other again. Not those obligatory mundane exchanges, but the brief encounters and connections that begin and end without any expectations.

There was a Colombian photographer-journalist who wandered around Mexico City with me on my first night in the there, whilst we communicated in a broken combination of our languages. I’d been vaguely wary of venturing into an unknown city alone in the dark, and instantly suspicious when he addressed me, but before long we were comfortably exchanging our bastardised sentences, and we sat beneath the museum, on one of the surrounding benches, and afterwards we wandered back to our hotels, with respective partners waiting in each.

There was the Melbournian man who greeted me with ‘Hey, I’m usually the one by myself at a bar, so I thought I should say hi,’ while I stood, bitterly sipping a delicious concoction, wondering where on earth my brother was, as he’d suggested we meet there for cocktails on his last evening in that well-

loved eastern coast oasis. Unbeknownst to me, my brother had passed out somewhere, and the next I heard from him was through an angry taxi driver requiring payment in the wee hours of the morning, having delivered my brother to the airport sans wallet. So this man chatted to me for well over an hour, saving my evening, and when I left for the last tram we said our goodbyes.

Today I spoke to a Cambodian lady travelling to Phnom Penh for the first time. I gave her a magazine because she was keen to learn more English, and she gifted me a brooch (the inequality of this exchange is not lost on me, and the feeling of guilt is fresh! But she was adamant I take it). And there are no names or numbers scrawled on scraps of paper, grubby, stuffed in forgotten pockets. No friend request, no follow.

No pretence of trying to prolong it. If we ever knew each other’s names, we’ve now forgotten them. And yet every one of these encounters has had an impact, and I suppose it would be nice if one could communicate some sense of thanks to the friendly, nameless, fleeting pals that have brightened days along the way.

LOOKING TO SAVE ON TEXTBOOKS FOR THIS SEMESTER? WANTING TO SELL YOUR OLD ONES?

WWW.GUILDTEXCHANGE.COM 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 UWA FACT The peacocks are wholly uninterested in your romantic problems

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FEATURE NAME

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UWA FACT Recorded lectures and low tutorial participation mark weightings mean that technically you can complete your whole degree from a sharehouse in Brunswick. Think about it

FEATURE NAME

Words by Harry Sanderson Art by Megan Ansell

I recently drew my first picture of Muhammad. It was a 10-centimetre coal pencil sketch on the back of a serviette I made while waiting at a coffee store.

Normally I prefer to draft with 24-H pastels on 300g/m2 hot press medium grain paper, but all I had at the time was the charcoal and the napkin, so I made do.

On a scale of new things to try in 2015, sketching the prophet Muhammad probably ranks below flying a kite or eating salmon in terms of benefits to your health. The hadith of Sunni Muslims are pretty clear in their distaste for it, and among fanatics it’s not difficult to inspire ire.

My friend Aamir is Muslim, but I don’t think he’d mind if he saw it. He’s not very concerned with poorly sketched representations of Muhammad. He’s into hip-hop and Emily Ratajakowski and I’m not sure he’d even tell me to throw the napkin away, let alone try and hurt me for it. One time he did punch me in the arm. I forget what it was for, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with religious figures.

I guess if someone does try and hurt me for it I only have myself to blame. Rules are rules after all, and the incentive for Islamic martyrs in protecting the reputation of Muhammad does provide a logical excuse, even if the reward itself doesn’t seem personally appealing. In my opinion 72 Virgins is far too

many. Most of my friends are virgins, and to be honest none are very good for conversation. three would be the maximum number I could stand to spend eternity with. Still, that’s just me, and I don’t want inflame tensions between those wanting virgins and those wanting free speech.

I’m not even 100% sure anyone would be able to identify my sketch as Muhammad. He has a beard and a turban, but so does Aamir, and I don’t think anyone would get mad at me for drawing him. My Muhammad is wearing a tuxedo, which I know isn’t strictly traditional, but if he’s never been factually represented, there isn’t a consensus on what he normally wears, no? I was thinking to clear it up maybe I should add a small plastic name tag or a speech bubble elucidating his true identity, but right now the sketch is going for more of an early Charles Addams type vibe and I think stylistically neither would work.

Sketching a new subject is an intimidating prospect for any budding cartoonist, and the hype surrounding this particular figure makes me more nervous than usual about showing it to anyone. Recently a lot of people have been talking about the power of the pencil, and how free speech can’t be stifled. If you want to know the truth, I think I’ll throw out my sketch.

Francois Hollande yesterday wore a pin that read ‘We are not afraid,’ but the truth is we should be. If we weren’t afraid of a drawing causing 12 deaths then we wouldn’t be talking about it. Acts of terror are intended to intimidate people, and they do. We must stay optimistic that in the future religious fanatics will be subdued, but for now we exist in a period where something as small as a French cartoon can incite terror. No one is safe from fanaticism, and I think that to be scared is to be sensible. The sketch will be discarded. I’ll fly a kite, eat salmon, and wait patiently until the pen really is mightier than the sword.

UWA FACT The Arts Union Common Room is on the Health Department blacklist

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YOUR VERY OWN VICE-CHANCELLOR! Cut him out, mix and match with all of his favourite accessories.

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Art by Alice McCullagh

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LABOUR DAY IS NOT A UNIVERSITY HOLIDAY, THE GRUBBY BASTARDS

CENSUS DATE! DON’T FUCK IT UP

PELICAN WORKSHOP IN GUILD COUNCIL MEETING ROOM TODAY 6PM! LAST DAY TO WITHDRAW FROM A UNIT, SLACKERS

LAST DAY TO ADD A UNIT, NERDS

POLITIC S

SINCE WE LEFT YOU A P ELI C A N POL ITICS RECA P B Y LEA H ROBERTS s the first month of 2015 sinks in, all of the politicians are anywhere but in Canberra. Although it may be slow at the moment, this is shaping up to be a huge year in Australian politics, and global politics and international relations as a whole – maybe even bigger than The Bachelor in 2014, although let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

So what’s been happening since the end of last year for all those people gallivanting across the globe or working away those summer days? On the day of the Sydney siege the midyear budget review was announced, and still went ahead. The results were as promising as the rumours that Beyonce and Jay-Z were going to break up...there has been a huge budget blowout (I think many of us know those feels) of $40.4 billion. This blowout has consequences for all Australians, but it is unclear at the moment what the government will put forward to try to reduce this deficit as the dwindling poll results continue.

So as the future leaders of Australia, what will the results be for us? Unemployment is set to rise, making it harder to snatch grad positions. The tertiary education reforms have been rejected by the Senate, which was a win for us students.

However, Christopher Pyne is set on bringing this policy back to the senate, and with only a 31-33 balance the tide could turn very easily, especially considering the unpredictable nature of the now-defunct PUP bloc. Worthy of note is that Pyne spent 8 million on advertising for our favourite higher education reforms – not smart. Other ways the budget will affect students is the abolition of 175 different government bodies, so for students hoping to get into the public sector the competition will be greater and the likelihood of employment will be sparse. At the moment this is how the budget mid-year review will affect students but with such a huge deficit it is predicted that more unpopular taxes and cuts will be introduced this year, possibly leading to more future budget policies directly affecting students.

Also of importance to students are the changes to the Medicare rebate. The Abbott government wanted to increase the cost of doctor’s visits of less than ten minutes by $20.

They have since abandoned that policy, but that level of sneakiness is on par with covertly trying to decrease the size of killer pythons or changing the classic Cadbury crème egg.

We’re onto you, Cadbury! Uh, I mean Abbott!

The Abbott government’s relentless pursuit of domestic 22

fiscal goals has resulted in a cut to Australia’s international foreign aid budget. In the context of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the international community has cause to frown.

Showing a modicum of logic, the Senate did vote down the Coalition’s paid parental leave scheme in the name of fiscal prudence.

In other political news, troops have been sent to Iraq to help the Americans and it seems as if more troops will be sent there this year as the threat of ISIS continues to grow. With the recent attacks around the world including the Charlie Hebdo killings and of course the Sydney siege, some predict that Australian troops may engage in further wars in the near future.

In November, Australia hosted the 2014 G-20 Summit in Brisbane. A key focus of Australia’s representatives at the G-20 was our relationship with Asia. Recent Free Trade Agreements with South Korea and China seem to indicate good things, though the extent to which these agreements positively affect Australians is yet to be seen.

Australia’s political fan girls swooned and sighed over Barack Obama’s address at the University of Queensland, discussing everything from economic growth to rather pointed jabs at Australia’s lack of climate action. Just days ago China and America make a landmark agreement on global warming agreeing to reduce their carbon emission by 2025 and 2030.

China had changed its long-standing view of anti-climate change to making a decision that took the world by shook the world. Obama’s speech had a strong focus on its student crowd, and drove home the importance of climate change to his agenda by announcing that his government would make a 3 billion USD contribution to the Climate Change Fund.

And then there was Putin. Abbott’s attempt to diplomatically confront (“shirtfront”) Putin over MH17 was an abject failure. The coolness and awkwardness directed towards to Putin by foreign leaders was unbearably cringe-worthy, though Canada’s Stephen Harper stuck it to him. Putin’s entourage of Russian warships caused a bit of drama, but essentially revealed that he was resorting to late nineteenthcentury gunboat diplomacy.

New years resolutions are a lot like election promises; they’re usually quite grand and we make them with sincerity, but as the year drones on, exactly how many are we able to keep?

Time will tell.

UWA FACT To reach a slightly higher spiritual plane while conveniently loosening your bowels, drink three guild coffees within half an hour

P OLITIC S

Victoria's Secret Words by Thomas Rossiter Art by Elysia Gelavis For the first time since 1955, Victorians have ousted a one-term state government. The last time this happened was during the Labor party split, where Labor party preferences were split down the middle, and the party’s anti-communist members decided that the prospect of electing their erstwhile enemies was preferable to voting for possible communist spies. Understandably, losing after one term without a historic catastrophe is incredibly embarrassing for both Denis Napthine and the party he represents.

Interestingly, this was not the only ‘first’ of note in this election.

The Australian Sex Party took their first seat in the Lower House, and the Greens acquired Prahran, edging out their usual allies the ALP. The result in Prahran was particularly surprising, as Liberal incumbent Clem Newton-Brown won his last election with a healthy 4.6% margin. However, the performance of the Federal government, widespread campaigning by Greens candidate Sam Hibbins and Prahran’s thriving and growing gay community have orchestrated enough of a swing to secure them the victory.

Early in the count, it looked like the Greens would be eliminated, but after preferences from the Family First, Animal Justice and Independent candidates were distributed, they pulled ahead of Labor candidate Neil Pharaoh by 41 votes, eventually winning the election by only 262 votes. This makes Sam Hibbins the first Greens candidate to have ever taken a seat from a Liberal candidate, and the second to ever sit in the Lower House. This victory reflects the growing power of the Greens as well as the minor parties, (Shooters and Fishers picked up two seats) and it stands in contrast to the utter defeat of the Napthine government and the decline of his party.

