Pelican Edition 2 Volume 86

IssUe 2 VolUme 86 AprIl 2015

peLican guns for A stuDent waLkley

FOLLOW F OLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM I NSTAGRAM ! @UWAST @ U WASTUD EN TG U I L D

Tag your photos with #uwastudentguild.

We may even repost them and make you instafamous!

EDITORS’ NOTE S

FROM THE PRESIDENT Welcome to issue two, friends.

As I write this, late, I reflect upon my office bin full of hexagon coffee cups and ref-roll wrapping. If my five plus years at UWA have taught us anything, it is that having a toasted ham and cheese croissant and a medium flat white from Guild Café almost every day does not result in any major health implications (yet). As I move further and further away from a career in research, perhaps this shall be my great contribution to science.

If being involved in the Guild teaches you anything it’s that students care an awful lot about food. There are few things on campus that get talked about (or complained about) more than food. Who needs representation, quality education and emergency/interest free loans when you don’t have a five star restaurant on campus, amirite? But for serious, food is something that students care about, and rightly so. Guild Catering needs to balance student welfare (we subsidise the fuck out of what we sell) and quality/fanciness. If you feel we’re not hitting the mark, want to see the return of the (in)famous Guild Café Laksa or simply want to share your feels, email president@guild.uwa. edu.au.

This year will see the refurbishment and hipsterification of a number of the Guild Catering outlets. Who knows, maybe by the end of the year there will be somewhere you can eat brunch on a board on campus.

Much love, Lizzy

FROM THE EDITORS Pigeons surround me as I write this. Pelican is about a week past deadline, and I’m typing onehandedly and with some degree of stress on the notes section of my phone while feverishly masticating a mouthful of falafel kebab (sauces: garlic and chilli). Phone typing and eating are two processes that come too naturally to me, and at times like this I like to think that their blessed combination will culminate in productivity. My skirt is covered in sauce, and there are now little bits of falafel all over the pavement. The beady-eyed birds are closing in. The various businesspeople and tourists of the Perth cultural centre are giving me looks (again). I’m basically Joan Didion. Welcome to Pelican, issue two.

The past month has been a haze of $3 sparkling wine (it’s safe to say I’ll miss the Bakery when she closes – Maisie’s elegy on page 29 brings a tear to the eye), potato board conspiracy (the truth is out there, specifically on page 17), and Swan River yacht-commandeering ‘youthful experiences’ (thank you to everyone who came to our launch party). It has been a strange, tasty and beautiful joy to work with UWA’s writers and artists to put together this issue, and especially to meet new student press enthusiasts. Please don’t ever hesitate to come and see us in the office (Ref courtyard, you’ll see some irreverent signs), or email pelican@ guild.uwa.edu.au to get involved with the magazine.

Thanks for reading!

Kat

I thought there was maybe another decade in it before I became The Single Friend. But of late, my loved ones have seen it fit to pass comment on my singledom. The comment isn’t always verbal; in fact, more often than not, it’s entirely mute. As soon as they hear ‘No, I’m single’, I get The Look. Brow furrowed, bottom lip pouted, ‘aw’ optional. In its crueler incarnations, this look can say ‘she must be so lonely’, ‘nobody wants her’, ‘unfuckable’, ‘but what do you have to live for?’, and etc, without a single word. Kinder souls might only intend to offer a sympathetic ‘that sucks for you’, and I thank you for your self-righteous concern.

But here’s a radical thought: maybe I’m not unhappy. Maybe I’m really, really, deliriously, blissfully happy.

My life bursts at the seams with love. Sometimes my parents send me a text just to say they’re proud of me. I live with my best friends, and we laugh every day. I work on Pelican, a project that I love, and it gives me endless satisfaction.

I work and work and work to pay my own way, and to cultivate a life that I’m obsessed with.

I’m ambitious, capable and completely fearless.

The only time I feel sad is when I’m faced with that Look, and am reminded yet again by someone who I thought was on my side that I, alone, am not enough.

It’s no secret how much I love brunch (a key reason why this, the food issue, is so close to my heart). Last week, I indulged in some smashed avo courtesy of Mrs S with four gorgeous friends. And that was it. That was pure bliss. Don’t ever look at me as though my life is anything but.

(If you’re reading this patting yourself on the back, thinking ‘sounds like what a single girl would say’ while you sit smugly next to your partner, that’s fine by me. Good for you. And don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find your clit soon enough.)

With much uncondescending love, Lucy

3

Contributors PELICAN IS UWA’S STUDENT MAGAZINE, SINCE 1929

Editors Kat Gillespie Lucy Ballantyne Subeditors Mark Brandon Morgan Goodman Section Editors Politics Brad Griffin Film James Munt Music Hugh Manning Literature Kate Prendergast Arts Emily Purvis Lifestyle Morgan Goodman Contributors Megan AnsellPatrick Bendall* Mark Brandon* Sam Calleja* Carin Chan* Jessica Cockerill* Miriam Crandell*Hayden Dalziel*Emily Foyster* Miah de Francesch* Caitlin FrunksTristan Fidler*Maisie Glen* Matthew Green* Tash Harris* Joseph HartleyDaniel Hu* Rachel King* Emily Lamberto* Cameron Moyses* Kate Oatley* Georgia Oman* Wills Pritchard* Leah Roberts* Thomas Rossiter* Bridget Rumball* Jasmine Ruscoe* Bermond Scoggins* Aakanksha SharmaLaurent Shervington* Tamara SindhunakornElisa Thompson* Christina ThompsonLaura WellsDan Werndly*

*Words - Art Cover Photography James Gillespie Cover Model Macca the pig Design Kate Hoolahan Advertising Karrie McClelland Chelsea Hayes Pelican thanks Team Macca at Unicare 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.

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

Getting involved with Pelican is easy! Perhaps too easy. Like us on Facebook, email us at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, or drop by the office (it’s right next to The Ref !)

Hyper Buddha by Hayden Dalziel

offer applies to large pizzas only

FEATURE

IS S U E 2 : FOOD REGUL ARS EDITORS’ NOTES ...................................................... 3 SOCIAL PAGES . . ......................................................... 6 FRESHER DIARY ....................................................... 7 FRESHER DAN: SCIENCE MAN................................. 9 CALENDAR ................................................................ 21 MATILDA BAY MUSINGS WITH TRISTAN FIDLER ... 32 RETRO PELI .............................................................. 46

FE ATURE S CAMPUS FORAGING. . ................................................. 9 JAMIE OLIVER........................................................... 10 EATING INSECTS . . .................................................... 11 GOONOLOGY ............................................................ 12 LABEL YOUR FOOD .................................................. 13 FOOD MYTHS ............................................................ 14 EATING EINSTEIN ................................................... 16 POTATO EXPOSÉ . . ..................................................... 18 COOKING WITH EXPORT.......................................... 20

SE CTIONS POLITICS . . ................................................................. 22 FILM .......................................................................... 26 MUSIC . . ...................................................................... 28 LITERATURE .. ........................................................... 34 ARTS .......................................................................... 37 LIFESTYLE ................................................................ 42

5

SOCIAL PAGES Send tips to pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au

BLIND ITEMS Which student newspaper received an anonymous tip that its off-campus party was about to get shut down by the Guild over fears that guests might actually have fun?

Certain members of this campus music appreciation society have been seen around Oak Lawn flashing their extra cash, while reportedly sporting some rather irritated looking nostrils.

Which former Pelican editor practises his signature on expensive watercolour paper?

6

Which Guild Catering employee made an official complaint to the university about Pelican’s occupational health and safety? (We’d really like to know) This campus personality was recently caught out faking a brain tumour to get attention: will she ever learn?

W $4 .70 CREASE ARE NO PRICE IN ODLES O N D IL ED $0.20 IN A L P PSA GU X FFICE .

UNE LICAN O ING AN RIL 8, PE P A FOLLOW Y A SD D WEDNE TT GUIL BOYCO EET 9AM T E ST M O R P L OFFICIA IGNAGE BRING S

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

saying weird shit but he said he would take me to the LDS Church, which I think is a new club. Omg don’t get me wrong I’m not like, a druggie, or anything. I wouldn’t do anything gross, but like, LDS. The Beatles did that, right? Anyway, it’s totally on.

Dear Diary,

Totes got tickets to Mexicana on O-Day!!!! Gonna get so fucked, can’t wait. I’ve already asked our cleaner Maria if she can lend me something to wear. She seemed weird about it, but whatever. Nachos and margaritas, bitches!!!

OMG O-week was mental!!!! Had to do all this boring shit for the first bit, which sucked. Blew it off to go and see this guy who went to Trinity. Now he lives at Trinity. We made out and he fingered me a bit but tbh I’m onto bigger and better things now. And by that I mean St George’s. There’s like, a view of the river, and a fuckload of roses. I guess I’m just a romantic, y’know.

I hit up O-Day with the whole squad. We pre-gamed at Bryony’s from 8 am, there are some sick photos of it on insta. No filter required on that shit hahaha!!!!! Stopped at Guild Village on our way to James Oval and got 100 bucks out - like, it’s exxy, but it’s worth it. Basic bitch Felicia was there and totally harshing my vibe - told her where to go by joining every single club on campus, including the weird nerd ones. Idk where Cameron Hall is, but something seriously wack is going on in there. Highlight was probs meeting this guy near Engineering. He seriously needs to sort his shit out fashion wise - I mean, the white collared shirt, and the weird tight pants, ew. But he was soooooo cute, diary. He kept

Campus Rant with Enviro Officer, Jessica Cockerill Our university is more concerned with aesthetic than a tumblr #vapourwave blog. The major problem is that the aesthetic it is going for targets only three audiences: a) crusty academics who like to pretend they are in a more prestigious city, b) glowing young bridal couples out the front of Winthrop Hall, and c) the middle-aged patrons who flock to Somerville and the Perth Writers’ Festival. Any progress or innovation is hidden way down the science and business school end of campus: such modern architecture being considered a blight upon the old-world façade that UWA prides itself on. God forbid we appear modern. God forbid we build our campus as a model of the future which the researchers within these crumbling walls are working so hard to envision.

But the problem with clinging to such beautiful anachronisms goes beyond mere image. It has delayed the installation of many

The Shenton boy from next door on leavers hasn’t stopped blowing up my phone. Like, keen much??? Finally went with him to Tenth State just to shut him up. He kept going on and on about how he’s learning to play the mandolin and how he thinks we all have creativity inside of us. I was just like, what. He kept giving me full homeschool eyes. What’s that about, diary??? I just sipped my coffee and was like, okay. I think I felt something in my tummy, but that might have just been the cold brew.

Gonna go get some FroYo now with this girl from linguistics. Fkn yum!!!!

Love ya bitch!!!

G xoxoxooxoxoxoxoxo

features that would be cost-effective, practical, and cutting-edge.

For instance, solar panels “cannot be installed on red roofs”, because apparently this is an aesthetic faux pas, an architectural sin akin to wearing socks and sandals. Solar panels are to UWA what wind turbines are to Joe Hockey: an eyesore. Never mind that solar panels could give the guild (and, consequentially, the university) at least the appearance of supporting renewables, something which other universities, like Murdoch and Curtin, are doing far better at. If the future of energy is in renewables, the future of energy is not here yet.

Facilities that might make it easier for students to cycle to university are hidden away out of sight, and maintenance of the lawns is more extensive than maintenance of the classrooms.

While there is no doubting that the beauty of Winthrop Hall and the sunken gardens allow us to be momentarily suspended in a Eurocentric academia fantasy, this image is fading along with the wispy old white men that hold it in place. With so many out-dated buildings and facilities, and a refusal to proudly adopt the kind of modern, sustainable infrastructure that make Universities leaders among the community, the truth is that UWA is falling far behind.

Club Spotlight SABAS (Sausage and Bun Appreciation Society) to SABAS is one of UWA’s original secret societies, thought s campu l gentee of group a by 1908 circa d have been founde ated. sophisticates. Little is known about them, but much is specul iate the apprec who ands gourm y The club primarily appeals to tertiar ugh. sourdo of slab a on served meat cured fine a simple pleasure of cavern round underg an in located be to red rumou is om clubro The sausage below the engineering building, in which regular gourmet tastings take place.

interview Membership to the society is highly selective. A rigorous every dish name to able are s process demands that potential recruit e is critiqu n commo A it. e critiqu and on the menu at Jamie’s Italian known are rituals Hazing .” chorizo more bit a “use could that the dish test to to be conducted, with new recruits forced via blind taste Those rt. frankfu a and ta chipola a en identify the difference betwe SABAS annual the to ion invitat an with gifted are test who pass the es from Sausage Fest, a three day long feasting celebration of sausag . breads n Germa around the world, served with fine

7

: n a d r reshe

f

n a m e scienc

Skewed Food Art by Megan Ansell GMO 4 LYF If food contains nuts or gluten, they’re usually labelled either on the front or the back of the pack. But the US government is currently reviewing appeals for genetically modified (GM) foods to require specific labelling. The problem with labelling GM foods is that how you define genetic modification dictates what foods get labelled. Humans have been modifying the plants and animals we consume since the advent of agriculture around 12 000 years ago, so practically every item of produce in the supermarket would require a ‘GMO’ sticker.

Phospho-loss Native plants have been adapting to the phosphorous-lacking Australian soils for millions of years; northern hemisphere crop species have not been so lucky. Non-native plants were thrust into our harsh environment with European colonisation in the 1800s. European farming techniques also leave the soil nutrient depleted, as tilling (the practice of churning or agitating the soil to aerate it) releases carbon from the soil and reduces water retention. But there is hope!

Currently a grassroots group of Western Australian farmers are developing non-tilling techniques, that reduce the nutrient loss from harvest to harvest.

Soylent Green Fields Soylent burst into the international sphere when it garnered an immense $3.5 million on crowdfunding sites. The creator claims that it can serve as a single food replacement, able to sustain an adult indefinitely. Although Soylent is reasonably

8

sustainable, the main carbohydrate is still produced from starch, which requires a lot of arable land to produce in large quantities. This carbohydrate, maltodextrin, is also absorbed quickly by the body, almost as fast as a single glucose molecule. This effectively means that your body is rushed with energy for a short time and then suffers an immense plunge after insulin begins to key the sugar into your cells.

Despite this, Soylent is being taken up by western culture like a moth to a flame, while an even more sustainable and healthy option remains unembraced. 80% of the world’s countries currently consume insects as a food source. Only in the western world is their consumption viewed as taboo.

A number of companies are currently working to change that, making cricket flour available to the general population.

Insects use chitin to create the hard parts of their bodies, a much more complex molecule that releases energy much slower than maltodextrin, but can still be broken down by our gut.

Coffee Heart Attack A South Korean Research team released findings indicating that coffee consumption may reduce your risk of coronary disease and heart attacks. According to the study published in the online journal Heart at the beginning of March, drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day reduces the build-up of fatty plaques in the major arteries. Although this may seem like a beacon of hope for all the run-down students pulling regular allnighters, consuming more than 5 cups a day increases the risk of heart failure - so maybe stick to apples after you reach your limit.

UWA FACT The peacocks are wholly uninterested in your romantic problems

FEATURE

CAMPUS HUNTING AND GATHERING Words and Art by Hayden Dalziel So you’ve been lost in the tropical grove for hours, haven’t eaten anything recently, and your next Centrelink payment isn’t for another thirteen days. Luckily, nature’s bounty is all around and ripe for the taking. All you need is a little hunter-gatherer know-how.

Most of you will think of gathering as involving various nuts and berries, however UWA is fairly devoid of edible fruits - the closest thing is the Moreton Bay figs that cake the surfaces of pathways.

Unfortunately, these provide little nutritional value. Likewise, the dates that grow on some of the palms around campus are of a non-edible variety. If one is to survive on gathering alone, then garden weeds might be the only option. English Dandelion, Flat Weeds, Capeweed, Smooth Cat’s Ear and Sow Thistle all have edible leaves, best harvested while the plant is young. Henry Ford was quite fond of offering guests his ‘roadside salads’ but if you’re going to follow his example you’d better get started on the racehate. Not to mention that most weeds you’ll find will taste like the lovechild of dirt, shit and spinach.

If you can’t survive on the meager greens growing on the lawns, then hunting may be your only option for a nutritious diet.

Options here include hunting the peacocks, which have succulent breast meat and can make a nice pukeko when boiled in water, stuffed with a few small stones. They can also be roasted as one would a pheasant (pair with mature classic reds such as Burgundy, Bordeaux or a Northern Rhone).

The koi in the ornamental pond by Social Science are in fact quite edible once their large scales are removed and they are properly filleted and fried (enjoy with a dry sherry). If you’re planning on staying a while, keeping them in clear water can flush out the bitter taste that comes from the algae they typically consume.

Finally, for the truly adventurous culinary pioneers, there’s always a plentiful supply of what the Marquesas islanders called ‘long pig’.

While Pelican does not condone the eating of engineering students, there’ll be very few uses for them once the mining boom is over so don’t knock cannibalism till you try it (serve with pinot noir as one would a pork roast).

For those still bound by the stifling and archaic code of ethics that chains society, there is one other option. In the anatomy lab UWA keeps a wide selection of meats, which have unfortunately been coated with various preservative chemicals such as formaldehyde. Luckily we can apply an old Nordic method still used by Norwegians and Icelanders to remove the antifreeze and urea from the blood of Greenland Sharks, by burying our delicacies under the ground for six weeks in shallow sandy soil.

Rocks should be placed on the ground where it is buried, which will press the fluid out of the meat. Sharks must then be exhumed and dried. The taste should be somewhere between hakarl, lutefisk and pork. Enjoy with a suitably Nordic beverage such as Akvavit or unsweetened schnapps.

