Woroni Edition Eleven 2018

woroni VOL. 68, Issue 11. Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

PAGE 3

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES COURSE CUT IN WEEK ONE CITING NON-EXISTENT POLICY: QUESTIONS RAISED PAGE 5

KAMBRI UPDATE

PAGE 16

THE PUZZLE OF LEGACY PAGE 31

NOSTALGIART

PAGE 43

WE NEED TO ARGUE FIRST

Vol. 68, Issue 11 News comment 6

Meanwhile, in Canberra...

ScoMo, crackle and pop on breakfast telly Jasper Lindell 7

Political Discourse: From the Ecclesia to the Newsfeed

2 acknowledgement of country

31

Nostalgiart

We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the traditional owners of the land on which Woroni is written, edited and printed.

Tabitha Malet REVIEWS 32

We pay respects to Elders past, present and future.

Hannah Gadsby’s 'Nanette' Is the Confronting ConversationStarter We Need

We would also like to acknowledge that this land – which we benefit from occupying – was stolen, and that sovereignty was never ceded. Within this ongoing echo of colonialism we commit, as writers and editors, to amplify the voices and stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at our university.

Sophie Johnson

Ben Jefferson

UNI LIFE

8

33

Dan Debruyn and Jemma Sbeghen

Sumithri Venketasubramanian

We will honour the diversity of their stories.

34

Board of Editors

Anonymous

Editor in Chief: Mia Jessurun Deputy EIC: Ben Lawrence Managing Editor: Jonathan Tjandra Content Editor: Alisha Nagle Radio Editor: Steph David TV Editor: William He Art Editor: Sophie Bear News Editor: Noah Yim

Wright Hall Transfers

9

Chill Girls Stella Slack 10

Adulting 101

The Letters I Will Never Send SCIENCE

The Banks are Doing Something Right

35

Jade Lin

Sophie Burgess

INTERNATIONAL

36

11

An Unpredictable Nature Ezra Yeng 12

Shoes,Socks and Social Justice: Nike’s Ad Campaign with Colin Kaepernick Kate Coxhead ‘ENIGMA’ - Features 13

The Tourism Dilemma in Croatia Bella Dimattina 14

After Auschwitz, There Can Be No Poetry: Guilt, Germany and Gunter Grass Lottie Twyford 15

The Enigmatic Mad Dan Morgan Sophie Johnson 16

The Mystery of Antimatter Why We Need a World Space Agency Brody Hannan 37

Creating Life in the Lab Eliza Cowley and Arabella Davey ENVIRONMENT 38

The Aussie Bee Crisis: Truths and Myths Xavier Anderson 39

Living a Zero-Waste Lifestyle Ailsa Schreurs 40

Let There Be (No) Light Prakriti Bhardwaj BUSINESS & ECONOMICS 41

Artificial Intelligence: The Future Face of Businesses

The Puzzle of Legacy

Soumyadeep Sengupta

Abigail Manning

42

17

From the Archives Multilingual 18

Womanhood Jolly Bhattacharjee 19

The Lucky Country – A Brief Economic Outlook for Australia Felix Ryan CREATIVE 43

We Need to Argue First Jeremy Tsuei

A Murder One Summer

44

Aya McKinnon

Aryanne Caminschi

Clare

20

46

Jonathan Hiroki Nonogaki Hunter

Her

Spoons Pull-out

The People I Saw on the Train

Space

Skeletons and Sedation 47

ARTS

Phoebe Lupton

29

sATIRE

Framing Trans Characters and Other Artistic Endeavors Al Azmi

This paper is recyclable.

Protect the environment and recycle me after reading.

Andy Yin

Financial Controller: Brendan Greenwood Distributor: Jasper Lindell Business Development: Sumedha Verma Marketing Sub-Editor: Daniel Schuler Social Media Sub-Editor: Brandon Tan Photography Sub-Editor: Bryana Smith Photography Sub-Editor: Hannah Nigro Senior Sub-Editor: Miriam Sadler Senior Sub-Editor: Caroline Dry Comment: Ben Jefferson International: Riddhi Mehta Features: Abigail Manning Multilingual: Melissa Nuhich Arts: Tabitha Malet Reviews: Surbhi Arora Uni Life: Madeleine Sinnis Environment: Xavier Anderson Science: Erin Ronge Business & Economics: Soumyadeep Sengupta Creative Writing: Phoebe Lupton Satire: Gene Pinter News: Aishwarya Taskar News: Caitland Coulson News: Dan Le Mesurier News: Jeffrey Weng News: Nick Richardson Executive Producer: Imogen Purcell Presenter Liason: Maddie Kibria Radio Technical Officer: Ben Donald-Wilson Music & Events: Albie Ryan Breakfast Producer: Sumithri Venketasubramanian Radio Producer: Patrick Bruce Radio Producer: Vikram Sondergaard Radio Producer: Maleika Twist Radio Producer: Gil Rickey Radio Producer: Claudia Weatherall Radio Producer: Jeremy Abdul-Karim Senior Art & Design: Maddy McCusker Art & Design: Jessica Benter Art & Design: Millie Wang Art & Design: Hannah Charny Art & Design: Clarence Lee Art & Design: Georgie Kamvissis Art & Design: James Atkinson Technical Manager: Bremer Sharp Executive Producer: Zachary Schofield TV Producer: Jasmine Ryan TV Producer: Nathalie Rosales-Cheng TV Producer: Ria Pflaum Video Editor: Cedalise Mariotti Video Editor: Aryanne Caminschi Video Editor: Savannah Benson Camera Operator: Derek Wu Camera Operator: Prakash Singh Camera Operator: Cathy McGrane

48

Tidying Tips for a Tiny Space Eleanor Armstrong

Want to contribute?

30

The Art of Unseen Things

staff and Sub-Editors

Send words to write@woroni.com.au and visuals to art@woroni.com.au.

Woroni is powered by....

breakfast at 11pm.

3

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

QUESTIONS RAISED OVER ANU'S MANAGEMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES AS COURSE IS CUT IN WEEK ONE OF SEMESTER CITING NON-EXISTENT POLICY

Text: Woroni News Team Questions have emerged surrounding practices within the ANU School of Literature, Language and Linguistics (LLL) following the discontinuation of second-year Portuguese class (PORT2002) at the end of Week one of this semester.

Upon cancellation, a ‘micro-levy’ embedded in the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) policy was presented to the course convenor as the reason for cancellation. The policy supposedly outlines the discontinuation of, or imposition of a levy on, any class with less than five enrollments.

Denise Steele, manager of the School of Literature, Language and Linguistics (housed within CASS) sent an email on 27 July stating that, “due to very low enrolment numbers the above course will be cancelled for semester two, 2018”, a week into semester. Oliver Levido, one of the students in the now cancelled class told Woroni that “there was no consultation at all” prior to the cancellation.

This further highlights a worrying trend of neglect towards languages in ANU

following the cutting of the Diploma of Languages earlier this year.

started, and I can’t remember us doing so.”

When contacted by Woroni, Acting Associate Dean of CASS Dr Andrew Banfield confirmed that no such college-wide policy exists and that the cancellation of courses is a decision that is made by the individual heads of schools based on their circumstances.

The lack of accountability towards students by CASS and the SLL that this cancellation displays has also caused first year Portuguese students to worry that this will occur again in future, throwing a wrench in the works of their degree plans.

Dr Banfield outlined that the process of course termination entails: firstly, the provision of a request from the individual schools, which is then sent to the Academic Standards and Quality Office (ASQO). ASQO then provides information as to whether there are students enrolled in the course and advises that the college inform the affected students.

The question then arises, is this merely a questionable practice taking place in one school or is it representative of a more pervasive attitude towards Latin American Studies within CASS and the University at large?

For comparison, where CAP is concerned, Dr Stephan Fruehling, who is the Associate Dean (Education) of the College of Asia Pacific (CAP), stated that there exists an “internal guideline that states that courses with at least 4 students would not be cancelled for low enrolment” when asked by Woroni. He also said that “while we have in the past cancelled classes with less than four enrolled students, it would be most unusual to cancel a class once the semester has

As it stands, ANU is home to the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies (ANCLAS). However, this Centre does not appear on CASS’ list of schools and centres, and appears only on the page of the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIR).

While SPIR is the home of ANCLAS it begs the question as to why other centres and institutes dedicated to regional and Australia studies are given preferential billing.

The Centre’s director, Dr Elisabeth Mayer, had to concede that while the Centre is internationally recognised, it lacks

that same level of recognition at home.

This, it seems, could be analogous with its treatment by its home institution.

In February of this year, Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt conveyed that he wanted a strategy for the Centre but as of yet no strategy has arisen. As such, ANCLAS continues to operate under its 2017-2019 Operational Plan, but cancellations like that of PORT2002 hinder the Centre from producing “excellence in education and research” through “flexibility and accessibility within the current courses”.

When reached for comment as to the importance of engagement with, and education regarding the region, Max Serjeant, a Latin American Studies scholar and host of The History of Latin America Podcast, stated that “its importance should not be overlooked”. As “home to two of the five global cradles of civilisation” and as a “major outpost of Europe’s early modern empires, it played a major part in the development of today’s globalised world.” Furthermore, “the similarities in our histories and current status on the world stage mean that our interests often align and make us natural allies in an increasingly unpredictable world. To ignore this would to be to miss an important opportunity.” W

Vol. 68, Issue 11

4

NEW BUSINESSES MOVING INTO KAMBRI

Text: Noah Yim Woroni has learned that a range of businesses will be establishing themselves in Kambri over the coming months. This will include a Chinese restaurant, burger joint, salad bar, late night dessert cafe, supermarket, bookstore, bank and others.

Furthermore, there will be a street between the student services

building and Chif ley Library, with small shopfronts of Asian eateries featuring Korean, Japanese, and other cuisines on one side, and shops selling items such as t-shirts and records on the other.

Kambri will also be home to a gym operated by Club Lime, which overlooks an indoor 25m swimming pool, sauna and spa. The f loors above that will be the medical

centre, which is due to be outfitted with equipment such as x-ray and MRI machines.

ANU Observer reported that a Harry Hartog bookstore will be replacing the Co-op as the only store in Kambri. More recent information

now shows that this will be the largest bookstore in the ACT. The Kambri construction is due to be completed and ready for function by the first day of Semester One, 2019. W

EDUCATION COMMITTEE PROPOSES ESTABLISHMENT OF DEPUTY EDUCATION OFFICERS Text: Nick Richardson

The ANUSA Education Committee gathered for their first meeting of term four. Hosted in the ANUSA Boardroom, the meeting set the stage for current ANUSA Education Officer Harry Needham to outline five proposals, which aim to alter the functioning of the Education Committee.

Most notably, Needham proposed the establishment of “two or more” new deputy positions to the committee.

The deputies would work closely with the Education Officer and assist “with

running campaigns and convening the committee”. It was concluded that the positions would be more effective if they were elected.

the ANUSA supported first-year camps, citing his excessive workload during this period.

2019 Education Officer-elect, Tanika Sibal, voiced her support for the establishment of Education Officer deputies. Sibal also supported the appointment of these positions instead of the proposed Education Committee elections.

The current Education Officer demonstrated his belief that the limited student engagement in the actions of the Education Committee was partly the result of a lack in “student buy-in” and that the creation of Education deputies would help resolve this issue.

Needham highlighted that deputy Education Officers would have been “useful” during his organisation of

The positions would be unpaid but would be eligible to receive a slice of the current $5,000 ANUSA honoraria

fund. However, questions were raised as to the equality surrounding the delegation of the paid Education Officer’s work to unpaid deputies.

It was concluded that constitutional change would not be required to create the positions. Needham clarified that the process for the establishment of the deputy positions is still unknown and was dependent on the pending drafting of the Education Committee’s terms of reference, which Needham is hoping to complete by the next Education Committee meeting. W

5

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

KAMBRI UPDATE

Text: Jeffrey Weng and Dan Le Mesurier Woroni sat down with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ANU Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), to learn about the latest updates on the Kambri project.

Hughes-Warrington said the construction is on-budget and on-time for Kambri to welcome students in Semester one, 2019. One of the six buildings is expected to be finished by the second week of December, the second building will be finished by the second week of January, and the remaining buildings to be finished before O-Week.

The two wooden buildings, the Cultural Centre and the Learning and Teaching Building, will be the largest of their kind in Canberra. Described as having “warm bones and rough exteriors”, the buildings will have fixed stone exteriors in an effort to ensure they are weatherproof. The wooden frames were specifically chosen for their positive benefits, including better wireless connections than in steelbuilt buildings.

The Cultural Centre will feature a 500-seat lecture theatre, named the

Manning Clark Theatre. These seats will have the ability to pull away, allowing for an open space that can fit 1000 people. The Centre will also be home to a number of the Indigenous artwork donated by ANU Alumnus Craig Edwards earlier this semester.

A ground map is currently being designed to explain the Indigenous significance of the area, which will also be featured in the Cultural Centre.

A native bush garden will be planted outside Fenner Hall, and the four pillars of the bridge leading into Kambri will each include further information regarding the traditional owners of the land.

The ground floor of the Learning and Teaching Building will be a Student Commons, while the top floor will be used for large-scale classes or events.

Aiming for a more open learning environment, the classrooms will have glass walls that can be moved so as to accommodate for different class sizes.

Colleges will have to apply for the use of the Learning and Teaching Building facilities, making a case for how they will utilise the area to properly

engage students and provide an interactive learning experience.

and includes student representatives from ANUSA and PARSA.

Regarding the retailers that will operate in Kambri, Hughes-Warrington told Woroni that 42 of the 45 available businesses have been filled, and will be announced later this semester.

One such confirmed business is Harry Hartog, which was announced earlier this month. Harry Hartog will replace Co-op as the only bookshop on campus. The bookshop will sell new and second-hand books as well as textbooks, some of which have already been ordered in preparation for the store’s opening next year.

The weather and environment has also been a major consideration in the design of Kambri, particularly in regard to Sullivans Creek. In mind of the flooding of Kambri’s construction site earlier this year, Woroni asked whether any changes had been made to prevent such events in the future. The examples given by Hughes-Warrington include a weir, adjustments made to the creek’s banks, and the addition of rushes and plants. These changes will also help keep the water clean.

The other retailers operating in Kambri will include a supermarket, one fine-dining restaurant, and two licensed venues – a bar and a wine bar.

Hughes-Warrington confirmed that there will be meals within the $4–10 range available to students in Kambri, and that affordability was one of the chief considerations in choosing Kambri’s retailers.

The leasing committee responsible for choosing Kambri’s retailers has been operating for the past year and a half,

The Kambri site itself will also feature increased greenery, as there will be triple the amount of trees than what was featured in old Union Court.

These will be a mix of Indigenous and European trees, and will provide much-needed shade in the summer.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington will be discussing the Kambri project with students on 10 October in the Brain Kenyon Student Space. W

comment

Vol. 68, Issue 11

6

MEANWHILE, IN CANBERRA… ScoMo, crackle and pop on breakfast telly

Text: Jasper Lindell Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

Demosthenes had the Agora, Franklin D. Roosevelt had the fireside chats and Gough Whitlam had the Blacktown Civic Centre.

Scott Morrison has breakfast television.

It may seem quaint to give a lot of importance to breakfast telly, given that young people don’t watch it. You’re lucky to find someone under the age of 25 who even owns a television set.

times for the breakfast television cameras in a month?

‘ScoMomentum’ they’re calling you, fair assessment?”

There’s an election coming. Morrison has confirmed as much on his breakfast television appearances. He’s pulled out the classic line: that the government will get on with the business of governing.

Yes, there’s an election coming, but don’t you worry about that.

“Oh definitely not,” Scott Morrison didn’t say. “I really think our lack of action on climate change, housing affordability or raising Newstart is hampering our chances of winning the next election, don’t you?”

But those morning programs – which dress up advertorial with some light entertainment and often alarmingly off-kilter talking points – have become vital for any serious political media strategy in Australia.

Morrison has the difficult task of making everything seem normal when it clearly isn’t. His party, despite a long history of sanctimony, convulsed and ate itself just as their opposition Labor colleagues did in the Rudd-Gillard era. Now, the government is leaking like a sieve. The Liberals are also strapped for cash and need to splash some to make sure they retrain Wentworth, fending off any by-election threats opened up by Turnbull’s swift departure.

Kevin Rudd was the master. His regular spot with Joe Hockey on 'Sunrise' helped create his public image in the lead up to the Kevin 07 campaign. Rudd worked hard to be relatable, doing his best to make sure we – voters – saw past his nerdiness and policy wonkery.

So he’s making it as easy for himself as possible. Older Australians watch breakfast television, and they’re more likely to vote Liberal. The interviews are short and breezy. Any appearance of depth or policy insight or probing questioning is just a mirage.

Being relatable is key. Pauline Hanson, also a 'Sunrise' regular, leveraged the exposure to come in from the political cold, all the way back to the hot and arid madness of the Senate. Nothing says, “They’re just like us!” than an appearance on breakfast television bemoaning the madness in Canberra. (Don’t let your desire to cause some of the madness get in the way.)

On breakfast television everyone is a “mate”. “G’day” is the standard greeting when the PM appears on a live cross from whichever campaign backdrop suits the moment: solar farms, major infrastructure sites, that weird place called Canberra. The questions are softballs.

Does a regular spot on breakfast television guarantee political success? Of course not, but it must do something.

Why else would Morrison turn up six

Georgia Gardner, 'The Today Show': “All right, let’s add that to your to do list, Prime Minister, because you’ve been in the job for just month and boy, oh boy, you haven't stopped! From the drought, to aged care, Catholic school funding, strawberry sabotage saga, you have been described as a man in constant motion.

The media has a lot to answer for in making politicians palatable. Politicians aren’t like ordinary people, even though they pretend to be. They shouldn’t be like us. I’m glad they’re not like me, for instance. I get distracted far too easily and quite like to sleep in. But that doesn’t mean their conservative views, bad decisions or personal axes to grind should be airbrushed from their public image.

Morrison’s transformation began as soon as he got the top job in the messy and nasty events of August. The Australian Financial Review called him “ScoMo” on the front page, a jovial nickname, the kind of thing you’d call a bloke down the pub.

Melbourne or Brisbane or Sydney or anywhere else around the country, as if he’s already in the job.”

Can you blame him? Morrison has already shown he’s not the savviest political operator and the polls certainly aren’t in his favour. He’s been backed into a corner over Australia Day and the need to change the date. Then Morrison started to brick himself in, announcing a thought bubble: maybe we could have another day as well?

This totally misses the point of changing the date, and Morrison soon distanced himself from the idea. He also reiterated the position of his predecessor, rejecting an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

Pat Dodson, Warren Snowdon and Malarndirri McCarthy – Indigenous Labor parliamentarians – issued a joint statement to say they were disappointed by the Prime Minister’s view. But they weren’t surprised.

It isn’t just about respecting the person who is prime minister. There are some who contend no respect is necessary – and proceed in politics accordingly. This is about making sure journalists and those they report on are not mates. It helps if they get along but friendship is a dangerous development in journalism.

It sums it up nicely. Morrison’s view is part of that widespread belief that politicians make the decisions and those decided upon will have to live with it, dealt with and not heard. Funny how conviction politicians have their strongest convictions when it’s out of step with the public they represent.