As Napthine’s loss trickled down into the minds of Liberal party members, blame began to be apportioned. Most say that the loss is the result of ‘state specific issues’, such as the weakened economy and rising unemployment (at its highest level since 2001 in Victoria), as well as a lack of leadership from Denis Napthine.

The largest contributor to this loss however, was unquestionably Tony Abbott. The Abbott government’s popularity is at an all-time low; the federal budget in particular proved too large a weight around the neck of the LNP campaign and this has led to increased friction between Abbott and his premiers as they try to distance themselves from Canberra to secure elections.

At one point during one of Tony Abbott’s endorsements of the Denis Napthine campaign, Tony broke into what was clearly an unscripted hug. I can say it was clearly unscripted, because

Napthine laughed and then pulled right away, literally distancing himself from Tony Abbott. Visual poetry.

The Victorian Liberal party has long been struggling between its Christian and old-school business conservative factions.

Even before the whole Geoff Shaw situation (former Liberal MP misusing his taxpayer funded fuel card), the Napthine government has been in trouble. The first two years of the term were characterised by a failure to deliver on election promises, and the switch in leaders from Ted Baillieu to Napthine was, while necessary, poorly handled. Napthine could not unify his party, recover the energy lost in Baillieu’s first two years, or reign in Geoff Shaw (the very man who declared the lack of confidence in Baillieu’s leadership in the first place). With Labor running an excellent campaign, and the steady shift of key liberal demographics towards the left, most predicted a solid victory for the ALP. The East-West link, perhaps the cornerstone of the Napthine campaign, proved to be incredibly divisive. The project was a proposed tunnel, connecting Melbourne’s eastern freeway, their airport and, ambitiously, their docks. Napthine’s government claimed that it would ease the long standing complaints over congestion on the roads, whilst the Opposition insisted that the costs were tremendous, and the project ineffective. This led to huge and vitriol-filled arguments about job creation, the tunnel pandering to car drivers without addressing the state’s problems with public transport. Whilst the extent to which the controversial East-West link influenced the election is still up for debate, its effects may still be felt; as the Abbott government has indicated its desire to carry out the project, dragging the state along whether they like it or not.

Unfortunately for Napthine, these failures have been enough to overcome the usual voter allowance for shaky starts to a new government. For the first time in over 50 years, a state has decided that its new leaders do not deserve a second chance; the voter’s naturally forgiving nature for first term failures has been overcome by steady and unceasing incompetence. With the New South Wales and Queensland state elections coming in March, this loss can only come as a sobering memento mori for the federal government. As the King rides through the streets of Canberra, Victoria will whisper in his ear; “Remember, you are only human.”

UWA FACT The third floor of Reid library has an entire shelf dedicated to vintage pornography

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POLITIC S

ACKNOWLEDGING THE FIRSTS Words by Brad Griffin Art by Natalie Thompson Here in Australia, we have a problem with firsts. First people, that is. I don’t pretend to be some kind of enlightened white guy messiah who understands the plight of Australian Aboriginals – that ain’t me. What I do know is that I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like to be murdered, enslaved, subjugated, institutionalized, kidnapped, and then told to get over it. I haven’t had some pitiful amount of money thrown at my face and told that it’s time to engage with a cold, machine-like, alien society.

This is unfortunately a scene that has been repeated across the world in nations where a foreign majority have imposed their will upon a broken native people – instances decrying the mantra of ‘might is right’. The history of conquest of native people goes back thousands of years. Homo Sapiens displaced the Neanderthals, the Persians and Greeks waged brutal wars of conquest on each other for hundreds of years, the Romans did so until they held hegemony over all of Europe, and recently, nations like Britain and Spain took to the high seas to discover and destroy all that they saw for the almighty dollar and to prove whose dick really was the biggest.

I had always thought that I was a pretty apologetic guy when it came to Australia’s sordid history of Aboriginal subjugation. I was 15 when Kevin Rudd made his Apology to the Stolen Generations and I knew it was a good thing, but I did not understand the significance. I impassively watched as victims cried in the gallery of Parliament House. I knew something big had gone down, but I was pretty oblivious. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, my main education on the Stolen Generations was watching Rabbit Proof Fence. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an excellent, accurate, emotional portrayal of a heinous crime, but it’s not an education.

The teaching of our cruel history was not overlooked because it played on the minds of the powers that be and they were ashamed of it; it was overlooked because it simply wasn’t deemed important enough. Black history would never be as important as white history. You only have to recall Tony Abbott referring to Australia as ‘nothing but scrubland’ and ‘empty, uh, I mean sparsely populated’ in the past year to see that Australia’s dominant historical discourse actively seeks to deny our black history.

The inconvenient truth is this: an unrelenting hangover from the West’s long history of subjugation and enslavement of colonised natives is that in the mainstream media, black lives are still seen 24

as less important than white lives. Don’t shoot me, just hear me out. Have a look at the international reactions to two recent terrible crimes: the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, and the recent massacre committed by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Twelve innocent French citizens; journalists, cartoonists and police officers were slain by misguided religious zealots. The wrongdoing here is not hard to spot. At the same time, Boko Haram was carrying out the systematic liquidation of the town of Baga in north-eastern Nigeria, also in the name of rampant ideology.

2,000 dead. Let that sink in.

That’s what like, half of the entire 2015 UWA fresher cohort?

Officials can’t confirm how many are dead exactly because they can’t get near the town. Boko Haram now controls towns bordering it and the surrounding countryside. Western media did of course cover the killings, but not with the same psychological outrage that characterized the Charlie Hebdo murders. It seems that so often, black deaths and indeed, any non-white, nonwestern deaths in general are treated much more impassively.

Closer to home, consider the Aboriginal communities that are living in extreme poverty out in the red centre. The media reports it as the ‘noble savage’ needing to be ‘rescued’ by the ‘civilised’ white man. If they were white, would the reporting really occur in the same way?

The problem in Australia is a firmly psychological one. Successive governments have thrown money at it and inevitably failed.

It requires a shift in the way that white Australia perceives its indigenous population. The best way – the only way – to do this is through education. The new Australian Curriculum has several ‘cross-curriculum priorities’ that are intended to be embedded in every subject taught, from story time in Pre-primary to Year 12 Calculus. One of these priorities is ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture’. As a Bachelor of Education student last year, I was sceptical as to how it would be possible to include that in my lessons, but I found that it was much easier than I expected, and there are many resources available. If the adults of tomorrow are not only exposed to but actively engaged in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures from an early age, then we stand a chance of removing the stigma and the ‘othering’ complex that begins so early and is so rarely shaken.

Show a little love, everybody.

UWA FACT Most political science students are an easy lay

POLITIC S

Great Humans of Politics Julia Gillard Words by Brad Griffin The theme of ‘firsts’ is a great way to kick off this new regular feature in the Pelican Politics section. The idea behind this new regular is to highlight political figures throughout history that most exemplify the qualities and ideals behind the issue’s theme. As far as ‘firsts’ goes, it was a hard choice. There are an innumerable amount of examples of great men and women who could be written about, but I finally settled on one incredible woman.

Look call me and old tragic but I think that Julia Gillard gets a lot of flak for no reason. I distinctly remember Mid Year Rotto 2010 and waking up on the final day hungover, tired, and having to quickly pack up and seeing Julia Gillard on the news. I was off the Australian mainland again in Europe when three years and three days later she was ousted by Rudd. It seemed as if every time I traveled, a government fell. I’ve been travelling frantically since the 2013 election but lightning has not struck again.

On the 24th of June 2010, Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister. I’m not going to get into the murky waters of what was right or wrong in her challenge of Rudd’s leadership, but if you look at the intricacies of the running of

the government toward mid-2010, the proof is in the pudding.

Like it or not, Gillard acted boldly and swiftly, as she did throughout her time as Prime Minister. She was never popular, and opinion polls over her three years of leadership hit some pretty disappointing lows, however she never let this slow her down or damage her ambition and vision for Australia. Indeed, despite the hung parliament and a vicious opposition, Julia Gillard passed, on average, 0.495 acts of legislation per day during 1098 days in office, making her the most productive Prime Minister in Australian history.

Most importantly, Gillard was not afraid to call things as they were. As she did with Rudd’s failing leadership in 2010, she called out Abbott on he and his party’s attitude toward her leadership in August 2012. After relentless (and as we now know baseless) accusations of misconduct on Gillard’s part, she took a stand.

She made history and international headlines when she branded Abbott as a misogynist. Her tenure as Prime Minister of Australia raised questions as to whether Australia as a nation was mature enough to accept a female leader. One fact is without question though: Gillard was a trailblazer and a woman truly devoted to the wellbeing of her nation.

UWA FACT Kendrick Lamar has an MBA from UWA Business School. He and Matthew Pavlich are good friends

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aware of how urgently films addressing issues of race are needed, kids deserve representation from films without ignoring their cultural heritage that are not specifically about race. Lukas Moodysson’s (whose lesbian coming-of-age Fucking Åmål is also incredibly cute and worth watching) Vi är bäst! about 3 Swedish girls who start a punk band was probably the most fun and optimistic film I saw last year and it’s a shame that this kind of portrayal of carefree youth is so often denied to women who aren’t white.

Angst and ennui are quintessential teenage emotions, but unless they’re as compellingly depicted as the coming-ofage in rural Texas of The Last Picture Show, they can be frightfully boring and cliché as driving themes.

BOYHOOD & THE HOMOGENEITY OF COMING-OF-AGE FILMS Words by James Munt Award season’s here, and having swept up three Golden Globes, Boyhood, perhaps the best-received film of 2014 looks strong for the Oscars. I’m not surprised by its success, nor do I think it’s entirely undeserving of it; Patricia Arcquette gave a remarkable performance as his mother, for the most part the conceit works beautifully and the film has genuine heart.

However, for a genre that’s historically defined by, and to this day overburdened with its straight white male protagonists, it’s sad that about the only POC in the most successful coming-of-age film in a great many years (decades even) is at the centre of a gross white saviour subplot.

A film that relied heavily on projection with music like Phoenix and Soulja Boy used as little more than period music, the critical consensus suggested something profoundly real and relatable for everybody and in many ways it was.

It’s not untrue to suggest that the best coming-of-age stories are able to express something almost universal about reaching adulthood. It’s also true that privileged representations of whiteness are far easier for the audience to project onto because of the way that they’re normalised in comparison to ‘othered’ representations of blackness or queerness. The specificity of 26

female, queer or non-white experiences are something by definition non-universal (just as non-universal as normalised whiteness or straightness).

Consider the brutal frankness with which Catherine Breillat’s À ma sœur! deals with issues of body image and female sexuality and its distinctness to male narratives of adolescence; e.g. the contentious freeze frame ending a direct reference to the quintessential male coming-of-age film The 400 Blows.