Mi Goreng Stories with Tash Harris On sale for 75c at IGA, Mi Goreng will always be a hit. Add an egg, some cheese or fried sausage and you have the holy grail of MSG, fat and sodium in one dish. Mi Goreng is Indonesian for “fried noodle,” and although it may not be the healthiest of dinner options, it has been part of a staple student diet since 1982. It’s a little sweet, a little spicy and very tasty.

UWA FACT The barista you have a crush on at the Tenth State is waiting for you to finally make a move

9

FEATURE

Words by Laurent Shervington Art by Laura Wells Picture this: the beautiful scenery of Stockholm coming into view, its gorgeous side streets and monuments backed by the lush strings of ‘Viva La Vida’. Out of nowhere, an all too familiar accent is squawking. “So ere we arr in Stokhalm, it’s a beuiful beuiful cite!” Cue a panning shot to our knight in shining armour, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

to prepare some pasta today, here what you want to do mate is take your olive oil there and just drizzle it over ya pasta, while you do that boil some water and add a bit of olive oil in there mate, be generous, then to finish it off just a smidge of olive oil there you have it, simple yeah”.

Real quote.

Not only is this the whitest introduction to a TV show of all time, but it is episode four in Food Escapes, one of the seemingly millions of TV shows centred on the favourite chef of every mum in the world. Even beyond the yellow teeth and lame haircut, this man reeks of mediocrity. Here are five reasons why Jamie Oliver sucks.

3. He thinks people eat bad food because they’re stupid.

While stupidity might play a part in some people’s dumb dietary choices, Jamie Oliver fails to understand the various other socioeconomic factors at play. Furthermore, his constant capitalism fest of merchandise, adverts and terrible TV shows do nothing to address these issues.

1. Most of his shows don’t have subtitles, and they really should. Jamie grew up in Essex, otherwise known as home to the worst accent in Britain, according to a poll by the Daily Mail. He is certainly no exception to the rule; while his mockney accent may charm many, I don’t think it should ever be socially acceptable to pronounce think as “fink”.

4. Your Mum won’t shut up about how good his recipes are, and it makes you feel self-conscious. And that goddamn cookbook, yeah - you know the one.

2. He has an obsession with using olive oil for everything, and it’s weird. “Oi mate Jamie Oliver here and today we are going

10

5. His child naming game is shockingly awful. Jamie has four children, named Poppy Honey Rosie Oliver (2002), Daisy Boo Pamela Oliver (2003), Petal Blossom Rainbow Oliver (2009), and my personal favourite: Buddy Bear Maurice Oliver (2009).

UWA FACT UniMentors are employed by the Ministry of Magic to protect Azkaban, and feed upon human happiness

Eating Insects

FEATURE

Words by Kate Oatley Art by Kate Prendergast

During any exotic holiday, some will admit to eating insects from a roadside stall. But in everyday life, us Westerners usually reach for the bug spray when we see a spider, not a knife and fork. So could edible insects ever become part of an average Western diet? For entomophagists – people who study human insect consumption – insects may be the only way to sustain a growing human population.

Inevitably, there is a serious, if positive, side to eating insects.

FAO’s 2013 report – ‘Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security’ – predicts a population boom to nine billion by 2050, a boom current food production cannot sustain. We urgently need to change the types of food we eat to cope with such a huge increase in demand, or suffer major food shortages; traditional food supplies, like cattle, will physically run out at the current rate of production and are too space-consuming, expensive and environmentally detrimental to increase. With 2000 species of edible insects, this source can provide an abundant and established food supply that can cope with food demands. Insects also have a significantly smaller environmental footprint than traditional sources, and everyone likes a happy planet.

On a lighter note, insects are seriously super ‘superfoods’, being full of protein, essential micronutrients, vitamins and fatty acids.

Online store The Edible Bug Shop, in Australia since 2007, advertises cricket powder that is 68% protein and contains twice as much calcium as full cream milk, double the iron of spinach and almost four times as much potassium as a banana.

While Westerners automatically react with disgust when asked to eat an insect, a multitude of non-Western cultures have consumed insects for thousands of years and developed recipes to cook them to perfection despite their squirmy appearance.

Grasshoppers are the top protein providers, especially Mexican chapulines, which are made of 77.13% protein – higher than the corn, beans and alfalfa they feed on – and are often eaten with guacamole and tortillas.

Fat is the most energy-dense macronutrient in food and palm grubs, being made of 69.78% fat, provide more energy than honey, and more unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids (good fat) than fish and poultry. They are eaten in the Americas, Southeast Asia and tropical Africa, either raw or cooked in their own fat, and are described as tasting creamy when raw, and sweet when fried.

In a sick reversal of the hungry caterpillar, mopane worms (caterpillars) are heavily consumed in southern Africa for their iron content. Mopane worms, with 31-77g iron per 100g, contain more iron content than beef (which has 6mg per 100g). With iron deficiency being the most widespread nutritional disorder in the world, eating mopane worms would drastically reduce the disorder, and even eradicate it for good.

There are, of course, obvious downsides to eating insects, not least of which, the unintentional shiver down your spine at the idea of eating one. To start, there is a danger of people consuming insects from their backyard, which is unsafe partially because they may be covered in chemicals and parasites, and because some insects are detrimental to human health – i.e. do not eat that redback. Scorpions exemplify this problem: when processed by a reliable source, the venom is harmless and they are safe to eat, but problems have occurred with the sending of live scorpions that have not been processed, which is incredibly dangerous.

Even with their superfood status, it would be an immense challenge getting Western cultures to willingly eat insects. Edible Bug Shop, however, has developed a potential solution: cricket powder. Grinding the insect into a powder that partially replaces flour creates no taste difference in the food and avoids having to stare down a plate of worms at dinner.

The best option for Western consumers currently looks to be mealworms, which are nutritionally comparable to beef, already mass reared as pets, and easily processed into foods that are palatable for Western tastebuds. They also have a lower ecological footprint than beef, milk, chicken and pork production, lower greenhouse gas emissions and use less land and water. Surprisingly, consumers are trending away from mealworms recently and towards crickets, especially with the innovation of powder – could this be the beginning of accepting insects as tasty morsels of super-health?

It’s doubtful that by 2050, insects will be a staple food for the masses, but it likely will be integrated enough to help offset food shortages. Although the limitations of edible insects are minor, the challenge of getting over the Ick Factor to make them a widely consumed food in Western cultures will be immense, no matter their superfood capabilities and ability to halt food shortages. Who knows what we’ll be eating in twenty years? Twenty years ago, the idea of eating sushi was unheard of even by the most cosmopolitan of Westerners, yet it is now accepted as a delicacy and potential primary food source. The hope is definitely still burning for edible insects, so to follow the lead of a certain unrelenting advertising campaign and thoroughly desecrate their catchy slogan: “Get some worm on your fork!”

UWA FACT The gozleme place at Broadway shut down when its owner retired. He owns three yachts

11

FEATURE

Goon is felt by the Australian nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its many varieties of Bunnings cordless drills and Mrs Mac’s sausage rolls (that compact, sweaty, encrusted re-envisioning of the banger-in-bun classic). Sealed in a shimmering bladder, encased in a fibre-board box, goon is oddly cosmic in its undulations and its crumpled silver sheen; for no intents or purposes like a space-man’s plumbing. Or, perhaps a more apt (yet equally pat) comparison can be drawn with a celestial sea-slug—slowly shrivelling under successive squeezes, carried ashore by a rogue, dissolute tide slapping itself over the bulwark of civility.

Yet there is nothing more down-to-earth (nor down-under) than the endearingly grotty goon bag. So true-blue is it in its practicality; so larrikin in its multi-purpose functions. Not only does it perform a means to intoxication through a 10%+ alcohol content, but it is an event and a play-thing in itself. Often remarked upon for its astonishing breadth of utility amidst phrases like ‘Bazza ya farkin drongo stop pissing in my mum’s pot plant’ and ‘is my head bleeding?’, if one composed a ‘Guide to Goon’ handbook, it would most likely have to be released in several volumes. Students, backpackers and Tom Rossiter have known it as inflatable pillow, football, makeshift clothing, porch ornament, hanging goon-tern, Hills-hoist game bait, recycled fashion accessory (Perth Now reports how police mistakenly waylaid a young woman sporting a goon bag clutch bag), and even—though this would require at least several days of drinking or a large, Aguirre-skilled gathering—a raft. The Pelican crew themselves trialled the goon bag as a flotation device in the Swan River in late February. Resulting buoyancy issues have been put to poor drainage and insufficient inflation, such that the whole experiment merely begs for a retrial.

Today goon floaties; tomorrow goon zeppelin.

Invented by Thomas Angove of South Australia fifty years ago, the product name is thought to be a contraction and then bovine widening of its suspected etymological origin,

‘flagon’. In form and function, the goon-bag recalls a bushman’s water pouch or Italian shepherd’s goatskin— albeit with an inverted purity of these receptacles. With its tragi-comic-heroic qualities, goon at once renounces the traditional dignity of wine and at the same time recovers it, by way of earnestness, irony, and humble exuberance. Insistently, it celebrates the fact that drunkenness shall be got at minimal coin; plastic cups shall be the vessels for quaffment; and all the weird scatterment of night shall be played out in a scuzzy shadowplay of slackaroonis cutting up their aces and barnacle-bleeding their legs, moaning and mischieving and staggering out their madnesses in the oily glitter of turbid goony youth.

The most praiseworthy and political aspect of goon, however, is its egalitarianism. The cask is a leveller. Whereas Roland Barthes expounds his nation’s wine as a Last-Supper essence—‘the old hypostasis’— goon is the blood a costume-party Christ spilled when he got drunk at that party that one time and tried to feel up Mary Magdalene in the olive grove only to fall over an ill-placed urn upon touch of boob. Anti-posh, communal, goon sloshes proudly around the cells of Australia’s BWS-based identity.

At around ten bucks for a four litre cask, you can’t expect too much from the goon-grape when it comes to refined taste (although there are signs and rumours some brands are militating for a bourgeois box). A potent liquid, it is cheap, sometimes vile, and may (tiny side-box writing whispers) contain ‘traces of fish, eggs and milk’. Yet goon is—pragmatically, chemically, environmentally— in many ways the superior to its glasssheathed and slender-shouldered counterpart. It does not break like the bottle because of its resilient plasticity; its cardboard shell enables easy transport and storage; its air-tight seal and vacuum engineering bequeaths it an anti-oxidation endurance, so that it can be plied for weeks after opening (in the unlikely event it outlasts the night).

But most importantly, goon can always depended upon to fulfil its promise of conversion. Under its influence, a strong man may become silent, a silent man may become strong, and a strong silent man may start shouting Lenny Kravitz lyrics to passing Holden Tritons on Guildford Road.

Tacky, bloated, billowing and proud, there will never be a more magnificent sculpture to grace our shores than the giant goon bag of ‘14. Nor one which better bespeaks our bogan heart.

At the sale price of $20 000, I leave off by condemning this university for disdaining the opportunity to purchase the piece for installation in the Winthrop Hall reflection pond. Graduation photos would never be more symbolic, nostalgic, or— for Arts students— premonitory.

12

UWA FACT That Subway is coming any day now

MYSTERY MEAT

FEATURE

Words and Art by Miriam Crandell

I still remember the last meat I ate. It was a caesar wrap from Macca’s, the crispy deep fried chicken in perfect harmony with its attendant bacon.

But it left a bad feeling in my stomach, and it wasn’t just queasiness from eating greasy food. I had developed, over the months of being weaned off dinnertime meat by a vegetarian sister, a deep discomfort with eating animals. That day, I tentatively resolved to stop eating meat, and I’m proud to say I’ve only mourned the loss of bacon a couple of times since.

Starting out on my self-imposed bacon-exile, my understanding of a vegetarian diet’s requirements read simply ‘no meat.’ I knew about gelatine (bits of animal jelly that is somehow in so many things), and scouted out a gelatine-free sour cream, but that was pretty much it. It was only recently when I came across a post on Tumblr about rennet that I started to realise how often meat was hidden in processed foods, cosmetics and medicine. Aside from clearly stated meat-origin ingredients like gelatine and rennet, many hide behind vague or unintelligible descriptors like ‘enzyme’ and ‘additive E-120.’ My experience of food labelling is that it’s so inconsistent that it’s often impossible to find out if foods, even ones calling themselves vegetarian, actually are.

This really pisses me off. I’ve been unknowingly eating things containing meat-derived ingredients this whole time I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid doing so (although I admit my resolve always weakens in the face of sweet, juicy, gelatinous gummy bears).

Take the headache that is rennet, for example. Rennet is an enzyme, according to Wikipedia, ‘produced in stomachs of ruminant mammals which is used in the production of most cheeses.’ Okay, I don’t know what a ruminant mammal is, but I’m guessing something cow-like with lots of stomachs. In the case of cow-cheese production, rennet is sourced from the stomach of baby calves and is a by-product of the veal industry. So it’s definitely not vegetarian. But vegetarian ways of producing this kind of enzyme do exist. Here’s that problem again: ambiguous and inconsistent labelling. On inspection of cheese ingredient lists, you’re likely to find some that simply say ‘enzyme’ (sooo helpful!), others that are slightly more specific that say ‘enzyme: rennet’ (thanks, but what kind?), and if you’re really lucky you’ll find a ‘non-animal rennet’ or ‘microbial rennet’ listed in there somewhere.

It’s annoying to scan every cheese label in the shop to find one that I can eat, but rennet goes further than that, because of course cheese is an ingredient in lots of other things. The ‘Vegetarian Cheese Wrap’ I found at Hackett the other day lists

‘enzyme’ in its cheese-ingredient breakdown, so you can see why I have serious trust issues. How many times am I being lied to by companies that don’t know what they’re talking about? How many people don’t realise you can’t just leave the meat out of something and slap a ‘vegetarian’ label on it?

I think the solution to the ignorance and lack of transparency surrounding meat-derived ingredients is clearer food labelling. Right there next to the food allergy warnings it could say something like ‘contains no animal products’/’contains animal products’/’contains meat products.’ India, for example, has a system where vegetarian food is identified by a green dot and meat by a brown one.

It’s a little different though, because India’s system includes eggs in the meat category due to religious definitions (unlike the common ‘no meat but still eggs and milk’ definition used in Australia), and the proportion of vegetarians and vegans in Australia is so much lower than in India. So why should you care about vegetarian food labelling if you’re part of the meat-eating majority in Australia?

In 2009, an application to Food Standards Australia New Zealand called for ‘suitable for vegetarians’ and ‘suitable for vegans’ labelling on relevant food. It was rejected because the presence of meat-derived ingredients isn’t a public health and safety issue. But knocking applications like this one back has a direct impact on our ability to make informed decisions.

It’s not fair if vital information about what we eat is withheld from us just because those in charge of our food labelling laws think only our safety matters, not our agency. Australia prides itself on the ideology of freedom of choice, so food labelling needs to be transparent enough to allow all of us to make our own informed choices about what we eat. You only have to look as far as the recent push towards country-oforigin labelling to see a desire for consumer consciousness. Let’s add meat products to the list of things we’d like to be aware of in our food.

UWA FACT The Sunken Gardens are thought to be the original site of Atlantis by several prominent researchers

13

FEATURE

Words by Georgia Oman Art by Aakanksha Sharma

If the old adage ‘you are what you eat’ was meant to be taken literally, I would have completed my transformation into a freakish cornflake/girl hybrid by about the age of seven.

This would have been an idyllic existence, perhaps only marred by an unquenchable thirst for milk. But putting aside fantasies of sprouting pizza wings until technology catches up, the idea that the food we consume is directly linked to our health and wellbeing isn’t exactly a controversial theory.

What food pyramids teach us (apart from the fact that in Ancient Egyptian pantries, the good stuff was kept up top) is that fruit and vegetables are good for you, whereas a deepfried chocolate bar wrapped in bacon might be best saved for special occasions, when you have a specialist doctor on standby.

But beyond these basic guidelines, is there any truth to some of the more peculiar food myths out there, the ones that sound like they were thought up not by scientists in lab coats, but by a frustrated babysitter trying to get some kid to stop eating pizza and go to bed? How else did it get around that eating too much cheese will give you nightmares? Why are oysters an aphrodisiac, and will your hair really grow curly if you eat too many bread crusts? These are the questions that keep me up at night, and in the interest of science I’ve taken

14

it upon myself to investigate a few of these well-known food fables and find out whether or not what you eat makes a real difference after all.

Carrots I don’t know how many times I was told as a child that eating carrots helps you see in the dark. It’s perhaps one of the least damaging lies that can be told to children, and at the time the story seemed to check out – rabbits eat carrots, after all, and they didn’t seem to be staggering blindly through their burrows bumping into things. It just so happened that I loved carrots, and in my mind I was basically one salad away from turning into Cyclops from X-Men. Unfortunately, while scientists have identified the vitamin A found in carrots as necessary for the synthesis of rhodopsin, a particular pigment in the eye that aids vision in low light, no amount of carrots will ever let you see completely in the dark. The origins of this old wives’ tale can be traced back to the Second World War, when the British Government announced that their air force’s incredible success in intercepting German bombers on night raids was due to the amount of carrots eaten by pilots, and not the newly-developed radar they were keeping under wraps. In the 1940s, vegetables giving you the power of night-vision was apparently the more believable story.

Fish The belief that eating fish will make you smart is a prevailing one, and one of the main reasons why I switched from salmon to dolphin (the smarter the fish, the smarter you get, right?). Taking the idea on good faith, my

UWA FACT Ararat’s kebabs were recently awarded three Michelin stars

FEATURE consumption of fish and chips peaked around the time of my final high-school exams, due in no small part to the small voice in my head telling me fish was ‘brain food’, even if it was smothered in enough deep-fried batter to send me into a food coma instead of hitting the books. Unfortunately, the truth is that force-feeding your child tuna from birth is not a foolproof plan to raise the next Einstein or Stephen Hawking – only Dora the Explorer can do that. However, the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish (particularly in oily fish such as salmon, mackerel, and tuna) are the rock stars of polyunsaturated fatty acids, credited with improving everything from heart health to the brain. Which is good, because if you’re buying something called ‘Fish Oil’ to willingly ingest, you want to know it’s doing something.