If only issues were as simple as the strawberry crisis.

The perception of it is perhaps even worse.

Jasper Lindell is Woroni’s political columnist and a former News Editor

Meanwhile, Morrison has accused the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, of swanning about like he owns the place.

Speaking in Western Sydney, the traditional battle ground for all of our political and culture wars, Morrison said: “Bill Shorten thinks he’s already there and he’s strutting around, whether it’s

7

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

comment

POLITICAL DISCOURSE: FROM THE ECCLESIA TO THE NEWSFEED

It’

a citizen would count themselves lucky to have met their representative. Instead, we have access to a vast network of political information, government policy, opinion and analysis. It is easier than ever to be politically informed and yet political discourse is, more so than ever, stagnant and aggressively partisan.

One of the reasons for this is that social media politics resembles something like the Athenian ecclesia.

Standing in the field, you see the hands of everyone around you. Similarly on Facebook and Twitter you see the opinions of others before you can form your own. Political information is vast, but opinion is orders of magnitude vaster. Social media is more than the ecclesia though: it is the field, organised such that your closest friends and those you share the most opinions with are standing as close to you as possible. As such, even if you haven’t formed an opinion on a new issue, you will be likely to follow the lead of those around you who have agreed with you in the past.

Text: Ben Jefferson Graphic: Hannah Charny

The enclosure of you and your similarly-leaning friends within a social media network leads to the formation of an epistemic bubble: an unintentional ‘echo chamber’ which obscures alternative opinions from your view and reinforces your priCONTENT WARNING: or leanings. Politics thrives on the Discussion of transphobia back-and-forth between people with different views. Ideally, this leads to Politics, an art of interaction, will some exchange of views, some modalways be influenced by the platform eration. But when conversations are on which it is conducted. The debut locked within one camp or the othof democracy in ancient Greece saw er, this doesn’t happen, and the only It’ a radically different political system outcome of political discourse is a to the one we engage with today. The strengthening of prior convictions. very physical platform on which politics took place influenced how de- When content from the other side cisions were made. Standing in an comes in through the walls of your assembly of other Athenian men to epistemic bubble, it is only the most vote on policy, you would have seen outrageous, straw-manned conyour friends raise their hands in sup- tent used to destroy the opponent’s port of a proposition. After this visi- viewpoint. Case in point: a youngble display, who knows if your deci- er friend who expressed distaste for sion to support or not is the same as the view that “you can be whatever it would have been if you’d voted in a gender you want these days… you secret ballot? can be a carrot, or an animal, how ridiculous is that?” Social media In aristocratic and monarchical gov- boosts these posts more than othernments, the limited circulation ers because they are outrageous and of political information and deci- attract more clicks than others. The sion-making influenced how policy failure of legitimate and representawas formed. In communist and fas- tive political arguments to make it cist societies, the constant political through to both sides of an issue is a discourse at a community level in- huge problem for political discourse: fluenced the thoughts and feelings of essentially, it means that neither side the population when it came to make of the argument really knows what political decisions. In each case, it the other is thinking. wasn’t just the government but the arena in which politics was conduct- Finally, and possibly even more imed that influenced decisions. portantly, social media politics has given rise to a new form of humour In modern democracy, the platform that erodes certainty in political infor politics is the internet. Informa- formation both on the part of the retion is not circulated within small cipient and the creator. Ironic, deep communities: letters from govern- ironic and post-ironic memes and ments are few and far between, and political pages present a quandary

to viewers unsure whether the creators are serious, joking or somewhere in between. If they are joking, these jokes can spiral out of control when viewers don’t understand the context, and I think that even the admins can condition themselves to believe their own extreme content.

For reference, I point to the banned page ‘Abhorrent Australian Memes’, one of a suite of alt-right meme pages that use particular branding to make aggressive partisan political statements in the guise of ironic humour.

The defence that “it’s just a joke” will not cut it any more.

Politics will always have systemic flaws. No method of communication, no instrument of democracy will ever perfectly capture the ideals of government by the people, for the people. However, understanding the platform on which it is conducted is important when entering any political conversation. Self-awareness and awareness of how others might be thinking and acting in a political space is necessary to engage in productive discourse. Above all, that is what we should be seeking.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

comment

8

Wright Hall Transfers

Text: Dan Debruyn & Jemma Sbeghen Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

At a period in which housing affordability is a critical issue to all Australians, it was inevitable that the shock waves of this crisis would inevitably influence[a] the student population of Australia’s national university. Housing affordability has always been a concern for the students of ANU, but recently has become more significant than usual.

Conversation has been rekindled as students have been transferred from their current, less expensive halls to Wright Hall due to a lack of transparency regarding the new returners application process.

In past weeks, a small number of students reapplying for colleges such as Fenner, Bruce and Burton & Garran were denied their first preference and subsequently moved to new colleges – particularly Wright – in order to fill quotas. A lack of transparency in the reapplication process has meant that many students who cannot afford the rates demanded by new halls have been forced to make a significant financial decision as to whether they accept an offer and a financial burden or reject ANU accommodation options and take on the inconvenience of unplanned house-searching.

A lack of clarity about the transfer process did not allow students to make a properly informed decision regarding their accommodation preferences.

As such, some students placed Wright as a ‘second

preference’, not aware that this choice could override their first preference. ANU Accommodation could have avoided this easily by keeping the transfer and readmission process separate, as has been the practice in the past, or by explicitly informing applicants that a second preference may impact their chances of gaining admission to their first preference. In this case, students would have been in a better position to explore alternative accommodation options having recognised the financial responsibility of potentially being accepted into a more expensive hall.

It was inevitable that a disruption to pre-existing college communities would arise from the introduction of new residential halls. These halls have beds that need to filled and communities that need to be created in order to weave themselves into the fabric of the ANU. If they are to be of worth, as they surely will be, time and effort needs to be taken in building their central values, spirit and population much like those that current colleges already possess. It’s also important to acknowledge that these new hall needs to be profitable and sustainable. Wright and New Bruce offer a range of new facilities that reasonably demand a relatively high weekly rate which is similar to those of other catered colleges.

It is difficult to ignore that many of those students reallocated from pre-existing colleges are those who have previously sought out self-catered, less expensive accommodation. We understand the situation that accommodation administration faces with the challenge of these new halls. However, the lack of compensation for students who genuinely cannot afford such a hike in rates leaves a bitter taste in the

mouths of afflicted students and has the potential to foster resentment within and towards these nascent communities. If students are really required to be transferred from self-catered to catered residences, the existence of transition bursaries for students who have been removed from more affordable colleges would minimise feelings of frustration. ANU accommodation services should be more attentive to the financial situation of students, particularly those who have no financial assistance from family. Discounted fees should be offered to students who were denied their first preference and moved to Wright so that they are more in line with the prices of their current halls.

We acknowledge ANU’s commitment to offering a unique on-campus living experience which contributes greatly to our student experience. However, if our ambition for this new college is one of fairness and honesty, it seems contradictory that it will begin with a lack of transparency and compulsory transfers. If we want the vision for Wright as a welcoming and collegial community to be fulfilled, the introduction of some form of financial assistance or compensation for students who have been removed from their first preference seems warranted and even critical to its sustainability and acceptance on our campus.

9

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

comment

Chill Girls Text: Stella Slack Graphic: Sophie Bear Somewhere between high school and college, I became frantic to adopt a fabulously chill and complacent attitude: the esteemed and famed persona of a ‘chill girl’. I have tried endlessly to pinpoint the exact shift in my perception of myself. I continue to fail admirably. I realised that I was looking for some critical juncture in the past scattered year – for some enigmatic eureka moment that made me strive tirelessly to become easy going, complacent, and ‘one of the boys’.

However, this past year has seen many of my closest friends scoffing at how miserably I have failed at being chill.

So of late, I’ve retaliated by ironically captioning all my social media with “I am SuCh a CHiLL GurL”. But why was I so secretly obsessed with conforming to this cookie cutter identity?

Why would I be so willing to absolve myself of my empowering characteristics of being passionate, at times very argumentative and quirkily exuberant?

In answer to this: moving out of home, immersing yourself in an intense college culture and starting to work out your own adult identity is super difficult. There is every reason in the book for women to look for some simple way to ensure that they will be liked, celebrated and popular within their own social circles. I would argue that it’s human nature to adapt and conform to established social practices in order to fit in.

It happens to be that this brazen unfazed aura and magnetism of breeziness is what many young women aspire to.

A chill girl’s laid-back outlook instils a sense of emotional stability. It seems to attract friendships and the male gaze.

A chill girl’s inherent willingness to go with the flow is a staple in forming long term relationships that are ‘low key’ and low maintenance.

An aversion to committing to romance or even engaging in political discourse lends to the development of her seemingly aloof impartiality. To chill girls, I would assume their grievances seem utterly avoidable. Their perennial sense of complacent apathy allows them to remain detached in a buffered margin, away from argument and conflict.

For me, adopting and harnessing this chill girl vibe could only occur in some

alternate universe. If the personal traits I mentioned above were found all in the one person, would I even want to be their friend? Our society has molded an feminine persona who is meant to abandon all curiosity and all drive in order to make our lives potentially easier and unchallenged.

Someone who is

willing, in every conversation and in every interaction, to lay themselves down as a ‘doormat’ and abandon all drive, sacrifice and curiosity. The drive and curiosity that is so intrinsically connected to a unique personal identity.

I have come to realise that attaining a chill girl vibe wasn’t achieved through changing my loud, sometimes obnoxious traits into a ‘chiller’, demurer version of myself. Rather, I was simply adding things to my personality; choosing to “chug a few beers” before Moose, joining in on jokes about Rick and Morty despite having never

watched an episode. On a broader scale, I made a point of being unbothered by drama but yet leant an ear whenever something dramatic happened in other’s lives. And I elected to not pull my friends up if they made a political statement at dinner that I didn’t agree with.

The word ‘chill’ wasn’t so much about ‘chillin’ out’ but rather adding activities that were deemed ‘chill’ to my already enthusiastic agenda. So, retrospectively, it really did nothing except allow me a quasi-orgasmic rush of feeling ‘cool’. So silly.

I know I can’t speak for the entire female experience, but being the ‘chill girl’ or actively labelling yourself can be dangerous. It is a fast track to a serious alteration to an unique set of values and beliefs. I embrace getting heated, laughing out loud, being excited and adventurous without having to adopt a backseat attitude towards life. I think that women in the 21st century are taught by structures within society that their personalities will never be good enough, and thus men will forever be in search of a ‘chill girl’, a figment of their imagination, an extension of themselves. Look to Year 11 English staple ‘500 Days of Summer’ – an awakening for all – which showed that cool and aloof Deschanel was just not what Levitt made her out to be. She waltzed in and out of the relationship because of a self-sabotaging sense of emotional unavailability. It’s these kinds of tropes that can fuel, but also harness, the innate sense of female passivity to which some women subscribe.

‘Chill girl’ and ‘cool girl’ feminism presents a mixed bag of issues. At the end of the day, I think ‘cool girl’ feminism is just a very sexy way of promoting sisterhood.

While the chill girl ideal rests upon a singular attribute, ultimately I believe feminism is contingent on embracing an intimate understanding of yourself and your idiosyncrasies, whilst accepting that the female experience is transformative both for ourselves and others.

Adopting a chill girl vibe is only a half-step in the direction of empowerment.

After writing this article, I flicked back to December 2017 in my Google history right before the New Year, amidst all the pirated ‘Friends’ episodes, and saw a blinking WikiHow article: ‘How to be a Chill girl’. Cringe worthy and alarmingly pre-pubescent, I hit * Remove Website *.

“Fuck being chill.”

comment

Vol. 68, Issue 11

10

The bANKS ARE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT CONTENT WARNING: Mentions of domestic violence Text: Jade Lin Graphic: Sophie Bear In August, a young woman who I haven’t seen in years shared a Facebook post.

It was the first that I’d heard about the domestic violence policies of the Big Four Banks.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, three or four years ago, when my mother started speaking about a friend of hers who was faced with an impossible decision. She hadn’t worked in years, was raising kids, and had limited access to accounts controlled by her husband, but she desperately wanted to leave the relationship.

To this my mother said, “money and assets are survival. Put it away before you get married and never speak of it again.”

Yet, not everybody has the foresight, the ability, or the initial capital to put away enough to leave a financially abusive partner, especially given that Australia has the second highest household debt-to-savings ratio in the world. Someone’s savings should never define their ability to leave a relationship.

The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence describes financial abuse as “difficult to identify” and “poorly understood.”

Banks can now be one of the first points of call for survivors. They can make a difference in people being able to leave relationships and preventing them from falling into poverty once they make the brave decision to do so.

So what are the Big Four Banks doing about it, and how do you access their support?

(Note: banks cannot remove someone from a joint account without a court order).

Commonwealth Bank The Commonwealth Bank Domestic & Family Violence Emergency Assistance Program offers: At the point of leaving: – Access to specialist trauma counsellors – Financial assistance – Safe establishment of bank accounts – Telephone support Broader support: – Education programs on gender equity principles – Training for ban employees and financial counsellors – Access to an EXCELLENT resource on how to prepare to leave a financially abusive relationship, with a step by step checklist.

Financial assistance DV policy (what to do afterwards in terms of loans with

Commonwealth Bank): – Homeowners wishing to move are provided a grant to support relocation – Those who want to stay have options with their mortgages, e.g. payment deferral, reduced repayments or lower interest rates – Restructuring loans – Unsecured debts may be waived, or repayment assistance provided – Preventing any restructuring from impacting credit histories

Support for customers takes place via the Customer Connect team, the ANZ hardship assessment team. Note it takes 21 days to confirm an outcome for the following: – Extensions of loans to reduce each repayment – Deferring some repayment – Refinancing personal loans – Reducing/deferring credit card repayments

National Australia Bank NAB has ‘Domestic and Family Violence Assistance Grants’, which provide 1.4 million dollars to support domestic and family violence prevention and early intervention.

Financial literacy (MoneyMinded)

NAB also provides a financial helpline called NAB Assist that can help women to get back on their feet if they are struggling financially.

NAB is able to help by: – “Setting up a transaction account for you that is not listed on Internet banking, – Changing your passwords and PINs, – Changing addresses to keep your location confidential, – Breaks from repayments or reduced payments for fixed periods, – Stopping access to redraw on loans, – Updating joint accounts so that both people need to sign on any changes (known as 'both to sign'), – Cancelling secondary credit cards, – Offering financial and personal counselling.”

Additionally, NAB has: – Financial hardship assistance, in partnership with Uniting, can include family violence worker, safety planning, assistance leaving. In some circumstances this can include a grant towards rent, bond, or expenses to keep you safe.

– Advice for changing your mailing address to either online statements and letters or a trusted friend if you have an emergency/ separate account.

– Provides No Interest Loan Scheme (NILS) through community organisations – Settlement Services International provides these ANZ Support for employees: – “Access to our Employee Assistance Program, a free and confidential, short-term assistance program provided by qualified counsellors – Have a specialist Indigenous EAP – Assistance for employees who are concerned about safety at work – Access to special leave and flexible work arrangements – Relevant information on our intranet, including links to resources and support.”

– Worked with Rosie Batty to create a Global Domestic Violence Strategy to educate employees.

training

program

Westpac Group Support for employees: – “Counselling – Flexible working arrangements – Time off work – Financial assistance, $5000 grants via Westpac Employee Assistance Foundation – Paid leave – Emergency Accommodation – Free financial planning from a BT Financial Planner: budgeting, superannuation, investment, insurance” Additionally, in its delightfully vague policy, it also has “Financial products and advice to support our customers” and cohosts the White Ribbon Breakfast with Finance Sector Union.

Recommendations The banks, for the most part, have made genuine attempts to improve their policies. Yet, it seems some are doing better than others.

One-off programs are not enough to support customers through leaving abusive relationships. Banks need to, over a long term, take special note of survivors and actively help them rebuild their financial life, potentially with the support of the government. Banks are a point of contact, and the government should capitalise on this by creating support programs within banks, such as co-funding specialised counsellors, or by creating structured referrals to other government funded services.

We need to view banks as a part of a complex interwoven system of domestic violence support, as opposed to being just the first point of call. To make them as effective as possible, banks must actively collaborate with local domestic violence services to ensure people are not lost through the gaps of inter-agency non-cooperation.

Finally, banks must collaborate, not compete, with one another. Each bank should have an avenue whereby non-customers are referred to the people they need to speak to in their banks, and to other referral services.

11

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

COMMENT // INTERNATIONAL

An unpredictable nature Text: Ezra Yeng Graphic: Maddy McCusker In recent months, tropical cyclones have ravaged many parts of the world, including Hong Kong, China, Philippines, and the south-eastern border of the USA. To some extent, this is unsurprising; each year, tropical cyclone activity peaks during this period of seasonal transition. However, the activity has been exceptionally high this year with more than six storms appearing without much prior warning.

The death toll has been unusually high too: in just the last month, tropical cyclones have claimed over 60 lives in the Philippines, at least four in China and 31 in the USA’s Carolina States. Millions more people have been displaced or reported missing, and vast amounts of infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.

Tropical cyclones occur close the equator, where the ocean is warmest. This warm water transfers heat and moisture into the air above, causing it to rise, fast. As it travels higher into the atmosphere, it cools,

and eventually loses its ability to hold water. This creates condensation and clouds. Meanwhile, the air that has left the water’s surface leaves a ‘depression’ – an area of low air pressure – which warm air moves towards as the air pressure restabilises. Influenced by the rotation of the earth on its axis, this warm air begins to spin and, as this cycle repeats itself, a tropical cyclone is formed.

Since tropical cyclones gather all of their energy from the ocean, once they reach landfall they begin to lose their energy. However, this feature leaves countries like the Philippines, effectively a nation made up of islands, particularly susceptible as they are perpetually surrounded by warm ocean currents. Combined with the lack of infrastructure and resources, this is why many island nations experience such a high degree of damage and destruction at the hands of tropical storms.

There is no doubt that the efforts made to mitigate the effects of the recent tropical storms were not enough.

Scientists have a solid understanding of how tropical cyclones form.

However, how they will react to, and interact with, different environments is still only partially understood, leaving countries facing a degree of unpredictability. We have come along way with weather and storm monitoring and geographers and geologists can help predict the paths that tropical cyclones will take, but exact routes are still are pretty hard to anticipate. Moreover, although we know that tropical cyclones usually happen during transitional seasons due to an increase in air instability, which is the air pressure changing, global warming is disrupting these patterns.

While infrastructure is constantly becoming sturdier, preventing it from being destroyed met with winds moving at 200 km/h it seems like an impossible task to prevent mass destruction. There were many news reports showing glass being shattered in newly built buildings in Hong Kong. The financial cost of repairing and rebuilding is enormous, not to mention the social and emotional cost for the people and communities that inhabit these buildings.

Though we have made vast advancements in science and technology, there are some things that just cannot be

determined by as the course of nature as it follows its own route. While the prospects of helping the world prevent environmental disasters might look bleak, there are other ways we can deal with the outcomes of such.