The Hispanic worker in Boyhood, thanks to encouragement from Mason’s mother, becomes a restaurant manager, bespeaking a carpe diem attitude quite alien from the realities of class and race in America.

Consider how foreign the America of Boyz n the Hood or Hoop Dreams, its similar production premise to Boyhood, following two boys’ NBA dreams over 6 years, to that of Mason who is able to take drugs without especial fear of consequences or police violence. One especially poignant moment in the former speaks to the epistemological disconnect between these realities, Ice Cube’s character speaks of a TV program he saw “about living in a violent world,” saying, “They had all this foreign shit. They didn’t have shit on my brother, man”. Whilst I’m obviously

Diversifying not only gives representation to those who need it but also breathes life into a stultifying genre. How many films can you think of that cover issues of trans youth for example? Ma Vie En Rose with its responses of colourful magical realist to her parents’ and neighbourhoods’ attempts to deny her gender serves a very different but no less needed type of representation to Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, whose gender ambiguous trans-masculine protagonist has their gender identity attacked repeatedly and bracingly. Yet Tomboy is a film imbued with gentle lyrical symbolism, for example, when they tuck a playdoh packer into a box with their baby teeth.

I’ve always found kids being bullied immeasurably harder to watch compared to a lot of other adult conflicts represented in film. It’s a time I think people try hard to forget and when many people were perhaps a lot more vulnerable than they are now. At that young age when kids are so impressionable, these kinds of subtleties of discursive identity formation are so important and ripe with stories to be told. A not dissimilar moment of enforcing gender norms occurs at the hands of Mason’s stepfather in Boyhood when he sees him wearing nail polish, and it’s a welcome subversion of the rather standard idea of American boyhood the film paints.

Please give us a break from these overdone narratives; I love Boyhood but I have seen almost this same film under different names so many more times than I care for. Let kids see themselves growing up, let them see empowering representations of the same kinds of experiences and struggles with identity they went through, beyond simply a dubious representation of universal childhood in straight, white American boyhood.

UWA FACT Uni security have cracked down on the sunken garden, blaze it on the foreshore instead

FILM

DIGITALLY DISTRIBUTED TOILET HUMOUR Words by Samuel Montgomery On November 24, 2014, a hacking group self-identified as the ‘Guardians of Peace’ hacked into the corporate network of Sony Pictures Entertainment and missed the irony of their name.

The US Government has since declared that the so-called ‘Guardians of Peace’ are actually hackers acting on behalf of Dear Leader Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean Government. This act of corporate espionage resulted in leaked internal emails, employee records and personal information, as well as several as-yet unreleased Sony films.

The extensive hacks occurred after the North Korean Government promised a “stern and merciless retaliation” if popular Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg film The Interview ever saw the light of day.

It’s not often an authoritarian regime threatens war over a comedic feature film, but honestly I wish it would happen more often.

So what prompted this (over)reaction from Dear Leader? Most likely (i.e. definitely) the graphic death scene of that same Dear Leader, which caused North Korea to state that releasing The Interview would literally be ‘an act of war’.

In response to the leaks and threats by the ‘Guardians of Peace’/North Korea, Sony Pictures absolved the five major US cinema chains from their contracts to show the film, and all five subsequently cancelled their December 25th release of the film. This was a blessing in disguise for Sony Pictures and for pundits backing the move to digital distribution of film and television.

The Interview is the first major big budget studio film to be released (primarily) digitally. After backing down on releasing on the planned release date, Sony Pictures last-minute decided to digitally release The Interview via YouTube, Google Play, Xbox and its own website. It cost $7 to rent the film for 48 hours and $15 to buy, even undercutting the independent cinemas that Sony did get to screen it. Smaller films like the Veronica Mars movie and the Bong Joon-ho film Snowpiercer were released online but were smaller films (and sample sizes) than the major studio backed film. Sony Pictures also makes more money via streaming services with revenue splits with cinema chains traditionally 50/50 while streaming services such as Google Play and YouTube take a much more conservative 30% of revenue. Since release (currently restricted to the US), The Interview has grossed US$5.8 million, well below the $44 million budget. However, Sony Pictures stated that The Interview was rented or purchased online for than 2 million times in the first four days of release, earning $15 million digitally.

Cinema attendance in Australia fell 0.7% between 2012 and 2013, and digital distribution of media can be seen (and hopefully utilised) as a method to combat loss of revenue as a result.

Although The Interview seems to be a promising test for digital distribution, it is an imperfect model. Films usually generate interest and hype via trailers and marketing, and not only did The Interview have that prior to being pulled, it’s since had massive media and even Presidential UWA FACT You should write for Pelican!

coverage by good ol’ Barack as the centre of an international incident. This skews sales data due to larger than usual public interest, as well as digital distribution advanced by forums specifically to induce purchases that people might not usually consume. The Interview has also still only been released in the USA. Digitally distributing a major film with lots of interest but restricting it to a small region created an atmosphere ripe for piracy by people in countries unable to legally access the film (with 7.8% of downloads from Australia).

Although there was a tonne of hype surrounding the movie due to the release being cancelled altogether (see the Streisand Effect), critically The Interview was panned. The hype surrounding the movie probably contributed to this by pushing expectations higher prior to the release of the film. I’ll admit I did torrent this movie prior to its Australian release (I mean c’mon, it was available in 1080p), and I watched it in all its semi-censored glory. Personally, I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t like the obvious toilet humour of Seth Rogen/James Franco movies then it probably isn’t for you (because it has plenty), but it does also present a satirical view of the way the media deals with the megalomaniacal dictator Kim Jong-Un and heavily features the works of Katy Perry. If that hasn’t sold you, I don’t know what will.

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FILM REVIEWS There was a great deal of angst from Sondheim fans at the announcement of the big screen adaptation of the play. Not only was the film being directed by Rob Marshall (whose first musical Chicago was well received and whose second Nine has the distinction of being Daniel Day-Lewis’ one shitty film), but it was being produced

by Disney. Could Sondheim’s subversive and psychological fairy tale survive being produced by the company built on sanitising fairy tales?

INTO THE WOODS Director: Rob Marshall Starring: Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods first debuted on Broadway in 1987, predating the recent trend of revisionist fairytales by 20 years. It is a show which pushes back at the idea of happily ever-after. The whole point is to explore what happens when real life kicks in and your wishes come true but everything is turning to shit.

The answer to this question is actually mostly yes. Whilst purists may balk at some of the changes and cuts made to the play, Marshall’s adaptation retains the subversive nature of Sondheim’s original.

The film struggles from some necessities of the transition between mediums. An intermission is kind of needed to sell the juxtaposition between the two acts, and to give more time to develop the malaise which grows following happily-ever-after.

The cast, playing a collection of fairy tale characters all brought together by their competing wishes, is generally very strong.

There’s no Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia style disasters in the film. Meryl Streep takes the showcase role of The Witch

Movement. Enter James Gralton, a Communist Irishman who returns to look after his dying mother after living in the United States.

JIMMY’S HALL Director: Ken Loach Starring: Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Jim Norton It’s 1932 in County Leitrim, Ireland. The country is rife with political tensions following the civil war ten years prior. An Irish Free State has been established, but the friction remains between the Catholic Church, the State and the Republican 28

His return exacerbates the tension, especially when he reopens the town hall for the community to debate political issues, to dance and to enjoy. It’s difficult to talk ill of veteran director Ken Loach’s work – after all he has forged a career filled with films known for their realist style as well as their social commentary, and both are evident here. But unlike Loach’s other work (see Palme D’or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley that broaches the same pocket of history) Jimmy’s Hall seems to lack the same emotion and intensity that is necessary for slower films to captivate their audience (see Paris, Texas or Under the Skin). Loach’s approach here is reminiscent of something that would be found on SBS in the middle of the day. Interesting to those who have nothing better to do, beautiful to watch, but on the whole absent of

and she performs the hell out of The Witch’s two big numbers ‘Last Midnight’ and ‘Stay With Me’. Streep manages to really highlight The Witch’s sympathetic qualities; even if the cuts in the second act take away from a lot of The Witch’s motivations.

Emily Blunt as The Baker’s Wife is one of the film’s highlights. Blunt does not have a perfect voice, but she brings a great sense of warmth to her character. Johnny Depp wears a dumb costume, but still brings the sexual subtext of the Wolf to the fore, even if he’s missing the exposed wolf cock of the original production, and Chris Pine as Prince Charming, another highlight’s duet with Billy Magnussen, shot like a medieval Michael Bolton video is the film’s funniest moment.

Into the Woods is by no means a perfect musical, but its message that “witches can be right, and giants can be good”, along with Sondheim’s beautiful and witty music means that it’s a musical well worth your time.

3.5/5 Kevin Chiat

cinematic grandeur and unreasonably filled with long conversations that fall flat.

Loach seems preoccupied with making a social statement, so much so that his characters are strictly caricatures of good and evil. The Catholic Priests are the illogical conservatives, whereas Jimmy is the archetypical revolutionary free spirit fighting for the best cause. Only once are the Priests represented as having some sort of moral compass, when the younger Priest (played by Andrew Scott of Sherlock fame) mentions that the tactics used by them are similar to the Ku Klux Klan.

The film is undoubtedly heartfelt and filled with beautiful landscape shots as well as exquisite costuming, but on a whole falls short of what Loach can achieve. It is thought to be his last work (he is 78 after all) and it’s a shame to see him finish a sublime career on a mute note.

3/5 Jade Bates

UWA FACT The Reid library toilets are the easiest to steal toilet paper from

FILM

comedic and humanising and say more than most actors could in words. Some particularly delightful responses emerge during a comically banal discussion on the proper cultivation of gooseberries led by the famous critic John Ruskin whom Leigh portrays with playful irony as a pretentious, lisping buffoon. The tightrope Turner walks here between the bourgeois art world that both celebrates and mocks him and his working class background is brilliantly portrayed and one of the most interesting aspects of his character.

MR. TURNER Director: Mike Leigh Starring: Timothy Spall, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson Mike Leigh’s revelatory new J.M.W. Turner portrait features Timothy Spall as the titular landscape artist, a perfect fit in the world of Leigh’s England.

His incredible performance is abetted by some of the best sound production of the year, lending a voice to Turner’s every grunt and grown which give varying impressions from the grotesque to the

“The sun is God” Turner says at one point and this philosophy of light is dramatized by cinematographer Dick Pope better than one could possibly hope for. I’m immediately reminded of Kubrick’s breathtaking lens experiments in Barry Lyndon or perhaps more pertinently two other British directors Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and John Maybury’s Love is the Devil respective cinematic representations of Caravaggio’s tableaux’s and chiaroscuro and Francis Bacon’s claustrophobic and hallucinatory grotesqueness.

There’s really only one other thing that makes my stomach turn, and that’s INJUSTICE, so overall this film made me want to run for a port-a-loo, stat.