Spinach So with two food-based superpowers denied to us, where do we go in our mission to build up an army of super-healthy mutants?

Having been denied super-vision and super-intelligence, can we at least hope for super-strength? If the tattooed and perpetually squinting cartoon character Popeye has taught us anything, it is that YES WE CAN. All you have to do is swallow a can of spinach and you’re good to go about your daily business with the combined strength of an Olympic weightlifting team – and who’s going to argue with a pugnacious sailor with anatomically disproportionate forearms? Today, while spinach no doubt enjoys its status as a superfood, lording its high vitamin and mineral content over all the other leaves in the salad aisle, it seems that what Popeye really used his strength for was propping up the spinach industry. In 1937 the spinach-growing town of Crystal City, Texas erected a statue of their greatest patron. And in the end, isn’t encouraging young children to want to eat a flavourless green leaf the greatest feat of strength there is?

Mi Goreng Stories with Tash Harris After hearing stories from people that ‘don’t even go here!’ I thought there must be some words to be said by actual students at UWA about their experiences with the noodle.

ended up in the pie maker, cooked pastry ended up on top and some sort of ketchup/chilli/soy sauce concoction was left on the side.”

I spoke to a third year law student, who after a few too many late nights got a bit confused between the ‘Jaffa pie maker’ and the pot on the stove.

When I asked him how it tasted, he made a face that can only be described as “eeeuuggghhhhrrrr.” This experiment was never to be repeated. That pie maker is now on the side of a dank Dalkeith street, with the remnants of the noodles still stuck to the metal. It will probably still be there when this goes to print.

“I put in the pastry while cooking the noodles on the side, I’m not sure what happened in the next five or six minutes, all I know is the noodles

UWA FACT Don’t stare too hard at yourself in the reflection pond, lest you fall in

15

FEATURE

DAVID BOHR-OCCOLI A tale of vandalism, vegetables, and the UWA physics department Words by Mark Brandon Art by Christina Thompson

The office of the Head of Physics looks how you would expect.

The room is spacious, but the cabinets, bookshelves and touches of home make it feel close, personal. A broad desk dominates the centre of the office. Papers and folders form hills and tussocks across its top. The actual surface is hidden.

Behind it all, legs crossed and hands templed on his thigh, is the Head himself, Ian McArthur.

“Vegetarianism is up to the individual,” he says. “But if we want to eat animal products, it’s up to us to drive producers towards more humane and sustainable methods of production.”

I nod and make a note, but at that moment, my mind is elsewhere. I’m considering how I ended up here, talking about a subject that I wouldn’t associate with frontier physics. Talking about vegetarianism.

It started a week ago, I realise, with a decision that seemed innocent at the time, but would set my week on a course that I could never have predicted.

He turned to me and said, “It’s pasted to the outside of the window.”

Allow me to explain something. The physics building is not easy to access from the outside. You would need a ten metre ladder to reach the second storey – something most casual activists don’t have lying around.

This means that our mystery poster is someone in a position of authority within the university, or it means that they scaled the outside of the building, clinging to window frames and water pipes, to post the quote on their lonesome.

At this point, I realised that I was chasing after someone who might be impossible to find.

A week ago, on the second storey of the physics building, I saw something pasted to one of the windows. A quote, about a person and subject that seemed an unlikely pair.

Over the next week, I continued the search. My lecturer, Ian McArthur, emailed the entire undergraduate cohort asking for leads, but nobody responded.

The person: Albert Einstein. The subject: Vegetarianism. The quote? Well, it went as follows: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

By all rights, I should have been disheartened, but I wasn’t. Ian had found more quotes scattered across the physics building.

Some hidden, some easily visible. All of them stuck to the outside of a window. The mystery poster had gone to an impressive amount of effort, and not without reason.

It piqued my curiosity. I didn’t know Albert E. was a vegetarian, and I wondered who it was that went to the effort of posting this quote – and, as I discovered later, several others.

Although I had a lecture to attend, I lingered a moment longer, an idea forming in my mind. What drove someone to post it, I wondered. Who were they? Could I find them? If I did, what would they have to say?

See, they had gotten me thinking.

In an instant, I made a decision, innocent of the knowledge of how it throw my week into chaos.

I decided to find the mystery poster.

I started with the simplest course of action: I asked my lecturer whether he knew who had posted the quotes. He didn’t.

Moreover, he didn’t know that the quotes even existed.

Curious, he asked me to take him to the stairwell, and so I did.

I showed him the quote, hoping for an epiphany, some sudden remembrance. What happened instead raised more questions than it answered.

My lecturer stepped up to the window, tilted his head, like a cat 16

examining a mouse hole, and ran a fingernail across the paper.

The paper didn’t tear. His finger slid past the quote with a dull squeak.

All these famous scientists, the brightest minds of their age, had shared the belief that it was ethically wrong to slaughter animals for consumption. They believed it barbaric, something that needed to change for humanity to progress. I found myself asking a question: What does it mean to be vegetarian in this day and age, and what will it mean in the future?

I had to know the answer to my question. So, in a few spare minutes, I booked interviews with every physics lecturer I could think of.

Ian McArthur accepted my request for an interview, which is how, a week later, I find myself where I am: in his office discussing vegetarianism.

Ian is not a vegetarian, but he believes in sustainable and humane eating practise. Vegetarianism, he believes, is the most extreme expression of these values – the furthest end of the spectrum. Instead, he advocates for purchasing products from confirmed humane and organic producers.

UWA FACT People seem to genuinely enjoy Mexicana

FEATURE

“I don’t think there’s much of a chance to convert the large majority of people to vegetarianism,” he confides. “But it is incumbent on those of us who can afford to spend more to drive produces towards humane and sustainable practises.

“But a major problem in Australia is that there isn’t rigorous enforcement of the definition of what is meant by ‘free range’ or ‘organic’. I think some other countries do better in that respect.”

As the interview comes to a close, Ian repeats the statement with which he opened. “In the end, it’s the individual’s choice.”

“I was from China,” says Jingbo Wang, lecturer and researcher, “and during that time, we really didn’t have much meat. Life was simple, but beautiful.”

A day has passed, and I have traded Ian’s office for another.

This one is smaller, but neater. The stacks of files and ordered cabinets exude a sense of precision and control. I appreciate it, even as I listen.

“My view is that we need food to sustain our lives. If we take the minimum, the right amount, then there is no waste. That is the way to go.”

When pressed on the subject of vegetarianism, Jingbo responds by saying, “You do need protein. But if you don’t eat meat, you can eat soya and tofu and beans. There are many options.”

Another day passes, and I have much to think about.

Both of the views presented to me side towards ethical meat consumption, but they are quite different in nature.

Furthermore, I have had no positive responses from the physics department, and I suspect the one I’m chasing after hails from another school of study.

As my search comes to a close, I hear back from one last staff member: Carlo Margio, second year lab coordinator and teaching assistant. He is interested in being interviewed.

I meet him in the second year lab room. We sit down. Only lab stools, this time. There is no desk between us.

“I am a pescetarian,” he tells me. “I eat fish and fish products about once or twice a month. I was vegetarian for a long time, but eventually ate a bit of fish to keep my diet one hundred per cent nutritious.”

Intrigued, I ask him what caused him to become a vegetarian.

“My daughter became a vegetarian, and as I was cooking for her, it was easier to eat the same meals. Then I read a book on ethics by Peter Singer, and that swung me to vegetarianism.

“I would like to see our species move to vegetarianism just for the ethical aspect of eating other living creatures,” he continues.

“But especially because of the suffering we cause them during so-called ‘processing for consumption.’ ”

birth. To take a creature that can suffer and put their whole life to that use is an astounding level of cruelty.

“I believe that when future generations look back, they will think us barbaric for eating other living creatures.”

As I listen, I’m struck by the passion behind his words. They resonate in the empty laboratory and gain a weight beyond simple sound.

“It’s an individual choice,” he says. “I happily ate meat for a long time, because I hadn’t given it much thought. I don’t begrudge those who choose to do so.”

After my last interview, I reluctantly pull the pin on my search.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t find the mystery poster, but in the end, I didn’t need to. The quotes had done their job: they had gotten me thinking.

Moreover, they have opened up new ways for me to view the issue of vegetarianism.

It is, largely, an ethical dilemma over whether we should kill and eat creatures capable of suffering. It is possible to reduce this suffering by enforcing humane, sustainable practice, by reducing our reliance on meat and shifting to vegetable proteins, or by giving up meat entirely.

But ultimately, these interviews have reinforced the undeniable truth of the issue: our diet practices are our own choice, something we need to consider and decide on as individuals.

What may work for one might not work for someone else.

I have my own thoughts, and after this, I will be making a few changes.

“What I dislike most about the current system is the factory farms and cruelty to animals. That’s a principal driver for me.

The life of a cow or pig is considered a commodity, and they’ll spend years in cages, on controlled diets, feeding and giving UWA FACT Please consider before enrolling in an ALVA unit if an asymmetrical haircut is right for you

17

FEATURE

THE POTATO EXPOSÉ The Yukon Gold. The Austrian Crescent. The Irish Lumber and the Bintje. These are outlawed potatoes, just a few of the many varieties that are people are forbidden to grow in Western Australia. You see, unlike anywhere else in the country, potato growing in Western Australia is a regulated industry, like finance or petrol. A decision by the state government at the end of the Second World War has led to the establishment of a shadowy board of elites, whose Machiavellian schemes control every aspect of the potato market. They are The Potato Board, now rebranded as the Potato Marketing Corporation of WA. Haven’t heard of them? You have probably seen their work. If you’ve been watching TV lately you may have seen their latest campaign in the form of the ‘Serve Up Some Goodness’ ads. They also attracted some media attention recently when potato grower Tony Gallati, owner of Spudshed Innaloo, gave away over 200 tonnes of potato in protest against potato board limitations.

Yet as the majority of people don’t know of the board’s existence, the issue of potato regulation has stayed out of the limelight, simmering just under the surface of public awareness.

The Potato Marketing Corporation (PMC) came into being after the 1946 Marketing of Potatoes Act, and they have effectively controlled the market ever since. Potato growing is tightly controlled, and restrictions placed on farmers almost seem to treat potatoes as an illicit substance. Growers must be registered at the board, and their farms must be licenced.

18

They require a permit to grow an approved number of potatoes of an approved variety. Within seven days growers have to lodge a ‘Planting Declaration’. Transporting potatoes from the farm requires a ‘Notice of Harvest and Delivery’ form. The PMC controls who buys, sells, even who uses potatoes (hopefully my humble stockpile has escaped their iron grasp).

It doesn’t stop there. The Board holds the power to search premises and confiscate equipment believed to be supporting illicit potato crops. Appointed ‘Potato Inspectors’ can even stop vehicles if they suspect them of carrying over 50kg of spud. While it is unclear exactly what sort of qualification it takes to become a Potato Inspector, it is clearly a position of some power and prestige. How is this funded? The Board prides itself on receiving no state funding; they instead take commission on all potatoes grown and sold within WA. This works out to millions of dollars each year; in 2014, the cost of running this board was over 4.9 million, which included a $240,000 salary for the chairman. All this from a board controlled by only six members. Clearly, the PMC are no small fry.

But if you’re not a grower, why would you care? Nationally, around 66 varieties of potato are grown and eaten, but in WA, only 13 are allowed. And if you can tell your Royal Blue from your Ruby Lou, then being forced to eat watery Delawares just because you live in WA doesn’t sound like a fair trade to me.

UWA FACT Apparently there’s a Claremont campus

FEATURE

The truth behind Australia’s only regulated vegetable Words by Patrick Bendall Art by Hayden Dalziel It seems I’m not alone in this regard. In 2012 the WA Chamber of Commerce spoke out against the board, with spokesperson John Nicolau holding nothing back. “Plans to scrap the Potato Marketing Corporation and free up the humble potato from excessive and anti-competitive organisation are long overdue”. A recent report by WA’s Economic Regulation Authority (ERA) found that the board were keeping prices high and damaging the industry in the process. They recommended deregulation. The ERA is not alone in condemning the board. A recent two page spread by the PMC attracted the ire of shadow treasurer Ben Wyatt, who declared the advertisement was a political campaign designed to justify the PMC’s existence. Leader of the opposition Mark McGowan also chipped in, saying that it “would be comical, if it wasn’t so damaging to the WA economy”. In 1993, the Potato Board, then known as Western Potatoes, began running their iconic advertisements featuring Con the Fruiterer, the images of which I have never quite erased from my memory. Despite the board’s efforts over the last twenty years, potato consumption has declined by 20% per capita in WA in the last decade and it seems that finally the chips may be down for the PMC. There is still significant support for the board. The Marketing of Potatoes Act is reviewed every five years to assess its relevance and it has survived each assessment so far, with the Barnett government publicly committing to the PMC until the next election. In January 2015, the Shire President of

Manjimup Wade DeCampo put out a media release in support of the PMC in the face of growing opposition. “Rather than paying attention to the outlandish statements made by a few people who know little about the industry or the Potato Marketing Corporation, the general public should be paying attention to the growers and the truth.”

“Appointed ‘Potato Inspectors’ can even stop vehicles if they suspect them of carrying over 50kg of spud” Historically, there have been a little over 100 potato growing farms in Western Australia. The protectionism that the PMC can provide would certainly seem attractive to some of the larger established farms, especially those owned by board members themselves. The legislative seat of Warren (Manjimup) is a swinging seat. It is also a prominent potato growing area. No doubt PMC’s political powerbase around the area only serves to muddy the waters of this unwashed, soil covered issue.

As Con would say, “What, no Western potato?”

UWA FACT Rocketfuel only hire white people

19

Cooking with Emu Export Words and Art by Hayden Dalziel Impress your friends and punish your enemies with these three top-notch recipes.

Beer Cheddar Soup A creamy delight with a hidden kick. Preheat oven to 200°, sauté an onion in a pan for 4 minutes, add garlic, stir in one can of Emu and simmer for 20 minutes.

Blend the beery-onion mixture and 1 cup of stock until smooth. Pour the blended mix back into the pan with 3 more cups of stock and simmer for 10 minutes.

Combine half a cup of flour and 1 cup of milk then whisk until smooth. Stir this mixture into the pan before adding another cup of milk. Add about 1 ½ cups of a decent matured cheddar. Serve with beer.

Beer-Battered Onion Rings Cut 2 onions into rings. Combine 2/3 cup flour, ¼ teaspoon paprika, ¼ teaspoon pepper, ½ teaspoon salt, an egg white and 1/3 of a cup of (preferably flat) Emu. Thickly coat the onion rings in this mixture then fry them until golden. Place the rings in an oven tray and bake for 10 minutes or until crisp. Reward yourself with another beer.

Drunken Cheese Bread Preheat oven to 180°. Heat oil in a small skillet and fry up ½ an onion, a pinch of pepper and a garlic clove. Combine 3 cups of flour, 3 tablespoons of sugar, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1 teaspoon of salt, stirring with a whisk. Make a well in the centre and pour in the fried onions, 1 cup of cheese, 1 can of Emu and stir until moist. Spoon the mix into a loaf pan and drizzle it with butter a few times while baking for 60 minutes. Reward yourself with like, 3 beers - you’ve achieved a lot for someone so drunk.

PELICAN RANKS RICH PEOPLE IGAS OF PERTH 1. Leederville Open 24 hours, and the free samples are near-constant.

Average price for a loaf of bread: $12 2. Mt Lawley This IGA cultivates a bohemian vibe for the MP budget.

3. Dalkeith MILF central. You will probably get to pat like three poodles on any given visit.

4. Claremont-Nedlands Some lovely cheeses, but why bother stopping? The Quarter is minutes away.

5. Mosman Park For when you run out of tonic water for the Hendricks.

20

UWA FACT You should write for Pelican!

Good Friday (University Holiday)

Easter Monday (University Holiday) 6th- 10th Non-teaching study break

Last day to withdraw from Semester One units (unit shows on formal academic record without academic penalty)

Pelican Meeting, 6pm Guild Council Room

ANZAC Day

Pelican Workshop, 6pm Guild Council Room

Art by Tamara Sindhunakorn

21

POLITIC S

Art by Joseph Hartley

WHAT’S UP IN POLITICS A TASTY SECOND HELPING Words by Leah Roberts

Ahhh ‘politics’. It’s often a word with a lot of negative connotations.

When I asked one of my friends for his thoughts on current politics, he described it as “Lame, like I care, but look, as long as it’s going okay.” Most of my friends treat my love for politics as a bizarre obsession and have to put up with my rants. So much has been happening in politics since the last edition and I don’t want to subject you all to a rant so I’ve decided to use the medium of Mean Girls to attempt to describe it all.

Our political parties are like high school cliques, each with a certain reputation. There are the Liberals, who are essentially the Plastics. The Plastics of Canberra include Joe Hockey, who follows the lead and always wears blue ties, Julie Bishop, who like Gretchen follows the lead of Regina (Tony Abbott) but probably has her own leadership ambitions. A couple of weeks ago, some backbenchers rebelled against the status quo and announced that Regina should stand down as leader. The school voted and the spill was defeated 61 to 39. Though victorious, much of the media and many political commentators speculate that the writing is on the wall for Mr. Abbott now.

22

The spill was the culmination of many weeks or months of poor decision-making by Mr. Abbott. The poor performing budget, the constant changing of key policies such as pushing the Medicare co-payment and then the next day dropping it.