There are multiple charities that are making efforts to help rebuild these devastated areas. We cannot do much to control nature and the destruction it brings. However, we do have the power to help those in need. Every little contribution and donation could help millions of people displaced by these natural disasters.

COMMENT // INTERNATIONAL

Vol. 68, Issue 11

12

Shoes, socks and social justice: Nike’s ad campaign with Colin Kaepernick

Text: Kate Coxhead Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

Nike’s recent advertisement featuring Colin Kaepernick, the US NFL player who protested racial injustice and police brutality by kneeling during the National Anthem, has sparked notable backlash. The advertisement, which features a black and white shot of Kaepernick captioned with the words “Believe in Something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” seems to express support for Kaepernick’s activism, taking a stance on deeply fraught issues in the US. This high-profile campaign by Nike begs the question of what role, if any, should corporations play in social justice and activism?

The Kaepernick ad campaign has led to calls by some to boycott Nike, with outraged individuals on Twitter, posting about setting their Nike shoes alight and cutting the logo off Nike-brand socks. It’s drawn the attention of Donald Trump, who tweeted that “Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts” Despite this, it’s been reported that online sales of Nike products increased after the release of the campaign. Although it’s uncertain whether the increase is directly related to the Kaepernick ad, it indicates that Nike is not doing too badly. And, all the attention directed towards the

campaign has created an avalanche of free publicity.

It seems that there are significant benefits to be gained from taking this stance, despite the risks.

Even if a number of consumers are alienated by the support for Kaepernick, Nike’s alignment with a social justice cause means it can fashion itself as a bold, socially aware and progressive brand, and having this image may well prove profitable in the long run.

The fact that profit is such a key driver of action complicates corporate activism. Wariness and scepticism are needed when thinking about whether corporations should be advocating for social justice issues, in the way that Nike has, particularly when considering how they are often implicated in many social justice issues themselves.

perpetuates. Perhaps instead of posturing about certain issues, corporations like Nike need to first look at the ethics of their everyday practices.

In spite of these problems, the campaign could still have some merit or positive impact. By supporting Kaepernick, and ostensibly taking a stance on the social justice issues he protests, the high-profile campaign could help generate support for these causes or otherwise have an impact. In a series of Tweets Rolling Stone writer Jamil Smith asked: “Is this a corporation seeking to profit off of the pursuit of social justice? Yes. But this accomplishes one thing that could be important… Signifying that your corporation is willing to stand behind people fighting for social justice and civil rights helps build trust.

Criticism of the use of sweatshop labour alongside other ethical issues have long been problematic for Nike – indeed, a desire to shake the image of an unscrupulous corporation may be a motivating factor for the recent campaign’s overt support for Kaepernick and his cause. Recently, Nike has come under fire for claims of gender discrimination, as well as for withdrawing from its commitment to the Worker Rights Consortium, an organisation which independently monitors factories and provides a means for workers to have grievances investigated.

These issues make the social justice stance taken by Nike in the Kaepernick ad appear somewhat superficial, as it indicates a lack of holistic commitment to addressing social injustice, including that which the company itself

Also, it’s how corporations should use their clout."

This shows there may be a meaningful outcome from the campaign – and perhaps that it counts as a win for social justice and civil society that a powerful corporation is publicly throwing their weight behind a figure like Kaepernick.

Though these are important outcomes to consider in weighing up the issue, the problems of self-interest, and hypocrisy of big businesses being involved in corporate social activism are still pressing. Ultimately, when it comes to the part that corporations have in matters of social justice, attention should be primarily focused upon their own role in injustice, like gender discrimination, commitment to ethical labour practices, and more - and, ideally, any improvement on this is not just done as part of a marketing strategy.

13

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

PROMPTED // FEATURES

The Tourism Dilemma in Croatia Text: Bella Dimattina Graphic: Hannah Charny

For the last two years, one destination has repeatedly seemed to clog up social media with its posts. Images of friends, acquaintances and people you aren’t sure how you know end up on your feed. The background?

Bright blue skies, calm clear waters.

The setting? Croatia. The super fun, super cheap alternative to the Greek island hopping you can’t afford.

Unfortunately, it’s not super cheap.

Let’s be real – if the f light to Europe isn’t the financial stumbling-block to your holiday getaway, the accomodation and food prices will be.

With farm-factory hostel beds costing at least 60 euros a night in Dubrovnik, Croatia is now no different from hotspots in Italy or Greece.

Compare that to the tourism prices and industry in neighbouring Bosnia. An hour away in Trebinje, an aesthetically-pleasing centre of the wine region in southern Bosnia, beds are just 10 euros (usually with breakfast).

While the tourism industry is booming, the Croatian Government hasn’t forgotten the economic situation for everyday Croatians. Tourism may differ starkly to its Balkan neighbours, but regional issues of unemployment, workers’ rights and corruption persist.

The tourism industry provides much-needed work in a country

with 8.6 per cent unemployment.

However, each year the government has increased the quota of foreign workers in the tourism sector.

The increases address shortfalls in manpower on the coast in summer.

This inf lux of seasonal workers hides an overall population decline in Croatia, as youth go overseas to seek greater opportunities. The tourism industry cannot provide opportunities for all skill sets, and the work usually dries up in winter.

To put it simply, the tourism industry isn’t enough, and there’s a brain drain in Croatia.

Eduard Andric from the Tourism and Services Trade Union of Croatia says the tourism industry is plagued with poor working conditions. This summer, Croatian Airlines had planned a mass strike, but was obstructed by court rulings after the company argued it would have devastating economic effects. It’s common to encounter twelve-hour shifts and extensive overtime requirements that cater to tourism demands. Inspectors focus on payment of minimum wage, rather than other workers' rights, when they investigate workplaces.

Then there is the culture of using cash, which can help companies to hide the

mistreatment of their workers. It also allows for tax evasion, as taxes in the tourism industry, currently sitting at 25 per cent, increase each year.

These taxes are being used to fund 337 million euros in employment programs, with most focusing on upskilling for the tourism industry. Hopefully it will aid Croatians to attain better job opportunities in the tourism sector, and benefit from the Aussie dollars pouring in. But it doesn’t resolve the seasonal nature of the work, or issues of worker mistreatment.

At the same time, millions also are being spent on advertising campaigns in the tourism industry. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is providing a 73 million euro loan to Sunce Koncern, a Croatian tourism group. It will help them restructure and fund future investment. The European Travel Commission is funding advertising for Croatian tourism in China, with Chinese tourism in Croatia already growing 36 per cent. Korean Air operated their first f light to Zagreb, Croatia last week. There’s a 23 per cent increase in American tourists too.

They’re capturing the American and Asian markets following mass success

with tourists from Central Europe.

The government said that tourism in 2018 was “very successful”. But growth is no longer in the double digits like last year. Environmental concerns, particularly at Dubrovnik and Plitvice, have led to restrictions on tour groups and cruise ships. And with tourism now 18.8 per cent of GDP - the largest percentage in the world - slowing down this growth would be devastating. It’s an unstable situation for Croatia economically, threatening their status as the Golden Child of the Balkans.

Some of these concerns were highlighted by Suzanna Zdrzalek in her German docu-series 'Croatia without Limits - Tourist Fever on the Adriatic’.

She concludes that Croatian authorities need a new strategy to manage and combat the effects of tourism.

What’s our strategy, then? Party-hard young Aussies need to start thinking about the potential effects of their spending on the local country when they’re on holiday.

They also need to prepare for the worst: figuring out where to go for their selfies if they’re priced out of Croatia.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

PROMPTED // FEATURES

14

After Auschwitz, There Can Be No Poetry: Guilt, Germany and Gunter Grass Content warning: discussions of the Holocaust, mentions of suicide

Text: Lottie Twyford Graphic: Maddy McCusker

After Auschwitz writes Adorno: “to write poetry would be barbaric”. For how can the language of burning books, extermination camps and final solutions be used to create beauty once more?

German author Gunter Grass, awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature for his portrayal of the “forgotten face of history”, attempted to answer this question. In a 1979 speech he implored: “what shall we tell our children … what are we to say of the German guilt that has lived on from generation to generation?”

This German guilt, according to Grass, was a necessity for a country that had allowed Hitler to rise to power through its own democratic institutions. Whose ordinary men and women had supported his ideals. Indeed, in his 1963 novel Dog Years, he writes about magic spectacles that allowed German children to become privy to just what their parents had been up to in the years between 1939 and 1945.

He stripped the mythology away from the Nazis, rendering them as someone’s father, neighbour, brother, son. Creating a working German identity was predictably difficult – when Hitler ordered the destruction of the Third Reich moments before his suicide, nihilism essentially triumphed. What Grass wanted was to drag the dark years out from under the rug and openly speak about them. To try to create a working

German

identity,

post-Auschwitz.

The atrocities committed during the Second World War in the name of the German people contaminated, according to Grass, the very German language itself. The only way to cleanse this was to drag it through ‘literary’ muck. Grass’ 1959 The Tin Drum embodied this muck, as well as its author’s mission, to awaken the German conscience to the horrors in which ordinary people had partaken.

The images that rest with the reader long after the final page has been turned are disturbing. An attempted sexual encounter between a dwarf and a nun, sex being allegorised through fizz powder, eels eating a horse’s head from the inside and a girl pissing in a pot of soup, all narrated by a precocious three-year-old dwarf born with the brain of an adult and the ability to shatter glass with his screams. The only appropriate response is violent recoil.

And is there any response more apt?

Yet, much as the novel was blasted as an “exercise in blasphemy and pornography”, it does attempt to move beyond such literal readings. Grass’ magical realist text cannot avoid its place in history. Indeed, when the Nazi atrocities became public, people had little choice but to admit ‘collective guilt’, and Grass mocks this very notion. He essentially sought, with The Tin Drum, Dog Years and Cat and Mouse which together make up the Danzig trilogy, to blast a hole into the collective amnesia of a German generation which wanted instead to focus on economic growth and progress.

But what Grass seemed to fail to mention, whilst encouraging others’

responsibilities, was his own individual guilt. In 2006, almost 60 years after the fact, he admitted that he himself had been a voluntary member of the Waffen-SS. Before this, he had largely been assumed to be one of the generation too young to have been active in the war. And why had he joined?

He cannot put his finger on a response to this question. In a piece for The New Yorker he cites his animosity towards his stuffy, cramped and Catholic home. In the end, however, he seems to lead inevitably to the conclusion that what drew him to enlist were dreams of glory. The allure of black and white newsreels which advertised black and white truth to his seventeen-year-old self. Nobody ever lost wars in the news. Even up until the very end of the war, Grass has been quoted as saying he still believed they would win.

Of course, his confession was immensely critiqued. Many called for his works to be –, if not banned – at least ignored. He was seen as a moral hypocrite who had encouraged others to examine their individual responsibility in the war effort, whilst ignoring his own. One notable hypocrisy was his denunciation of Raegan and Kohl’s 1985 visit to a cemetery where Waffen-SS members were buried, even though he himself had been a member of the SS. The man once described himself as “inexorably attuned to contradiction” and there is perhaps no better way to describe him than as inherently contradictory. Born 1929, Danzig, to a German father and a Kashubian mother, he came of age in a continent torn apart by hatred. Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, was the first

territory to be captured by the Nazis.

His political views are interesting, to say the least. Politically left-leaning, he denounced revolutions, whilst defending Castro’s Cuba, and encouraged a slow move towards progress.

He called Catholic and Lutheran ideologies moral accomplices of Nazism. Intensely anti-nationalist, he argued against German unification on the grounds that people responsible for the Holocaust had forfeited the very right to self-determination.

That Germany was better weakened so that it did not attempt to become belligerent once more. He denounced repression in the Soviet-bloc and fundamentalist religious governments.

Then simultaneously criticised Western capitalism and was especially angered by Germany arming Hussein. Furthermore, he got himself declared persona non-grata by Israel after publishing a poem in which he declared that Germany must not continue to aid arming the country., Grass ends up tainted by the brush which tainted all of the twentieth century. Depending on the way you look at it, this either make his works and words completely senseless and false, or, even more so the conscience of the nation and humanity itself.

Or, does his denial of his own truth speak to a deeper level about the very ambiguity of truth and memory itself? He analogised memory to being like an onion. How many layers must we peel back before we arrive at any semblance of meaning?

15

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

PROMPTED // FEATURES

THE Enigmatic Mad Dan Morgan Text: Sophie Johnson Graphic: Sophie Bear

Mad Dan Morgan is a little known, and therefore incredibly underrated, figure in Australian history. Born Jack Fuller (1/10 – boring name, due an upgrade), Mad Dan was adopted by ‘Jack the Welshman’ (8/10 – a descriptive, but not particularly original name), and eventually became a criminal. Disclaimer: there are a lot of names in this narrative, particularly because as soon as ‘Mad Dan’ ditches ‘Jack Fuller’ he becomes ‘John Smith’ (10/10 – purely because it’s the most stereotypically common and mundane name in history).

Mad Dan was basically a red hot criminal dude. A quick highlight of his show reel includes: stealing horses, saddles, bridles and selling them, as well as holding up various small, rural businesses. He terrorised the Australian Outback for years, and was pretty famous for it. He was a big enough deal that a fair few business owners basically had the policy that if Mad Dan showed up, you did what he wanted, and you didn’t kick up a fuss. Some even went so far as to hang up food in the outback for him, hoping that if he had easy access to food he wouldn’t turn to crime.

Spoiler alert: this usually didn’t work, primarily because Mad Dan DGAF. Most importantly, our Mad Dan had a flair for the dramatics, and went by several fantastic names, including ‘Down the River Jack’ (20/10 – best name I’ve ever heard, a classic). His companion, ‘German Bill’ (5/10 – because compared to ‘Down the River Jack’ it sucks), helped him with a variety of stunts, but eventually the pair was surprised by a party of police. Dan (the bastard!) turned on his friend and shot him point blank, thus evading arrest. He continued being a great criminal – as in, great at being a criminal, not just great in general – and had a good ol' time.

But Mad Dan was more than your simple run-of-the-mill hooligan.

When holding various businesses at gunpoint, he would steal alcohol from the business’ stash and feed it to his tied-up prisoner’s/hostages.

At his core, Mad Dan may have been little more than a lonely boy, looking for a classic rave. But, alas, he wasn’t

quite cut out for the party life, instead getting annoyed at the noise-levels, and then blowing people’s brains out (classic “this music’s too loud” move).

At other times he made people cook for him naked, forced women to sit on fires, pretended to be a house guest at the places he robbed, and was generally a bit of a weird bloke.

Finally, after years of shenanigans, Mad Dan Morgan came to his untimely end when he was shot in the back by police, but, luckily, the fun didn’t end there. After his death, Mad Dan was identified by literally almost a hundred of the people that he held up: his face was CUT OFF (how?) and his scrotum was made into tobacco pouches – no doubt passed down through the generations. If you have a Mad Dan tobacco pouch please slide into my DMs. And there you have it, folks. The fun, weird and overall exciting life of Mad Dan Morgan (who should be known as ‘Down the River Jack’, because it’s by far his best name): an all-round kooky guy with a flair for dramatics, and no conscience.

PROMPTED // FEATURES

Vol. 68, Issue 11

16

The Puzzle of Legacy Text: Abigail Manning Graphic: Millie Wang

When do our habits become our legacy?

My grandma used to have the daily paper thrown onto her front lawn every morning. She would sit on the couch by the window and read, circling the occasional spelling mistake in black pen, then do the crosswords.

I remember sitting next to her, trying to help with the word jumbles, and brainstorm answers to tricky clues.

Sometimes a topic I knew well would come up, animals, gemstones, classical mythology, and in excitement I would blurt out a list of possible words. She would humour me, though normally the gemstone would end up being RUBY, and the snake an ASP. This pattern was often the case, and I remember being in awe of how nan seemed to know what many of the words would be purely through practice. ‘To make lace’ was always TAT, ‘Cult’ was always SECT. You see the thing with crosswords is that they are harder to make than they are to solve.

The people who create them have their own little toolbox of useful words.

Short words with common vowels that can fill a gap, or pieces of obscure vocabulary that they find fun to include.

If you solve the crosswords written by the same person enough, you start to notice their style, and get a peculiar insight into how they see language and the world.

One thing that always intrigued me as a child were the cryptic crosswords.

They seemed so bizarre, this list of nonsense sentences among all the straightforward synonyms. Often nan and I would start reading the clues out to each other and laughing. One day when I was around 11, I read about how cryptic crossword clues were

made, and to my delight discovered there was a method hidden in the cacophony of words. Rather than try to use this knowledge to solve the cryptic crossword that day, I decided instead to write my own. I drew up a grid, and wrote some rather obvious clues, plus a couple that were so tangential they didn’t even make sense. Then I took the crossword to my grandma’s house.

I was halfway through writing this when I found out nan had passed away. It isn’t sudden, and indeed my reason for writing this was originally to reflect on how even though dementia and old age have taken a lot of her sharpness, so many of my memories will be of her teaching me things, solving puzzles, and lots of laughter. Now I find myself having to regard those memories as even more precious, because there will no longer be any more.

The day I took her the cryptic crossword I had written she was delighted, and sat and patiently solved all my clues. This was how I always remember her being, constantly encouraging me to learn and embrace my love of words and knowledge. Long since retired before I was born, she had been a primary school teacher. All through my childhood her passion for education and learning shepherded me. I remember her taking me to the library to borrow picture books. Or creating games to teach me to read and do basic arithmetic.

Every year on my birthday she and my granddad would buy me a ‘true book’, encyclopedias, almanacs, books of fun facts, a beautiful dictionary and thesaurus. I still have the globe of the world they gifted me, the stacks of national geographic magazines they subscribed me to, and the postcards from

all over the world nan would lovingly write when they travelled.

When you lose someone, you remember the times you had with them. I think the hardest thing about seeing nan deteriorate was that there was a sense of guilt and loss in reminiscing of times spent with her before she got ill. As if I was mourning her while she was still alive, and doing her a disservice by focussing on the past when I should have been treasuring the present. Now she is at peace, and I can remember, with tears, or with wistful smiles.

The lunches we would have, at various cafes around Milton and Ulladulla, and rank various aspects of the food, ambience, and service, in a little notebook. Playing at being restaurant critics, for something to giggle about.

Or the lunches where we would sit in nan’s house and have a feast of party pies, and fish and chips, and watch murder mysteries on tv.

I guess habits become our legacy when they capture a part of our personality that is treasured by those who loved us. It is the nature of memory that the things oft repeated are the ones that will stick in our minds. Our habits, our quirks, the little traditions we create with each other, they make up the tapestry of memories that remain of us with the people we leave behind.

Don’t worry nan, I’ll keep doing crosswords for you.