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev Starring: Aleksei Serebryakov, Roman Madyanov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Elena Lyadova I have a very weak stomach. Perhaps it really is a delicate constitution or perhaps my parents coddled me, but whichever it is: my stomach and my drinking habit

Thematically too, painted in isolated but seamless vignettes, Mike Leigh tends toward the proto-abstractionism of Turner’s later work; the film driven only by its subject’s own drive for his art. It appears to suggest a cliché that talent can hit anyone, but the crass and coarse nature of Turner is never at odds with the sublimeness of his landscapes. On the contrary, as might be expected of Leigh, it complements it; the saliva he spits onto his ongoing work almost makes no less sense on the canvas than the paint itself. To a rare degree, it succeeds as a character study not just of its titular character but also of the neglected and mistreated women in his life, including Dorothy Atkinson as his housekeeper and Marion Bailey as his landlady and second lover.

4.5/5 James Munt

Film is used as a tapestry, consciously recreating works of the aforementioned

always had a love/hate kind of thing going on. Learning how to drink was a rollercoaster; that is, I felt queasy and vomited a lot, and mixing my drinks was always a catastrophe. So watching this very, very Russian film’s cast swill vodka like water made my tum feel a little uneasy.

LEVIATHAN

artists so that the source for these films is just as much if not more so the artist’s oeuvre than their life.

Leviathan is an epic, a contemporary Russian take on the biblical tale of Job, chronicling the story of a family in crisis as they’re set to lose their home at the hands of a corrupt government official. The casting is sublime – Roman Madyanov’s chubby, slimy mayor is every bit as detestable as you want him to be – and Elena Lyadova’s quiet melancholy is truly heart wrenching. The long, slow shots of the Barents Sea are at the same time gorgeous and frightening in their scale, as is the score by Phillip Glass.

Trying to pin down a film this grand is nigh on impossible, but it seems to me that its real success was in its quiet reminders of the depth of class prejudice.

As the result of a like-Gone-Girl-ButBetter twist towards the end of the film, the viewer sees an earlier shot replicated, with a government official reading a legal statement to the protagonist Nikolay.

We’re reminded that not only were these rules and these judgments made without him but they’re also articulated in a language and in a manner that excludes him. When Nikolay’s young son is offered a favour by adult friends, he queries, ‘is it for the money?’ a salient reminder of what exactly is privileged above all else in this setting. In a particularly gorgeous shot, the mayor sits behind his desk, and a photo of Putin hangs framed on the wall behind him, painting a grand and ambitious portrait of the roots of moral bankruptcy in contemporary Russia. Watch it with a drink – or a bucket – at the ready.

4/5 Lucy Ballantyne

UWA FACT North Fremantle still counts as Golden Triangle

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MUSIC

FIRST IMPRESSIONS Words by Bridget Rumball

What’s one of the very first things that you see when you look at an album? You turn the LP over and right at the top of the track-list sits its lead representative: the best shot a band has to sell their soul to you. Track 1- something that can make or break the rest of the album, in keeping with the ancient ‘judge a book by its cover’ principle. If you’ve never heard a particular band before, the first song usually gives you a good indication of what the artist, or at least their album, sounds like. It is the most important thing about an album- it has to often promote itself as a single, introduce the themes/tone of the album and be able to hold its own as a solid song. The extent to which an opener can do all of this can singlehandedly determine an album’s success- without grabbing a listener’s attention from the get-go, your album won’t sell.

The first crucial factor that album openers generally have is ‘single-ability’, or the ability to be marketed well as a commercial single, as well as double as an opening track.

This is pretty much the most direct way for a band to reach out to an audience. By making their Track 1 popular among the masses, new listeners are more likely to buy an album and listen to Tracks 2, 3 and 4, thereby guaranteeing the success of the album as a whole. Of course, not all openers have to be lead singles- there are plenty of instances where they don’t correlate. But if they are, they represent a double whammy of sorts- a song catchy enough to be played on the radio, as well as draw listeners in completely cold turkey.

One famous opening track that fits into this criterion is none other than Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The first song on 1991’s Nevermind, the now-iconic track was reluctantly chosen as a lead single- its only purpose was to build Nirvana a stronger alt-rock listenership, before major single ‘Come As You Are’ was dropped three months later.

However, when Nevermind was officially released, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ caused a humongous spike in the album’s commercial popularity, resulting in unprecedented exposure for the band. Within months of the single’s debut, Nirvana went from being an unheard of grunge band from to having regular airplay and critical acclaim- essentially due to their album’s opener. It was grungy enough to satisfy old fans and introduce the album, yet accessible enough for

alt-rock radio audiences- causing the large jump in Nevermind’s album sales.

Secondly, successful album openers somewhat indicate the themes, tone and direction that the rest of the album is to take. If a band is opting to change their sound, the album opener should be a listener’s first gentle taste of it; subtly heralding the feel of the rest of the album. This is always risky when correlated to the success of an album; if the opener is way too different, listeners will abandon ship without giving an ear to the rest of the tracks. Hence, subtlety is key- something exemplified by The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ .

After their 1970 performance at Woodstock, guitarist Pete Townshend felt like The Who’s ‘underground’ rock tone was becoming too mainstream. Acting on this, Townshend began to incorporate some more electronic influences into his and the band’s songwriting, utilising synthesisers and keyboards liberally. This change in the group’s musical tone is heralded in the opening of ‘Baba O’Riley’, in which Townshend smashes out a minute long synthesiser intro. This is hardly a subtle change from The Who’s rock-centric past; the last thing fans would have expected would have been an album combining rock songs and synths. However, ‘Baba O’Riley’ acted as this bridge between genres- rocky enough to satisfy listeners and guarantee Who’s Next’s success in terms of sales, and strange enough to bookmark The Who’s progression into a new style of music.

As a music listener, the importance of an album’s first song might not even cross your mind. A song is a song- its only purpose is to sound good and maybe make a statement. But for the rest of the music industry- a world that is dependent on sales, performance and impact to stay alive- the opening track of an album is a mouthpiece to an audience. Openers must have the potential to be successful singles, as well as represent their writer’s vision and sound- akin to what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’ managed to do for Nirvana and The Who respectively. All in all, they have to be strategically planned and perfectly balanced- lest success may not be yours.

Art by Richard Moore

MUSIC

PELI’S FIRST CDS Best of Radiohead – Radiohead (Capitol Records, 2008)/Yes Yes Vindictive – Operator Please (Virgin/EMI 2007) In my mind, there are two albums that I consider the first I ever bought. If my 12 year old self is trying to show its alternative/ pretentious side, the Best of: Radiohead was the first LP that I bought on my own. Looking through the stacks in our local, now-defunct-and-replaced-with-a-dodgy-carpet-shop CD store to find the one band that Rolling Stone, NME and Q kept going on about. This would have been circa In Rainbows- and between all the critical hype it was getting and the fact that ‘15 Step’ was featured on the very first Twilight soundtrack, it was my first taste of being something of a musical hipster. I mean, what other Year 6 knew about Radiohead? I’m dead certain that compilation kickstarted my ‘wanky teenage indie/alt’ phase, and set up my musical taste to this day.

Then again- if we’re talking honestly about the first album I ever bought for myself, it would be Operator Please’s Yes Yes Vindictive.

Keep in mind that this was right after ‘Just a Song About Ping Pong’ had become the newest junior school craze- I stormed into the CD store, snagged a copy and was ALL OVER it. Then, as quickly as that single was dropped, Operator Please disappeared off the radar; never to be heard of again. Or played by me, for that matter…

- Bridget Rumball American Idiot, Green Day (Reprise, 2004) I bought my first album, American Idiot, in 2005. Yes, a decade has passed where American Idiot exists, there are fifth graders who have never known a world without American Idiot. I was 14 and I bought it with $20 of Christmas money from Sanity because I liked the title track. I listened to it addictively for over a year, idolising this ‘Saint Jimmy’ character and his politically enraged partner ‘Whatsername’, and relating strongly to lyrics like, “where will all the martyrs go when the virus kills itself / and where will we all go when it’s too late?” – shit’s deep. Listening to nothing but Green Day’s American Idiot through my formative years lead my 14 year old self to dark places, from internet forums on political anarchism and narcotic drugs, to buying a Green Day poster for half price from the local record store when it closed down in 2006 and painting anarchy As on my converse sneakers in puff paint. Several of my friends claim that they enjoyed Green Day as teenagers, but none of them liked American Idiot. Wait, did you want me to say it’s crap in hindsight? Fuck off. They might have only used four chords and ripped off all that was holy, but Green Day introduced me to punk, political resistance and the idea that

I mattered. I still think it’s fucking great. Happy 10th Anniversary Saint Jimmy.

- Richard Moore Beautiful Soul, Jesse McCartney (Hollywood, 2004) The very first CD I bought, at the age of 12, was the debut full length Beautiful Soul by the teen pop idol Jesse McCartney. This album stood out to me at the time as having all of the elements that a good album should have; catchy choruses, lyrics about love and of course, a Disney Artist Karaoke Album released alongside it. I remember walking into the JB Hi-Fi in the CBD intent on buying my very first compact disk with the money I earned from strenuous tasks such as cleaning the bath and making my bed each morning. I remember looking through the aisles determined to find a universally approved classic, one that would introduce me to music I didn’t think possible, a genre defining or destroying masterpiece..

Unfortunately my budget lingered on about $16.50 and McCartney’s debut was noticeably cheaper than other releases, so I guess you could call it fate. Looking back, this CD made me feel warm inside and introduced me to the idea of buying and collecting music in physical form. While Jesse McCartney may never release a pop masterpiece like Beautiful Soul again, he’ll forever remain in my heart.

- Laurent Shervington Bardot – Bardot (Warner, 2000) My first has got to be Bardot’s debut album, Bardot. Growing up in the kind of household where family time = TV time, meant that in 2000, my mum, dad, sister and I were all really into Popstars.

We all had a favourite; mine was Sally. And my parents were more than happy to drive us the hour it took to get to the nearest Sanity, to fulfil my dreams of having Bardot’s new album. Thanks Mum, thanks Dad. Re-listening to their album now, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether Bardot really did become Australia’s very own Spice Girls for the two very short- lived years that they were together. My 7-year- old self certainly thought that they were. Now I’m just puzzled as to why they never really did make it to the big time.

Their songs were fairly catchy, they looked pretty great in latex on the album cover and they had even had a movie made about them.

What exactly was missing? I’m pretty sure that the potential was there. Maybe if they’d just stuck it out a little bit longer they could have made it. Who really knows.

Bardot forever.

- Lauren Croser

UWA FACT UWA ranks no. 155 globally for academic achievement but no.1 for effort and participation

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MUSIC REVIEWS SpaceManAntics – Katzenjammer/Don’t Be The Last (Independent, 2015) When you are meant to review an single by a band called SpaceManAntics, it’s hard to take their music seriously. Good thing that this small band out of Freo seem like they want you to do just that- enjoy their specific breed of psych-pop, their weird and oft-unintelligible lyrics and their lo-fi production, without having to think too hard.