Also, the fall of Liberal state governments to Labor, including the crushing defeat of Campbell Newman, took their toll. A week before the Victorian election, Mr. Abbott refused to fund one of the Liberal state government’s key infrastructure plans, and gave an Australian knighthood to Prince Phillip just weeks before the Queensland election. This was a move that was viewed very negatively by the majority of Australians, with many Liberal cabinet members having to embarrassingly sidestep questions about their feelings on the matter. Recently, Abbott has called on the Indonesian government to “Remember the aid we gave in 2005” in response to their refusal to grant amnesty to the Bali Nine ringleaders.

Gaffe after gaffe. Will the Plastics change? Will Tony Abbott lead next time we meet? Only time will tell.

UWA FACT There is no philosophy department - or is there? Discuss

POLITIC S

Words by Brad Griffin In 1917, Imperialist Russia was swept away by two cataclysmic revolutions in February and October (March and November, depending on which calendar you’re using). The old, practically feudal system had seen much reform in the early years of the 20th century, but it was still backward and overwhelmingly saw the peasants and workers of Russia working most of their lives simply to enrich those who virtually enslaved them. By 1923, the Bolsheviks had cemented their rule over Russia and most of the former Imperial holdings including Ukraine, though some rebellions would last into the 1930s. Though promising equality and freedom for all, by the time Stalin had consolidated his power in 1929, all promises of individual freedoms and liberties had been stripped away, and the ignorant, selfish Romanov Dynasty and its ruling class had been replaced by something far more sinister.

But you’ve read Animal Farm, so you already know that some animals are more equal than others. Well, if stories of Vladimir Putin wrestling bears and hunting tigers are anything to be believed, then some animals truly are ‘more equal’ than others.

However Putin’s presumed ascendency over other living creatures does not stop at his lust for animal trophy heads. Putin is, for all intents and purposes, the dictator of over 140 million people.

Many Russians respect and revere Putin for the amazing growth rates achieved since the beginning of his presidency in 1999. The eventual success of market reforms begun under Yeltsin and the tapping of Russia’s enormous mineral wealth once again made Russia a major economic and diplomatic world leader in under a decade. Russians have a long memory, and the despondency and depression that characterized the 1990s, which saw poverty rates of over 30% are alive and well. Russians saw what capitalist democracy was like, and for the time being, they seem to have re-embraced a cult of personality fervor for their leader – the exact kind of thing Kruschev’s ‘Secret (but come on really not so secret) Speech’ in the aftermath of Stalin’s death tried to stamp out.

Putin has been President of Russia for twelve of the last sixteen years, ever since Yeltsin’s resignation and endorsement of him.

He was elected in his own right in 2000 and again in 2004, and gracefully stepped down in 2008 due to the Russian Constitution’s ban on third consecutive terms. The West heaved a sigh of

relief in 2008, thinking ‘gosh, that could have gone a bit awry’.

However, Putin clung to power by endorsing Dimitry Medvedev as a 2008 Presidential election candidate. After winning, Medvedev promptly appointed Putin Prime Minister. It was at this point the West said ‘well, I guess we actually should have seen that coming’. When Medvedev increased the Presidential term from four to six years, starting in 2012, political commentators in the West became suspicious, and by the time Putin declared his intent to run in 2012 and then won, few in the West were surprised. So far, all of this has occurred, in the strictest sense, democratically and according to the Constitution.

So if the people love him, and the law supports him, what’s the fuss? Doesn’t that just make Putin a popular, as well as successful leader? Does he not have the moral ascendancy over the democracy-loving leaders of the West?

No. Putin does not govern for all Russians. If you are LGBTQI, he doesn’t want to know you. He wants a bag on your head and a number on your cell. If you dare speak out against his violent repression of Chechnya, he does not want your vote. If you are bold enough to stand against him and form political parties that draw voters away from him, you will be shot. Recently, the leader of the Republican Party of Russia, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead by an assassin a stone’s throw away from Red Square. Does this sound like the kind of thing that would occur in a peaceful, stable, democratic country? Would the members of Pussy Riot have been locked up for simply singing in a church in a liberal society? Australia may not have legalized gay marriage yet, but at least the government does not openly encourage gangs to beat gay youths on the street.

Russia has gone from despot to despot, riding whatever highs and lows they bring. In 1917, the people rose and declared that enough was enough. In 1991, the crumbling Soviet Empire saw the writing on the wall. It is highly unlikely that Putin’s tenure as Russian Supreme Overlord will come to an end through democratic process. So what will it take? Western sanctions against his actions in Ukraine have merely incensed the public against the West, and not the enemy right in front of them.

UWA FACT For several years, UWA arts department professors have been carrying out a secret study to discover whether students with top knots really do achieve more academically

23

POLITIC S

Tony Blair AND THE INVASION OF IRAQ Words by Bermond Scoggins It is disheartening when politicians prove they are not the perfect combination of intellectual and activist. I am writing about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In August of 2014 the Daily Telegraph reported that Blair had given public relations advice to current Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev on methods to minimise media controversy over the December 2011 massacre in the Kazakh town of Zhanaozen. Prior to a speech Nazarbayev would deliver at Cambridge in July of 2012, Blair had offered, in the letter leaked to the Daily Telegraph, to insert passages into the speech that would attempt to justify the deaths of the 14 Zhanaozen energy workers at the hands of Kazakh security forces, who were striking over poor working conditions and low wages. Among the paragraphs Blair added was a section where Nazarbayev would ask for observers to acknowledge the “huge change of a positive nature we have brought about in [Kazakhstan] over the past 20 years”. Such assertions have proven spurious as the United Nations and Human Rights Watch continue to condemn Nazarbayev’s autocratic restrictions on freedom of assembly, speech, and religion.

Despite criticism, Blair has defended his actions. By declaring that he is ‘nudging controversial figures on a progressive path of reform’, he is forgetting that since the Zhanaozen incident, civil liberties in Kazakhstan have all but become a vestige of post-Soviet optimism. The arrest and imprisonment of democratic opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov, who lead an investigation into alleged human rights violations at Zhanaozen, marks a sharp regression in what tenuous progress had been achieved throughout Nazarbayev’s twenty-three year tenure. It seems quite intrepid of Blair, who was a vehement opponent of tyrannical regimes not a decade ago, to defend a government antithetical to liberal democratic values. Some have claimed it is a consummate betrayal - hyperbole perhaps - but Blair, in concert with his consulting firm Tony Blair & Associates, plays a greater role in legitimising despots than playing the transformative, democratic reformer.

Blair can also be accused of contravening his Labour principles by not condemning the Zhanaozen massacre in the first place and failing to support the workers’ right to strike. This, however, can be cynically forgiven in consideration of the alleged

24

millions of pounds in consulting fees poured into his coffers by Nazarbayev.

His principle transgression, for which he seems unabashed, is that he has unequivocally reneged on his commitment to the opposition of tyranny, and his neo-conservative beliefs that shaped his decision to endorse and participate in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In abandoning his idealistic beliefs for seemingly so trivial a reason as money, he diminishes the tolerance for idealism in foreign policy and contributes to an unhealthy pessimism that can and is bound to stifle the popular willingness to effect liberal democratic change around the globe. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama made the moral argument that ‘it is simply unacceptable for the richest and most powerful countr[ies] in human history to be indifferent to the plight of countries that not only lack its human and social resources but are moving steadily backward in their standards of living’.

With a parlous international system fraught with aggressors determined to subjugate whole peoples (i.e. ‘daesh’ or Islamic State and Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists), the obligation to combat barbarism becomes ever more pressing. And while irresponsible idealism or poorly expressed benevolent intentions, as evidenced by the overtly optimistic assumptions of the 2003 Iraq Invasion, can be injurious to the liberal democratic project, inaction is itself a guaranteed path to the proliferation of tyranny. The lessons of Munich or Jimmy Carter’s weakness in wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution can attest to this fact.

It is easy to fall into the ‘Blair trap’, where pragmatism and self-interest trump once passionate ideals. His abandonment should not facilitate the abandonment of idealism for all, nor be speciously construed as a failure in the idealistic project altogether.

As Laurence Silberman pointed out in his Wall Street Journal article “The Dangerous Lie that ‘Bush Lied’”, it is important to remember that up until the occupation of Iraq, the intelligence community (as represented by CIA director George Tenet and the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate) held a 90% level of confidence that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. There

UWA FACT Aim Higher. Transfer to the Uni of Melbourne!

was also consensus across a wide cross section of foreign intelligence agencies. Silberman lambasts the fact that the anti-war phrase ‘Bush Lied’ has become part of the everyday lexicon. He warns that in allowing such distorted beliefs to go unchallenged it ‘can take on the air of historical fact’, ruinous perhaps for a future president that chooses to ignore a military response to a threat, corroborated by intelligence, on the basis of preventing the possibility of scandal.

To understand the Iraq War in any meaningful way, it is necessary to be appraised of the policies that led to war in the first place. Framed against the atrocities of the September 11 attacks and the War on Terrorism, the Iraq War stands on its own as being largely predicated on neo-conservative principles. While one of three casus bellis was the tenuous connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, the war, courtesy of 9/11, was much more a product of urgency than prudent planning. Iraq served as a first step in democratising the Middle East, principally because it was the wellspring of terrorism and religious zealotry whose ‘shaping of the future security environment’ was incompatible with Washington’s worldview. As evidenced by the 1992 National Defence Guidance and the 2002 National Security Strategy, this worldview was product of America’s ‘unipolar moment’ following the dissolution of the USSR, that, according to Charles Krauthammer, designated the United States as the ‘custodian of the international system’. Neo-conservatism was a manifestation of this unique moment in history.

The neo-conservative position rests on four main pillars: (1) A belief that the internal characteristics of a government shapes external behaviour, and therefore, democratic and authoritarian polities are distinguished in their international objectives, where authoritarian nations are liabilities both domestically for a proclivity human rights abuses - and internationally - for their belligerent tendencies, (2) A belief that military power can and should be used for moral purposes (such as deposing the tyrannies of Manuel Noriega in Panama and removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait), (3) A distrust in the ability of governments to successfully effect large-scale social engineering (ignored in the case of Iraq due to the Bush administrations particular understanding of this theory), and (4) A scepticism in the efficacy of international institutions such as the UN – a pillar that lends itself to justify unilateralist policy.

It was unwarranted and overt idealism that ultimately buttressed the war with Iraq. This idealism was rooted in a specific interpretation of neo-conservative principles that assumed theory could overcome the vagaries of reality and that American benevolence would ultimately triumph. The Bush administration’s neo-conservatism was what Ken Jowitt called the Leninist doctrine to a traditional neo-conservative Marxism, in that it was activist, and tried to accelerate historical processes (that would lead to global liberal democratic homogeneity) analogous to the Leninism a century ago. This ‘activism’ was derived from the writings of William Kristol in the Weekly Standard and Robert Kagan. They subscribed to the unilateral, military oriented solution to the problem of rogue or tyrannical nations, derived from a narrow understanding of Reagan’s Soviet policies of the 1980s, where the military solution was successful in bankrupting the USSR and ultimately effecting regime change in the Eastern bloc.

These views were connected to the ideas of Leo Strauss who, among many of his achievements, conceived of the ‘regime’ as a feedback loop between governmental institutions and the norms of the society.

Strauss disagreed with Burke that the most desirable social orders were based on the accretions of culture and norms. Instead he thought that governments (in the spirit of the founding fathers) should be established on rational and protracted debate.

Many of his acolytes thought that if the success of the United States, which has been an exemplar of liberal democracy, is courtesy of its institutional framework, then regime change (i.e. the transformation of an authoritarian society into a democratic society) could be accomplished by reforming the political institutions of foreign nations. Of course, this was an incorrect assumption because it ignored, or choose to avoid, the influence culture and values have on those institutions. The success of the American polity can in part be explained by the fact that it enshrined pre-held values (individualism, limited government, free markets, private property). Similarly, the success of the liberal democratic transition in Eastern Europe was a product of a moral and material repugnance to Soviet authoritarianism and the failures of a centrally planned economy.

The rationale for the Iraq War adopted an overtly idealistic and ‘one-size-fits-all-approach’, inconsiderate of the interminable religious, geopolitical, and cultural factors. The Bush administration anticipated, and indeed believed, that the Iraqis, liberated from Hussein’s tyranny, would adopt democracy with the apparent ease and willingness of the Eastern Europeans.

The administration had not considered post-war reconstruction at length - political and economic development - nor anticipated a protracted occupation stemming from post-Saddam sectarian violence.

The spirit of urgency that succeeded 9/11 led to US policy being governed more by a few select theoreticians (prominently Paul Wolfowitz) than by consensus or rational, protracted debate. The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq should not be understood as an indictment of the efficacy of hawkish liberalism or idealism. Rather, the failure to anticipate the variables and to create sufficient contingencies is much rather owed to a lack of time. Tony Blair’s hypocrisy should not discredit the liberal democratic mission.

UWA FACT Yep, you studied abroad. We get it.

25

FILM REVIEWS more reliant on nurturing parental figures, even after standing up to his mother and running away from home. By the end of The Master, Freddie Quell was still just a boy in the body of a dangerous man, clutching at the breasts of a woman he’d made out of sand.

INHERENT VICE Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson A running element within the works of Paul Thomas Anderson are central characters who fail to achieve any selfactualisation by the end of the film. Daniel Planview remained a tyrannical monster and embodiment of strained capitalism until the end. Dirk Diggler became yet

SELMA Starring: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Oprah Winfrey Directed by: Ava Duvernay Selma is a film so powerful and thoughtprovoking that it will leave you speechless.

My partner and I barely spoke for a solid 30 minutes after watching this film, as we both felt that any comment we made wouldn’t do the film justice. It’s just that good.

26

Inherent Vice doesn’t buck trends. An adaption of a work by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon, the film is a strange thing to behold. One must approach this as if it were any other PTA flick, and remember that the worlds within his films are just as important as the characters who flourish inside them. Inherent Vice amps this idiosyncrasy up to eleven, and what we’re left with is a gigantic yet beautiful mess.

PTA has a knack for infusing his actors with a raw energy that sparks to life on screen. The standout character, obviously, is Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello. In an unbelievable performance, Phoenix glides around with laid-back charm and style, having the capacity to turn a funny joke into an unforgettable one by contorting

his face. This performance will go down in history, in my estimation, as a superior version of The Dude.

I haven’t talked about the plot at all. Partly because I think the blinder your eyes are going into a PTA movie, the better - but mostly because I can’t remember what the fuck happened. The film follows Doc bouncing around memorable locations and people, trying to figure this whole mess out. The film is schizophrenic in tone, wildly veering from serious to hilarious with reckless abandonment.

The story makes no sense at the best of times, apparently constructed with the intention of giving the audience the rickety perspective of the paranoid Doc Sportello.

It sure doesn’t help that he mumbles a lot - honestly, waiting for a blu-ray to come out with subtitles might be best.

Ultimately though, does anyone really need to understand what’s going on in order to enjoy this? No. 5/5 Cameron Moyses

Selma provides us with insight into the Civil Rights Movement by focusing on one major event: the three month period in 1965 when Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. led a campaign to secure equal voting rights in America. Through the efforts of King and those around him, he eventually led a march from Selma to Montgomery, towns in the state of Alabama, which resulted in President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What struck me most about the film was the ever-present threat of violence.

There are scenes of pain and death that will bring you to tears, punctuated more subtly sinister reminders of the completely legal systematic oppression of African Americans. The scenes of violence and suffering reinforce the importance of the activists’ non-violence stance, whilst revealing how challenging and frustrating maintaining that stance must be.

This film does not glorify King as an infallible hero, but instead reveals to us his human aspects – his feelings of fear, selfdoubt, and his internal struggles – to show both the full extent and limitations of his greatness. King the public figure is often portrayed with an ethereal glow about him, but this disappears in his private moments. Importantly, this film depicts not only King, but also those who support him - both his fellow activists and the Selma community. It attempts to show us individual stories of pain and injustice.

This film will challenge and inspire you. It is one of those great films that remind us how disturbing and cruel humanity can be, while assuring us that there is hope. The attitude and actions of King will inspire you to want to be as passionate about a cause as he is.

4/5 Emily Foyster

UWA FACT The BPhil is just an arts degree with a fancy name. You should have taken that high ATAR to the Murdoch law school

FILM

familiar metallic voice and mobile chair.

Directed by James Marsh, Hawking’s life definitively makes it to screen in The Theory of Everything. In the film it is Marsh as much as Hawking asking questions of a complex kind. Whilst the film traces the academic milestones of Hawking, Marsh’s filmmaking genius tells a more humbling story about the personal lives of Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife, Jane (Felicity Jones).

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, David Thewlis Directed by: James Marsh 27 years after the publication of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking has remained a household name not only for his physics theories, but for his all too

With an Oscar in hand as evidence, Redmayne’s performance was exceptional.

Mirroring the various stages of development of Motor Neuron Disease as it impeded Hawking’s dexterity, Redmayne made certain that equal attention was paid to the human qualities so central to Hawking’s disposition. His understated sense of humour, ruffled hair and lopsided glasses complement his sheer determination for brilliance in a way that leaves you rooting for his success and wincing at every setback.

The film is set in the slums that border Paris, where a group of young NigerianFrench women live. Marieme, desperate to escape the apartment where she lives with her abusive older brother, falls in with a gang of three other disenfranchised young women. This isn’t your twee feminist gurl gang – this is legit gang warfare.

Starring: Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh, Mariétou Touré Directed by: Céline Sciamma One has certain expectations when watching a film entitled Girlhood. We’re talking slumber party vibes. ‘Girlhood’ seems to suggest a babysitter’s valley high worth of burgeoning women sitting around braiding each other’s hair

4/5 Emily Lamberto

It quickly becomes clear that the film is every bit a tale of triumph as it is a

and talking about their crushes. Aided by a poster that pictured four female adolescents in fits of carefree laughter, my expectations for Girlhood’s Not-A-GirlNot-Yet-A-Woman romp were set. But I could not have been more wrong. Girlhood is harrowing.