17

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

From the archives Photos from the Woroni Archives

PROMPTED // FEATURES

Vol. 68, Issue 11

PROMPTED // MULTILINGUAL

नार ीत्व Womanhood Written and translated by: Jolly Bhattacharjee Graphic: Millie Wang Language: Hindi

मैं वो हूँ जो है च िं त ा क ी स ीमा से परे ,ज िसे कोई बं ध न न घे रे ज िसक ी सौमयता सब निहारे ,मु श ्किलों में ज िससे सब पु क ारे | खोलकर अपने सोच क ी स ीमा , मु झे उड़ने दो होकर निडर , च ीत्कार कर उठता है मन जब नह ीं करता है कोई मे र ी कदर || कभ ी बन ी माँ ,कभ ी पत् नी,बे ट ी या बहू, सालों से स ींचा है मैं ने र िश्तों को दे क र अपना लहू | वजय ी आत्मा है तै य ार ज ीतने को धरत ी , शक् ति का प्रत ीक आजक ी हर एक लड़क ी || निष्पाप बचपन रहे ग ा ज ीवित हममें , सफलता पा चु क ी मैं दफ्तारों और घरों में | चड़ चु क ी मैं पहाड़ , अं त र िक्ष को भ ी है मैं ने छु आ , हाँ मैं हूँ , मैं वह ी हूँ , ईश्वर क ी अनमोल दुआ ||

Unbound by ties, unlimited in thoughts, With bountiful grace and depth that sorts Unpack your imagination to discover the eternal beauty that lies within me yes I am she, yes I am she

The victorious soul which conquers the world, the powerful face in every girl I cross all odds to reach my dreams, when taken for granted my bleeding heart screams The amaranthine child who never dies in me yes I am she, yes I am she

I climbed mountains, I reached the space.

I am the queen, I am the God’s grace Let me cherish womanhood and fathom the strength in me yes I am she, yes I am she

18

19

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

Prompted // MULTILINGUAL

ある夏の殺人 A Murder One Summer CONTENT WARNING: Depiction of murder 閲覧注意 Written and translated by: Aya McKinnon Graphic: Sophie Bear Language: Japanese

彦根駅で下車すると熱 風が待ち受ける。 滋賀は東京より暑く、 セミが騒々 しい。ホームに人影はなく電車 は静かに私を置き去りにする。 改札を抜け、１年ぶりに駅の構 内を見渡す。公衆電話。自動 販売機。田舎はいつだって変 わらない。駅員だけが見覚えな く、好奇の目で私を見る。午後 ２時を過ぎ、暑さで息苦しい。 彼はどうしても目に止まってしま う。家庭教師やバレー教室の 広告に埋もれ、相変わらず私を 見つめてくる。あまりにも分か りにくい似顔絵でもう少しはっ きりした物を描けなかったのか と腹立たしく思える。目元のコ ブ以外目立った特徴はない。こ んな男性どこにだっている。 ポスターの上半分には大き く「琵琶湖バラバラ事件—情 報提供お願いします」と記し てある。日付は２００８年六 月。十周年だ、と不謹慎な私 は思ってしまう。うっすらほこり を被るそれは色あせ、最早景 色の一部である。未だに名無 しの彼は静かに情報を待つ。

ああ、暑い。 セミの声で耳が潰れそうだ。

２００８年、１０歳の夏。近江 八幡市の琵琶湖岸に男性の頭 部、左足、左手、右手が打ち 上げられた。滋賀のような眠た い田舎でこのような生々しい事 件が起こるのは稀であり、滋賀 県民は一時パニックに陥った。 彼の似顔絵を乗せたチラシが 配られ警察は数週間以内に身 元が判明する事を期待した。 一ヶ月後、身元不明なままの遺 体に警察は焦り、男性の似顔 絵が駅前の電柱やデパートの広

告板に貼られるようになった。 同じ夏に私は兄弟とトンボを 追いかけ琵琶湖でシジミを 集めた。田舎の夏は瑠璃色 であまりにも楽しく、彼の遺 体が浮かんだ同じ水の中では しゃぎまくり茶色に焼け、松 の木の間を跳ねまわった。 危機感など一切感 じなかった 。 １９歳の今、事件にどうしても 執着してしまう自分がいる。彼 はだれなのか。なぜ誰も彼を 迎えにこないのか。そもそも 彼はここの人なのか。東京の人 では無いのかという説もある。 田舎でもこのような事件があ るのか、田舎だからこのよう な事件が起こってしまうのか。 犯人はまだここにいるのでは ないだろうか。番場の道を歩 き、田んぼのあぜ道で塩おに ぎりを食べ、夕方には自分が 死体を捨てた湖を見つめる時 もあるのではないだろうか。 （そう思うと背筋が凍る。） 琵琶湖は相変わらず静か に私の足元に寄り添う。 三津屋にむかうバスはいつも からっぽ。運転手が私に目を 向ける。平日この時間、琵琶 湖の砂浜は無人である。 田ん ぼが地平線まで続く。琵琶湖 の湖岸に佇む家は古く、瓦の 屋根が太陽の下できらめく。 １９歳になって色々変わっ てしまった。もうあの無邪 気さは手に届かない。あ の夏にはもう戻れない。

A scorching wind awaits me as I disembark at Hikone.

Shiga is hotter than Tokyo. The cicadas cause a racket. The platform is deserted and the train pulls away quietly, leaving me alone.

I pass through the ticket barriers to survey the station for the first

time in a year. The payphone.

Vending machine. The country never changes. Only the station attendant is unfamiliar and observes me with an expression of curiosity. It is past 2:00PM. The heat suffocates me.

I can’t help but look at him. He stares up at me as always, buried between advertisements for tutors and ballet class. The sketch is so vague that I feel irritation at the fact that they had not drawn something more descriptive.

Apart from a mole beneath his eye, there are no outstanding features.

You can find men like this anywhere.

In the upper half of the poster “Biwa lake decapitation incident – information wanted” is printed in bold lettering. The date shows June 2008. Tenth-anniversary, a blunt part of me thinks. The poster has become part of the scenery, faded and resting beneath a fine layer of dust. The nameless man quietly awaits information.

Christ, it’s hot.

The cicadas turn deafening.

I was ten years old in the summer of 2008 when the head, right leg, right hand and left hand of an unknown male washed up on the shore of Lake Biwa in Oumi-Hachiman. It is rare for such a gruesome incident to occur in a sleepy country town like Shiga.

The news sparked panic within the community. Flyers featuring his face were distributed and police expected his identity to be revealed within the following few weeks.

One month later, the still unidentified body sent police into a frenzy and the man’s face came to be plastered on light poles in front of stations and advertisement

boards in department stores.

The same summer my siblings and I chased grasshoppers and hunted shellfish in Lake Biwa.

Our summer was the colour of lapis and so exhilarating. We frolicked in the same water his body had floated in, burnt brown and bouncing through pine trees.

We felt no sense of danger.

Now at nineteen years old, I find myself fixated upon the incident.

Who is he? Why won’t anybody come to get him? Is he even a person from here? There is a theory that he may be a person from Tokyo.

Are there incidents like this even in the country? Or are there incidents like this because it’s the country?

I wonder if the murderer is still here. Whether he walks the streets of Banba, eats rice balls sat on the dirt paths between the fields. I wonder if at twilight he looks out to the lake where he once discarded a body.

(It makes my skin crawl.)

The lake nestles quietly by my feet.

The bus bound for Mitsuya is empty. The driver turns his eyes to me. At this time on a weekday Lake Biwa is deserted. Rice fields roll out to touch the horizon. The lakeside houses are old, tiled roofs glinting beneath the sun.

I’ve turned nineteen and many things have changed.

That innocence is beyond reach. I can never return to that summer.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

Prompted // MULTILINGUAL

宇宙 SPACE Written and translated by: Jonathan Hiroki Nonogaki Hunter Graphic: James Atkinson Language: Japanese

隠れようとするが、君は飛び跳ねるぞ 。 無限の空虚だ。 君は何物なのだ。 多分、白衣を着ている頭のいい人々がずっと君を見ている。 僕の理解を超えている。 考えとするが、頭の中は宇宙しかない。 恐怖を感じる僕である。 きっと君は僕の中にいるのだろう。 そうなる僕は宇宙人なのかな。 地球人かもしれない。 どっちも嫌だ。 僕は意味無い人生が欲しいのだ。 線路の近くにあるアパートに住みたいんだ。 ウイスキーを飲んでチーズを食べたいんだ。 だが君は何も無さすぎるのだよ。 どこ見ても宇宙、目を瞑ると宇宙。 どっか遠く行ってくれ。 そう言っても、宇宙にしか行けない君である。

Overflowing, you are leaping above.

An infinite source of empty.

Who are you?

Probably, smart people wearing white robes are always staring at you.

Clearly, you have surpassed my understanding.

I try to think, but my mind is filled with space.

How you scare me.

Probably, you are somewhere hidden inside of me.

If that were the case, am I a spaceman?

I could be an earthman too.

I don’t want to be either.

I just want a meaningless life.

I want to live in an apartment near the train line.

I want to drink whiskey and eat cheese.

But you have too much of nothing.

Everywhere I look it’s space. Close my eyes and it’s space.

Go away some place far.

I say that, but you can only go to space.

20

21

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

The

s n o Spo Pull-out Welcome to the 2018 Woroni Spoons Pull-out.

This pull-out has been entirely created by students who identify as having a disability. Juggling study, work and social lives can be hard enough, but when you throw illness and disability into the mix the challenges can seem overwhelming. All the people who wrote for this pull-out, and indeed every single student at ANU who identifies as having a disability, face insurmountable challenges every day. Access, medication, stereotyping. And misrepresentation. The aim of this pull-out is to showcase the voices are our community who, in the face of hardships, are so very strong.

These are their stories.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

22

The Importance of SurfaceLevel Awareness Raising for Mental Health CW: Discussion of mental health, mention of bipolar disorder and disordered eating.

Eleanor Armstrong Eleanor is a member of the batyr@anu executive team and has spoken for batyr.

In the wake of large scale events, such as Mental Health Day on 10th October, there is often conversation to do with the value of awareness-raising campaigns. People may question the value of such initiatives that seem only to only scratch the surface of the tough issues, or even ‘trivialise’ the lived experiences of those with mental ill-health. Messages such as ‘reach out’, ‘ask your friend if they’re OK’ or ‘self-care’ can feel empty or potentially patronising to someone who struggles with ‘real’ deep-seated demons. In the ANU context, these campaigns can feel especially empty given the strain on the mental health and pastoral care resources available and the over-saturation of government outreach bodies.

I’d like to make a case in favour of these campaigns; to demonstrate that they make an impact upon the community by doing more than just getting people ‘talking about it’. While only, for example, writing down ‘one thing I’ll do for my mental health this year’ may seem meaningless, it can be the start of intention setting and a conversation with friends. In no way do organisations in the early intervention campaign space think they can fix major issues, such as overworked counsellors and poor quality of service. They aim, instead, to start discussion before and beyond when many individuals reach a crisis point. A seed planted is worth far more than nothing at all, especially when it doesn’t require excessive amounts of effort from the recipient. The reality is that most people don’t often set aside a dedicated period to talk about mental ill-health and check in with each other, so having a day or an occasion is necessary. It is often friends who are first responders to disclosure of mental ill-health, and it is important to nourish a culture of acceptance and proactive

listening within that demographic. Rather than being shallow, these campaigns are an important way to broach a somewhat uncomfortable subject for many people.

This is especially important when people of a variety of backgrounds and levels of exposure to ideas relating to mental ill-health convene in a place like a university, so as to avoid a self-perpetuating stigma cycle exacerbated by lack of understanding.

Mental health awareness campaigns should aim to be intersectional and cater for a variety of experiences, by understanding that different cultures, abilities, genders (among other things) all experience mental ill-health differently. This is due to the combination of various stigmas they must contend with. For instance, not everyone can relate to ‘keeping a stiff upper lip mentality’ as a prerogative and similarly, not everyone is comfortable talking about ‘feelings’.

Issues relating to identity and acceptance can also be a major source of stress for young people, making this especially important.

Ultimately, the aim of these campaigns is to promote understanding, leading to a climate in which people feel as though they can seek help. However, it is also worth noting that increased help-seeking leads to increased demand, so it is important that the support is there for those who seek it, so as not to be a discouraging experience. If most people in the community understand the prevalence of these situations, and friends can also recognise symptoms of mental ill-health in their peers, a more proactive and recovery-oriented environment is created for those in the middle of a period of poor mental health.

It is impractical to initially engage a wide audience with sudden deep analyses of the scourge of mental ill-health upon the population. Sometimes it is necessary to cater to a particular audience,

on a practical level, as the general public is not necessarily inclined to want to listen to information that can get them down themselves.

Presenting the issue of mental health (with sensitivity of course) in an upbeat and smile-first way is both pleasant and pragmatic rather than ridiculous. This is the way in which organisations are often able to recruit wider support – such as in the corporate sphere – where issues such as ‘image’ do come into play. At the end of the day, these are the bodies with resources to contribute towards genuine research, education and general progress when it comes to the support of people living with mental ill-health. It may be worth spending a bit of money on merchandise or social media if it means that it will one day result in a substantial donation. Such a dilemma is one faced by many of those in advocacy roles, but an outcomes-focussed approach can be preferable over a highly principled, yet unproductive, one.

However, mental health advocacy is of course about more than just the slogans and the marketing. Despite the stigma surrounding the more common examples of mental ill-health (like depression and anxiety) being gradually broken down, this is not applied universally across the board. There certainly needs to be more attention paid to the less commonly understood varieties of mental ill-health.

There remains a divide between the ‘crazy’ and the ‘down/stressed’. Whilst people are often happy to talk about mental ill-health in terms of ‘wellbeing’, conditions such as bipolar disorder and eating disorders still often elicit some level of judgement and the potential perception of fault of the individual. It is generally more acceptable to a degree nowadays to be ‘not doing so well’ – people are practicing greater forgiveness for themselves and each other.

Yet, there are certainly some problematic characteristics

of the ways in which ‘not being OK’ can be romanticised in internet culture and how the narrative of ‘I have problems so I’m different/special’ is played out in the minds of young people as a result. It is also important to note the divide between having a ‘bad day’ and having substantial periods of mental ill-health, so as not to create misunderstanding or to invalidate the experiences of those with these difficulties. This is where health providers and educators can work together to elucidate what mental ill-health actually looks like.

Furthermore, there is a place for dedicated organisations that aim at general prevention, reducing stigma and wider culture change – such as batyr. It is going to be the university students of today at the helm of meaningful whole-community change in a decade or so. This doesn’t have to necessarily be in direct mental health action, but can be involved in disseminating attitudes in the workplace in the long term.

So, next time someone on campus or at your residential hall wants to run what seems like ‘just another awareness campaign’, know that, whilst there is still much to be improved upon in the mental health advocacy sphere, it could be the conversation that helps a person too afraid to address topics that are ‘deep’ or ‘difficult’ to speak up. Whilst many mental health services are terribly under-funded and those contending with mental illhealth are under-supported, it is still important to open dialogue. If an environment is created where help-seeking for a mental health condition is encouraged, that could be the difference between one person reaching out or suffering in silence.

If a simple campaign makes even a bit of a positive impact on someone’s well-being, surely then, it’s worth it.

23

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

OCDon'T CW: Discussion and Description of OCD. Anonymous I’m sitting in a cafe just off-campus sipping overpriced coffee at 3:30 in the afternoon when it occurs to me that I don’t know how to write this story. I can give a list of dos and don’ts, but that’s kind of overplayed, isn’t it? Lists are, by and large, boring. I’ve written and edited too many in this past semester. There’s got to be something else.

I could write a poem – sure, it’s been a while since I last sat down and put my thoughts down in that way, but leaving room for interpretation means nothing can really be pinned on me when it comes down to it. Oh, you read that poem as a metaphor for [insert subject here]?

Cool, cool. I’m open to that.

Maybe I should tell this story for what it is: a story. I was nineteen when I got my first real job at a cafe, and one of the supervisors was showing me the ropes. She was heaving the doughnut mixing bowl to the dishwasher and blasting leftover dough off the rim with the pressure hose. "Usually people just leave it here," she shouted over the spray, "but I'm a little OCD, so I clean it."

I laughed politely and changed the subject. A year later, I had another job, and another supervisor said the exact same thing. I don't doubt that any workplace, in food service all the way to Tesla, is free of the most tried

and tested joke in the book: I’m a little OCD. Aren’t we all?

routine, then all the things I'm scared of won't happen.

Here’s another story: I’m fifteen and talking to a psychiatrist because I freeze up and panic when there’s a mess. I’m sixteen and my therapist tells me that no, most people don’t have a capital-T Thing about the number five. I’m seventeen and I graduate high school with a decent ATAR – nothing to brag about because I figured that I didn’t really deserve the extra points from disability support. I’m eighteen and uni is great, except I’m taking three showers a day to make sure things stay that way.

Here’s the thing: whenever someone makes an OCD joke, no matter how benign, it takes that whole experience and slam-dunks it in the trash. According to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, approximately 1.9 per cent of all Australians live with OCD. That’s just a conservative estimate because this condition is so heavily stigmatised that people don’t want to talk about their own experiences. Whenever someone makes an OCD joke, it’s more than just making a joke: it’s trivialising the stories of every single one of those people, and more.

The ‘too long, didn’t read’ definition of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is this: an anxiety disorder categorised by the presence of obsessive thoughts and/or compulsive behaviours. Obsessions are recurring intrusive thoughts that cause significant amounts of distress; compulsions are the repetitive actions or counter-thoughts used to combat that distress. Here's the kicker: people with OCD are fully aware that most of the time, the connection between our obsessions and compulsions is totally arbitrary. I know three showers aren't going to give me an HD-average, but damn if my OCD is going to test that.

This is magical thinking in action; if I stick to this completely random, capricious

I don’t want to sound preachy – we all know by now that preaching just pisses people off. Preaching is what pushes people away, and right now I want to connect us through the common goal of not being a dickhead. So, let’s try it out for a change: don’t be a dickhead. Next time you want to describe something as OCD (and this goes for any disorder), take a second to think about what you’re really saying.

Because eventually, I want to tell this story without being just another part of

Vol. 68, Issue 11

stop my storm Julia Faragher

I know that you don’t see My brokenness inside The way I cry at night How I cower and I hide You’ve never understood How my weakness is within That I am followed by my fear And it prickles at my skin But when you call me empty Something in me starts to crack I become the hunted And you, the animal on attack If you knew emptiness The way I only do Trust me, you’d hate it If I called you empty, too – jnf, “WHEN YOU CALL ME EMPTY”

I am told to take control Of the weather in my head To ignore those dark clouds Dream a pleasant day instead Apparently it’s that simple Just push all the bad away But that only stops the rain My day is still as grey I can’t adjust my mind Just like I can’t control the sky Outside my classroom window That rages while I cry There’s a storm inside my head The grey and gloomy backdrop To all these pointless words Want to actually help it stop?

– jnf, “STOP MY STORM”

24

25

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

ROBot leg Jeremy Tsuei She called it a robot leg.

I mean, I wished it was. That it would fizz and whirr into motion, then propel me across that primary school hall to that the other side so far away, so I could look back to her, and look around, and Did you see that?

I think I nodded along. Yeah, it’s a robot leg. What else is it? What else could it be?

Did they have a word to describe them? Barely padded plastic brackets that I had to be fitted into whenever I grew (they had a Rubik's cube there in the clinic in Sydney), that the specialist (also in Sydney) would always ask about, that made me need to shop for two shoe sizes, that got so hot in summer, that got discoloured around my toes where I would press in, that stuck to my skin and kept my ankle from moving because if you let it then it would move and tippy toes – tippy toes were bad.