The single’s A-side Katzenjammer clearly takes influence from the trippy, psychedelic rock sounds of the 70s and early 80s.

Each component of the track is dripping in synthesised, edited glory; a loose throwback to the hallucinogenic side of early 70s Krautrock (also indicated by the single’s vaguely Germanic title.)

The group’s lead singer drones a ‘Slow down/Come down/ It’s alright, don’t fight it’, guiding listeners through a whimsical descent from a LSD-induced musical trip of beeps and electronic noise- as if you’ve just run through a games arcade whilst higher than a kite.

B-side Dont Be The Last takes a much heavier influence from Krautrock and the likes of Faust, with a slight tinge of Joy Division on the edges. Again, it’s a psychedelic sounding track- a much faster pace than Katzenjammer, and certainly more reminiscent of something Tame Impala might have tacked onto the end of Lonerism or Innerspeaker. For someone unfamiliar to the pop-psych/lo-fi genre, it would just sound like a mash of noise that’s kind of been awkwardly strung together, complete with nigh-indecipherable lyrics, and thrown through a multitude of synthesisers. But for the faithful, it’s a manic 2:25 minute dash that serves as balance to Katzenjammer - a clouded soberness to the A-side’s drug-induced psychedelic.

7/10 Bridget Rumball Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper Founding Animal Collective member and resident Beach Boys worshipper Noah Lennox comes out with his first Panda Bear album in four years.

Lennox hits the sweet spot between past neopsychedelia flavours and layers of brawny and sprawling noise.

Playfulness seems to be a lot more present in this effort compared to his previous album Tomboy and it comes across well, with the vocal harmonies in particular nailing this tongue in cheek attitude.

The production on PBVSGR was shared between Lennox and Spacemen 3 producer Peter Kember (Sonic Boom). Together, the group down a swirling aural overload well suited to Panda’s harmonies. Case in point: lead single ‘Mr Noah’. This piece opens with the whimpering of a dog and spinning synths, then jumps straight into a head-nodding smorgasbord of melody and some A- grade Panda Bear hooks.

While lyrics have played more of a passenger role in previous albums (bar Young Prayer), to create a focus on enunciation and melody, the lyrical content is more prominent here, particularly in the track “Tropic of Cancer”. This track employs a slow 32

moving emotive ballad about “sympathy for disease” that floats quite beautifully but stings with some lines such as “When they said he’s ill/Laughed it off as if it’s no big deal/What a joke to joke, no joke” , which presumably recalls Lennox’s late father’s diagnosis with brain cancer as well as playing to the death themed title of the album (see Flying Lotus).

Altogether PBMGR isn’t bogged down by these darker lyrical themes but chooses to portray death as an agent of change from which growth can emerge, and while there is occasional filler, its ear for melodies sails it through to its place among Lennox’s most celebrated work.

9/10 Laurent Shervington Husband – The Money (Independent, 2015)

5/10 Lauren Croser Skullcave- Skullcave EP Skullcave’s 3 members Jay Marriott, Liam Young and Steve Turnock have a wealth experience on the Perth music scene, each of them having been a part of numerous acts in recent years (The Novocaines most prominently sticking to mind).

Their latest project Skullcave brings to the fore their collective stoner/sludge influences with undertones of other genres such as shoegaze and post rock.

Pursuant to these influences, this EP’s 5 tracks feature heavily distorted guitar work, relentless if simple rhythm work and moderately subdued vocals with all the sensibilities of shoegaze rounding out the mix. Songs such as Acid Tone and Echo Room perhaps best demonstrate this combination of influences and are particularly strong in their soundscapes but for different reasons.

The former features verses centred around a punchy guitar phase giving way to much more flowing melodic choruses. The latter has a more relentless stoner quality to it which, in my opinion, represents the more appealing dimension of this band’s sound, or at the very least, the stronger one. Importantly, Young’s vocal delivery serves as a nice common thread between these songs, and indeed, the whole EP. I think the most important observation I can make about this EP and perhaps, more broadly, this band’s sound is that their synthesising of influences is haphazard. On one hand, elements such as Marriott’s guitar tone and Young’s vocals are perhaps the highlights of Skullcave’s sound. However, in a number of places in this EP, these strengths aren’t well combined, resulting in bland interludes and outros that fade out. These problems, whilst notable, are reasonably minor overall and even if this EP in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting, the sonic direction Skullcave is taking warrants interest in its own right and for that reason I’ll be paying close attention to Skullcave this year.

6/10 Wills Pritchard

UWA FACT UWA Student Guild KeepCups are made out of the melted down debris of the old guild building

MUSIC

MATILDA BAY MUSINGS WITH T-FID #1: ‘Steal Away’ by Robbie Dupree (1980)

Musings. Oxford Dictionary defines musing as “A period of reflection or thought…” Just kidding - never start a piece of writing with a dictionary.com. Where was I? Oh, yes, the best thing about the UWA campus and what you always have to remember about it is its proximity to Matilda Bay. Dictionary.com defines Matilda Bay as “an ideal location to visit...”

You are walking to class? You have a break between classes?

You finished a long day? All of these scenarios are vastly improved by a walk across the road (look both ways). Sit

yourself down on the grass and put your feet into the sand.

Watch the daylight ripple across the water and feel the seabreeze caressing your face. Embrace the comfort; this is a site to reflect.

So what goes well with the sight of boats on the water? How about Soft Rock 101 aka Yacht Rock aka The Soft Serve aka what your parents listened to at uni aka 1080 6IX (Perth). Yes, that’s right, I will now recommend the right soundtrack for your very own exploration of Matilda Bay. A serving suggestion for this time of the year, a starter if you will as summah gives way to semester, is the one-hit wonder Rob Dupree and his song ‘Steal Away’, which bears sonic similarity to The Doobie Brothers ‘What A Fool Believes’ (another stone-cold soft rock classic; do yourself a favour and listen to both in your first week of uni). ‘Steal Away’ has its own virtues to speak of, however. Firstly, you should watch the video of Rob Dupree performing this song or just look at a picture of him. There’s a very Ned Flanders vibe to him with his still-growing beard and flat hair, the look of an atypical 80s sitcom dad. Alongside 1970s-era Kenny Loggins, Dupree is the very definition of the dorky white guy extolling the sweet and seductive aura of romance, a major theme of the soft rock genre as a whole.

With its slow start sneaking up on you, the song’s chorus advises one to find those moments in between. Fantasising about breaking away from the pack with the heart’s intended, the song’s big-hearted vibe implores us to find that sliver of time outside of a busy schedule. Take a bit of time for yourself. There is so much to see and contemplate. For example, you might come across one particular boat anchored out on the water. On its side, which is painted red, there is one word in white lettering: “Redrum.” One ponders its very existence as the year beckons. Does the ship’s owner love the Stanley Kubrick film a great deal or do they just like the word – its very idea – reflected back to them on the surface of the water? Very heavy stuff to contemplate from the shoreline.

Probably best to keep on walking and steal away into the night.

See what the combo of Matilda Bay and soft rock has produced? Pure drivel.

UWA FACT That strange cheesy smell is coming from Cameron Hall

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LITERATURE

Little Pretty Pocket Books and Murderous Clones: The Dark and Puritanical Heritage of Kids’ Lit Words by Kate Prendergast It would be grossly naive to think children’s stories are undeserving of serious consideration. Prevailingly though, they’re seen as the ‘paddling pool’ of literature; a place we glibly float before maturation demands we heave-ho-huh-what into the rougher seas of Woolfy’s Waves. Simply because children’s books target an audience that sometimes pours honey in their ears and/ or crawls around grassy spaces pretending to be a puppy (was I was guilty of one these? Yes), this doesn’t mean they can be written off as silly, facetious, purely diverting fare for midget cretins. Nah, mate. Like every other form of media we consume when we’re young and custardy, children’s tales are capable of significantly impressing themselves upon the sub-strata of our very consciousness and being.

The fact of its low-profile status in academia makes kids’ lit an extremely interesting province. There are a couple of semantic complications that attend the term though— by saying ‘children’s literature’, we make some automatic assumptions about what the category of ‘children’ means, and what the category of ‘literature’ means. Wikipedia limps weakly up to this difficulty by summarising children’s lit as ‘stories, books, magazines, and poems that are enjoyed by children’. But what about those salacious little crumbs who enjoy Game of Thrones at age 9?

And surely there is no demographic that does not dig the surreal and grotesque cavalcade that is Alice. Dat hat. Dat cat. (So phat.)

The origins of children’s literature are quite fascinating, and like with almost any art form, deeply rooted in religion. Many came into being as ‘morality tales’— written to inculcate ‘wholesome’ attitudes and behaviours like discipline, obedience and a very selfabasing kind of godliness. The first book aimed specifically at the youth is thought to be John Cotton’s 1646 collection of Christian catechisms. It is long-windedly titled ‘Milk for Babes. Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments. Chiefly, for the Spirituall Nourishment of Boston Babes in Either England: But May Be of Like Use for Any Children’. A passage: Q. Are you then born a sinner ?

A I was conceived in sinne, and born in iniquity.

Q. What is your birth-sinne ?

A. ADAMS sinne imputed to me, and a corrupt Nature dwelling in me.

Q. What is your corrupt Nature ?

A My corrupt nature is empty of ( h ) Grace, bent unto sinne, and onely unto sinne, and that continually Demonstratively, tales such as these are highly expressive of an anxiety surrounding juvenile development. This anxiety was stoked by the 17th century Puritan upswell, meaning the child figured in the English imaginary basically as a degenerate adult 34

shrimp; blasted out of the evil loins of Eve’s descendents to enter the world a bawling maggot of moral toxicity. ‘Childhood’ as a period construct is in itself pretty novel— ‘invented’ in the 18th century— and it continues to be nebulous and wobbly across different cultures today.

The genre of kids’ books as we recognize them now really only took off with this Victorian invention (does this suggest a capitalist hegemony over growing up? Moot point, but I am Lenining towards YES). This was accompanied by the popularization of philosopher Locke’s theories on education, and his idea of the child as an innocent to be spiritually nourished, patronisingly cosseted, and most importantly, constitutionally invigorated for the ‘swiftly changing, upwardly mobile society’ of the industrializing nation. Credit for kickstarting the trend goes to Newberry’s 1744 ‘A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly with Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer, as also a Ball and Pincushion, The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl’— adding further proof that Happy Meal marketing had a precedent and that ‘succinct’ is something people back then just did not get. (Fun Fact tho: this book contained the first printed reference to baseball).

Whilst all children’s books retain the didactic impulse to some extent, modern authors like Morris Gleitzman, Lemony Snicket, Roald Dahl and Andy Griffiths (check Griffy at Perth Writer’s Festival ’15, yo!) snub their nose at its pretentions and conceits.