GIRLHOOD

heartfelt love story. Adapted from the memoir of Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My life with Stephen, Marsh shifts the attention away from facts and instead explores her depth of courage and unyielding faith that love is stronger than will. Particularly as Hawking’s strength weakens, the increased mental and physical strength portrayed so well by Felicity Jones offers a wholesome balance that might otherwise have rendered the narrative unhinged. There can be no denying that Marsh has directed this film in a way that is accessible to a spectrum of viewers. The honest account and gripping performance of Jones combined with the raw displays of physical discomfort by Redmayne leaves any accusations of sugar-coating without substance. By contrast, the film will take you on a journey of emotional exhaustion –and boy, does it feel good.

What Girlhood does so expertly is subvert all your initial expectations of what girlhood is. Make no mistake – these girls are hardened. And yet, they’re also intrinsically likeable. The chemistry of the four lead actresses is superb, and their friendship sparkles on screen. The music video-style scene in which the girls sing and dance along to Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’

is so utterly heartwarming, and at the same time completely gut-wrenching. I walked away feeling sick to my stomach.

Girlhood’s biggest disappointment wasn’t in the film itself, but in the response of the WA media in the days that followed.

I read more than one review that suggested that Marieme’s performance of masculinity towards the end of the film is the character exploring her gender and, most bizarrely, her sexuality. If that’s what you’re looking for: this is not the film you want. Marieme tries to make herself more masculine towards the film’s conclusion because she knows, and as it has become obvious to the audience, the only way she’ll ever truly make it out is if she becomes one of the boys. It’s another way Sciamma plays with a saccharine title like ‘Girlhood’. It’s not what you want, but it might be what you need.

4/5 Lucy Ballantyne

UWA FACT Wear your Hale blazer to the Tav for a 10% discount on their range of fine scotch and bourbon

27

SELLING SIA Pop’s musical superwomen Words by Bridget Rumball Art by Megan Ansell and Laura Wells Sex, body and appearance sells. This is true now more than ever within the music industry, generally renowned for a constant pushing of image and appearance as a way to sell songs. Naturally, some emerging artists will be caught up in this mentality- and as to be expected, this tends to affect female musicians more than men. For women with burgeoning musical careers, emphasis on body image is the ultimate form of objectification in every sense of the word- through music videos, album covers or tour performances, image is seemingly everything.

Countermovements are growing. Musical women are becoming sick and tired of having their appearance mean more than their music. There are women who utilise the obsession with image to their advantage, being absolutely conscious of every facet of their body and appearance and using it to make a statement beyond what record producers and audiences necessarily want. On one hand, image can be mocked, with plenty of female artists denouncing the industry’s emphasis on 28 28

body through huge wigs or ludicrous fashion choices. On the other hand, image can be played to an artist’s advantage, with many female singers and musicians playing up their best assets to make a bigger statement about culture or female empowerment. All the while, these women are in deliberate control of their body and their actions - bucking the barriers that have been unexpectedly put up around them. Musical superwomen, if you will.

The music industry is a market- whatever audience demand wants out of a performer aesthetically, labels will provide by either dramatically or subtly altering the sound, style and most importantly appearance of their signee. Audiences are buying up more pop albums? Your favourite alternative singer-songwriter has now incorporated a slight pop-twinge into her writing. The market swings towards a more grunge-alternative style? That poppy sweetheart has started wearing darker clothes and claims a ‘lifestyle change’ is behind the new jet-black hair she’s sporting. The classic example of

this is Katheryn Hudson, aka Katy Perry.

Despite her roots in gospel songwriting, her appearance and image have changed constantly according to audience demand.

From gospel songs, to an AlanisMorissette grunge aesthetic, to kooky Warped-Tour girl, to full-blown pop superstar- Katy’s whole aesthetic changes according to what sells, and what doesn’t.

Industry objectification doesn’t just affect multi-million dollar performing artists- it trickles down to any female just starting their career, and even down to talent shows and national competitions.

X Factor, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent; each bracketed under the umbrella of ‘musically inclined talent programs’, in which industry-based panel members hunt for the ‘next big thing’. Image and marketability play a much larger role than raw talent for female contestants.

Take American Idol contestant Mandisa for instance, who auditioned as part of the show’s fifth season. When walking onto the stage for the first time, judge Simon Cowell asked whether ‘[Idol] had

UWA FACT Lukas Wimmler moonlights as a concert pianist

a bigger stage this year?’, and promptly compared Mandisa’s size to ‘France itself.’

In order to advance, Cowell recommend that she lose weight fast- otherwise risk not being ‘marketable enough.’ This is obviously manifestation of the bodyimage obsession the music industry holds in regards to women. Even the lovely Susan Boyle was hardly an exception- she was almost voted out by all three Britain’s Got Talent judges before she sung a note, because of her age and appearance. These aren’t even professional artists that have been working in the industry for years these are regular (yet talented) women who are from day one of competition already being conditioned into a frame of mind in which body objectification is normalised.

In order to win your one chance at stardom, you need to alter your image according to your coach, your executives, producers and ultimately your TV and genre audience- your image and body is already property of the industry.

So what’s the big body image revolution that has been edging its way to the forefront of the music industry in recent years? Put simply, it exhibits itself in the form of two general camps. Firstly, there exist female artists who would rather defy the industry, and the high gender expectations of image that they exist within. Instead of bending to the wills of record execs and changing their aesthetic to suit a market or clientele, this breed of musical superwoman consciously critiques the system she works within, and very cleverly brings to light the objectification she ensures. Sia Furler is a current example of this. When releasing her previous five albums, Furler attended red carpet events, radio promotions and ARIA awards in full face. But, after her personal resignation from the music scene in 2010, she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease- a medical disorder in which a person’s eyes bulge and thyroid overworks. Naturally, this has detrimental effects on someone’s appearance- which, for a woman who has been constantly scrutinised by both the Australian and international media for over ten years, is a significant issue.

If she was to ever return to music, Furler’s image and marketability to audiences would be tarnished- she would no longer be appealing based off skindeep attractiveness alone, as the industry conditions females to believe.

Yet in 2014, return she did- with her entire face covered by humongous blonde wigs on red carpets, and with her back turned from the audience during performances so that her disorder (and gradual recovery) were shielded from the world. Her physical

appearance was no longer the centre of attention- she focused her ‘image’ around a face that simply wasn’t there, as opposed to the ‘less-commercially appealing’ appearance that had befallen her. As she puts it, “I didn’t want to be… recognisable- I didn’t want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the internet,” as she knew she would. This was a leap into the void, particularly for a female performer- as the industry dictates, not to have a face was to lack personality; a tangible point for audiences to recognise you. However, with a smash-hit single and 762,000 worldwide sales of recent album 1000 Forms of Fear under her belt, it’s safe to say that this ‘leap’ paid off. All in all, Sia Furler proved to the world that female artists can carry their careers on their artistry and talent alone, without the unnecessary body control and objectification that currently accompanies it.

A second type of musical superwoman who has come to surface is the female artist who uses the music industry’s system of control to her advantage. She knows what audiences want, and will most likely give it to them- but without handing over complete control of her executive powers. She is the dictator of her own image and comfortable in her own body, and knows how to use her assets for something bigger than just appealing to a market. The perfect example of this is Beyonce- someone who is able to accept her appearance for what it is, and utilise it in order to spread messages about female empowerment and the stupidity of the very image-centric culture that she lives in.

Her most recent self titled album is filled with body-positive, feminist messages about NOT valuing yourself based on body image and gender alone. At the end of 2014 she released a twelve minute short film about gender expectations in which she candidly explained that ‘[People] do not value [themselves] enough. Especially young people, [who] don’t really appreciate, how brilliant our bodies are. I’ve always been very, very specific… about what I do with my body, and who I want to share that with.’

talk about using her body in a ‘specific way’ and preach about valuing themselves on more than their image? This is a defining feature of this second type of superwoman- choice. As opposed to acting a certain, forced-sexualised way to attract an audience, performers such as Beyonce and Nicki Minaj simply express their heritage, their views and themselves on stage without giving a second thought as to how they appear. Again, they are confident in their bodies and know that their image doesn’t define them. They have the choice to dance provocatively, or to sing about sexuality; if they have a vision they wish to express, they are able to follow through on that vision as an extension of themselves, and not of their record label and the ‘image’ they are meant to confine to.

Slowly but steadily, the music industry is becoming infused with these multiple talented superwomen, who reject the all-important pedestal of appearance and image that females are so often placed on during their careers. On the one hand, musicians like Sia mock the expectations they feel pressured by through exaggeration; on the other, performers such as Beyonce use the skin they feel comfortable in to put a stop to objectification and spread a wider message. This is not to say that the battle is won just yet. For every musical superwoman who bucks against their industry’s objectification culture, there are several more who change just to appease an audience, and not for their own personal benefit. In such a cut-throat world this will always remain a problemwomen being criticised by men, and indeed other women, over their image is something that occurs in all forms of media. Yet the trail that these women are blazing is an important one- and hopefully a sign of a bigger change to come.

Many critics seem to label Beyonce a walking contradiction. How can someone whose songs, dancing and performances are often sexually charged and ‘self-objectifying’,

UWA FACT Parking permits can be purchased in exchange for your soul

29 29

MUSIC

DON’T GO BAKING MY HEART Words by Maisie Glen Art by Hayden Dalziel

This city always complains about itself. The coffee isn’t as good as Melbourne. The beaches aren’t as famous as Sydney. The nightlife isn’t as good as Melbourne. The drinks aren’t as cheap as Melbourne. Mostly we just want to be Melbourne.

The thing is, we aren’t Melbourne, but we may have to start looking to them for inspiration. Because, like Melbourne, our live music venues are closing their doors, a phenomenon that is set to have a huge impact on Perth’s incredible live music scene.

If you’re not aware, there have been an unprecedented number of local venue closures in the last few months. Blow after blow has rocked the industry, with long-term stalwarts the Bakery, Fly By Night Club, Devilles, Ya-Yas and Kulcha all disappearing within the last year. Let me be clear - these aren’t just pubs, they are institutions. Each of those venues filled a niche in the scene and provided something to local musicians and punters that nothing else did.

What is most alarming about this is that some of these closures have been government decisions. The Bakery was situated on land owned by Western Power, and the State Government approved the sale of the land without thinking about relocating the venue.

Kulcha had its funding gutted by the State Government, and closed its doors with a whimper after thirty strong years. Premier Colin Barnett has publicly stated that he wants to remove Perth’s enduring ‘dullsville’ tag. Yet many of his government’s actions are incongruent with his words. Providing this city’s musicians with a place to play is asking very little of public funding.

Arts Minister John Day recently pointed to the $340,000 of recurrent funding given to West Australian Music (WAM) every year, and $468,000 in arts grants distributed by the Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA) as proof of his government’s commitment to local original music. I would contend that this is not enough, nor has it ever been. Don’t get me wrong - I was a recipient of one of those beautiful DCA grants last year, and am a member of WAM - I am more than thankful that arts funding exists. I think WAM and DCA punch well above their weight with the services they provide in comparison with the paltry funding they receive. However, live original music requires venues, and it’s becoming apparent that government financial support is required to keep specialist live music venues open.

Some of you might be asking why it is seemingly so important that these venues continue to exist. For those unfamiliar, here’s how the music industry works: no one tells you anything. There is no secret password, you just watch and learn and bluff and bullshit until people start taking notice. You try not to piss off too many people, but it’s hard to tell because everyone is overworked and underpaid, so they seem pissed off anyway. An alarming number of us battle mental illness in an uncertain and occasionally treacherous industry.

30

Original musicians work to get a show at the smallest, nearest venue. And then they must battle to play at increasingly larger ones, battle to make enough to pay for flights over east, and scratch together something to make a record. These bands aren’t asking for fame or even a living wage, just a decent stage to play on.

Drawing inspiration from a huge community-led effort to save live music venues in Melbourne, Life Is Noise director Dave Cutbush is spearheading efforts to reverse this trend. His social media activism led to a 300-strong crowd at an action meeting in late February, and this has already prompted Minister Day to ask his department to “look at options” for replacing the Bakery.

Looking forward, Cutbush has formed a steering committee which will continue to lobby the government on behalf of Perth’s music industry.

In further good news, the Fly By Night has announced it will move into the nearby, unused Victoria Hall and festival promoters Sunset Events will be taking over the Fly’s former home.

Although it’s heartbreaking to see the end of the Fly By Night’s 25 year stint in the Old Drill, overall it may be a good result for Fremantle. Hope seems like it may be lost for venues such as Kulcha and Devilles, but we’ll have to wait and see if the Bakery will somehow rise like a phoenix and continue its 15-year legacy of top notch live music and strangely sticky floors.

UWA FACT Clubs seeking to borrow a guild megaphone for common lunch hour need to put down a deposit and fill out a form confirming that only misogynists will be allowed to speak

MATILDA BAY MUSINGS WITH T-FID

MUSIC

#2: ‘What ‘Cha Gonna Do For Me’ by Chaka Khan (1981) Words and Art by Tristan Fidler Ned Doheny was a white session musician from the ‘70s who came from money and played in the band, Average White Band. While existing for over thirty years, Doheny’s solo stuff has only come into my life recently through the good taste of friends playing cuts from the Numero Group compilation, Separate Oceans. My favourite of his compositions is ‘What ‘Cha Gonna Do For Me’. One of the smoothest R’n’B tunes around, it also functions as a question one should ask the self as we head into the deeper waters of semester one. What are you gonna do for you?

There’s a lot to stress about: juggling four units a semester, simultaneous assignment deadlines, making new friends, understanding what is soft rock, etc. What you can do for yourself is take some time out and walk down Matilda Bay. Head down a bit further past the Business School and to the dock where all the windsurfers congregate. Yes, Nedlands’ own conclave of Point Break types, letting the winds and the waves bounce them across the waters. You stand there long enough, you’ll see a windsurfer’s gliding ease take a stumble, fall off, smackbang into the deep. Setbacks are par for the course when you want the wind through your hair.

Now while Ned Donhey’s ‘What ‘Cha Gonna Do For Me’ is itself a gliding ease, Chaka Khan’s version takes it up a notch and sails that tune right into the stratosphere. The bounce of the horns, the chug of the rhythm guitar, the beat of the drums, all become blanketed by Khan’s soulful pipes, which escalate with the chorus. Listening to it, you might swoon like a coastal breeze that treats you right.

The power in Khan’s voice, you wouldn’t want to mess with it or disappoint it. So, when it comes to your studies, think of Chaka Khan. Set yourself to that standard when the chips are down. Don’t disappoint yourself, don’t leave Chaka hanging.

As I was musing this, I accidentally dropped my slip-on phone cover into the water. An inconvenience, yes, but at least it wasn’t the more valuable item of my phone. I put the phone into my pocket as I stepped down onto the shore and picked up the leather phone cover as it drifted towards me. Couple of minutes in the afternoon sun, it was dry and ready to use. Across the water, a windsurfer sailed past a white two-tiered boat with Pelican written on the side. Sometimes life opens up, “in the cool of the night, when nothing feels right, the feeling can take you” as the song goes, and gives you all the answers.

For further Chaka Khan, please also check out ‘Through the Fire’, her Prince cover ‘I Feel For You’ (opens with a killer harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder), and of course, ‘I’m Every Woman’, which when played on a receptive dance-floor sets everyone on the right course.

I really sound like I know what I’m talking about, right? But it’s all second-hand knowledge gleaned from Wikipedia and friends. See how a bit of research can make you appear like an expert?

UWA FACT The Oak Lawn is fertilised with student guild bullshit

31

MUSIC

MUSIC REVIEWS

Dream Rimmy – Dream Rimmy EP The term “up and coming” has been prone to overuse in the Perth music scene, but this is a well-founded depiction of Dream Rimmy in terms of the musical quality of their self titled debut EP. The Fremantle based band have been on the scene for a touch over 18 months and in that time have made significant inroads with their instrumentally lush power pop-influenced shoegaze sound. The EP’s five tracks exemplify this musical direction, featuring crisp guitar and synth tones and clean, harmonised vocals tied down by a restrained but immaculate rhythm section.

by Cop”, to songs about breakups, cultural tension and the experiences of an Indian man living in the US. But all his songs are of a much more serious tone than anything Heems has released previously. There is no ‘Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell’ on this album.

That’s not to say the album is without a sense of humor. The funniest parts of Das Racist songs were always scrawled in the margins. References to Heems’ personal life, literary works and political events permeate the entire album, and the intelligence behind Heems’ work remains as strong as it ever was.

This is the album of a man trying to escape the ‘Joke rap’ (or at least the perceptions of joke rap) often levelled at Das Racist, with an album self-described as “post 9/11 dystopian brown man rap.” This is Heems escaping the shadow of his former partnership, fresh from a year in India, bursting with fresh ideas, and with great results.

8/10 Thomas Rossiter

To this end, the key strengths of Dream Rimmy’s sound on this EP is how these components are arranged into quite absorbing soundscapes, particularly prominent in tracks like “Sunshine” and “Otherside”, which both feature tastefully sparse guitar work making good use of “strip back, build up” dynamics.

The trade off is that on a number of occasions, this lush instrumentation comes across as overcrowded. Another strength of this EP is just how good it sounds. The guitar tones capture perfectly the power- pop jangle and complement the sweet sounding vocal harmonies and the overall production makes for a cohesive sound.

Unfortunately, this cohesive sound doesn’t feel particularly fresh, let alone like a creative exploration of the late 90s shoegaze/ pop that it takes sonic cues from. In this way, it seems a little confined to the parameters of the genre. Fortunately, I can’t honestly say that these weaknesses make this EP any less immediate or enjoyable to listen to and, for that reason, fans of this genre will find its five tracks readily appealing. More importantly, moving forward, Dream Rimmy may well possess the ability to more creatively contribute their genre if they harness the momentum they currently enjoy from their status as “up and comers”.