A splint, I think. But that was a word from another world. I didn’t know what the doctors meant when they said it.

So I nodded along to robot leg.

Cool! She smiled a bit, then walked off to somewhere else.

Was that- was that me? Hey – I was the robot leg kid. Robot leg. Robot leg. The robot leg was cool.

Optimus Prime had a robot leg. He had two robot legs, and they had wheels on the side, and would fold backwards when he turned into a truck. And he was cool.

And it would go clunk, clunk, clunk when I walked but that was the sound of the robot leg, and it was cool.

Yeah, robot leg!

But then I noticed that all the other kids didn’t have robot legs. They didn’t seem to need them. And they could run, and play handball, and walk through the bushes without getting twigs stuck inside their legs.

Faster, easier, more balanced. Perhaps I wondered if I would be able to move as fast, as easy, as balanced if I didn’t have a robot leg.

And the robot leg was cool, but wasn’t it also cool to do all that other stuff, go out there, and tumble, and roll, and play? Soccer was a foreign word. There was no point trying in the cross country because I knew I’d be at the end. I threw up a barrier at even the notion of speed. It wasn’t for me. Couldn’t be for me. But wasn’t it cool when they did it?

I wasn’t the only one with a robot leg.

His had camo on it. It was gaudy because the brown looked like skin, and the robot leg wasn’t made of skin. His was worse than mine. He had more of a limp, needed to wear glasses. I saw him at events, sometimes at the Governor-General’s house with the party pies, sometimes in the Exhibition Park with the fire truck and everything – but I never talked to him.

It was like It was like a funhouse mirror. Things blurred and distorted – blown and exaggerated.

Things ballooned, bloated; they were ugly, unnatural masses, and they didn’t work properly, and nothing fit. He didn’t run, he didn’t play handball, he didn’t go walking around in the bushes.

And if he’s reading this right now, I’m sorry. Because it was them, or him, and I chose them.

I hated that robot leg. I wish I could have just said ‘oh, cool’ and walked away from it, like she did.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

26

That One Time Google Told Me to Figure it Out Myself.

Madeleine Sinnis I'm someone who is in limbo.

On paper, I have a disability, although this is something that I'm too afraid to say out loud. I'm afraid that people will not believe me or even criticise me for claiming to have a disability. A big part of me agrees with them, and that's why for the most part, I don't identify as someone who is disabled. I'm not physically disabled, and to most people, I don't seem to be limited in what I can do.

However, every day I have to take medication in order to function as a regular person. I can't do certain things that most people have the option of doing.

Every once in a while, something will happen that will remind me that I am not normal. That I have a mutation that nothing or no one had any control over.

I suffer from epilepsy. Juvenile Myoclonic epilepsy, to be specific. When I saw a post asking for those who identify as suffering from a disability to share their story, I kept scrolling. I assumed it didn’t apply to me. It didn’t stop me from asking myself – is epilepsy a disability? Am I someone who is, on paper, disabled?

I turned to Google (I know, don’t judge me). According to Epilepsy Action Australia, “most people with epilepsy do not consider themselves to have a disability especially if they do not experience significant limitations…Regardless of how or when epilepsy developed and if it is completely controlled with medication, people with epilepsy are protected by the Disability Discrimination Act.” So essentially Google was telling me to figure it out myself – do I identify as being disabled or not? As someone who has grown up with a disabled sibling and seen the struggles, stigma,

assumptions and limitations that my sibling faces – no, I don’t identify as suffering from a disability. When I think about this, a part of me feels ridiculous for even considering writing an article about me and my epilepsy.

However, before I settled things then and there – I decided to turn to one other source of information. The source that always manages to answer the questions that Google can’t. I went to my Mum. So at 11:30 pm on a Tuesday night, I flicked Mum a message, asking her if she thinks my epilepsy is a disability. Her answer reminded me of all of the changes myself, and my family, have had to make. Of how my epilepsy has really impacted my life.

Every day, twice a day, I have to take medication. If I don't, then I start having fits.

One fit, and I legally can't drive for 12 months. When everyone else was turning 16 and getting their licence, I had to wait 18 months before I could drive due to fits and medication changes.

I also constantly find myself in a tricky situation – the main precipitators of my fits are stress and lack of sleep. As I am a university student, stress and late nights are unfortunately too common. Exam period has the extra stress of me waiting for a fit to happen, but I’ve been very lucky that so far I haven’t experienced any major fits or seizures.

However, one of the scariest parts about all of this is that generalised tonic-clonic seizures (also known as grand mal seizures, that cause your entire body to spasm and convulse and there is nothing you can do to stop them) are reported in nearly every person who has Juvenile Myoclonic epilepsy. I have never suffered from one of these, but I have been told

to be prepared for it. I don’t know when, where, why or even if it will happen – all I know is that at any moment I could go into a full-blown seizure and have no control.

When I think about my family, I am reminded that my epilepsy has had an impact on my them, and not just myself. From the medications and emotional mood swings that go with them to the VERY expensive neurologist appointments – my family were there for it all. The random calls I get from Mum reminding me about SUDEP (sudden unexpected death in epilepsy) and how she is worried I’ll become a statistic reminds me that even if I’m not worried about my epilepsy, my family certainly is.

Ultimately, I’m lucky that I have access to medications and specialists which allow me to live a relatively ‘normal’ life – something which I have realised is a privilege that too many people are not able to access.

I would encourage everyone reading this to go and support groups such as the ANU Disabilities Student Association and advocate for those who have disabilities to be given a fair go. From the NDIS to the resources that are available here at the ANU we can always do better to support those who rely on these resources – – and we must do better.

27

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

On Being (Re) diagnosed By

steoh

Stephanie Kerr About eighteen months ago I wrote an article for Woroni for a Spoons edition, about being a type-1 diabetic. So here I am again, doing the exact same thing. What has changed? Where is my new material? Surely I have moved on, expressed whatever sentiment I needed to last time. Maybe there is a new medical breakthrough in the field? And we are one step closer to a cure? Except, there isn’t, and, we’re not.

Everything I faced eighteen months ago, I still face today, and will face again tomorrow. Inevitably I am just a little more wearied by it all, a little more frustrated that things don’t seem to have gotten ‘better’. But how can they, when I’ve so far rejected this part of myself?

It is like that old myth that lightning never strikes in the same place twice. I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was ten years old, yet as I approach my twenty-second birthday, it feels as though I am dealing with it afresh all over again. I have found that with the diagnosis of a chronic illness comes a second diagnosis; a time much later when you feel the same initial confusion, anxiety and isolation you felt all those years ago.

A time when you are, in a sense, reawakened to the fact that this illness is a fundamental aspect of your life.

The tiny part of you which harboured some false, unhelpful hope that it was all only temporary is shattered, and in its place crashes the weighted realisation that this is permanent.

For me, this probably correlates with a more defined move into adulthood. Along with the usual angst and worries we all feel about the future and its uncertainty, there is an additional feeling

of suffocation in acknowledging that whatever direction you are headed in, you will have your illness trailing along behind you the whole time. Financial anxieties are a given; before I even engage in the debate between smashed avocado v owning a house, my thoughts are whether I will eventually be able to afford all my medical costs. My insulin pump, a machine which administers insulin through a cannula, costs around $10,000 if not covered by private health insurance. Those who know me are aware that I do not have a single maternal instinct within me; yet if I ever want to consider having children in the future, being a type-1 diabetic already means I have a higher chance of infertility, as well as carrying increased risks of birth defects, heart abnormalities and miscarriage.

Then there is the rather morbid issue of confronting your own mortality almost on a daily basis. In addition to a host of complications, such as neuropathy, mismanagement of type1 diabetes can be fatal. I don’t get anxious about growing old; I get anxious that I may never get the chance to grow old at all.

I remember crying to my friend after school one day when I was eleven, telling her that I wouldn’t live past the age of fifty. Now, I actually have no idea where I had pulled that number from, and it was fairly dramatic and unfounded, but when something as simple as forgetting a spare AAA battery for my insulin pump can be a life-threatening mistake, it isn’t easy to remain so rational, or even hopeful, about the future.

Part of me still hurts for the scared and confused young girl that I was, and part of me still empathises too – because she seems to have resurfaced lately.

So, the shiny allure of finally receiving Youth Allowance has been somewhat eclipsed by being re-diagnosed.

However, instead of ignoring it, or trying to so desperately pretend it doesn’t exist, this time around I am acutely aware that the only helpful response is to accept it. In the past I have tried to prevent it from limiting me in anyway, but anything I achieved I did so fighting against my body: I wanted to prove that I could accomplish things in spite of being diabetic, rather than being capable of things as a diabetic.

To ‘embrace’ my illness is a bit ambitious for me, but a good first step is at least acknowledging it as something that shapes the person I am and aspire to be.

That doesn’t mean it has to define me, but if I don’t start aligning goals for managing my illness with my ambitions for the future, I may not have a very bright one.

If I compare what I wrote last year to what I am writing now, I realise that before I was challenging others to understand and accept diabetes, without actually having done that myself. My new challenge is now a personal one, and I hope that maybe in eighteen months’ time I will be able to reflect on this period of re-diagnosis as a formative and strengthening moment. And maybe I will even write about it again.

Vol. 68, Issue 11

28

On Fibromyalgia CW: Discussion of chronic illness.

Miriam Sadler The first doctor said “it’s a legitimate illness, and it can be very painful”. In some ways, that gave me hope –- my pain was validated. The second doctor said “well I don’t really believe in that”. I let him treat me for a year and I think his disbelief did just as much damage as the illness itself. The third doctor said “well it’s just a diagnosis of elimination, it doesn’t mean very much”’. By that time, I was immune to the scepticism.

It had been three years and I’d heard this a lot.

order to get access to drugs.

Fibromyalgia is a condition characterised by widespread pain, extreme fatigue and sleep problems.

Some people report having a kind of ‘foggy’ brain, where they feel they can’t remember simple things they used to know. There is no known cause or cure. Sometimes it is attributed to a combination of genetic and environmental factors, especially a physical or mental trauma.

Some think it is a problem with the way the brain processes pain, in that all pain is being amplified to unprecedented levels. Others think it’s ‘all in the brain’ (as in our brains are making it up), but I reject this –- all pain comes from the brain.

Fibromyalgia disproportionately affects women, and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that this alone has denied thousands of people proper treatment and support. It is a societal shame that women presenting with agonising pain are not believed, are accused of being a drug addict or have all their symptoms chalked down to depression. My hairdresser opened up to me about his struggle with fibromyalgia and it felt like he was talking about a different illness. He was supported, his doctors nipped it in the bud through telling him exactly what treatments (yoga and diet change) would work for him. They even helped him get a nutritionist. And then there was me, sitting there, thinking about how I couldn’t even get my doctor to believe in holistic practices. In fact, I couldn’t even get him to believe me.

None of this is actually very helpful to someone living with possible fibromyalgia pain. There is really no medicine to help; Panadol and Nurofen are essentially useless (in my experience) and doctors will rarely prescribe anything stronger. This is primarily because stronger drugs are not thought to make any difference to the pain anyway. But it is the case also that too many people believe fibromyalgia sufferers have just made up a bunch of symptoms in

Trust me it wouldn’t be worth it. I’ve read horror stories online of people in screaming in pain only to be denied proper care in hospital. I’ve heard hundreds of people talk about the years it took to get a diagnosis and the amount of bureaucratic disbelief they had to push against. I personally spent hours of my time with doctors, having MRIs and going over things time again before I was told it was probably fibromyalgia.

People with fibromyalgia are angry. Go on to any online forum and you’ll find people who’ve been trodden on by the system. They are fighting these battles every day, and worst of all, they’re in severe pain during all of it. It’s no wonder the rates of people with

fibromyalgia who don’t believe it’s actually a real condition are still pretty high For a long time –- too long –- I have been one of those people. My relationship with fibromyalgia is fraught at best. I’ve been conditioned by the scepticism of those around me to be a sceptic myself. But where has that left me? The word is so hard for me, I don’t even say it.

I can’t remember the last time I said to someone “I have fibromyalgia”. Mostly I say “I have chronic pain”.

Often I just say “I’m fine.” I have lied to a lot of people about the level of pain I’m in.

And who am I hurting? Just myself. The controversy and vitriol directed at fibromyalgia is denying my pain, denying who I at this moment.

The goal is then to be myself, start making a fuss and start getting people to listen. But we as a whole need to change the way we talk about pain. Change the way we listen to women in pain with no obvious physical trauma. Because I can promise you, if someone tells you they have fibromyalgia, they don’t want your sympathy, your opinion or your drugs –- they want you to say “I believe you”.

29

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

CULTURE // ARTS

Framing Trans Characters and Other Artistic EndeavoUrs Text: Al Azmi Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

My most memorable experience of realizing a character was transgender was in a webcomic. It wasn't an especially grandiose moment, only a few panels of lines and colors and pixels. I remember exhaling - feeling like all the air had been pushed out of my lungs as the recognition hit me square in the chest. It was a transmasculine character casually taking off their shirt, revealing a binder underneath. No fuss, no fanfare, no surprise or discussion or "very special moment" acknowledging that they were trans.

You, my mind whispered. I recognize you. I know you better than the back of my hand.

Because really, who spends that much time looking at the back of their hands anyway? Not me, that's for sure. But this? This nebulous feeling, the subtle wrongness of trying to fit into any definition of "woman", the yearning of seeing T-shirts that lay flush against flat chests. Yes, I knew the feeling very well.

The name of the webcomic itself has long been lost to the haze of memory, but that particular moment felt

like a revelation. Finally seeing someone like myself in a story – not only present, but tangible - was euphoric.

Of course, there are other systemic issues with the representation of trans people in our media. Firstly, there was an absolute dearth of trans representation in any sort of mainstream media until very recently, despite the fact that we have always existed - in every culture, across every time period. This non-representation is an even worse problem for trans and gender diverse people of color, who are basically non-existent in popular media.

It took me a long time to realize that non-binary person of colour was even an identity that I could claim, a thing that I could be. A lot of that stemmed from not seeing anyone who looked like me or who felt the way I felt represented anywhere at all. Even now, the question of where exactly people like me belong remains. The shedding of identities that needs to take place just to fit into one place or another (cultural spaces, religious spaces, queer spaces) still gnaws at me regularly.

Then there is widespread practice of hiring cisgender actors, and those of the wrong gender especially, to play trans characters. This does tangible harm. Not only does it deprive trans actors of already scarce roles, it also solidifies the perception of trans people — trans women especially — as

just cis people playing dress-up. Consciously or not, when people see cis actors such as Jeffrey Tambor or Jared Leto in their suits, receiving an award for playing trans characters, the image of trans women as just "men in a dress" gets another boost. These issues have been written about by trans people more eloquently than I ever could. I'm just touching on them briefly here to remind you that they exist, and they are important.

What I want to explore more deeply today is the framing of trans people in popular culture. I don't know if coming across the same webcomic – the same colours, the same panels - would have the same effect on me today. I had only just come out to myself back then, and everything was feeling fresh and raw and new. But why I think it affected me so much was the context with which the character was presented. They were just living their life, and being trans was only a part of them being a whole self. Until very recently, I think that that might've been the best way I had ever seen a medium disclose that a character was trans. Until, that is, the queer visual novel game Dream Daddy, where a character only has an offhand line about wearing a binder to indicate that he is not only a trans man, but trans father to boot, and it is

not even close to the most interesting thing about him. It is fabulous!

Of course, I'm not suggesting that throwaway casual lines are always the best way to achieve trans representation. After all, we don't want the Dumbledore situation all over again, where creators can just retroactively point to a character and say "they're queer now!". But I think the best way forward for creators, especially cis creators who have no lived trans experience, is to let their trans characters exist in the way that feels true to their setting, without trying to shoehorn an explanation or calling excessive attention to their trans-ness.

Many of us are so desperate for any representation at all that we tend to overlook the implicit "othering" that happens to trans characters just by the virtue of the way they are framed.

Every trans story is not a coming out story. Every trans person is not staring at a mirror putting on lipstick or binding their chest. A majority of the trans experience has to do with normal, mundane day-to-day living. Or hell, fantastic, high-flying superhero living! After all, we come in all shapes, shades and sizes. I think it's about high time our media reflects the complex, diverse and colorful realities lived by trans people every day.

CULTURE // ARTS

Vol. 68, Issue 11

30

Lost opportunity The Art of Unseen Things Text: Andy Yin Graphic: Maddy McCusker

Text: Andy Yin Graphic: Maddy McCusker

The works of Korean artist Yunchul Kim look more like apparatuses for esoteric experiments. They are dynamic, incorporating the complex movement of liquids and particles suspended in them. In Kim’s installations, invisible phenomena effect shifts in the artwork, causing change that’s seemingly chaotic.

Two of Kim’s recent pieces are being exhibited until November 3 at the Korean Cultural Centre in London. Argos (2018) and Triaxial Pillars II (2017) were designed to be displayed together.

Argos hangs from the ceiling like a discarded projector – an object seemingly stripped of its casing, leaving its components exposed. Dozens of embedded bulbs flash many times a second, erratic as camera flashes from a crowd.

Triaxial Pillars II stands beside it: a water-filled glass tube about as tall as a person. A mass of golden particles are suspended in the liquid. Responding to a hidden algorithm, a pump causes the particles to shift – at one moment, they streak upwards in a turbulent flow; at other moments, they move like a continuous whole, forming smooth folds like hot, runny metal.

Apparent chaos defines Kim’s works, yet there is reason behind it.

Argos is actually built from 41 Geiger-Müller tubes – the same radiation-detecting component as in a Geiger counter. They’re often used to detect radiation at particle accelerator facilities, or nuclear power plants. Argos uses them for another purpose – to detect cosmic rays.

The Earth is constantly bombarded by high-energy particles originating from outside the solar system. When they hit the atmosphere, they can transmute into showers of rare particles like muons, a.k.a. ‘heavy electrons.’

These particles live perilously short lives – 2 millionths of a second – before they decay, but it is long enough, and the detectors are sensitive enough, for their passage to be detected.

Each muon detection triggers a flash from Argos. On each flash, a signal is sent to the algorithm that controls Pillars. The golden particles within dance and shift like puppets on cosmic strings.

Yet, to the naked eye, the change is totally random. Cosmic rays deposit muons onto Earth’s surface at a flux of about one per square centimetre per minute – yet, without equipment, we would never see or feel them.

How the most invisible phenomena affects the behaviour of things we can see is a subject of fascination for Kim. He recalls being captivated by the iridescence of a CD – the rainbow colours reflecting off a disc that change

enigmatically as it’s moved in the light.

grains that were nanometres in size.

At the microscopic level, the disc’s aluminium coating is covered with grooves and bumps, which affect how it interacts with light. Light waves collide with the rough surface and reflect haphazardly, causing waves to overlap and interfere. Some wavelengths (colours) of light overlap and cancel out. Other wavelengths combine and reinforce into a stronger wave. So when you look at an iridescent object, some colours are absent, while others pop out vividly. Which wavelengths cancel and which wavelengths reinforce will shift depending on the angle at which the object is observed. So as you turn your head, you see the same object flash multiple colours. But you don’t see the complexity of wave interactions that produce this effect. You see and feel a smooth CD, not the true bumpy surface that’s revealed at the microscopic scale.