Their writing embraces more the crude, violent and twisted that is the heritage of Grimm’s folk and Anderson’s fable (and probably good old goofy Australian gross-out culture too)— no Stephen King book will ever affect me quite so much as Paul Jennings’ ‘The Copy’— and the best strikes a gleeful rapport with the mischievous and often amazingly dirty pre-pubescent imagination. That they can set up and condition our first point of access to the realities of the human condition— ageing, mortality, cruelty, the brutality and beauty of love—means also that many of these stories cast a long, lanky and often thrillingly traumatic shadow over the adult soul. So give me dowagers defenestrated into cold leechy waters, give me Terrible Triviums and other such monsters, give me candy-jawed Jigsaws that manipulate and mince, give me inside-out people and that odd Little Prince, give me Too-ticky, trolls, and getting trapped in the shower— cause y’know I never really did give a fuck whatever the hell it was that Katy Did anyway. Fuck her.

UWA FACT If it takes you over five years to attain an arts degree, you receive a special certificate of commendation from the Premier

Rules of Summer— Lauren Croser This is what I have learnt this Summer Never come back from England in the middle of December Never expect your fish to be ok after leaving them with your sister Never take a laxative that you got from overseas Never be a vegetarian at a dinner on Christmas eve Never buy a laptop from gumtree to be more ecofriendly party Never do a freaky dance to Superfreak unless it’s that kind of Never move into a house that doesn’t have air conditioning g) Never bank on a lift from a friend (especially if they’ve been drinkin Never be the one at home when there’s an attempted robbery Always know the number to call when it’s not quite an emergency That’s it.

PELICAN POETRY CORNER

UWA FACT You’re detracting from the ambience at the Claremont Hotel, buddy

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REIDING MATERIAL Words by Kate Prendergast Birds with Human Souls—Beryl Rowland 3rd Floor 398.3 1978-2 Emily Dickenson was ‘able to confront a bobolink or robin at eye level as it hopped along the path towards her’. Can you?

Why must we forever persecute our winged friends— whether by the shot-gun, the cage, or foie-gras cookery (with its dubious, anthropocentric, yet insurmountable utilitarianism)? Since our alleged apostasy, a terrible silence—observes bird-fan and topbird author Rowland—has fallen over urban spaces. Once filled with the limpid peeps of chaffinches, they are now auditory chambers of filth; ghettos of the industrial pharyngitis of lawnmower, engine, and neighbour blasting With or Without You at 2am on Tuesdays.

Birds with Human Souls endeavours to restore our reverence for avian-kind. It does so admirably. I crowed with delight at every page turn. Set out in quasi-encyclopaedic fashion (read: pictures), this old-fashioned 1970’s quirk explores bird symbolism through the centuries as it appears in art, literature and myth. ‘Symbols of transcendence’, we realize birds to be somehow apart from the rest of the carnal Kingdom of Beasts; angelic, joyful and pure— although a YouTube viewing of Stephen Fry being molested by a kakapo may put you to doubts on this—they have for centuries been the darlings of poets.

From this book, I learned and inferred many things. Mainly of the erotic/sexual nature. Like how God got it on with Mary by sending a dove to impregnate her through her ear. Are doves God’s semen? Christian art of the Annunciation implies: yes. I also learnt how Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner is all about his need to confess his incestuous feelings for his mother.

My favourite entry, however, is ‘Bats’. Included because ‘although bats are not birds...they look like them’. This entry relates how Robert Browning embarrassingly rhymed ‘bat’ with ‘twat’ under the erroneous belief that a ‘twat’ was part of a nun’s garmentry.

Worse, Browning’s lines do not even rhyme, for in his day twat rhymed with what and not bat’.

This book is genuinely fascinating. I am quite removed from doubt that every visible stain on its pages can be attributed to the salivations of a certain former Pelican editor.

Kate Prendergast owns a 30-year-old galah called Monty, who is bald of all feathers on his breast, croaks ‘good cocky-boy’ habitually, and watches her with mad and beady eye through windows while she works.

Art by Kate Prendergast

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UWA FACT For the same price as a semester’s room and board at Uni Hall, you can buy a medium sized island off the east coast of New Zealand and live comfortably for several months

LITERATURE

BOOK REVIEWS In keeping with the theme of firsts, this was the first time I’d actually read a Stephen King novel. I wasn’t disappointed. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a fast reader, but I devoured Revival within a weekend. That in itself would probably be enough for me to recommend it.

As any good blurb-reading monkey can tell you, the novel spans 50 years, and tells of the entwined lives of a boy and a preacher amid electrical shenanigans, music, and addiction.

The viewpoint character, Jamie Morton, is a rock guitarist by trade, and I’ll admit that at times the novel stirred up the desire to pause my reading and wield my own axe a little.

The Reverend Charles Jacobs’ fascination with electricity didn’t have the same effect— although after finishing the book that’s probably a good thing.

On actually reading it, you’ll find a whole heap of themes have been explored. Tales of growing up and aging are prevalent; which is probably to be expected, given the time span of the novel (King’s stages of life are Youth, Middle Age, and How The Fuck Did I Get So Old?). Religion and cult followings are given a bit of a hard time, and devout Christians may want to steer clear, especially when it comes to the Terrible Sermon. There are also hints of the coming-of-age story and the horror King is generally popularly known for, although for the most part, the horror takes a back seat.

This mix made me wonder whether the novel could have managed to successfully pull it off by focusing on just one of those themes, but I’m not going to argue when they’re all done well.

Best bit: Jamie’s musing on ‘home’. Line up the ‘something in my eye’ excuses.

Worst bit: The bleak aftermath.

Score:

Jonah from Tonga, the TV series that nobody asked for, now has a poor-quality graphic novel to accompany it. It appears that after ratings failures and near-universal critical derision of the series, Chris Lilley has resorted to doing anything he can do eke the last drop of blood from this particularly malformed stone. The book itself appears to be a direct storyboard of the television series, which tracks Jonah’s ‘antics’ at a new school. I say ‘appears’, because I had the good fortune of avoiding the original television series, so cannot comment on its fidelity to its source material. But all you need to know about JFT is that on the first page, Jonah’s uncle speaks in Tongan. The Tongan language is rendered in what looks like Wingdings, covered almost entirely by the English translation. The bizarre attention to detail paid to this ‘quirky’ racism acts as synecdoche for the rest of JFT as a whole. The entire thing plays like an ABC executive’s fever dream, desperate to mainline some credibility from ‘the ‘kidz.’ It reeks of cash-in.

JFT’s art style, if we’re calling it that, consists of shots from the show that look like they’ve had five minutes worth of heavy-duty Photoshop filter run over them. They are then haphazardly arranged into something that feels like a discarded ‘very special episode’ plot, with Jonah sent to… gaol, for some reason? And to point out the 39 year-old white guy playing a teenage Tongan immigrant elephant in the room, Jonah from Tonga is just really fucking stupidly, pointlessly racist. The themes that Lilley swings for (and spectacularly misses), such as how the way we treat ‘troubled’ children is questionable, are totally overshadowed by this. Whilst ‘behind-the-scenes’ photos might please diehard Lilley fans, considering the shark he jumped over has now died of old age after enjoying a long, prosperous life, I don’t think there are enough left to justify the existence of this atrocity.

Score:

Daniel Hu’s inability to read quickly has come back to bite him in his English degree.

The Job Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

Jonah from Tonga: The Graphic Novel Chris Lilley

Revival Stephen King

Best bit: I spilled water on one of the pages which made several panels unreadable.

Worst bit: Someone saw me reading it on the bus and they smiled at me.

Thomas Rydll recently learned that sharks can live up to twenty to thirty years in the wild.

If you love fresh faced female FBI agents who remain willowy and lithe despite a previous career as a hardened Navy Seal, and a crook she wants more in bed than behind bars – you’re in for a treat. Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg team up for The Job - a series of heists perpetrated by a sexy cat burglar in disguise as a sexy ex-con turned FBI agent, hunted down by his sexy partner Kate, sexily. This then leads to a bigger, more implausibly sexy plot to kidnap a chocolate loving drug lord from his sexy secret compound and sexy Columbian body guard, with the lure of some sexy sunken treasure. Sexy, right?

This book could not have been filled with more cliché heist/FBI drama tropes than if someone had specifically set out this exercise in a high school creative writing class. It’s still laced with Evanovich’s tell-tale wry wit and unique turn of phrase, and Goldberg’s extravagant plot lines that keep you turning the page. However, after a while you realize that there is no possible way that even in a Michael Bay-esque blockbuster could this happen—, it regularly defies both international law and the laws of physics.

Please explain how so many ‘attractive’ characters can remain in one storyline.

Someone, somewhere has to be average, or even ugly. Are there no ugly criminals any more?

It is commendable however how well the characters throughout such an unrealistic storyline plot remain interesting and oddly down to earth. It’s really Evanovich we have to thank here, as her protagonists always remain relatable and funny with her thorough use of simple internal monologue, and her host of comedic supporting characters making it seem like the guys down at the supermarket decided to become international criminals. To round off the book, and really make it ‘unique’, there’s a perfect (sexy) bad guy with morals to snog at the end too.

Score: Best bit: The ex-navy seal has an ex-navy seal dad, with ex-navy seal dad jokes.

Worst bit: Realizing you’ll never be in a sexy heist story.

Caroline Stafford is looking for her bad girl with morals to snog in the sunset (sexily).

UWA FACT Law students who give wristies at the Courtyard Show are 100% more likely to top torts

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ARTS

E B G I N N I G R E F

Words by Anna Saxon Art by Catherina Pagani 38

UWA FACT Due to inflation, the price of an arts unit has risen in the last five years to ~$10 000

A RTS

ou wake up on a balmy February morning, tangled in your sweaty sheets. You had a terrible nightmare, and yet even in the light of day it seemed so real. Could it be true? Are there really no longer any ‘firsts’ left in the art world? Nothing truly original? New? Never before seen? Have we really seen the ‘death of the artist’? Are we doomed to a century of endless sequels, bad copies and plagiarism?!

the month of Fringe, make it part of your routine, like your breakfast Instagram browse or your morning crap. Not only will you wind up saving money, but it’s a great way to hear about shows you otherwise would never have thought of checking out. Buy a RushTix for one show - preferably one Margaret or David has reviewed - for either very early or very late in the evening. This leaves you wriggle room to turn this into a full out Binge.

Short answer - yeah, kind of. But, like, chill out about it.

The next step of the Fringe Binge is the most important - the pre-drinking. You are going, sight unseen, to what is essentially amateur theatre. You are going to need to be drunk as hell to get through this night. From one broke-ass student to another, drinks at the Pleasure Gardens may come from a bar that is literally a carousel AND a working fountain, but don’t be fooled - alcohol is still sold at festival prices. Buy yourself a $4 bottle of wine and finish it before you even think about heading to the Cultural Centre. Don’t worry, every other Fringe patron (and most of the performance artists) are all going to be in the same wildly careening boat.

You need to be drunk enough to sit through having a woman flapping a giant ham facsimile of a labia in your face, but not drunk enough to volunteer for any audience participation.