6.5/10 Wills Pritchard Heems - Eat, Pray, Thug Himanshu Kumar Suri, better known by the name Heems, and even better known as one third of the group Das Racist has just released his debut album, Eat, Pray, Thug. This is Heems’ first solo album, after the mixtapes released following his Das Racist tenure, Nehru Jackets and Wild Water Kingdoms.

And this album, more than any previous release, marks Heems’ departure from the stylings of Das Racist. Titled after the gallery show he recently curated, Eat, Pray, Thug varies from overtly political, with songs like “Flag Shopping” (I know why they mad/but why call us A-rab), “Al Q8A” and “Suicide 32

Rag N’ Bone – A Woman Under The Influence The debut EP of Perth 4-piece Rag n’ Bone does its best to maintain a collection of energetic and consistent post-punk tracks, but some questionable production choices and slightly overdrawn songs prevent it from reaching its full potential.

The real issue with “A Woman Under the Influence” comes from the mixing, in particular the vocals. While lead singer Kiera Alice Owen clearly has a strong set of pipes, the vocals are thrust too far forward and leave her band members in the distance for the majority of the tracks. While postpunk is very forgiving with vocal delivery (see Iceage and The Pop Group) the vocal mix feels too clean and polished, and spends too much time in the higher end of the mix, causing Owen to come off lacking personality. On occasion the band comes off sounding more like a pub rock band than a engaging punk outfit.

The EP’s lead single “Wood and Wire” shows a lot of promise in its opening sequence, with the rhythm section laying down an infectious groove - and finally, the guitar feels gritty enough to match the performance. However, the song lingers a little too long without much more reason than to give more revisions of the chorus, which whilst very catchy, is relied on too much to carry the song through to the 3 minute mark. Rag N’ Bone clearly have the potential to release infectious and energetic music, but on future releases they would do well to experiment with harsher production styles and more concise cuts in order to display the viscera that they are capable of.

6/10 Laurent Shervington

UWA FACT Guild coffee is made with the ashes of alumni

PWFfffft

LITERATURE

Words by Kate Prendergast Against the grandstanding hype surrounding The Giants (those magnificent invading foreign rabble-rousers and urban desecrators), the marketing of Perth Writer’s Festival 2015 was demure, and the ground-feel leading up the event ranged from unaware to mild to stoically unimpressed.

From the last-minute pull-out of Geoffrey Robertson QC— initially set to give the opening address—to the arrant insult behind the falsely jubilatory anticipation of a video-linked Hilary Mantel, this year’s PWF looked to be a bit of a flat-liner from the outset.

That’s not to mention the bizarre program-mashing of Mantel with ‘take me on a gastronomic and spiritual journey’ Elizabeth Gilbert; the latter who (I’m told) offered up such pearls of wisdom as ‘fear is a song with only one word and that word is stop’.

Please stop.

In fairness though, while the line-up was a little shabby against the big names of previous years— Richard Flanagan and Martin Amis in 2014, and Margaret Atwood and the HBO team behind series like The Wire in 2013—there were some irrefutable festival treasures to be found on campus that late February weekend. The grounds certainly did come alive— albeit with predominantly middle-aged women, and of the kind who know exactly how to time a sympathetic ‘harrumph’ during a talk.

On the Friday, the public was graced by notoriously elusive ‘starartist’ Tracey Moffatt, a photographer and film-maker whose alternately abrupt then vague manner was a delight, and whose offered reflections on place, process, identity and the buying of lamps made for an hour as inspiring as it was bemusing. Her inclusion in the program, however, still begs the question what a non-published

PWF – John Darnielle Words by Thomas Rossiter

It’s pretty fair to call me a colossal Mountain Goats fan. So when I heard that John Darnielle was coming to Perth for the Writer’s Festival, I prepared, against proverbial advice, to meet a personal hero of mine.

Discussing the theme of isolation in their respective novels, John Darnielle and Robyn Cadwallader talked for an hour to Amanda Curtin (herself a successful WA novelist). Cadwallader has written the wellreviewed story of an ‘anchoress;’ a woman who, of her own volition is sealed into a kind of tomb next to a church. She speaks eloquently on the subject, and certainly convinced at least one member of the audience to buy her book.

But I only have eyes for John Darnielle. He’s gained weight, but talks animatedly and with real passion about the theme, displaying an obvious fascination with Cadwallader’s work. Darnielle asked better questions than the interviewer, once asking the audience and panel if they could imagine a Christianity without St. Augustine’s writings; a Christianity not based on denial of the body. Much more interesting, I think you’ll agree, than another reiteration of ‘So where do you get your ideas?’ The Man was witty, intelligent and eloquent; entertaining the crowd with ease and his massive ‘stage presence.’ Perhaps the best part was that no one in the audience— even when presented with the opportunity to ask questions— mentioned his music career. The conversation was entirely and properly book-oriented.

artist was doing at a writers’ festival. Geraldine Doogue— with her majestic aura of female capability— never fails to impress, although her discussion alongside Mary Delahunty on women, work, power and politics perhaps settled a little too prematurely, not to say predictably, on a continuous head-shaking over the much-recited indignities suffered by Gillard during her term of office.

I deeply, deeply regret not seeing Andy Griffiths. Just...disgusted.

A personal PWF highlight for me was listening in on the supremely eloquent Bryan Stevenson in talks with Michael Mori, David Hicks’ surprisingly jocular ex-marine defence lawyer. Gathered in Winthrop Hall, a hushed and reverent audience gave ear to the pair’s clearsighted discourse on issues of corruption, hypocrisy and the pursuit of justice against a warped logic of state retribution powered mostly by fear and hate. The talks were made all the more relevant and cutting, timed as they were against the imminent execution of convicted Bali drug-smugglers, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, and the increasingly desperate last-ditch efforts to secure mercy for them.

Ironically, only weeks before the festival launch, cuts were announced to the WA Premier Literary Awards. In a move drawing outrage from the state’s writing and publishing community, the awards will now be held on a biannual rather than annual basis.

The way things are looking, within five years PWF will be just Stephen Bevis reading out a series of live status updates from E. L. James’ Facebook page.

We can only thank the cosmos for delivering us John Darnielle— our saviour, our hero, our one true god.

After this experience, I am left with an autographed copy of Wolf in White Van and a photo that causes my eyes to dilate whenever I look at it. So John, if you’re reading this (perhaps you picked up a copy of Pelican from all good aeroplane bathrooms/underneath couch cushions in Reid Library), know that you remain my hero.

Darnie: The Tweets In 15 mins of talking, John Darnielle made me want to move to Iowa, just by talking about living there. His writing is pretty good too. #cornfields — Wade I-Would-Die-for-You-Darnie McCagh I’d be happy if all dialogue in my life was replaced by John Darnielle talking about the mormon concept of heaven and his book. #the day your love came screaming through me — Hugh Hold-me-Darnie Manning I definitely did not record John Darnielle secretly, and I certainly don’t listen to his sweet voice of colour and reason every night before I sleep. #he has let me make it through this year #he has killed me — Kate Darnie-Don’t-File-Charges Prendergast I did but see him passing by...and yet I’ll love him til I die #all hail west texas #changed me — Kat Dammit-Darnie-You-So-Fine Gillespie

33

LITERATURE

Culinary Adventures with The CWA Cookery Book Words by Rachel King Art by Caitlin Frunks The C.W.A. Cookery Book has been grandparent staple for 79 years. First published in the thirties, this icon has infiltrated the kitchen cupboards of many an elderly Australian citizen. I myself received a copy as an heirloom from my grandmother for Christmas just last year. However, upon opening the book I saw— amidst the predictable favourites of scones and preserves—an alarming measure of horrifying surprises. Here are five.

Section: Entrée Recipe: Mock Brains Finally, if real brains weren’t bad enough, why not try mock brains? If the name isn’t sufficiently off-putting, consider the first ingredient: one cup of left-over porridge. There’s also the fact that other than cold porridge, the only other ingredients are flour, egg, onion and seasoning. Economical though, right? Turning that old abandoned porridge into a delicious entrée – BRAINS.

CAUTION: Avoidance of this article may be a good idea if the idea of raw meat makes you squeamish. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Despite what you see here, The C.W.A. Cookery Book contains more charm than terror, and has so far treated me well in my cooking endeavours. Still, can’t say I’m quite ready to try brain patties yet. One day. Maybe when I’m 80. Or a zombie foodie.

Section: Jams, Jellies, Marmalades and Preserves Recipe: Parsley Jelly Yes, you did read that correctly. Jelly, for which the main ingredient and therefore taste is parsley. Apparently this was/ is actually quite a normal food and is used on meats in small amounts to add flavour, particularly on lamb. Yet the fact that the recipe says to bottle the stuff makes it sound like that’s not all the C.W.A. thinks it can be used for. Hey, why not just eat it by itself ?

Dessert anyone?

Section: Veal Recipe: Calf ’s Head (Boned and Stuffed) The name says it all really. The worst part about this recipe is after you bone and stuff the calf ’s head, you have to tie it up in cloth for two hours then let it simmer. This is probably the least dignified method of cooking a cow I’ve ever heard of.

Section: Liver Dishes Recipe: Faggots Let’s have a moment of thought purely for the name.

Now moving on.

The main ingredient in this appetizing dish is sheep’s fry.

I did have to Google this one, and much to my delight discovered that it means lamb’s balls. Wonderful. The recipe says to fry the balls, put them into a mincer with some bacon, then roll the resulting mince into new balls.

How meta.

Section: Entrée Recipe: Brain Patties First line of the recipe: Soak the brains in salted water for a ½ hour, then boil lightly and mash. YOU HAVE TO MASH BRAINS. I have no more to add here.

34

UWA FACT The Veronicas’ hit song ‘Untouched’ was actually written about UWA’s Vice-Chancellor

Reiding Material Dinner with a Cannibal — Carole A. Travis-Henikoff 394.9 2008 DIN Words by Kate Prendergast Hannibal Lector is in your closet. In the evolutionary, cultural and historical sense anyway. So discloses the author of Dinner with a Cannibal— a book which disappointingly does not play out like an IT Crowd season two episode. Egg and author’s face were not at any point in alignment.

child would cut off a piece of their own flesh and feed it to an ailing elder, inspired by ‘Confucian filial piety coupled with the Buddhist compassion’. There’s also benign cannibalism, which is in what— so it goes—foreign ambassadors at an Idi Amin state dinner were unwittingly engaged.

The thought of eating another person’s flesh is a hard one to swallow.

The book endeavours to counteract this by making cannibalism ‘intellectually fun’ in a Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Academics kind of way, examining the practice through a number of disciplinary frameworks.

Beyond the occasional gag-reflex, some facetious puns, and a couple of bizarre digressions into the author’s personal life, the book really is highly consumable— jammed full of fascinating facts and mature-minded insights into human history, society and behaviour.

What you learn upon reading is, although guys boiling their girlfriends has got the media feed main share of #cannibalism, it isn’t just deviant psychopaths who have ‘long-pigged’. Turns out there’s a whole classification system of cannibalistic acts, and virtually every global civilization is somehow tied to at least one; whether driven by ritual or necessity, as a form of ghastly punishment or profound honorary respect.

It does leave a residue of queasy distress though. For—aside from being the suspected cause of a fatal brain-disease epidemic that decimated the Papua New Guinean population in the early 20th century—Dinner with a Cannibal forces us to consider the possible health and medicinal benefits of consuming man-flesh. ‘Was habitual cannibalism conducive to the development of the great height and stature of both the Fijians and the Maori?’ it queries. And let’s not forget the Aztecs— the most prolific and heinous practitioners of human sacrifice— were amongst the most sophisticated and wealthy of peoples our world has known.

Lastly— because I know you’re curious— human flesh is, reportedly, ‘sweet’.

For starters, there’s ‘funerary cannibalism’, which may involve sculling ash-broth. Then there’s necrotic cannibalism, which happens when Roman Catholic rugby players crash into the Andes. ‘Learned’ cannibalism occurred exclusively in ancient China, by which a devoted

FICTION: Hunger Words by Miah de Francesch “Listen, sugar,” he says, words sticky and salacious in his mouth, “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

His hands are greasy as he claws his way through the meat before him, tearing and picking it apart piece by piece. Too bony here, too much fat on this piece, not cooked enough here. He rips leg from socket, flesh from bone, tearing and shredding his way through. Bones crack and splinter but he continues to pull and ravage without care. Slathered in sauce, he tears flesh from bone before sucking it dry, lips smacking, juices bleeding from his mouth.

I feel small before him, not only in presence but also in size. Those bones are my bones. That thigh fat mine. He spits at it, tears it apart and then disregards it all the same. He does not want the fat, nor does he want the bone. He wants the meat – the thick rump, plump thighs, full breast. He picks and pulls and tears until he’s satisfied (and he never is) then throws the rest to waste. What is discarded is ripe and ready and edible, yet he pushes the greenery closer towards me.

“Eat,” he commands, “you’ll need the energy for later.”

He grins, ferocious, filthy and bloody, and I feel his eyes rake over me. I am disgusted.

I am starving.

He cracks the ribs, clawing through the carcass for more. The heart is torn from its place and held for inspection in his bloody hand. The rapid, pounding echoes in my ears. It twitches, beating, panicked in his grasp before he brings it to his lips, and sinks his teeth into the flesh. It starts violently and screams. Fangs rip tendons from muscle and chew; the organ whines and splutters in his grip.

Suddenly, without another thought, he flicks his wrist and the heart soars.

It flies free for a moment, alive, before it collides with the wall. Blood sprays upward and it bounces away before rolling to a stop on the floor.

The whine dies out.

The pounding stops.

Still. Dead.

I sit frozen across from him, terrified. He stares at me as he takes his dripping hand and places it over mine. His lips split into a bloody grin – eager, predatory. I cannot swallow the pain in my chest.

He’s going to eat me alive.

UWA FACT The collective noun for a group of ducks on campus is a ‘dissertation’

35

LITERATURE

BOOK REVIEWS Half The World Joe Abercrombie Half The World is Joe Abercrombie’s second book for young adults, following 2014’s Half A King, and in my mind this second volume of his Viking-themed Shattered Sea trilogy represents a return to form after a patchy couple of adult-market novels. When Abercrombie gained success with his First Law trilogy, his cynical, ultraviolent, convention-defying approach to fantasy seemed fresh and innovative, but by 2012’s Red Country this shtick had worn a bit thin and Abercrombie’s need to squeeze a laboured witticism onto every page had become frustrating.

It is good, therefore, to see him leave elements of his signature style behind in favour of a greater focus on good plots and engaging characters in this novel. Half The World presents a surprisingly standard fantasy narrative, focusing on two young protagonists as they travel far beyond their known world in order to save their homeland. Whilst Brand, the novel’s male protagonist, is a bit of a throwaway character, he is more than compensated for by the fire and vigour of Thorn, a young warrior battling against her society’s patriarchal culture and killing a bunch of dudes while she’s at it.

Whilst plot wise Abercrombie is treading familiar territory, he carries it off by spicing proceedings up with his usual dose of filthy medieval realism, inconvenient menstruation, masturbation references and hyper-violence, and overall he pulls it off. Whilst he strays, in my opinion, too closely to cliché at times, overall Abercrombie does a good job of melding the subversive fantasy he is renowned for with more conventional, YA friendly fare.

Score: 4.5/5 Best Bit: Thorn’s period leading her to accidentally foil a poisoner.

Worst Bit: Thorn miraculously saving a Princess, who is, of course, eternally grateful.

Hugh Manning saw Joe Abercrombie in person the other day and isn’t quite over it yet.

The Chimes Anna Smaill The Chimes is the story of Simon, a young boy with a strange power and few memories. Set in an exotic, dystopian version of London, citizens supplement verbal communication with a system of conductor’s hand signals (Doh, Re, Me, Fah, So, Lah, Te, fucking Sound of Music people), music is allimportant and memories are constantly fading from people’s minds.

Unfortunately, exploring this rather richly imagined world are some pretty thin characters.

We have the main character with a mysterious past, the requisite secret society and a friend slash mentor who knows the unknowable truths of the dystopian heart.

Mixed in through all of this we have Smaill’s prose, with her constant use of music notation in place of actual words— presto for quickly, forte for strongly, subito suddenly, etc. This will, at first, distract (particularly the phrase ‘Blasphony’, referring to a ‘crime against the song’ that seems to govern the lives of the people) but eventually fades into the background. The more musically inclined amongst you will have an easier time with this novel, but I found the necessary Googling that accompanied my reading to be somewhat bothersome.

For quite a large portion of the beginning, characters are stuck in a loop; forgetting the actions they have taken previously and repeating the daily struggle to feed themselves.

The author clearly intends for the mystery behind the characters’ backgrounds and motivations to pull the reader through, and it does— but not as well as entertaining plot developments would. This section is the first of a few ponderous bits that need to be surmounted by the reader.

For all its faults, and the similarities to the Jasper Fforde novel Shades of Grey (with the theme of music replacing colours and sans humour/charm), this is a novel worth reading.

The mystery surrounding Simon’s past and Smaill’s dynamic universe really captured my imagination in the end, pulling me through the parts which fell a little flat.

Score: 3/5 Worst bit: Realising your 8th grade knowledge of piano and musical terms is of no use at all.

Best bit: The unnoticeable moment you stop being distracted by the terms from music used in everyday language.

The Word Ghost – Christine Paice What do you get when you blend a ‘70’s political backdrop with the Romantic Period, and then throw in some ghosts? A cringeworthy novel that’s probably an English teacher’s wet dream. The novel is littered with literary references, from the Brontë sisters to the poetry of Keats and Byron, with the protagonist’s English homework conveniently transforming into her life.