Given Kim’s scientific approach to art, it’s fitting that he was chosen from more than 900 artists for the COLLIDE International Award in 2016. Awarded by nuclear research organisation CERN, COLLIDE encourages dialogue and cross-pollination between scientists and artists.

As part of the prize, Kim spent a twomonth residency at CERN in 2017.

There, he met extensively with scientists, and toured CERN’s experimental facilities to find inspiration for his own work. “The most unforgettable experience was meeting with passionate and creative spirits,” Kim said of his residency, “Most importantly, they really understood the artists.”

Kim’s fascination with such phenomena blurs the line between art and science. Despite having no formal scientific training, he’s a hands-on experimenter in his own right. The metallic grains used in Pillars are of his own creation. Finding that physical grinding produced particles which were too coarse, he researched and performed a reaction between iron chloride and ammonia to produce

This mutual understanding should not come as a surprise. Just like artists, scientists are driven by an impulse to know the invisible structure behind what we can see – a drive to make the unknowable known. And few scientists represent this urge so fundamentally as particle physicists, like those at CERN. Fundamental particle interactions occur at a scale far removed from ordinary experience, far smaller than the scales of atoms and molecules that chemists study. To go to the lengths that organisations like CERN have, to build colossal machines like the Large Hadron Collider, requires extraordinary passion – and passion is something science and the arts have to share.

31

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

CULTURE // ARTS

Nostalgiart Text: Tabitha Malet Graphic: Jessica Benter Sometimes, when I imagine home, he has beach-tousled blonde hair, a collared shirt and a nose ring. He is gay, and a quiet icon. He has four million subscribers on Youtube and is inspired by storied pop sensations like Taylor Swift and Lorde. He grew up streets away from one of my high school friends; is going to my old gym instructor’s wedding next month. His music is “layered electropop”, complementing a smooth baritone voice. He sings about a lot of things, but captures the feeling of growing up in suburbia perfectly.

Sometimes, she is a girl in her mid-twenties, all brown bob and ruched crop tops. She started playing the drums at ten, and grew up in the suburb next to mine. We went to the same school; perhaps even at the same time. Her band’s 2015 album was inspired by the tiny beach village where my grandparents have a holiday house, the place I have spent every New Year’s Day since I was too small to know what that meant. Her songs were on replay the summer after year 12, as my friends and I celebrated being free of school and waited with beach-bated breath for our next step.

These representations of home were the soundtrack to my first year. Every time I missed safe streets and endless green spaces and my sisters’ hugs, I turned one of them on and drowned out the world.

It was remarkable how much the voice of someone I knew understood my experience – despite not knowing them personally – could make me feel moored.

That ache for the feeling of home is a lot more occasional now, but when I feel it coming on I know exactly where to go for a dose of a familiarly endless, humid summer.

I can’t count the number of times since coming to college that I’ve heard someone proudly claim ownership of

an artist from their hometown. While (almost) all of us quickly become very fond of Canberra, the attachment to the town which holds memories of squabbling with siblings, high-school drama and long family dinners never seems to fade. Sometimes it can be hard to get the feeling of these memories from well-viewed family photographs or messages, but music has an inexplicable ability to create emotion.

Of course, one of the wonderful things about art is its subjectivity – meaning that not everyone resonates with the same songs or understands their favourites in the same way. This is one of the reasons that I love exchanging artists and songs from my hometown with friends; it often gives me a wonderful (and different perspective) on them and their understanding of my city.

Of course, it’s not only music which has this effect. Pause for a moment and imagine an arts or cultural event from your childhood. Don’t tell me there isn’t one, because there absolutely is – every tiny town I’ve been to in my life has its own inexplicably pride-inducing cultural icon. One of mine is the annual show, which displayed everything from art to cows, showjumping horses to local chocolate.

My family went every year growing up, my parents steering us fervently away from the rides and into the cattle lanes and regional flower displays until we became the sorts of people who sought the flowers out on our own, handing us sausages in wraps for nourishment and forcing us to bring seventeen jumpers for the fireworks display. I miss the show every year; it falls inconveniently in second term second semester, during the school holidays – but every time my friends and family tell me about going, or I see advertisements for it on Facebook, all those memories come flooding back.

The fact that event still takes place, drawing the same mixed crowd it always did, and that there will be other

families handing their kids sunscreen and sausage wraps and carrying their sleepy bodies into cars at the end of the day, makes me feel connected to home.

It’s worth also mentioning visual representations of home, which can not only connect us to landscapes and memories but help provide a macro view that we often miss due to our individualised focus. My aunt is a wonderful artist whose paintings often focus on the sea and the local river; sometimes I google her name to see a virtual gallery of vistas from my childhood, but seen from above or with a wider scope than ever takes place in my head. I come from a state awash with wildflowers and unique animals, photographs of which can also provide an injection of familiar sunlight into my day. The wonderful thing about the internet is that despite these pictures sometimes being thousands of kilometres away in reality, we can access them with two seconds of free time and a couple of words in the google search bar.

Thus even while we are at uni, arts and culture can help us feel moored to a lived experience we don’t live for 8 months of the year. If I miss home, or just need to remember it, the songs on my Spotify playlists, the cultural events on my Facebook feed, and the familiar landscapes of my favourite artists are always there to remind me.

I’ll end with the words of a song from the first artist I mentioned, the wonderful Troye Sivan: “Could be playing hide and seek from home; can’t escape my blood Well it seems I’m never letting go of suburbia.”

Culture // REVIEWS

Vol. 68, Issue 11

32

Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” Is the Confronting Conversation-Starter We Need Text: Sophie Johnson Graphic: Maddy McCusker

Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special Nanette took the Internet – and world – by storm, and with good reason.

Her set is a powerful, honest look at what it means to be a woman and a homosexual in the modern age, told with a touch of humour, followed by a dollop of anger.

It’s a Friday night, and I’m already in my pyjamas, sitting in bed, surrounded by blankets and pillows. I’ve been hearing about Nanette for a while now – Netflix put it on my recommended home page list for a few weeks, Twitter is abuzz, but it’s a well-placed Buzzfeed article that finally makes me take the leap. I settle in and put it on, thinking that it’ll be a fun night with an underlying message, akin to a Jim Jeffries gun control segment. For the first fifteen minutes, I’m just about right: Hannah starts off with a few light-hearted anecdotes and jokes about what it was like growing up as a lesbian in rural Tasmania, noting an incident at a bus stop where she was nearly beaten up by a man who mistook her for a gay male. I’m enjoying myself – Hannah isn’t my favourite comedian so far, but her jokes hit the mark, and I laugh along with the audience easily, while still gaining some food for thought.

But about fifteen minutes in she takes a turn, wondering aloud if she can continue with comedy. This is a marker for the audience of the new direction that the

special is about to embark on. She talks about the difference between humility and humiliation, and what it’s like to exist in the margins. She revisits the bus stop anecdote only to angrily admit that the man came back to “beat the shit out of [her]” – an attack that she didn’t report to the police and left her with injuries for which she didn’t seek treatment.

She speaks of men in power – Picasso, Trump, and far too many others – who still treat women as sexual objects that are theirs for the taking, valuable only for their appearance and what they can give. As she continues, the Netflix special turns from comedy into an angry shout into the universe from a woman who refuses to tell her story in a way that suits others. She refuses to relieve the tension that hearing her experiences inevitably creates, and she refuses to freeze experiences at trauma points to create jokes for others. Hannah Gadsby refuses to be part of a comedy world where she changes the dark reality of her story in order to appease listeners. She refuses to let men off the hook for the crimes that they commit, and for their lack of humanity.

Hannah Gadsby finishes by inviting men to test their strength out on her, leaving us with this harrowing message; “… there’s nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The special is confronting – it doesn’t shy away from the discomfort of talking about the issues around homo- and trans-phobia, around gender and racial fear, instead tackling them with personality and the seriousness that such topics deserve.

Nanette is a story that’s relatable on the most basic level for all women, and is a necessary watch for everyone. Gadsby’s honesty and raw emotion makes it uncomfortable at various times, but it’s only through such honesty that conversations can start, and change can occur.

33

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

Culture // UNI LIFE

ADULTING 101 Text: Sumithri Venketasubramanian Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

a friend and ask if I could come over for dinner one of those days.

For many of us, coming to uni is our first time living out of home and/ or making big decisions about our lives with minimal structure and guidance. Whether it’s filling out our first tax returns, finding time to complete assignments, or keeping in touch with our loved ones, staying across everything we have to do is a scary part of ‘adulting’. As we become independent and form our own futures, the new things we have to learn and confront can be immensely intimidating. But life is full of potential and opportunity, and learning to balance what we want out of each aspect of our lives really makes all the difference.

Whether it’s laundry, booking a holiday, catching up on lectures, or sending out a single (but very important) email, maintaining an ongoing to-do list can help relieve stress. When we go from tutorials to work and then home, our mindsets change with every activity – what this means is: work will be fresh in your mind, so you’ll be more inclined to follow up with work things, and forget about the tutorial stuff earlier in the day.

Schedule, schedule, schedule.

Getting stuff done gives us this incredible sense of achievement – a testament to our potential as responsible humans. Whether you handwrite notes in a diary or phone apps are your go-to, make note of every plan the moment you make it.

This can help avoid double-booking, which can often cause confusion, disappointment, and tension in relationships.

In my schedule I have down social plans, meetings, appointments, and deadlines. This gives me an idea of how stressed I may be at a given time, and I can work my other plans around that. If I know I’ve got three assignments due on one day and I’m going to be too stressed to make food for myself, I might reach out to

Prioritise and have a to-do list handy.

Jotting down a short dot point (“degree plan”, “bank”, “groceries”, “Josh”) is usually enough to spark your memory about that particular item. What’s important is to get it down the moment it comes to mind so that you don’t forget it altogether. It’s also crucial to prioritise the items on your to-do list: some things can wait, while others are time-sensitive. So when you have a pocket of free time, take a look at your list and think about the energy and resources you have. This is where scheduling and to-do lists go hand-in-hand, as you’ll be able to gauge how you might be travelling after a particularly exhausting day.

Communication and relationships are so, so important.

It’s really important to grant platonic friendships the same weight and importance as our romantic relationships. From friends, to family, to professional working relationships, the way we relate to the people around us can really make or break our experience in the world. Keeping our loved ones close is one of those things that comes back to us

in all kinds of wonderful ways when we need them. However, our time doesn’t need to be spent worrying about where we’re at with people.

Communicate openly and genuinely with others: tell them you love them and speak up if what they’re doing doesn’t sit well with you. Create a culture of honesty that comes from a wish to make things work, and talk about things before they become problems.

If you’re not feeling up to a massive hike you may have planned with someone, tell them, “It’s been a crazy week, and I don’t think I will have the energy to conquer the hike. But I would still love to see you in some capacity. Maybe we could do something else instead, like go to the markets or bake.”

This makes it clear that it’s not them that you are bailing on, but the specific activity – and it makes them comfortable to do the same in future if they need to!

Pro tip: Combine your to-do list with relationship maintenance. For me, some of the most memorable hangouts with dear friends have been made while grocery shopping and hunting down Canberra’s cheapest petrol. When people want to spend time with you, they’ll understand you not being able to take a huge chunk of time out – and chances are they’re in the same boat too – so it’s perfectly okay to suggest that someone come along to return your library books, or suggest that you could drive them to the train station.

Keep asking questions and learning.

Nobody has it all figured out. If there’s something in particular that you’re struggling with, reach out to

those around you who may be able to point you in the right direction.

Whether that’s going to the gym for the first time, or putting together a project proposal and budget, seeking out the guidance of people around us is an act of great humility. Similarly, if you’ve got something covered and someone else is just coming to understand it, be wary of being dismissive, as they may actually bring you new perspective and insight.

It is also important to keep pushing our comfort zones – to seek out new experiences. This is the way we grow and learn. Trying an activity seemingly unrelated to everything else in our lives may end up opening up opportunities we’d never considered before, or we may meet people who teach us fascinating things about ourselves and the world.

Be consistent.

The one thing to remember is to keep a consistent routine. Self-care is, at times, about sucking it up and getting stuff done, even if it may be the last thing we want to do. It is easy to find distractions and excuses – and sometimes we may really need a break – but it’s when I’ve pushed through a particularly rough time that I’ve felt the proudest of my achievements. Good days and bad days are a reality of life, but adulting involves being responsible to ourselves and others, and being able to continue with what we’ve got to do even at our worst. It doesn’t mean ignoring our well-being, but it means giving ourselves a certain amount of tough love and credit for how resilient we really can be!

Culture // UNI LIFE

Vol. 68, Issue 11

34

The Letters I Will Never Send CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and assault

Text: Anonymous Graphic: Sophie Bear Dear family, I’ve lost count of how many times I wrote and rewrote this letter over the years. It was always somewhat therapeutic to pen down my thoughts and frustrations. At age twelve I remember Uncle shouting at me, saying that I will never score higher than my brother in my major examinations that year.

As I entered high school I was berated every time I fell short of expectations and was asked if I was going to flunk out each year. At age seventeen I broke down in front of Mom for the first time. I told her university applications, SATs and school were too overwhelming and that I needed a gap year. I was simply told to ‘get “get over it”’.

At age eighteen I went through my first break up just one month before my GCSE A levels. I couldn’t tell you guys because I was scared of being berated yet again. At age nineteen I got my GCSE A levels results and found out I had underperformed. I stayed at my friend’s house that night because I was too scared to face you guys. I’ve been accused of being petty because I remembered each time I was berated vividly. I was just a kid and when you shouted at me it became ingrained in me. Over the years I started doubting my abilities and my self-esteem would slowly break down. I started to get anxious every time I wanted something really badly. I had panic attacks before every competition and examination. I know you guys just want what’s best for me, but you guys fed the self-doubt that manifested into what I didn’t know then was anxiety.

Dear first love, It was almost as if the universe wanted us together. We lived ten minutes apart, played the same sport, had the same family dynamics and were both ambitious. I thought we were made for each other. Maybe we still are. You didn’t understand why I had a nervous breakdown every second day.

You didn’t understand why I could not have faith in myself. You didn’t understand why I felt like the walls were closing in on me. It’s okay, I didn’t understand it then either. We broke up just one month before my GCSE A levels because the relationship had become toxic. You tried so hard to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. You tried so hard to fix me and in the process you became as unhappy as I was.

I am sorry.

When you left it felt like the only thing holding me together was gone.

The months that followed the break up were hell. I started to breakdown more often. I eventually screwed up my GCSE A levels. The months after I left school were even harder. My friends didn’t understand why I was sad all the time. They thought I was hung up on you. In reality, I felt numb.

My self-esteem hit rock bottom. Will I break every good thing that comes my way? This was the question I spent hours pondering over whilst I walked around aimlessly. I know now that I was both depressed and struggling with anxiety. You told me happiness was a choice but, in that moment, it just didn’t feel like I could pull myself out of the darkness.

Dear attacker, You attacked me at a time when things were finally getting better. I had just

arrived in Australia and had the fresh start I truly wanted. Part of me hates you. The part of me that can no longer walk in the dark at night, the part of me that jumps at the slightest sudden noise made, the part of me that can’t seem to sit back-facing a door anymore. But there is another part of me that feels for you. To be driven to commit a crime so heinous, you must have had demons of your own. From one screwed up person to another, there is a small part of me that understands you.

Dear younger self, The hopelessness you’re feeling now won’t last forever. As cliche as it sounds, things do get better. I wish there is someone to tell you that what you’re feeling now is not your fault, and that help is available. A couple years down the road you will get the fresh start you need:. Tthe chance to rediscover yourself and build up your self-esteem. You’re not as incapable as you think. For now, it's ok not to be ok.

Mental illness, when left to manifest, is like an invisible disease that eats away at you bit by bit. It doesn’t have to be that way. Help is available. However, it’s hard when the people around you are as just as ignorant about mental health as you are. Stigma smashing is the first step to addressing mental health. You need to talk about it to understand it. Unfortunately, mental health is still a taboo in many societies. I can go on and on about the stigma surrounding mental health but, for today, I shall stop at six little words: It’s okay not to be okay.

35

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

DISCOVER // SCIENCE

The Mystery of Antimatter Text: Sophie Burgess Graphic: Jessica Benter We shouldn’t exist. More so, nothing should: you, me, the trees, Earth, your dog, our Solar System, and the entire expanding universe. Why? Because the Standard Model of Particle Physics – a description of all the particles and interactions that form the world around us – says so.

Matter cannot come out of nothing; for every particle of matter that is created, an equal and opposite antiparticle is also formed to maintain a balance in the universe. What should happen then, theoretically, is that the particle and antiparticle will attract, collide and annihilate each other to leave nothing but the energy from which they were first formed.

This is what should have happened in the Big Bang. But, something occurred in those first few moments of our universe that led to an imbalance of matter and antimatter, leaving only matter behind which then formed our world. Physics: zero, World: one.

The answer to the question of how we exist lies in finding the remaining antimatter which should have ended the universe before it began. Why did the antimatter disappear and where did it go?

Here is what we do know: In the early universe, there was a small imbalance between matter and antimatter, with a surplus in the former.

For every 10 billion antimatter particles, there were 10 billion and one matter particles. Once the 10 billion matter/antimatter pairs annihilated, only the trace amounts of lone matter particles remained.

What we don’t know is how the asymmetry formed. Why was there a lack of antimatter particles?

Here are some current theories: Theory one: There was never an even amount to begin with. This theory predicts that in the high energy environment generated by the Big Bang, incredibly heavy antiparticles of matter were formed and decayed in a tiny fraction of a second. These particles - the antimatter counterparts of the heavy neutrino and the beauty quark - are predicted to decay in an unusual way, which would tip the scales towards a surplus of matter.

How can we know if this is correct?

Firstly, we would need to recreate the incredibly high energy conditions which were present in the early seconds of the universe. This is the exact work that particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, are built for. Then, we’d need to force particles to collide at velocities close to the speed of light, which is over 10 million times faster than your car at top speed! After the collision, these particles will split into their most basic components, and possibly even form new particles which we’ve never observed before. It is hoped that this process will shed some light on the behaviour of the antiparticle of the heavy neutrino and the beauty quark, and explain how the cosmos came to be.

Theory two: It’s hiding. This theory suggests that in those first few seconds after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter escaped from each other as the universe cooled, like the way in which similar individual atoms align when a hot magnet undergoes cooling. However, for this theory to work, there would have to exist a mirror section of our universe containing an anti-cosmos filled with stars, galaxies and maybe even life.

How can we know if this is correct?

Annihilation in the border between our cosmos and an anti-cosmos would produce an immense concentration

of light particles. As this is yet to be observed, we are left with the conclusion that if this anti-cosmos does exist, it does so in an unexplored region of the universe. Our universe is unimaginably vast, and we still know so little due to our observational limit being a 13.9 light year radius from our own position. However, there are other ways of finding concrete evidence of an anti-cosmos.