With hefty budget cuts to the arts looming over on us, our capitalist (Abbott-ist) overlords are much less likely to fund the little-art-show-that-could over the big, bland, state productions guaranteed to bring in the punters. Enter the Fringe Festival - the one time of year people confuse Perth with somewhere ‘cool’ and ‘hip’. Fringe is everything the Perth Festival is not. It’s scroungy, homemade, dirty.

The shows range from polished burlesque extravaganzas to the worst amateur improv you have seen or ever will see in your life - sometimes within the same hour. Most of it is downright weird, and a lot of it doesn’t work, which is GREAT. Bring on the massive flops! Bring on the hot messes!

You can’t have a silent puppet show about fertility without breaking a few eggs.

At Fringe, you will absolutely see some ‘firsts’ - your first angry German accordion stripper; your first 60 second comedic song cycle about the life of Hans Goering; your first live mermaid fish tank. In fact, there’s so much going on during the month of Fringe that the only way to really take full advantage of the artistic buffet is to partake in that famous Perthian ritual, The Fringe Binge. As suggested by the name, a Fringe Binge is not a healthy pursuit. Gorging yourself indiscriminately on bad theatre may lead to unknown after effects - both mental and physical - and thus is not to be undertaken by children, pregnant women or people with heart problems. Or lamo-buzz-kill-squares who don’t know how to have any fun.

A ‘Fringe Binge’ always begins as a gleam in your cheapskate friend’s eye. Everyday, the Fringe website puts up sale tickets or ‘Rush Tix’ for some of the more desirable shows in the festival. You should be checking these deals religiously. For

When you finally decide to move the party to the CBD, go straight to the giant chalkboards set up next to the State Art Gallery, close your eyes and buy tickets to whatever show you’re pointing at. Go crazy. Gorge yourself on ART. The perfect Fringe Binge combo is one positively reviewed show with some kind of artistic merit, one risqué show so you can feel a little naughty and giggle about the titties with your friends in the back row, and one scary as fuck show that will leave you and everyone you love traumatised for months. As most shows are between 30-60 minutes, it’s perfectly doable to walk out of one tent and straight into another. However, at all costs, avoid the Silent Disco.

As long as you’ve had enough overpriced ciders at the Spiegeltent, none of this will phase you. You’ve paid $5 for this unicycling burlesque show - pretend you’re in Melbourne, try not to get a splinter from the wooden benches and enjoy artistic freedom at its finest. The Artist isn’t dead, they’re simply pretending to be, as part of their debut morgue based burlesque show.

UWA FACT By the end of 2020, all buildings at UWA will operate on a hot desk basis, and have only walls made of glass

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Arts Reviews LES MISERABLES (MUSIC THEATRE) Cameron Mackintosh Review by Emily Purvis Fast-paced and driven with intensity, the Cameron Mackintosh production of Les Miserables follows faithfully with the Victor Hugo classic. Featuring an array of Western Australian talent, WAAPA graduates Lara Mulcahy (Madame Thénardier), Kerrie Anne Greenland (Éponine) and Emily Langridge (Cosette), all gave stellar performances, minus some minor fumbling by Langridge in her early scenes.

Jean Valjean (Simon Gleeson) had so much energy it was almost as if he was going to spontaneously combust into a handsome ball of fiery brilliance. However, whilst the show was predominantly vigorous and the cast, for the most part, exceptional, the performances by Euan Doidge (Marius) and Patrice Tipoki (Fantine) were a little under-whelming. Tipoki’s rendition of the iconic ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ seemed to be building to something it didn’t quite get to, and Doidge just kind of all-round sucked. But this is more than made up for by the remaining toe tapping diddies and tear-jerking

testaments that make up the rest of the play- not to mention the set design. Made up of interweaving structures which reached up to three stories high, the set interacted with the actors throughout their scenes in a really fun and kind of terrifying way. Rumored to be based off of Victor Hugo’s own sketches, Les Mis’s set is one actors dream of. Overall, it made for pretty remarkable musical theatre, and for a twohour show, both the cast and the audience exited exhausted, sated and satisfied.

Highlight: The Thénardier’s (Trever Ashley and Lara Mulcahy). You have to see it to know why.

Lowlight: Tipoki’s ‘I Dreamed A Dream’. Way to kill a classic.

The season runs until Sunday March 8, tickets at Ticketek.

TWEE TWENTY EIGHT YEAR OLD (INSTALLATION) Paper Mountain Review by Ariana Gomez What a joy it was to attend the opening night of this wonderful exhibition, so conveniently located in the loft above one of William St’s most expensive cafes. Over the past months, I’ve had the pleasure of indulging in many of Perth’s premier gallery events – a celebration of Leederville street fashion, a thirty day long zine festival, and a retrospective of graffiti found in the men’s toilet at Amplifier. All of these fell short of the latest offering from the erudite artists of Paper Mountain, ‘Twee Twenty Eight Year Old.’ Perhaps my favourite piece was ‘My Unfinished Thesis’, a Xeroxed copy of an unfinished PhD thesis about internet poetry. As I perused its tear stained, typo-ridden pages, I realized with sudden clarity that my life has been a privileged one, and that some people have real problems. A needlepoint

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cushion cover depicting the message “all my friends went to Melbourne and left me here” moved me, as did the several spoken word performance pieces featuring Taylor Swift lyrics, ironic hashtags, and a number of teary odes to “my recently departed beloved cat, Rufus.” Many of the artworks were just printed off Instagram photos from house parties in North Perth, a classic example of Paper Mountain’s signature gritty realism. It was difficult to talk to other gallery-goers as I perused the exhibition, as the National’s album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ was playing extremely loudly – perfectly complementing the critically high levels of late twenties angst that filled the room. A magical night, and certainly not one that compelled me to end it all before my twenty fifth birthday.

UWA FACT Hungry? There’s free food in guild reception! Noodles, soup, the flesh of student representatives past, and etc

A RTS

VENUS IN FUR (THEATRE) Black Swan Theatre Company Review by Emily Purvis

It started with thunder, it ended with leather. The bits in between were OK. Venus in Fur is the new one act, one scene play presented by Black Swan Theatre Co. written by David Ives and directed

by Lawrie Cullen-Tait. Starring Felicity McKay as ‘Vanda Jordan’ and Adam Booth as ‘Thomas Novachek’, it’s a loveaffair with power as the prize. Vanda and Thomas first meet in an all-too-late audition for the play Thomas is directing (coincidentally named “Venus in Furs”), and Vanda Jordan is trying out for the female lead, who is also coincidentally named “Vanda”. Essentially, the power dynamic of the director and the directed becomes inverted after they get a little too into the masochistic adaptation of the 19th century play they’re rehearsing. Now, whilst I do love me a good nested narrative, this one still left a little something to be desired. The two starring actors made up the entire cast. The

oscillating characterisation made things a little bit ambiguous, which was a technique that really worked within the narratives intricate game of domination. However, whilst ViF opened with a bang, and went out with a crack, I was left almost snoring throughout the whole middle of the play. McKay gave a great performance, and her accents and stage presence were on-point. But the segments led by Booth were somewhat one-dimensional, and his accents were highly inconsistent even within the realms of his oscillating characterisation.

Raw, and -slightly- sensual, take your lover or significant other, just not your mother.

Highlight: Whip cracking, Vanda’s profanities and LonelyLingerie.

Lowlight: Adam Booth’s terrible fucking accents.

UWA FACT Sometimes Drake thinks about you

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LIFE ST YLE

Virtual Nostalgia: The Path to Happiness Words by Kate Oatley Art by Megan Ansell Remember the first time you rode a bike?

That fuzzy feeling you just got is the result of getting nostalgic, a common phenomenon amongst us humans and guaranteed to occur after every significant moment you ever live through. According to Clay Routledge, a social psychologist at North Dakota State University, nostalgia induces much-needed feelings of joy, belonging and self-approval at times when we are experiencing intense negative pressures. It’s an entirely normal coping mechanism in the slightly broken washing machine that is life.

It makes sense for life, but why do we experience nostalgia in and about videogames? Games are designed to keep the happy juice flowing and allow players to climb an achievement ladder, not produce negative experiences that induce nostalgia; yet the vast majority of a group of gamers I interviewed regularly get nostalgic about games, even during play. It could be linked to a game’s design to keep us happy that when we search for something to lift our spirits, game-created memories emerge first. Certainly nostalgia occurring during game play appears to happen when a task gets sticky and the player remembers successful moments in the game to convince themselves to play on.

When interviewing this group of players, however, it emerged that only those who played excessively experienced ingame and from-game nostalgia, leading me to a far stranger phenomenon: the second life. Gamers immerse themselves in games to the point where that environment becomes a second home and their character becomes their second personality – they create a virtual life that carries the same weight as the physical life we all know. Nostalgia occurs as a byproduct of life’s stresses, and the virtual nostalgia experienced by gamers is no 42

different.

Because both types of nostalgia are regarded equally, virtual nostalgia manifests through the same channels as physical nostalgia, the most satisfying indulgence of which remains aroundthe-campfire-style storytelling. World of Warcraft gamer ‘Rosie’ recalls, “Flying over Shattrath […] everyone had just figured out they could do loop-the-loops with their dragons. I asked my guildies how to do it […] they told me to right click the icon of my character in the top corner of the screen… Of course at that point I didn’t realise that actually dismounts you and so I plummeted to a grisly death!”.

When returning to Shattrath on daily quests, ‘Rosie’ often gets flashbacks to that prank from “the best guild [she] ever had”. Flashbacks even occur in physical life, with another interviewee, ‘Jack’, remembering Runescape scenes whenever he hears words like “dragons” or sees pictures of medieval weapons.

Just as in physical life, specific places are linked to happy memories in games, leading gamers to physically return to specific game environments purely because they feel nostalgic. My third interviewee, ‘David’, returns regularly to the second level of Halo 2 because he spent hours playing it with friends during his childhood, inducing nostalgia from both his everyday and in-game life, and ‘Chris’ takes “mini-holidays” to World of Warcraft’s Ironforge simply because it is where he began the game. Several interviewees returned to nostalgic areas to see how things have changed over time, comparative to visiting a childhood home.

Memories created in games form around the same themes as in physicallife – childhood, significant moments, achievements, and other happy memories – and are triggered by the same things: UWA FACT The Reflection Pond is 500 metres deep

stress or sudden action- or environmenttriggered recollections. Memories from both lives can merge when a gamer feels nostalgic: ‘Rosie’ met her physical-life partner during a raid on Mount Hyjal in World of Warcraft. Nostalgic memories can also result in action in the same way everyday-life memories can: ‘Chris’ returned to Dun Murogh in World of Warcraft to defeat ‘Hogger’, a difficult boss he encountered when levelling up his first character, after a nostalgic flashback.