The novel is a coming-of-age story about fifteen-year-old Rebecca Budde, whose parents force her to move towns and leave her so-called ‘first ‘love’, Dave. The setting is the English village of Brightley, which is meant to be ironic, as it doesn’t have streetlights and is haunted by ghosts.

The town may be shadowed by the dark pasts of its ghostly inhabitants, but this book is creepy for the wrong reasons. The sexual tension between the protagonist and her various love-interests (a normal teenage boy, a ghost, and an artist in his mid-30’s) is non-stop, and the way Rebecca, who is the village Vicar’s daughter, loses her virginity to a middle-aged man on the kitchen floor within one paragraph, with the scene never to be mentioned again, well it just felt bizarre. Also she is kissed by a ghost, who lives in her wardrobe and likes to read her poetry when she’s asleep. I’m not sure whether this is all progressive or disturbing.

To give the novel a little bit of credit, it did keep me engaged with its slightly-off but intriguing nature, as I honestly had no idea where the storyline was heading most of the time. The author has tried really hard to weave together a narrative combining romantic love and the Romantic period, but it just feels corny, and whilst the novel is replete with familial love there is no great love story, just rampant sexual tension.

Score: 2/5 Best Bit: The nostalgic Old English village vibe that it creates. It makes you feel a little bit warm and fuzzy inside.

Worst Bit: Irritating characters and the boring, ‘tasteful’ sex scenes.

Emily Foyster now wants to frolic in the English countryside, drink cups of tea, and eat cake.

Thomas Rossiter was once told to ‘please, just stop’ by his music teacher.

36

UWA FACT All EMAS committee members were altos in their various school choirs

LITERATURE

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN MARSDEN

By Elisa Penella EP: Most readers will probably know you as author of young adult Australiana like the Tomorrow series. You have recently written your first novel for adult readers, South of Darkness. How did you find the experience of writing for this different audience?

JM: Not massively different. The elements are the same: it’s all about telling a story, with a cast of characters. The differences are relatively subtle, mostly to do with the choice of language and the treatment of sexually-charged situations. The pacing can be a little different too – rightly or wrongly, I had the sense that I could take more time; that adult readers would be more patient.

But I’m probably wrong about that – when you consider, for example, those long turgid scenes in Lord of the Rings – millions of teenagers plough through them, seemingly without too many complaints!

EP: South of Darkness is an historical novel. Was it important for you to ensure that your writing was historically accurate?

JM: Well, yes and no. As a novelist you are of course allowed to take liberties. But there’s a kind of convention I think, that when you are writing about something that should be true, then it must be true. For example, if you were writing about Napoleon’s manoeuvres during the Battle of Waterloo, you can’t move a couple of his battalions to the other side of the battlefield just because it suits your plot to have them there. You can invent characters like foot-soldiers and even officers, but I don’t think

you can legitimately invent a field marshal and plonk him by the Duke of Wellington’s side. It’s hard to codify these conventions, but they seem to be implicitly understood by writers and readers.

EP: Your descriptions of London in the 1700s are very visceral, how did you conduct your research?

JM: What can I say? Google, I love you. Despite its many limitations and pitfalls, the Internet is an unqualified blessing for novelists. I estimate that the research for this book might have taken me between eight and 12 twelve months in the old days; it took only a few weeks with Google. But I also did a huge amount of background reading, mostly of books I found in second-hand bookshops, and mostly of diaries or other first-hand accounts.

EP: I promised to ask a question from one of my year seven students: what continues to inspire you to write?

JM: I’ve never been too fond of that word “inspire”, as for me it summons a picture of a writer sitting at his desk in the garret, scribbling furiously by candlelight, lost in the ecstasy of creation, with the Muse hovering over him. Writing’s never been much like that for me! It’s more a compulsion, usually driven by the desire to capture and/or explore a situation which I find irresistibly intriguing. Luckily for me, there seems to be no limit to the number of situations which I find irresistibly intriguing!

ARTS

GLEN GARRY GLEN ROSS Directed by Kate Cherry Interview with Will O’Mahony by Emily Purvis So tell us about your role in Glen Garry Glen Ross: I play Office Man, John Williamson, who is universally despised in the play. His job is to ‘marshal the leads’. This essentially means he manages the contact details of clients who are interested in buying land. It’s a huge money fight, full of desperation. He is always bribed and has a great poker-face.

Mamet’s writing has been attributed to ‘the poetry of the profane’. And parts of his dialogue are actually written in Iambic Pentameter. Good text is good text.

What has been the most challenging aspect of the production so far?

David Mamet is a legend within American theatre. He writes with such talent and tenacity, his roles are so in the moment, there’s no ‘fat on the text’. Every role is authentic and his writing is so muscular, it’s an absolute bulldog of a play.

The first challenging aspect is that the entire play is essentially not really nice things happening to not really nice people. You need to work hard to find their redeeming qualities, and you need to come to the play with a lot of generosity. These characters have been shoved into a position of desperation, they’re every day people like you and me. Mamet’s direction to the cast who first performed this was to remember that ‘these are men who can and will sell you cancer’.

You’ve done a lot of professional Shakespeare since graduating WAAPA. How does acting modern drama compare to that of Elizabethan drama, personally?

The second challenging aspect is that the script is like a piece of music. It’s like a symphony- honouring the text as it’s written, it’s really tough.

To be honest, I try not to think of it as any different. To compare Mamet with Shakespeare, well, they’re both poets. In an interview,

Glen Garry Glen Ross is showing at the Black Swan State Theatre from 23rd May to 14th June.

How did you get involved with the production? What drew you to the role?

UWA FACT The Reid library burnt down in 1833. It was rebuilt again in 1798

37

ARTS

It Ain’t Over ‘til the Fat Lady Eats.

Words by Emily Purvis Art by Kate Prendergast

“You can’t bring those in here, they’ll make too much noise.”

I looked down, heartbroken, at the packet of BBQ Smiths I had been looking forward to since the moment I walked into His Majesty’s. They were unopened, crinkle-cut, and perfect. I hadn’t eaten all day, if you don’t count the half-drunk glass of bubbly in my hand. Glancing back up at the snooty usher, he snatches our tickets out of our hands, only to further the blow- “...and you can’t enter through here, this is the dress circle. You ladies are in the stalls. Downstairs.”

Embarrassed and starving, we made the walk of shame back down the carpet-covered marble staircase through the thronging crowd, a sea of white faces and expensive (if somewhat dated) gowns and black tie, as the last bell rang out through the foyer. I’d never been to the opera before.

“Do you have your tickets, ladies? On the left, row F, halfway down. Oh, and you can’t eat those in the theatre. They’ll make too much noise.” At the stalls, the second usher gestured pointedly at the packet of crisps we were each still clutching to. I had already abandoned my bubbly, and I was not about to lose these.

Muttering something about saving them for after the show, Brontë and I darted through the doors before the food-police could stop us. Taking our seats, on the left, row F, halfway down, I did not spot one, single person smuggling in a packet of BBQ Smiths.

Or any Smiths, for that matter. I began to feel self-conscious. We were a long way from the food-flinging Fringe World forays that I was used to. The lights were still on, people were taking their seats.

It was busy, a full house. Brontë whipped out her crisps, plain in flavour, yet equally as satisfying as the seasoned goodness I was hiding underneath my Madama Butterfly programme. I looked around, and couldn’t see any Ushers, but maybe they were hiding in the disguise of plain shirt and trousers, waiting in the shadows, ready to pounce on us for daring the unforgivable. We were about to crumb up His Majesty’s velvet seating. Brontë looked at me, and I started to sweat.

‘If we open them now, it will make less noise when the show begins’ Brontë reasoned, pinching the corners of her chip packet.

‘But what if an usher sees, and we get kicked out? I still have to write this review for Pelican’ I was never any good at defying authority, and Brontë’s eagerness wasn’t doing anything for my nerves. The lights were still on, and from Brontë’s bag came the sound of air escaping softly from its seal. Holly hot mumma they smelled good. Like salt and defiance. Placing them by her armrest, underneath the cover of her arm, she raised a golden crinkled circle to her mouth under the guise of pretending to yawn. It didn’t look so hard. I looked around. Nobody had noticed. The heavens had not fallen. Pulling out my orange packet from under 38

my programme, I imitated her. There was a slight rustle from my packet, and the couple in the seats in front of us shifted pointedly.

The lights dimmed, the show was about to start. I raised a circular piece to my mouth, bit down. A flavour sensation. These were the best chips I’d ever had. Well, you know what they say about a man and a desert and a cracker, or some such thing.

And ok, it was a little loud. I admit that I crunched, munched and masticated my way through that first mouthful, and it was glorious.

And after another pointed backward glance from the imperious couple in front, we resigned ourselves to placing each single chip delicately into our mouths and soaking them in the readily-formed pool of saliva on our tongues until they had lost the crinkle and crunch that was so annoying the wankers in front of us. The show had started. And at a glance, the review I read a week prior was right - the set really was very pretty. A self-proclaimed Japanphile, I’m a sucker for rice paper screens and silk kimonos. But really, that was about all that held my interest. The sopranos and baritones were obviously very talented, but not striking enough to hold my interest. Maybe it was His Majesty’s acoustics, but who knows? I was halfway through chewing my fourth chip when the packet I had wedged between my armrest and thigh fell to the floor with a muffled crumple. I froze. I couldn’t see Brontë’s face, but I knew it was turned to me, wide-eyed and startled. The couple in front of us sighed simultaneously, like a symphony of exaggerated indignation. Glaring in the dark, I kicked one of their chairs softly, an accident uncrossing my legs. I mean, what was this opera’s fucking problem? I’d been to musicals. I’d eaten my chips. MANY people had eaten their chips, and no one had ever batted an eyelid. They didn’t make too much noise, they didn’t ruin the show. Madama fucking Butterfly was so boring anyway that it might have been more interesting if it had. It was intermission.

We scurried to the side hall, towards the ladies, where we inhaled the rest of our crisps. An Usher stood to the side door, blatantly staring, grin on his face. Ignoring him, I crumpled my packet into a ball and deposited it in the ladies bathroom dust bin. Intermission was over and we went back to our seats, still aggrieved at the conduct of staff and patrons of Perth’s finest. We were never kicked-out- we were too covert to be noticed - but a part of me wishes that we had been. I would have stood my ground.

Made my scene, eaten my chips. I would have cared a lot more about the show I was going to see than being distracted about my lack of chip eating.

Maybe I should have just sucked it up and eaten a sandwich beforehand.

Maybe the opera just isn’t my thing.

UWA FACT A co-op membership entitles you to seven cents off each transaction

ARTS

1. How did you come up with the idea of running your own exhibition?

some more time would have been beneficial in maximising turnout.

Over the years we have come across many artists from different walks of life. Although some have exhibited their works previously, many just do art as a hobby and had yet to show their works to the public. Seeing the talent of these individuals and recognising I had a fairly decent amount of skill myself, we decided to showcase select local Perth artists by setting up an exhibition called AMOR.

4. What was it like working within the gallery space?

2. Who were the exhibiting artists, and how did they get involved?

The Art LAAB was a fantastic space to work in. It has a really interesting character as the exterior to the Masonic Hall.

The smallness of the room worked for us, as it provided an intimate setting to fall in love with the art. We also had the opportunity to display our works outside, and when it was all lit up at night, it created a romantic atmosphere perfect for AMOR. 5. How much of a response from the public did you get?

The AMOR artists were Frankie Shaw, Raen Coplin, Josh Naxington, Jake Quodling and Sanjay Zev Weinstein, along with myself. These people are all friends of mine, including Frankie, my girlfriend. Talking to them about their art and seeing their excitement in getting involved in an event gave us the inspiration to host an exhibition.

3. How did you go about launching the dream? Who did you approach?

Getting the space from UWA was one of the biggest challenges involved in creating the exhibition. Our first step was to contact UWA’s Faculty of Arts, Landscape and Visual Art- ALVA for short. ARTLAAB, a street-front gallery on Broadway, was the space given to us free by the university, which was a great help in getting us started and preferable to more expensive alternatives. We found that the space itself was heavily booked, giving us only four days over the Australia Day weekend. We pasted posters and flyers all over the city and used Facebook to create hype around the event.

Word of mouth was also important in raising public interest.

We only had two weeks to plan and execute the entire event-

Opening night was better than expected, with 70 to 100 showing up from doors-open to midnight. An array of people came along, ranging in age, culture, social class, etc.— it was great that our art was appreciated by all kinds of people.

We received a lot of positive feedback and were able to tell the stories behind our works and our individual processes.

Through the event I also met many other artists, several of whom showed an interest in being part of new events. Eight pieces where sold overall, which only motivates us to do something like this again.

6. What did you learn from the experience? Would you do anything different next time?

Next time the beer will be free! We found out after the event that local breweries offer sponsorship for events like this as promotion. Also the government offers grants to artists who put on community events. We’d also have the space being used more like a studio, with artists painting over the duration of the exhibition and allowing interaction with the public and possibility of communal paintings.

Mi Goreng Stories with Tash Harris I myself am actually a fan of Mi Goreng when sober, but when intoxicated these noodles are a whole different kettle of boiling water. I spoke to both 1st and 5th years, with plenty of experience with drunken noodling. They told me about mid-year Rotto, that crazy, drunken week that uni students spend on Rottnest in the middle of winter. In this scenario, “wine”, vodka, juice and cordial went into a very large silver cooking pot and were subsequently ingested. A few hours later, straight lines were difficult to walk in, vision was blurry and tummies were grumbling.

Noodle time! A certain chalet ended up with chilli sauce on the ceiling, two people with boiling water burns and mountains of Indonesian style stir-fry. The next morning there were noodles on the floor, noodles in the bed, noodles on the fence, noodles everywhere. Not only are they very difficult to clean, but seeing noodles after they have been digested is just not something anybody should have to witness.

UWA FACT The lift in the Scibrary leads to a hip rooftop bar

39

Perth Festival Reviews PELICAN MUMS REVIEW with Lucy and her mum, Kathy Ballantyne On the 20th of February this year, I took my mum, a former professional violinist, to see Remember Tomorrow by the Australian String Quartet. I asked her to email me her thoughts afterwards.

Ok Goose Maybe just a few ideas for your review?

Wot say you open it talking very briefly about your first experiences with Chamber Music…….being dragged to our friend’s soirees as a very small child. No names mentioned of course ( he reads Pelican!! Ha ha) I am sure you could make an amusing account of your non enjoyment of these occasions? (OR maybe I am wrong and you loved every minute of them) Then ASQ being different……..exciting evening blah blah…… like an overall view and list works played: Haydn string quartet no 76 “The Emperor” Ross Edwards “ Gallipoli” Schostakovich string quartet no 3 Wilma Smith was guest leader. Wilma was born in Fiji and raised in NZ .She was a founding member of the NZ string quartet, returning from studying and working in Boston to take up the position of leader. Later being appointed as Concertmistress of the NZ Symphony Orchestra. , then the MSO, from 2003 – 2014.

She has been guest concert master with SSO, WASO, TSO and the Auckland Philharmonic.

Also teaches at Melbourne and Monash Universities.

The well known Haydn “Emperor “ quartet is a delightful yet powerful piece of music It was beautifully played with a crispness and true classical style. The work has become so celebrated that the theme of the variation movement became both the Austrian and German National Anthems.

Ross Edwards “ Gallipoli” This work was commissioned to commemorate the centenary of the ANZAC landing in Gallipoli and Australia’s involvement in conflict and resolution A very moving and emotional; performance……..the players in semi darkness on stage provided dramatic effect.

Schostakovich quartet no 3. For me this was the highlight of the entire concert. Written in 1946 in response to the Second World War it is full of emotion and questioning. The work was played magnificently ,conveying both the passion and despair that Shostakovich desired.

It was during this piece that I decided I preferred the more traditional seating of a string quartet rather than standing as ASQ did with the cello seated in the middle and viola standing where the cello normally sits.

For me this resulted in the viola sound being slightly lost on occasion when it would have been good to have heard more ,especially in some of the viola players glorious solo moments.. ..as with the cello who also could have been more ‘visible’ ..the sound being occasionally swamped a little by the standing tall players.

Overall a stunning performance. If anyone wanted or needed to be converted to become a keen chamber music fan this was the concert to go to! The quartet was strongly led by Wilma whose playing is exquisite and an absolute joy to listen to and watch.

The group sounded like they had been playing together for years.

I hope you can glean something from all this Goose!

Lots of luv Mum xxxxoooo

THE RABBITS: PAWLESS BUT FLAWLESS Review by Sam Calleja The Rabbits, adapted from the picture book by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, is the story of native marsupials having their homeland ravished by invading rabbits, who gradually transform the land into a shadow of what it once was. It is beautifully symbolic of both how introduced species, such as rabbits, have devastated the Australian bush land, and of our shameful history in regards to our Indigenous people. The Rabbits brought its message home loud and clear. Set to Kate Miller-Hiedke’s superb lyrical adaptation of Marsden’s words, the music was haunting and devastating at times.

The costumes and set, taken from Shaun Tan’s illustrations and placed on stage perfectly to each and every detail, included steam-punk costumes for the rabbits and a distinct lack of paws

40

on all of the animals. Strangely, the true highlight of the show for me came from the lighting technician. In the opening scenes red and brown tones, symbolic of the bush, dominated the stage.

Gradually, the colours drew away leaving the finals scenes dominated by grey. This process was so slow that in the final scene when the original lighting returned, not only was it surprising, it brought home the damage caused by our collective past. Ultimately, The Rabbits for me was the clear highlight of this year’s festival, and hopefully earns its place as an Australian theatre classic.