One of these ways would be the discovery of anti-helium or other heavier anti-atoms. As these atoms would be formed by nuclear fusion in stars, anti-atoms would prove the existence of anti-stars. The mission to find such atoms would be conducted with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer – an experiment module mounted on the International Space Station. If anti-atoms indeed existed and avoided annihilation on their journey towards our world, this piece of equipment would find them.

Evidence for either of these hypotheses would have colossal implications on our understanding of the laws of physics, and could even serve to rewrite the Standard Model. Whether there was an imbalance of certain particles generated during the birth of the universe, or an anti-cosmos lurks at the edges of all we can see and observe, there can be no dispute that the mystery of antimatter is one of the greatest enigmas of our time.

When everything we know about science so far tells us that our very existence should be impossible, will either of these theories bring us any closer to understanding the vast complexities of the world around us?

Only time will tell.

DISCOVER // SCIENCE

Vol. 68, Issue 11

36

Why We Need a World Space Agency Text: Brody Hannan Graphic: Millie Wang

The World Trade Organisation. The World Bank. The World Meteorological Organisation. The World Health Organisation. Many international organisations are operating in the world today, each seeking to unite national efforts and to advocate for relevant critical issues. But, considering the minefield of problems in space exploration and the growing need for collaboration – should there be a World Space Organisation as well?

The idea of creating a World Space Organisation - or rather, a World Space Agency (WSA) - is not a new one. The idea is as old as the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), which was established in 1962.

But what about UNOOSA? Isn’t it a ‘world space agency’?

UNOOSA is responsible for promoting international cooperation in space, implementing space law and preparing publications, reports and presentations regarding space technology and space law. UNOOSA also maintains the official registry of all objects launched into outer space and even manages a 24-hour hotline for satellite imagery requests during disasters. But, what UNOOSA isn’t, is a centralised global agency which pools countries’ resources to foster tighter collaborations between nations. And this is where the need for a World Space Agency arises.

The Need for A World Space Agency As of 2017, 72 different government space agencies exist. And this number is only growing, with Australia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and a coalition of South American countries also declaring the establishment of their own national space agencies over the next

few years. The remaining 123 countries in the world without a national space agency are predominantly located in developing regions.

It’s not just unjust that wealthy governments and corporations have a monopoly on the ‘final frontier’ – it’s also against the mission of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to ensure that ‘the exploration of outer space shall be done to benefit all countries and that space shall be free for exploration and use by all the States.’ There’s a nuance, however, between ‘equal share’ and ‘equal access’.

The creation of a World Space Agency would act as a catalyst for joint international efforts into space exploration, rational management of resources and the strengthening of cooperation between states. It would also allow funds, technology, labour and finances to be centrally managed in an independent fashion to benefit all countries – not just those with existing government space agencies.

Collaborations between both countries and industries are what will help us accomplish the next milestone in human space exploration: Mars. President Obama thinks that this task will be achieved by the mid2030s, while Elon Musk has plans for SpaceX to do it by 2024.

International collaborations are already prevalent in the world. For example, look at the International Space Station – it’s construction and operation involves NASA working with 15 other countries, including Russia, Canada, Japan, Brazil and members of the European Space Agency. Therefore, the tasks of a World Space Agency should first be confined to those that cannot be

undertaken through other forms of international cooperation.

While UNOOSA is responsible for monitoring the application of space law, especially law regarding registration, recovery liability, satellites with nuclear power sources and debris, a World Space Agency could thus encourage the sharing of space technologies with developing countries, the training of specialists, and wide circulation of data gathered from remote sensing satellites, which can be important for geological, meteorological and agricultural planning of developing economies.

However, the greatest potential for a World Space Agency is in igniting new interest in space exploration. It would captivate a generation. As said by Stephen Hawking at the 2017 Starmus Festival in Norway, "to leave Earth demands a concerted global approach, everyone should join in... we need to rekindle the excitement of the early days of space travel in the 60s."

The Barriers to a World Space Agency While the benefits of a World Space Agency may seem clear, we need to be pragmatic. Given current economic and political structures, and our dislike of ineffective, large, additional levels of bureaucracy (just look at Brexit), a World Space Agency will probably not be a reality for several years… if not decades.

Regional cooperation on space exploration will more likely precede world space exploration. Much like the European Space Agency, the African Union and the Union of South America Nations are seeking to develop continental space agencies of their own. With New Zealand’s space agency being

established in 2017, and Australia’s in 2018… who knows? Perhaps our space agencies will team up and Scott Ludlam and Barnaby Joyce will be our first astronauts?

With this in mind, Australia and New Zealand are more economically developed countries. The key steps to laying the foundations for a World Space Agency will be considering the needs of developing countries so that they can partake in such a project.

37

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

DISCOVER // SCIENCE

Creating life in the lab

Text: Eliza Cowley and Arabella Davey Graphic: Noah Yim What do we define as life? Scientists commonly attribute two key characteristics to it: one is having a self-replicating system and the other is the ability to persist over time.

The idea of creating life, similar to the creation of Frankenstein, always seemed out of reach. However, through recent scientific breakthroughs, it now appears to be a possibility for the near future.

In 2010, Dr Craig Venter and his team of geneticists accomplished a major feat: creating a new, synthetic version of life. After generating a very short genome, consisting of 485 genes, and transferring it into a ‘synthetic cell’, they then proceeded to watch it grow and replicate – this process being the basic definition of what it means to be

alive. The research, which was published in Science, cost around 54 million Australian dollars and involved 15 years of hard work. Venter mentions that this research can lead to many new breakthroughs in the future, including the production of new chemicals and foods, as well as improved vaccines.

Following this discovery, in 2014, chemical biologist Floyd Romesberg demonstrated that is possible to expand the genetic alphabet of natural DNA beyond its current four letters: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). He did this by creating a strain of E. coli bacteria that contained two natural letters, ‘X’ and ‘Y’. What is most remarkable about the artificial X-Y pair is that they can co-exist alongside natural DNA pairs.

They also function similarly to natural pairs, as they can retrieve information and produce proteins – the material we use for making new cells. This synthetic form of E. coli can thus produce new proteins, which is extremely useful for

the synthesis of new drugs. After his findings, Romesberg even established a company called Synthhorx Inc, which works on developing protein-based treatments!

This research has sparked many ethical concerns. Julian Savulescu, a professor at the University of Oxford, emphasised that although studies like these may have positive implications (for example, introducing new ways to reduce pollution), they also can generate powerful weapons. Additionally, Dr David King, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, worries about the consequences of scientist gaining greater control over natural processes.

Even though the concept of artificially creating life may be intimidating at first, it can have many beneficial impacts in the future, if used ethically.

It is extraordinary that scientists have been able to synthesise life thus far, and we can’t wait to see where it will take science in the future.

DISCOVER // ENVIRONMENT

Vol. 68, Issue 11

38

THE AUSSIE BEE CRISIS: TRUTHS AND MYTHS Text: Xavier Anderson Graphic: Millie Wang The honey bee industry in Australia is massive. Honey production is estimated to be worth around 100 million dollars to the Australian economy. Honey bees are also worth way more than their honey. They are vital for the pollination of horticultural and seed crops, which increases crop yield. This service is estimated to contribute four to six billion dollars value to the Australian agricultural industry.

With the honey bee playing such an important role in Australia’s agricultural industry, many people are worried about the threats that face the species. According to Dr Veenstra from Deakin University, “We could struggle to sustain the global human population” if the honey bee were to die out. So, what are the threats to the honey bee, and will civilisation really collapse without them?

AUSSIE BEES Before we set off into heralding the bee-pocalypse, I think we should be clear as to what bees are threatened.

Most people are familiar with the European Honey Bee, Apis mellifera.

This is the bee that makes the (supposed) honey found in supermarkets and makes neat, little hives. Most of the threats, death and destruction people talk about refers to them. For example, Varroa destructor most greatly effects honey bees. But, if you hadn’t guessed it, European Honey Bees are not native to Australia.

There are actually over 1,600 species of native bees in Australia. They can be black and yellow or red, metallic green or even have polka dots. It is important to note that most native

Australian bees are solitary bees. This means that they raise their young in burrows in the ground or in tiny hollows in timber, not in hives. Native bees are important pollinators as well.

They have special relationships with Australia's unique wildflowers, unlike honey bees. They are a vital part of Australia’s ecology, pollinating these flowers and increasing water infiltration in the soil by burrowing holes.

VARROA DESTRUCTOR Varroa destructor and Varroa jacobsoni are species of mite that are the biggest threat to honey bees in Australia. These mites can feed and live on adult honey bees but really deal damage to the larvae and pupae of the bees.

When feeding on the developing bees the mites cause “malformation and weakening of honey bees.” They also transmit numerous viruses amongst bees.

With malnourished bees, honey production decreases, the queen bee is superseded and eventually the colony will breakdown and die. The Varroa mite has significantly affected honey production in Europe and the United States. Currently, Australia is the only large, honey producing country which doesn’t have the mite.

It is important to note that Varroa mites are only effective in hive colonies. As such, they only pose a major threat to the European Honey Bee, not solitary native bees. The loss of honey bees in Australia would be devastating, don’t get me wrong. However, many articles seem to ‘forget’ that they aren’t the only pollinators out there.

INSECTICIDES AND PESTICIDES Along with the Varroa mite, agricultural practices threaten honey bee populations as well. This is due to the use of insecticides and pesticides, many of which poison bees. Poisonings often occur when toxic insecticides are applied to crops during their blooming period. Poisoning of

pollinators can also result from the following:

the European Honey Bee is the least of our concern.

• Drift of pesticides onto adjoining crops or plants that are in bloom • Contamination of flowering ground cover plants when sprayed with pesticides • Pesticide residues, particles, or dusts being picked up by foraging pollinators and taken back to the colony, and/ or • Pollinators drinking or touching contaminated water sources or dew on recently treated plants In Australia, the impact of insecticides and pesticides is often overlooked in favour of stopping Varroa.

The mite does pose a significant risk, but farmers must restrict the use of pesticides to improve their yields – a concept that appears backwards but will protect honey bees and increase pollination.

IMPACTS All the factors outlined above are serious threats to the honey bee industry in Australia. Will it all lead to the collapse of civilisation as some articles suggest? Probably not.

LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY A depressing but important factor in determining threat to the honey bee is the global trend in declining biodiversity. Australia is currently the second-worst country in the world for biodiversity loss.

The major causes of this loss are the following: 1. Habitat loss and degradation 2. Climate change 3. Excessive nutrient load and other forms of pollution 4. Overexploitation and unsustainable land use 5. Invasive alien species Almost all the factors contributing to biodiversity loss are caused by humans. Instead of blaming a species of mite, policymakers should instead look towards our society. It is way more difficult to solve, but if this fundamental issue is not addressed, losing

If the Varroa mite gets to Australia it will certainly put a strain on our bee industry. However, Varroa mites have been prevalent in Europe for many years. The mites are just like any other pest or weed – they need to managed and controlled. The same action must happen if the mites breach Australian borders. Biosecurity should move from prevention to mitigation and management. This is the appropriate way we should approach the threats to our bees.

Even in the unlikely event that all honey bees were to go extinct, Australia would go on. For one, solitary bee species and other pollinators will remain.

Secondly, the only crops that will be affected will be ones that rely on pollination, like canola and almonds.

Grass crops like wheat, barley and rice will not be affected.

Australia will not starve, riots will not break out – we will continue on.

The threats to honey bees need to stop being sensationalised. We need to approach these serious threats reasonably: with effective policy and rational decisions.

39

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

DISCOVER // ENVIRONMENT

LIVING A ZERO-WASTE LIFESTYLE

Text: Ailsa Schreurs Graphic: Georgie Kamvissis

Zero-waste living: a phrase you’ve probably heard but know little about. It’s a recent lifestyle phenomenon where the goal is to reduce how much waste you send to landfill. This is done by switching out single-use plastics and other waste-producing items for more sustainable alternatives. For example, opting for glass or cardboard packaging, BYO reusable coffee cups and shopping bags. Recycling and compost are incredibly important to the process, as is the ‘refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra.

When I first learnt about living a ‘zero waste’ lifestyle, I assumed it an unattainable and idealistic goal. After watching a documentary on a British couple who managed the lifestyle for an entire year, I’d instantly written it off as something that only ‘crazy environmentalists’ do. It was for people with money, time, and no Echo360 to catch up on. The thought of making my own skincare products, buying fruit and veg from farmers markets and buying groceries from speciality stores, all to avoid plastic packaging and reduce my waste, seemed like something from a dream. …. Until recently.

I was gifted the book A Zero Waste Life in Thirty Days, written by Anita Vandyke. I casually flipped through it, intrigued by how simple it all appeared. Within a week, I was on a mission, determined to reduce my waste. I probably freaked out a lot of my friends. I’m going to store everything in old glass bottles! I’m not going to buy takeaway unless I can recycle the packaging! I refuse to buy new skincare products! I won’t lie, my initial vigour wore off. I quickly realised how hard it was to go from zero to hero (or just to zero, really). I hadn’t understood that this was the type of lifestyle change that took time and a bit of patience. Well, more than a bit. Patience is a key lesson from that book that I hadn’t exactly heeded until later on.

Of course, living zero-waste is entirely achievable. You just need to be prepared, organised, and determined. Having time helps, but

it’s more about prioritizing. I won’t claim to be zero-waste now.

I still buy strawberries in plastic boxes, drink frozen Coke from McDonalds, and I sometimes forget to ask for ‘no straw please’.

However, I find that the most important part of this journey, and the key to take away, is that I am more aware and conscious in my decisions than I have ever been before. I actively engage with and consider the purchases I make, which is, in my opinion, a huge and important starting step.

If you, like me, have been curious about becoming a zero-waster, a reduced-waster, or just a slightly-less-waster, I have included some other important and easy steps below that make that journey a little bit easier: First, keeping a zero-waste kit on you. For me, this includes a reusable coffee cup and bottle, a metal straw, a reusable shopping bag, and maybe a reusable container, for when you don’t finish your food at a cafe, but don’t want to throw it out either. You can take it home to eat later, or compost! (The Canberra Environment centre on campus has a communal compost bin! Just sign up online.)

Before buying anything new (eg. clothes, cutlery, makeup), think through these steps first: Can I borrow it? > Can I buy it second-hand? > Can I buy it more ethically? Try to be creative!

Bamboo toothbrushes, bar soap and eco-glitter are all cool, easy switches that are fun to shop around for!

We’ve all heard ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, but zero-waste means ‘refusing’ first. If the packaging is plastic, just don’t buy it. Of course, this isn’t always possible or easy, but it’s good to keep in mind!

By focusing on just one area where you can reduce, refuse or make a switch is a great starting point. Whether that’s making the commitment to never purchase coffee in a disposable cup again, taking your grocery bags with you, or only purchasing pasta from bulk food stores, every action counts. Simply by being aware, and making informed and conscious choices, engaging in a zero-waste lifestyle can be achieved.

DISCOVER // environment

Vol. 68, Issue 11

40

LET THERE BE (NO) LIGHT Text: Prakriti Bhardwaj Graphic: Noah Yim It is worrying to see the amount of lights being left on in office buildings during night time, or even in the wee hours of the morning. As someone who enjoys a relaxing stroll at night, I have encountered big bright buildings with almost every level illuminated. Yet at the same time, hotels, apartment buildings and other commercial places had their lights turned off. This is simply because there is no one there. So, I wondered, what is the deal with these office lights?

As I scrolled through quite a few articles and blogs on the internet, I came across some reasons why lights may be left on. Some employees work well into the night or sometimes overnight. Janitorial and maintenance staff come in at night to perform their duties. Lights are also left on so that the buildings are ‘visible’ and airplanes don’t hit them. Another reason is to ensure building security – lighting discourages people from approaching.

But these reasons aren’t convincing. Obviously, employees and other staff are not working on every floor

at all times during the night. Highrise buildings have antennas on the roofs to keep them from being hit by airplanes. Also, infrared security cameras requiring minimal lights solve the problem of crime. Not all lights need to be left on for security reasons. I looked into it some more.

occupants through simple ‘nudges’.

Then I stumbled upon a study on occupants’ behaviour surrounding building energy use by South Africa’s North West University. It highlights exorbitant levels of energy use during non-working hours (56%) compared with working hours (44%). The study attributes this “largely to occupants’ behaviour of leaving lights on the end of the day, and partly to poor zoning and controls.” Such behaviour can also be due to simpler reasons – it’s easy for people to assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to turn off the lights.

Perhaps they’re too stressed to think about it, or lack the motivation.

- Incentives can be linked to the performance of cleaners, maintenance staff and security guards. This can encourage them to turn lights off when everyone is gone.

If it is just diffusion of responsibility and lack of motivation that is keeping the lights on, then it mustn’t be hard to turn this around. Here, Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler’s ‘Nudge Theory’ comes in handy.

The management can generate effective behavioural shifts among the

- For starters, energy awareness campaigns can prove to be a worthwhile investment. Employees need to be made more mindful and ensure switching off computer screens and lights before leaving the building.

- The manager or the CEO can push for undertaking energy audits annually. These audits serve as effective feedback mechanisms on a company’s energy use. They can also highlight prospects for cost savings by eliminating wasteful consumption.

Technology can be leveraged to ensure energy efficiency and minimum wastage. Progressing towards energy saving solutions like motion-sensor lighting is a fruitful investment.

This not only reduces wastage but also alerts in case of crime.

Lighting technology is currently an area with immense potential for ensuring sustainable energy consumption. It is all up to us. Let’s take responsibility and do something about

41

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE FUTURE FACE OF BUSINESSES Text: Soumyadeep Sengupta Graphic: Hannah Charny

Today’s world is dominated by technology. Whether it be at work or home, or even when you are walking on the streets – technology is everywhere, and we can’t live without it.

Every day there are discoveries and new product created to make human life easier and more comfortable – as if we are employing ‘human robots’ – intelligent machines – to complete human tasks. There is a huge technological disruption in today’s modern society. While some inventions seem to be revolutionary in a positive sense, others force us to recalculate what is primarily meant to be human.

As the wind of technical disruption blows through human society, companies are inventing new ways of

creating automation in business processes. One of such discovery is ‘Artificial Intelligence’: intelligent machines that perform complex tasks like a human. Although not a new concept, AI is yet to show its true power in product creation and services. Companies are trying to create new products that use AI to transform aspects our lives into a bed of ease and comfort.

AI is currently the critical element to have in mind when creating new digital inventions. It incorporates several new innovative and problematic technologies, such as machine learning, cognitive and computer vision, conversational capabilities, human-to-machine user interfaces, predictive data analytics, cyber security, Internet of things (IoT) and intelligent

monitoring.

Businesses that have successfully integrated AI into their enterprise systems have increased their operational efficiency. This paves the way for companies to make faster, more informed decisions about innovating products and services for the general public.

For effective and successful integration of AI into marketable products, organisations need clear AI strategy, support from existing business processes and a specific set of metrics.

In the future, AI will transform the business environment to create more jobs than today. AI will help us to develop new products that could be used in our everyday life, achieve cost-efficiency due to streamlining business

processes, accelerate decision-making and expand the scope of business and machine automation.