If you’ve ever wondered why gamers are so relaxed, now you know. Nostalgia relieves stress from the present moment in any form, be it virtual or physical. While most have but one life’s worth of happy memories to draw upon, gamers have, at minimum, two. Gamers travel to specific areas in a game, either by physically logging on or by visualising in their minds, to escape the stresses from physical-life; to relax into another world where the sum total of difficulty arises from completing quests that have guaranteed achievability.

To deal with the added pressures of two lives, gamers can reverse this by spending time in the physical world to escape virtual-life stress, as well as escape the pressures of the game while remaining in its virtual boundaries by re-visiting old environments or exploring new ones that have no association with the current stressful quest or level.

Nostalgia is a by-product of life; produced by humans to ease the negative pressure we all live through from time to time and keep us feeling happy. Although it seems strange for a person to experience nostalgia in an environment that, initially, appears to be solely advancement-driven, it makes complete sense when we realise that, to a gamer, a videogame isn’t just an achievement ladder to be conquered: it’s a second life.

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Review by Morgan Goodman

I’m charging across emerald fields, steely glint in my eyes. The sky overhead is a sparkly portent of dark happenings, some sort of semi-religious conflict rages across the land and – You need me to find your pet goat, little old lady? Sure! Sorry, where was I? Right. Striding across the Hinterlands, my companions behind me bickering amongst themselves, occasionally interjecting a solemn comment on the Byzantine politics of this richly realised world – You need me to collect 100 bits of metal to build a small doghouse? Why not!

Bioware do two things well: creating massive, immersive, character focused role playing games and alienating new players. Inquisition might be considered their opus. It’s like watching the middle

three seasons of Buffy: from the off, you’re neck-deep in charming, complex character interaction, but every other line refers to some obscure scrap of lore from the first two games. Even before the game’s title flashed up I was wishing for a ‘mystified nod’ response in conversations for the sake of verisimilitude.

This is a shame, because of all the Dragon Age games, Inquisition has by far the least off-putting combat. More hardcore fans than I might refer to this as being ‘dumbed down for consoles’, but the flow of real-time combat punctuated by tactical pause perfectly suited my limited attention span.

And attention span is severely tested in Inquisition. The game (disappointingly) steers clear of the obvious Python reference, simply because it wouldn’t make any sense. The world is so laden with sidequests and collectibles that the titular Inquisition moves across the landscape slightly faster than continental drift. Everybody is expecting you by the time you finally arrive, pockets loaded down with bits of tree and sparkly rocks. This is forgivable,

even desirable, in other open world games, but Bioware’s is a tradition of storytelling above all else, and most of these errands contribute nothing to the tale while opportunities to get involved with your charming companions are limited to a couple of quickly resolved quests each.

Given how attached I had become to them, this felt a bit hollow and by the end of the game I was crying out for a few more excuses to spend time with my virtual friends.

Despite this, Inquisition kept me almost entirely distracted during the pre-exam study period, and is well worth a few playthroughs for the party banter and the opportunity to knife elves in the face.

Highlight: World’s greatest friend simulator.

Lowlight: The hours of my life lost in a dreamy haze of herb collecting.

UWA FACT The university is in talks to open a Nando’s in the undercroft of Winthrop Hall

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‘INFINITE JEST’ AT THE FLYING SCOTSMAN Review by Morgan Goodman On Sunday nights in the back of the Flying Scotsman, that institution cherished by Perth’s student body, there’s an almost perfect setup. A few rows of plastic chairs before a low stage in a room that somehow manages to have the smoky atmosphere of the classic comedy den without the associated risk of cancer. It’s the ideal place to get you in the mood for Infinite Jest, two hours of experimental comedy from diehards of the Perth comedy scene.

‘Experimental’ comedy, by the way, is what you have before slick stage shows and well-practised sets – this is where local comedians get to try out new, uncertain material in front of a crowd made amiable by cheap beer and good pizza. It’s the fetal form of a solid set, and some of the gags are rough, barely one step above pure improv. It’s not uncommon for a joke to fall flat completely, but it says something about the quality of the performers that they are almost always ready with a self-deprecating rejoinder that can tease a chuckle from the audience. Many of these performers have been working the Perth comedy circuit for a while now and it shows in their comfortable delivery and on-stage poise, and when a newer

A FEW FIRSTS WITH DANIEL CONNELL Interview by Ash Gould Daniel Connell is a comedian based in Melbourne, and has performed solo shows at Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe, Perth Fringe & The Canberra Comedy Festival. He returns to Perth’s Fringe World again in 2015 with his stand-up show “The Get Out Stakes”.

AG: When was the first time you knew you wanted to be a comedian?

DC: When I was 16 or 17 and I saw Jimeoin at the RSL in my home town.

AG: Tell us about your very first stand-up show… what was the best moment?

DC: When my final joke got a good laugh. My first four jokes didn’t go that well.

AG: What was the worst moment?

DC: When I walked to the microphone and realized I had never taken a mic out of a mic stand before. The mic came out after a four or five second struggle.

AG: What is this year’s fringe show about?

DC: ‘The Get Out Stakes” is about a six year period where I had a gambling problem. I lost a fair amount of money on horse racing and other sports during that time. Although it doesn’t sound like an ideal comedy topic, I’ve found my stories from that time and what I’ve done since then seem to make people laugh.

comedian is stretching their legs the crowd is usually polite enough that you’re not left cringing.

Each show is different. The night I went, MC’d by the energetic Cameron McLaren, the show included Fringe 2015 performer Cieron Lyons, an excellently self-deprecating set

by Glenn Grimwood and the eloquent stoner-y comedy of Jeremiah Watts. The highlight of the night was the deadpan Sonny Yang and wordsmith David Tuffley swapping material in the theatre game-styled Role Reversal set and attempting to impersonate one another while gently dissing the other’s work.

There is something very appealing about the raw nature of the performances in such a small venue. It feels very intimate; the small crowd is automatically part of the show, and a lot of humour comes from the way in which the comedians interact with them or with one another. It’s not the smooth performance of a polished stage show, but it is an entertaining way to get a look at the process of developing comedy, and to experience the range of the Perth comedy scene.

Infinite Jest runs every Sunday at the Flying Scotsman in Mt Lawley. Doors open at 7pm, tickets are $5 at the door.

AG: How does your first fringe show compare to this one?

DC: My first fringe show was last year and it was about the time I wanted to become a Dodgem Car attendant so it’s a fairly different narrative to this one. This one is also a bit more personal but will still have my same style of humour throughout.

AG: What advice would you give to people who are nervous about doing their first comedy routine?

DC: When I started I was told to memorize my set and stick to time limits, I think that works well. Also, nerves are good.

AG: When and where will you perform it for the first time?

DC: Perth Fringe World will be the first time I perform the show.

AG: What was your first car?

DC: 986 Toyota Corona Station Wagon.

AG: Your first job?

DC: Seafood Assistant at Woolworths!

AG: Your first CD? DC: The first CD I ever brought was Len’s You Can’t Stop The Bum Rush. They had one hit, “Steal My Sunshine”. I should have bought the single.

UWA FACT The very first cricket match played on James Oval featured a UWA team captained by Jebediah Springfield

LIFE ST YLE

Overlooked Gems of

Guild Catering “Take a chance on me” – ABBA Words by KAT GILLESPIE Art by KATE PRENDERGAST

ambiguity (what are the crunchy bits?) has nursed a thousand hangovers without breaking a youth allowance budget.

STEAMED BUNS You’d be forgiven for avoiding what are possibly the least appetizing culinary creations in the southern hemisphere – foetus-like soft grey balls of mysterious doughy origin, languishing sweatily next to the salad bar. I assume that the guild steamed buns are someone’s idea of a joke, or a weak cough in the direction of cultural homogenization.

Nonetheless, if you’re low on coins and resolve, let a cheap and oddly delicious steamed bun steer you through a midday episode of assignment panic.

MAKE YOUR OWN SANDWICH Making your first DIY sandwich at Hackett café is an intimidating experience. People are impatiently queuing behind you, you’re unsure what to do with your tray, and it is difficult to believe that they’re being serious with the unlimited avocado. Soldier on though, because the makeyour-own sandwich counter is one of only two or three aspects of uni life that won’t disappoint. Take a moment to appreciate the pleasing minutiae. Yup, that is a whole tub of crumbed chicken. That’s right, you can choose as many sauces as you want. Hell yeah, they’ve got beetroot. Right on, there are like six types of bread roll. Long live the Make Your Own.

MRS MAC NORMCORE CRED Guild cafés offer a delicate and varied selection of Mrs Mac’s pies and pastries. You may at first blanche at the prospect of hogging around campus, sausage roll in hand, tomato sauce streaking your cheek, but the more fashion-conscious students around you will recognize immediately that you are trailblazing the new Tradie Chic trend. Meanwhile, you’ll be saving money - a Mrs Macs snack won’t set you back more than $4.

MACARONS Whose idea was it to stock French macarons at Guild Café?

Macarons, the hype-food of 2012 that launched a thousand Instagram accounts, could not look more out of place here than if they were on the countertop of a truckstop diner, next to a jumbo sized carton of Farmer’s Union iced coffee. While I applaud whoever’s efforts to bring continental European culture to Crawley, when faced with a sad wilting guild macaron I am obliged to ask pourquoi? $4.50 NOODLES $4.50 noodles are the reason I pause every now and then to thank the powers that be for the fact Guild Village isn’t a sea of Aroma Cafés and Jamaica Blues. With all due credit to these fine establishments, nobody but the mysterious Guild Catering Overlord could come up with anything as satisfyingly disgusting as the $4.50 guild noodles, whose slimy UWA FACT Carrie Bradshaw got her start writing for Pelican

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FEATURE NAME

RETRO PELI Issue 8, Volume 55 In 1984, Pelican was complaining about law students, publishing scathing reviews of New Order albums, and promoting the University Karate Club.

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FEATURE NAME

What’s eating you?

Talk about it in Pelican!

The theme for Pelican’s second edition is FOOD Post-MasterChef food writing, feasting, eating out, being eaten out, eating as activism, food for thought - the possibilities are endless, much like our appetites for McDonalds right now (it’s 2am) The next Pelican meeting (feat. FREE PIZZA) is at 6 pm on Wednesday 25th February in the Guild Council Meeting Room (third floor, old Guild building) Come visit us in the Pelican office (which is actually the old catering office - enter to the right of the Ref main entrance), e-mail us at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, and like us on Facebook to stay in the loop

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Perth International Arts Festival.

Founded and brought to you by UWA.

All it took was a sparkâ&#x20AC;Ś In 1953 our Dean of Arts, Professor Fred Alexander, had an idea. His vision ignited the Perth International Arts Festival: the longest running annual celebration of culture and creativity in Australia. The University of Western Australia has supported the festival every year since.

Our involvement in the Perth arts community continues throughout the year at our Cultural Precinct. Come to UWA and experience exhibitions, music, theatre, ďŹ lm, conferences and symposia from Australia and around the world.

To explore the arts at UWA and find out about current and upcoming events at our Cultural Precinct, visit culturalprecinct.uwa.edu.au