UWA FACT Due to budget cuts, the Business School is losing two of its massage chairs

ARTS

A GIANT EVENT Review by Matthew Green There was a lot riding on the much-vaunted inclusion of the Giants as headliners for the 2015 Perth Festival. A total cost of $5.4 million ($2 million coughed up by the State Government), along with significant road closures throughout the CBD, hinted that urban theatre troupe Royale de Luxe might prove to be more of a nuisance than they were worth. However, the fanfare surrounding their arrival (and free entry) provided a guarantee: punters would turn up.

And turn up they did. Over three days an estimated 1.4 million people (counting repeat viewings) followed the oversized marionettes on their journey. The Little Girl woke on Friday, spent two days searching for the Diver, before they dramatically reunited in Langley Park on the Saturday night, and finishing with a celebratory send-off on Sunday. Royal de Luxe has performed to audiences worldwide, catering their programme specifically to the host city; and in all honesty, the narrative behind their performance was contrived to say the least. Ostensibly an amalgamation of appropriated traditional Noongar myths and the ANZAC legend, it felt a little forced, not to mention totally nonsensical. I had no idea what was going on.

Luckily, that didn’t really matter. Narrative and logic were pushed aside in favour of imagination and raw spectacle, fuelled

by an engaged crowd pulsating through the CBD. It sounds cheesy, but Perth’s mood lifted and literally came to life. Hay St had never been so interesting! A madcap team of Lilliputians - who looked to be having the time of their lives - operated the Giants by pulling on levers and steampunk-style cranes, and followed by a mobile prog rock band, creating an engaging atmosphere.

And that’s what it’s all about, surely? Critics of the Giants pointed to its admittedly bloated cost and the inevitable strain on transport services, and the question remains: Was it worth it? Our city has a lot of unflattering adjectives hurled its way (many of them deserved) - lifeless, uninspired, crypto-fascist.

If Perth is serious about shedding its Dullsville tag and competing with the likes of Melbourne and Sydney, greater public participation in the arts is essential. Whether it was ‘worth it’ misses the point. You can’t change a city’s character simply by throwing money at it (Elizabeth Quay, I’m looking at you); an interesting city requires interested people. In that respect, Perth’s reception of the Giants was a step forward, and the best advertisement for free arts events imaginable.

IN AN ITALIAN GARDEN Review by Carin Chan The concert introduced the works of 17-18th century composers such as Stradella and Banchieri, whose music is emotionally charged by the Baroque doctrine of affections. Indeed the Italian songs sung by the soloists sparkled under this singularly dramatic Baroque sensibility. Each piece was well-suited to vocal abilities of the singers, and the orchestra ebbed and flowed according to the fluctuations of the singers’ affections to create a wonderfully rich musical landscape.

Just as in the previous century, Gertrude Stein was convinced that the lines of a successful artwork should vibrate with a musical

sound which is compelled by emotions, sincerity and authenticity is everything in a moving performance. Compelling emotions are wrought by the artist willing to plunge into the depths of her soul.The only other times that I was blown away watching a live classical singer was during the concert of Korean coloratura soprano Sumi Jo and opera Madame Butterfly in His Majesty’s Theatre three years ago. Even spectacular theatrical productions such as The Magic Flute and Phantom of the Opera didn’t create such a lasting impression. This was definitely an unforgettable musical experience that will stay with me for a long time.

BLACK DIGGERS Review by Emily Purvis Funny and startlingly poignant, Black Diggers is a play which resonates with deliberateness on the centenary of the First World War. Featuring an all-male cast, the performance was powered by a myriad of theatrical styles, including musical numbers and extended monologues, which were executed well, minus some minor stumbling toward the play’s close. Its setting, concrete platforms, graffitied walls and a burning barrel further served to extend the symbolic notions within the play, as the names of fallen

Black Diggers were painted on, and over the black walls, with white paint. With no intermission, it was amazing that the cast in its entirety maintained energy and momentum for the duration of the two-hour show. It was both refreshing and confronting to see our forgotten history presented with such dramatic prowess and selfdeprecating (for the viewer) satire. Definitely one of the highlights of PIAF and probably the best play I’ve seen this year.

UWA FACT The Arts peacocks are horrifically inbred. In the wild, peacocks are red and white

41

LIFE ST YLE

How To Be a Wine Snob on a Budget Words by Rachel King Art by Catherina Pagani Welcome to UWA! You are now situated in the heart of not only the Golden Triangle, but also a heaving mass of young, sexually excited ladies and gents. Hooray! But how to ensnare one of these prime specimens? How to integrate yourself into Dalkeith when you’re from Mundaring? How to pull a girl from Claremont when you’ve grown up in the ghetto of Armadale?

Fear not brave traveller, for here lies the solution to your problems: wine snobbery. What better way to impress members of the opposite/same sex than with your upper-class snobbery knowledge? Let’s get started.

Begin by acquiring wine Keep in mind this doesn’t have to be good wine. Goon in a bottle does exist, and is certifiably far classier than actual goon purely due to its glass packaging. A great place to start is the bargain bin. All the shit wine nobody wants to buy at low low prices! Another staple is ‘Bowler’s Run’, the Black and Gold equivalent of wine which is almost cheaper than goon.

At $2.50/L for some classic Fruity Lexia or $3.80/L for any Bowler’s Run ‘wine’ (yes, I did do the math), there’s not a whole lot in it, and really, that bottle’s going to be useful later when you have to venture back to Midland.

Get prepared Before you try to impress that special someone, read ahead.

Get that dusty Year Eight thesaurus out and look up some tasty

adjectives. Another great way to get primed is to read the label before serving the wine to your fine guest. Verbally repeat said label with knowing head nods and hand gestures and you’re well on your way.

Now give us a swirl!

Tip: the less full the glass, the easier it is. I have been told that there is purpose behind this action. God knows what it is, but regardless, swirling makes you look fancy as hell. It’s all in the wrist ladies and gentlemen. Much like some other activities, possibly initiated with the help of wine.

Have a good ol’ whiff Describe the smell in relation to fruits. Use the wine label as assistance for what flavours are allegedly there. When in doubt: white = citrus, red = overripe berries. Gets them every time.

Finally, sip Let the sweet nectar touch your lips. It may or may not be better than goon, if we’re honest here. If not, continue drinking until you’ve convinced yourself that it is. Of course, prior to this, stunned by your impeccable knowledge, the impressee should well and truly have fallen at your feet. Well done! You’ve picked up in the GT. I bid you well on your future wine-induced travels.

Don’t forget to keep that bottle handy.

Mi Goreng Stories with Tash Harris These noodles are popular all over the world. Students both current and graduated all have their own story to tell about “one time I had Mi Goreng….”. One American on amazon.com said this: “Worse (better?) than heroin? This stuff destroyed my life. Don’t do it. Don’t order it.

30 packets are too much, you will end up eating it all in a week and a half and destroying your body, mind, family, friends, and job. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I’ve come to the conclusion that MG is amazingly delicious at any age, income or sobriety level - and kinda addictive. So after all this talking, I’m hungry. It’s Mi Goreng time.

42

UWA FACT If someone finds a way to inform you that they are “assured law” within ten minutes of meeting them for the first time, there is a 100% chance that they’re bad in bed

Carbonara Quest

LIFE ST YLE

Words by Daniel Hu Art by Tamara Sindhunakorn As a food lover, it feels appropriate to go on a heroic quest to find the best version of a favourite dish. In my case, the dish is the beloved carbonara. That stalwart of cream, egg and bacon is a fixture in any pasta restaurant, and even roadside delis offer their own versions. I’ve made it my mission to discover the best carbonara in Perth. Here, I explore the creamy depths of two Perth carbonara joints, and offer a recipe for my own.

Delisios For those who don’t know, Delisios is a pasta and pizza restaurant in ENEX100. I come here exclusively for the carbonara, and it’s the place that made me fall in love with the dish. A tip though: avoid during peak lunch hours, as seating gets very scarce in the complex at these times.

The plate comes out steaming, and the distinctive aroma of parmesan hits you as soon as you pick it up. The serving size is quite generous, with bacon liberally mixed in with the pasta and sauce. I haven’t been in the kitchen to observe, but there seems to be a lot of cheese going into this sauce, which is absolutely fine by me. It gives the sauce a strong flavour, as does the salt that comes with all that bacon.

Although it’s a lovely dish, it is a large serving, so those who struggle with big meals may not be able to finish (and not finishing food is almost a crime in my book). I would also advise not to get it takeaway, as in this context it becomes too obvious how much oil goes into making these kinds of pasta meals.

Tommy Sugo I think many a UWA student, myself included, were saddened to discover that the Gozleme stall had left Broadway. In its place was a fancy, tiled pasta and espresso joint. Despite being a bit pricey, the majority of the pasta at Tommy Sugo is great. Unfortunately, I can’t really say the same for their carbonara.

I bought a large serving, with gnocchi pasta topped with parmesan cheese. The description of ‘creamy sauce’ was most definitely accurate. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that this meant ‘the sauce is cream and not much else’. While the parmesan gave it some sharpness, and the sauce definitely had at least some taste to it, the entire meal could be described as ‘subtle nearly to the point of unnoticeable’.

I was disappointed with the slivers of bacon I received, which felt like they were added as an afterthought. On the plus side, the addition of peas lets you feel a little less guilty about the mountain of kilojoules that comes with cream, as you’ve obviously thought ahead enough to add a token piece of salad to your meal.

It’s serviceable, but it’s not worth multiple servings.

My Precious Carbonara Recipe This recipe is supposed to serve four, but depending on how much or little you eat, it can last for a lot more or a lot less. Like any home cooking, ingredients and quantities are to taste.

• 200 g of chicken breast, diced into around 1cm cubes • 3 cloves of garlic (or 3 teaspoons of minced garlic. I love me some garlic)

• Cooking oil (if you want to be thrifty, bacon fat can be used to oil up the pan instead)

UTENSILS • Pot for pasta • Knife/chopping board for preparations • Mixing bowl • LARGE frying pan • Spatula • Pasta scoop INGREDIENTS: • 400 g pasta (your own personal preference of type here) • ½ cup of long life cream (or milk, which works fine as well) • 4 eggs • 75-90 g of cheese (any kind will work. Parmesan will be sharper, but whatever you have on hand is fine) • 200 g of bacon, diced into around 1 cm squares (this should be rasher bacon. My experiments with pre-diced ‘bacon bits’ didn’t go well. Pancetta works quite nicely too)

METHOD: 1. Boil your pasta, and set aside.

2. Whisk the eggs and cream/milk in a bowl.

3. Add the cheese to your eggs and cream, mixing together.

4. Add oil to a large, hot pan, with the bacon, chicken and garlic, stirring until the chicken is cooked (covering the pan will assist with a little steaming, and will also introduce a tiny bit of lovely bacon-flavoured liquid for your sauce).

5. Turn down the heat, and add your cheese, egg and cream mixture. Mix continuously, so the cheese melts but your eggs don’t cook solid.

6. Add your pasta to the sauce, mixing with a pasta scoop until it is heated through.

7. Turn off the heat, and serve immediately with a salad. Note: The salad isn’t necessary, but it helps with the guilt.

UWA FACT Reid cafe carbonara: not even once

43

LIFE ST YLE

GAMER CULTURE HAS A COMPLACENCY PROBLEM Words by Cameron Moyses

It’s rarely acknowledged by those within gamer culture, but it must be addressed when attempting to define its problems: gaming is a hobby exclusive to the privileged.

A game itself is about 60 bucks, and can only be played on even more expensive, specialised equipment on a highresolution TV to get the best effect. Gamer culture also implicitly encourages gaming to be done on computers, which can bring costs into the thousands, in order to be considered ‘hardcore’. Not only that, a ‘true’ gamer is expected to be up-to-date with all the latest triple-A games, and completed them. This brings another cost into the equation: time. An open-world Ubisoft release, like Assassin’s Creed, can take weeks to complete, not taking DLC into consideration.

Rabid consumerism has baked itself into gamer culture, and has helped reinforce ideals of capitalism and isolation into each of its players. Exclusive games, a focus on singleplayer campaigns and anonymous multi-player experiences compound the problem, and trains users to regard others within the culture only on the base-level of ‘do they also like these games?’

Well, it’s no secret that gamers are capable of being a hateful group, who harass and terrorise other people to such a degree that it has become the norm. The excuse given is always the same. ‘Oh, those people are just the bad apples. It sucks, but I would never do anything like that. Don’t blame gamers for these actions, they don’t represent us.’

The recurring theme here is a focus on the lone gamer, as opposed to the group as a whole. A great example of this is the rampant sexism in the multiplayer space of online games.

If a player is revealed to be a girl, she can expect a barrage of disgusting slurs from gross bigots. Instead of examining what is it about competitive gaming that makes it such a hostile space for women, gamer culture as a whole refuses to hold itself accountable for these actions, and instead offers the weak excuse that ‘it is unfortunate that some individuals do this.’ The thinking here then branches into victim blaming, and suggests that women should just not reveal themselves to a crowd if they don’t want to be harassed. Complacency is key here.

44

More outspoken individuals try to argue that any attempts to address this problem would branch into ‘tone policing’ and infringe on their rights for free speech. There are then two sides to the conversation here, yet these are just the small minority at both sides of the spectrum of overall gamers, while the vast majority remain silent. Rooting out these problems is not practiced by most people within the culture, who would rather just play the game.

In major gaming forums, like /v/, /r/gaming and neogaf, the conversation being held simply boils down to ‘check out this hilarious meme’, which even someone with a passive familiarity of the medium would get, or ‘news’ which, more often than not, is comprised of pumped-up press releases saying when the latest whatever will be out. Anything of importance doesn’t get seen and is quickly forgotten.

This wouldn’t be a major problem if there were a huge array of audiences partaking in videogames, as it would then naturally set its own course. But the problem is that the most vocal members of gamer culture are also the ones the market is directly pandering to, and they are driving the conversation when it comes to deciding what is and isn’t popular in the triple-A sphere. Unfortunately, this market is young men who need some kind of ‘I’m a powerful man who gets the job done’ simulator. When Ubisoft announced that it wouldn’t have a female playable character in one of last years most hyped games, Assassins Creed: Unity, the ones who decried this as a major insult were drowned out by the total silence of the hardcore gamers, who on the whole didn’t care.

The people who loudly declare themselves as huge, hardcore gamers are also the ones who don’t give a shit about the culture’s problems. It sucks. Be vocal about shitty practices and exclusive acts done by both the members of the culture and the triple-A publishers. It is possible to change the collective attitudes of gamers out there, we just need to care about something for once.

LIFE ST YLE

SIMON TAYLOR’S FUNNY Words by Morgan Goodman I think it’s fair to say that good comedy can be roughly divided into two categories: the familiar, delivered well, and the new and exciting. Simon Taylor’s Funny falls squarely into the former, hitting all the right notes to appeal to a comfortable middle-aged audience. The main strains: the generation gap, the gentle stereotyping of our meltingpot society and a reliance on a self-deprecating ‘beta male’ mentality. Taylor, being a younger comedian, hits that last button pretty hard in this show, and it swings between being kind of charming and almost obnoxiously harmless. Defining oneself as a non-dominant, socially awkward person in comedy is a lot like wearing a waistcoat and pinstriped slacks to a bar that serves cocktails in jars: it seems really cool and funny until you realise everyone else in the room has been doing the same thing a lot longer.

told bitterly and it was peppered with lighter-hearted tangents that saved it from becoming too moody.

This is really obvious in the centrepiece of the show, coming after jokes about stealth mormons, pubic-hair lucky charms and Australian accents. It’s a lengthy story about chasing a ‘Fringe girlfriend’ that ended up being more poignant than funny through its genuine portrayal of the kind of silly insecurities that plague people every day. Fortunately, it’s not

Simon Taylor has a way with words and timing that allows him to present a set of familiar comic themes in a way that’s still funny and enjoyable. Should he turn to more experimental or interesting topics in future, he’ll become something really special to see. Until then, Funny is a nice hour of professional comedy.

None of this is to say that Funny doesn’t live up to its name.

Taylor’s delivery is great and no punchline, no matter how predictable, failed to tease a hearty chuckle even from the relatively small Monday night audience I attended with. To my mind, he focuses too much on the traditional build-upto-punchline construction of his jokes when he really has a talent for a sharp turn at the end of a sentence or a quick one liner inserted into a paragraph. Every one of those felt far more lively and interesting, whipping past and moving on smoothly before the audience catches up a second later. It just works well with Taylor’s clever wordplay and added an occasional sharp point to the slower observational comedy.

There’s nothing funny about being the kind of person who waits in line for Krispy Kremes.

Art by Aakanksha Sharma 45

RETRO PELI

46

Issue 6, Volume 20 In 1950, Pelican was whinging about guild catering (surprise, surprise), running at a loss, and wondering if ‘this generation of students is destitute of ideas’.

FEATURE

PELICAN’S ANGRY! The theme for the third issue of Pelican for 2015 is PROTEST! Being happy that the late-night trains are back, being sad that you don’t get to go to a sit-in, keyboard warriors, slacktivism, accidentally joining Socialist Alternative in your first year or tweeting your gripes re. Guy Sebastian at Eurovision.

That sort of thing.

The next Pelican meeting (FREE PIZZA) is at 6 pm on Wednesday 25th March in the Guild Council Meeting Room (third floor, old Guild building) The Pelican office is packed with couches and curious minds come and join us! Enter to the right of the Ref (the old catering office), email us at pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au, and like us on Facebook for everything you need to know!

Pelican Gives You Wings by Laura Wells 47

Our postgraduate courses give you strong global connections.

worldwide The aren’t links best

clickable.

The connections you make at The University of Western Australia are as important as they are far-reaching. When you undertake a postgraduate degree here, you’ll be studying alongside other like-minded, passionate peers and making relevant industry connections all over the globe. It’s the perfect way to advance your career and puts you in the best possible position for your future.

To find out more visit studyat.uwa.edu.au/postgraduate CRICOS Provider Code 00126G BRAND UWAM0303