With the proliferation of data in today’s world, AI is mainly used to analyse these massive data to predict a specific outcome. It is integrated primarily with the production of new software, which is widely used in the healthcare, mobility and financial industries. Over the next decade, it is predicted AI enterprise software revenue will grow from $644 million to nearly $39 billion. AI will transform the nature of the business processes in the distant future and will help in the creation of a technology-dominated society with business automation.

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

Vol. 68, Issue 11

42

THE LUCKY COUNTRY: A BRIEF ECONOMIC OUTLOOK FOR AUSTRALIA

Text: Felix Ryan Graphic: Hannah Charny The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was undoubtedly one of the most destructive economic events since the Great Depression. Titanic financial institutions previously thought beyond collapse fell apart almost overnight.

Economies that had experienced phenomenal growth were hit with sudden bouts of bank collapse and unemployment. They were in desperate need of financial bailouts. Worldwide there was rampant unemployment and disruption to pensions, savings and investments. Further, the damage was lasting. Many European countries, due to poor implementation of policy, lingered in economic slump well into the 2010s. We were fortunate that Australia had not slipped into a similar recession. Indeed, careful policymaking and increased private sector activity relating to China’s demand for our resources steered us clear of the worst aspects of the GFC. Australia was one of two the OECD countries to experience growth during the GFC, while the US economy shrank by $2.5 trillion. Unemployment peaked at 5.1%, one of the lowest levels for OECD countries during the GFC years. Continuous growth since the crisis has convinced many that Australia has escaped unscathed; claiming that the “the North Atlantic Economic Crisis” had been avoided.

However, this does not mean that Australia has ongoing immunity. For this, we need to examine the causes of financial crises throughout the decades. Only recently has mainstream economics taken a closer look at the role of lending and debt in economic cycles. Previously, the activities of the

financial sector were only considered in tangent; perhaps at best as a source of ‘financial frictions’ that can hinder investment activity and growth. Ironically, in the period of stability just before the crisis, mainstream economist bodily declared that economic depressions were a curio of the past; never to be repeated under the current economic paradigm. Thus, the GFC was a rude anachronism that these models failed to predict and solve (as shown by European economic stagnation), with former World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer deriding their unrealistic assumptions.

Economic models, including the core tenants of economic analysis, found that focusing upon lending and private debt were far more accurate at predicting crises. In these models, when individuals/firms have a strong tendency to invest (which usually involves taking loans and creating private debt), the level of private debt in an economy begins to rapidly increase relative to GDP (i.e. the debt to GDP ratio, an important metric in this discussion, increases). It can be passed off as economic growth; since debt is often used to power economic activity and as the value of debt to GDP increases, logically the percentage of credit (i.e. debt) of GDP rises. Critical mass – when the model economy’s GDP and employment crash to zero – occurs when this debt growth begins to slow down (an inevitable outcome, whereby businesses and individuals reduce their level of borrowing), resulting in a cataclysmic systems failure of the model economy.

To further explain this, it is best to look at how this has played out during

recent years. Japan’s ‘lost decade’, whereby it experienced a severe economic downturn that continues to haunt it, is one of the prime examples of this kind of ‘debt’ crisis. During the 1980s Japan’s economy proliferated; much of which fuelled by debt and speculation. The Japanese system was heavily reliant on using debt to finance operations, with agreements connecting businesses more closely together. By 1982, corporate debt to GDP averaged at 100% of GDP while household debt (both components of the overall level of debt in an economy) reached 25% of GDP. In this period, Japanese banks continued to provide finance for not just industry but for share and property speculation, fuming the f lames of a rapidly rising Nikkei index. However, just as the models predicted, this boom period is only sustainable so long as the debt to GDP ratio continues to grow, which cannot go on indefinitely. By the early 1990s, the ratio peaked at 27% before quickly slumping to -1%, causing a sudden economic contraction spilling over into a collapse in the Japanese financial system and economy. Similar patterns were present in the US and other GFC stricken countries, with high levels of private debt fuelling GDP growth as a percentage for years and upon slowdown sending these economies into a nosedive.

But how does this relate to Australia?

As mentioned, we, fortunately experienced an increased demand from China for Australian resources, meaning industry needed to rely on further borrowing to finance its activities. Policy makers at the RBA acted cautiously to maintain a stable and robust economy. These actions meant that credit

continued to grow at a faster rate than GDP, allowing us to escape recession.

But this is unsustainable. Chinese demand has been tapering off significantly, and the only way to maintain credit growth into the future would be an impossible increase in household borrowing (of 170%). The total private debt would need to exceed 250% of GDP, which would be the highest level ever recorded in the OECD. Given this, it is likely a debt growth slowdown will hit in the next few years, potentially even as soon as 2020.

There is no easy solution to this. Interest rates could be dropped to enable further room for private debt and incentive to borrow; but as mentioned this is only a short-term solution and won’t solve the heart of the issue.

Even solutions that tackle the growing amount of private debt are dubious: Milton Friedman’s idea of ‘helicopter money’ has been re-suggested, but commitment methods of ensuring it would be used by consumers to reduce debt must be included. This issue, while complex, is highly relevant to all university students: those that graduate during recessions earn far less than those who graduate during economic booms over a lifetime. Economies are highly chaotic and complex systems, owing to human agency (as rightly pointed out by Hayek), and a recession, whether in several months or years, is nonetheless a possible reality that we all should be prepared for.

43

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

creative

WE NEED TO ARGUE FIRST Text: Jeremy Tsuei Graphic: Maddy McCusker ‘We need to have an argument.’

‘Hmm?’ ‘An argument.’ She does that thing where she sighs at herself, blinks a few times towards the distance, searches, decides, yes, those are the words that she will say: ‘A fundamental disagreement. A difference of opinion. I say something, you say something else, we raise our voices, and then there’s a difference of opinion and then maybe we agree to disagree.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ He chews on nothing.

‘I’m serious. Before tomorrow. Before midnight, hopefully. That is tomorrow.

Okay, well the sun’s already set. How about before ten? No, that’s too close.

Eleven. We’ll aim for before eleven.’

‘Oh, I agree.’

‘Good.’

‘Before eleven. That’s good. Then we can get eight hours of sleep if we sleep at eleven-thirty.’

‘Yes, but at the same time I need you to stop doing that.’

‘Doing what? Eight hours is recommended by the majority of medical professionals. Maybe seven, now that we’re getting older-‘ ‘Yes, dear.’

‘Can you call me that yet?’

‘I like calling you that. Makes me feel prepared. So it’s not too strange when I have to formally start doing it tomorrow. Take it as practice.’ She runs her hand along his arm. Her fingers feel brittle, delicate, like shards of melting ice. He feels strong.

‘Okay.’

‘But I need you to stop agreeing.

Just,

before eleven. We need to have an argument.’

‘But what are we going to argue about?’

‘I don’t know. I was hoping you’d think of something.’

‘What about, what about…’ He isn’t going to think of something, and she knows it. Maybe this is what they should argue about. She settles for something else.

‘Politics. People always disagree about politics.’

‘Okay, okay. Well um, I voted yes. Yes, that’s what I did. Of course. How did you vote?’

‘I said yes too.’

‘What do you think of the current Prime Minister?’

‘Margarine.’

‘What?’

‘Well, he kind of looks like butter, but you know it’s not when you taste it.’

‘Oh. That makes sense. Did you know that margarine is actually black without colouring?’ He used to work in a margarine factory.

‘Yes. You’ve told me, dear.’ She called him dear again. Practice, that was what it was, he reminded himself.

‘But so is the other one. The opposition leader.’

‘Oh, of course. I guess there’s nothing worth disagreeing about. It’s all the same whichever way you take it.’

‘Okay, okay. What if we – like a debate.’ He had done debating in high school. They had lost the regional semi-finals. He remembers the feeling of wanting to intensely squeeze something in his hand that he got when the adjudicator told his team they’d lost, and the acrylic smell of the table. ‘Like, I take one side, you take another.’

‘This could work. So I can be WeetBix. And you can be muesli.’

‘Do you want to start?’

‘No, after you.’

‘Okay. I am far, far more varied.

You’re a brick of wheat and your most interesting flavour is the milk you’re paired with. Sometimes people pour Milo over you because they’ve realised how bland you are and they’ve had enough. Sometimes honey. They poured milk and honey over people as torture in Ancient Egypt until their victims drowned in their own vomit and faeces and they do the same to you, this is because you are so bland that they should do the same as you. Now you go.’ She had studied Archaeology in university, which he thought was very attractive.

‘Wow. Okay well let me first communicate my respect and congratulations to you.

There was a formal way of doing this in high school, but I’ve forgotten so I’ll move on. You are muesli. I am WeetBix. Now, you have said many things that I am. Let me continue. I am utilitarian. I am

simple.

Above all I am Australian, and I am the breakfast of champions.

There are many types of muesli and many ways of eating those many types. But I am simply Weet-Bix. Milo, honey, yes, but underneath, I am the same. I am singular, I am unified, I have direction and I am purposeful. Everyone knows who I am.

Those who do not subscribe to me only reinforce my dominance as they confirm that they are the exceptions to the rule. I am the rule.

Now, to you. You are many, you are multiplicity, you are legion.

Barley connected. Your diversity will tear you apart.

'Soon there will be in-fighting from your multi-polarity. Nuts, no nuts. Sultanas, no sultanas. Bran, no bran. Each one of your components is merely waiting, biding their time to establish their superiority. But I am one. I am, and always have been. This is why you are inferior.

Thank you.’

‘Okay. Do you want to have a rebuttal round?’

‘No. Formally, I think we’re a bit messy. It’s okay.’

‘I don’t think that was an argument.’

‘You’re right.’

‘It’s almost ten thirty.’

‘We’re running out of time.’

‘Tomorrow we’ll be married.’

‘Yes, but we need to argue first, dear.’

‘See, it’s good practice, isn’t it?

Soon it will feel normal. If we let it seep into our vocabulary now it will only make the transition easier.’

‘Yes, but you’re still right. We need to argue first. We’ve never done it before.’

He drums his fingers against his thigh.

They are like the rapid presses of a stamping machine. It is no longer almost t e n

thirty because it is now ten thirty.

‘I am worried though.’

‘You suggested it.’

‘And I hold by it. But now that I’ve thought about it for a bit – what if we start something? Something that sits away, but then boils, grows, comes up again in a few months, something we can’t just share, and it puts itself there, every day, in, and out, whenever I see you, I see it, there walking on its own two legs, forming a mind of its own, babbling and speaking, this disagreement, placing itself in the middle of the house and marking it like it’s all its own and, oh… maybe it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe we should wait until afterwards. Until it comes organically. I was talking to Linda before, and couples are having disagreements later and later in their lives. Maybe it’s just best for it to happen, maybe when we’re not even trying.’

‘It’s okay. We still have more than twenty minutes. We can do it now. I won’t let that happen.’ He looks at her, expecting her eyes.

‘I know. I think I know. I guess what I’m trying to say is… did you bring protection?’

He sees the clock flash as it changes to ten thirty-three.

creative

Vol. 68, Issue 11

44

CLARE

Photos and text: Aryanne Caminschi

These photos are about the composite of a human; how, close up, we can be made entirely of shapes and colours. I tend to think of humans as these spectacular entities, but when I see these photos, my subject Clare becomes a myriad of curves and shadows, not the wonderful girl I call my friend.

45

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

creative

Vol. 68, Issue 11

Creative

46

Skeletons and Sedation Text: Her Graphic: Jessica Benter

I sit at my desk, naked.

No, I sit on my bed, naked, but clothed.

Veins busy treating a poison.

Shrouded by the shadow of a daemon.

Cast with a light of my own making.

Adding shadows to the wall of the Cave.

Our cave.

His Cave.

Maybe Plato was right.

My head locked, a fire burning.

Prisoner, prisoner Prison Pri Pry? Pried.

Opened. Split. Torn.

My shadow wears no clothes.

She dances to a controlled rhythm.

Mused by Him. All of Him and all of the Hims.

The base lines my waist line, the beat my shudder, the melody His groan.

My head locked.

The Cave cold.

I am naked, but clothed.

My bed is warm.

My daemon lays next to me.

My daemon lays on top of me.

Clothed in a custom-made dress straight-jacket.

My shadow dancing whilst I march.

A heart in atrophy I am naked, but clothed.

A ladder used as kindling.

For the flames.

An arsonist’s lullaby.

No one can climb of the Cave.

Self-destruction. A skeleton sedated.

He made me naked.

47

Week 9, Semester 2, 2018

creative

The people I saw on the train Text: Phoebe Lupton Graphic: Maddy McCusker

At 7am on Sunday 23 September 2018, I went to the station to board a train. It was very early in the morning, so the station was rather like a ghost town.

There was no one there other than me, except for this one guy standing a few feet away. He was a little odd-looking, probably at least 6’5 with neatly cut hair but a dodgily shaven face, a black leather coat, matching leather boots, blue jeans and a white t-shirt.

I looked at the strange, strange man and he looked right back at me. I didn’t know what to make of it so when the train came just a few seconds later, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The man boarded it where he was and I boarded it where I was. We were in different carriages, unlikely to see each other for the rest of the trip.

I sat down at a seat next to the window. The train made its departure and my gaze turned to the world outside. I looked at the people who walked down the suburb streets and wondered if any of them were likely to die young. That’s what the brain can do to you when you’re mind-numbingly bored. It can make you think about mortality, about life and death and everything in-between.

All I had ever thought about myself and the rest of the human race is that we are born, we breathe, we live and ultimately, we die and explode into thousands of

tiny atoms.

The floor squeaked. I looked up – another woman around my age wearing a small backpack had entered the carriage. She placed herself on a seat on the opposite side of the carriage from where I was. This one seemed far less scary than that bloke at the station. She was small and had clear, pale skin and dead-straight black hair. The only thing slightly abnormal about her was her outfit; it consisted of a green singlet top and denim shorts, despite it only being 14 degrees. The woman rummaged around in that backpack of hers and from it extracted a book and a glasses case. She took the glasses out of their case and put them on. I came to the realisation that I was staring at her just like the strange man had stared at me. We made eye contact and she smiled as if to acknowledge my presence as another young woman travelling alone. A few seconds later, she opened her book and began to read it.

Fuck, why didn’t I think to bring a book?

I thought. Guess I’ll have to carry one staring out the window and thinking about morbid bullshit.

I spent so long gazing mindlessly at thin air that I fell asleep. I came to when a voice sounded on the train radio saying: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now at Central Station. For all passengers wishing to transfer to the country line, please get off at this stop. Repeat, for all passengers wishing to transfer to the country line, please get off at this stop!’

I got up from my seat, gathered my things and walked out of the train.

Central Station was a bit more populated than the station in the suburbs. There must have been hundreds of people commuting, getting on and off the trains and just going about their business. But out of all those crowds of people, there was one person in particular who caught my eye: the odd-looking man from the first station. Once again, he was staring at me. I broke into a power walk, fast enough to make a quick getaway but not so fast as to look conspicuous. I went the long way around to the train I needed to catch to get to the coast and I made it a matter of minutes before the train departed. I sat down at a seat next to an old woman and took a few minutes to get my breath back.

‘Are you alright, darling? You look as though you’ve been out for a jog.’

It was the woman in the seat next to me.

She was very old, somewhere between 85 and 100 years old, but her face had retained a sort of prettiness. Her eyes were a warm dark brown, her hair dyed blonde and immaculately cut. She wore a blue pantsuit and red lipstick.

What business could a woman dressed so professionally have in the country of all places? I thought.

The woman smiled at me. Then, her eyes darted to look at something behind me. ‘ Deary,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to worry you but there’s a man looking at you in a rather strange way.’

My heart skipped a beat. I didn’t dare look to see who it was but I had a fairly

good inclination as to who it might have been. The old woman patted my knee.

‘Would you mind standing up for a moment, deary?’ she said. ‘Only, I have to get off the train now.’

‘Oh yes, of course, of course,’ I said. I got up from my seat and made way for the woman to move past me. I watched her as she got off the train and a sense of doom washed over me. As I went to go back to my seat, I found myself face to face with the odd-looking man. He gave me a wide, toothy smile as if he were a predatory lion and I were his prey.

Fuck fuck fuck I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I thought.

He raised his hand, grabbed my throat and the world went black.

At 11am on Sunday 23 September, I exploded into thousands of tiny atoms. My body was found on the train with the odd-looking man’s fingerprints all over my neck. I tell you this story from the grave in the hope that you will learn not to trust all of the people you see on the train.

Creative // SATIRE

Vol. 68, Issue 11

48

Tidying Tips for a Tiny Space Text: Eleanor Armstrong Graphic: Jessica Benter As university students who have moved out of home, we have grown accustomed to living in shoeboxes of varying sizes, and out of this habitation situation comes the inevitable dilemma of how to fit a myriad of belongings into such a small amount of space. While the independence afforded to us is something we’d be very reluctant to trade in, we do miss are the vast expanses of cupboards, large basement square footage and under-the-stairs clutter void. As a result, I have made it my mission to gather and share the wisdom acquired over my three years in a constrained dwelling.

The Under-Bed Vortex No one really knows what breed of were-dust-bunnies live under beds, and it’s likely that you’ve lost some smaller possessions to the voracious appetites of those mysterious creatures (think bobby pins, spare change, earphones…). Why not make friends with the wildlife and organise your larger items under your bed? Wistful suitcases, eager yet unsatisfied washing baskets, and duffel bags of ‘not-sure-I-wantto-donate’ clothes fit in quite nicely with the under-bed dust community.

Edition 10 Solution

On Top of Cupboards The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” applies all too easily here.

Have a bill to pay? Top of the cupboard. An important letter to answer? Top of the cupboard. A photo of an ex that you can’t bear to throw away? You guessed it…top of the cupboard! The tops of shelves also make an excellent candidate for extra university work storage: past assessments that you’re excessively proud of, printed readings that you just spent too much credit on while trying to get the printer to work, and various other papers.

Filing, Filing, Filing Hanging baskets and in-trays are a student’s best friend. Let’s face it – you’re a new adult and you don’t really know what documents you should keep and which you can throw away. With this in mind, it may be best not to take that risk and instead, keep everything! Some may call you organised, others may call you a hoarder, but at least you’ll have a copy of a 2016 ANU careers pamphlet and expired O-week vouchers, just in case. That being said, don’t turn your nose up at the classic corner-of-desk-paper stack either.

imaginable. However, you don’t need to look any further than an old favourite: Aldi. Known to have near-authentic knock-offs of your classic acrylic units and bathroom drawers, don’t discount this German all-rounder, as you’ll be surprised what may crop up in the special buy section every few months. To stay in the loop, I would recommend subscribing to the e-Newsletter, if not just to marvel at how weird some of items are (meerkat statue anyone?).

Pass it On If you’re not able to move on for sentimental reasons but also just can’t stand to house a particular item within your home any longer, the most effective answer to this conundrum is often the good-old give-it-to-a-friend. You’ll know that the novelty pillow your other friend gave you as a joke will have a loving home and won’t be a standout feature of your décor any longer. While some people may object to the principle of re-gifting (especially if you run the risk of the original giver of the gift seeing its new home), things were just getting a little too awkward every time you had visitors.

Sorted: Gadgets!

There are many stores these days that sell tailor-made storage ‘solutions’ for every possible clutter issue

Edition 11 Sudoku