Woroni: Creative Edition, 2012

W

WORONI GETS CREATIVE

No. 14 Vol. 64 Nov 1

EDITORIAL BOARD Liv Clark Farz Edraki Nakul Legha Yasmin Masri Gus McCubbing Dan Rose Lisa Visentin Cam Wilson

SUB EDITORS

Ben Henschke Shan-Verne Liew Alex O’Sullivan Gareth Robinson Vincent Chiang Jess Millen Josh Chu-Tan Louis Klee Maggie Thompson AJ Neilson Kristen Augeard Ross Caldwell

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WORONI Hey, folks!

You’re holding the inaugral creative edition of Woroni.

If you’re a regular Woroni reader, you’re probably thinking, “a magazine? Pah! This isn’t the broadsheet Woroni I expect and deserve! What is this flip-flopping faffing about?”.

Well, we here at Woroni think that a student media organisation shouldn’t simply focus on current affairs and comment. We recognise that young writers and artists at ANU struggle to find a platform to express their creative sides. We want to help provide that platform for you.

After putting a call-out to ANU students for poems, short stories, photos and drawings, we’ve had an overwhelming response. In this issue, you’ll find stories on Colonel Quaddafi’s love affair with Condoleezza Rice, and photography from Ross Caldwell.

Sit back, unwind, and get your exam procrastination on with this very special creative special spectacular, spectacular! issue of Woroni.

You can find us on Facebook, contact@woroni.com. au, or summon a courier pigeon.

With love, Woroni Editors

on the kitchen radio, syrup lyrics trickle summer into my left ear.

was allergic to pets, but she did allow us one concession: dragonflies. in summer,

summertime, and the living is easy.

we caught them by surprise with nets. clutching onto our winged prizes, took

i stop chopping carrots, let the sweat of the july afternoon marry singlet to skin. closing eyelids to the sun, first the kitchen disappears, and then the house, until instead of chicago i see mildura. i’m six, walking home from school, past the vineyard, past the corner store, watching boys watch girls watch dogs sniff at grass, sniff at each other’s butts, chew on forgotten bread. my mother

them back home, buried them between frozen peas and corn in the freezer. once they came out of their ice comas, she gave us thread to loop around their bodies. no, not like that. here, let me show you. maryam, take that radio and join leila outside. standing knobble kneed in the front yard, we gawked as she showed us how to fly the dragonflies like kites, zig-zagging green across the southern sun.

LISTENING TO BILLIE HOLIDAY farzaneh edraki

jemima parker (un)wearable jabara artonshow.org/2012/10/10/jemima-parker

the humid throng misty stationmaster : All Clear leaning against the pole that held the beam that supported the awning, you were waiting smouldering pensive beast of the street -- time raced paced exponential. alcove, magazine stand lazy gander city wander our final pavane.

APPARITION amanda taplin

YOU SHOULD ASK GUYS OUT. REALLY. samantha bradley

Dating at uni is just really, really hard.

Don’t get me wrong – my close girlfriends and I stride through our lives wearing our independence as a badge with prime real estate on our vintage dresses and Country Road blazers. By no means do we need boys in our lives. Our priorities lie in our GPAs, jobs, families and co-curricular pursuits. We can dance until 2am in the morning one night and spend the next curled up in bed with a cup of green tea writing an essay. We have opinions, passions and the time and energy to indulge and express them. I guess I like to think that we have our shit just a little bit together.

We are strong, autonomous women who pride ourselves on our ability to be happy and whole regardless of whether we are single or in a relationship.

However, as I see it, feminism and romanticism are by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed, I have resigned myself to the fact that, as much as I can deftly parade around like it is a periphery

concern, romantic love, and its associated intimacy, inevitably carries a certain quantity of significance. Love is a conditioned, expected and desired human state. Lust is biological. We are built and taught to crave intimacy. Simple.

Even the best efforts to remain immune to a ‘want of romance’ are inevitably rendered futile. Sometimes it is raining and cold and you just really want to be snuggled under a doona watching 80s movies with some nice, sweet guy who smells faintly of fresh air and shampoo and has the perfect amount of stubble.

Sometimes you simply have the sudden and distressing realisation that it has been more than four months since you have been kissed and you may have begun to fantasize about the cute LSR barista, that guy you see sometimes in the law library, your tall, dark and luscious co-worker, or, dear god, your lecturer, topless (maybe that last one is just me…). But you should seriously see this barista. He has a tattoo of a church on his arm, this boyish smile and an unruly mop of hair. I can just picture him spending his weekends climbing mountains and surfing waves. I digress…

At some point, between first year and third year, one inevitably has the painful realisation that kissing boys on the Moose dance floor is just not really an efficient or effective means of sorting through frogs. That in fact, this behaviour amounts to something akin to a train wreck. Because the frogs are actually toads and the best-case scenario is that the toad turns into a member of the Canberra Brumbies. At this point, maybe you pick up what shreds are left of your dignity and head to Honkeytonks or Tongue and Groove. Maybe you take to online dating. Or maybe you simply resign yourself to a life spent in the loyal company of labradors (I’m allergic to cats, okay?) and focus on your studies.

Boys are confusing damnit. I just spent four hours snuggled in bed with chai, cake and two of my best girl friends. At least three and a half of these hours were used to debrief on encounters with the other gender. Some guys will hang out and go on pleasant dates with you for several weeks or even months, only to end it

abruptly with a three-word text message. Sometimes, you won’t hear a single word for weeks, and then they’ll suddenly emerge from the unknown, demanding your love, space and time, all exclusively and without delay. They are a complex and baffling species and by no means a monolithic or even homogenous block. It breaks my heart to see a girl I love naively putting her heart on a plate for an emotionally stunted invertebrate who doesn’t deserve or appreciate her.

I am not going to use this as an avenue into a tirade about how there are no nice guys anymore because porn culture has morphed the male species into sex-obsessed, violent, narcissistic misogynists. That would be utterly ridiculous.

There are plenty of lovely, intelligent, gorgeous guys out there. I see them everyday in lectures and tutes. I play lunchtime sports against them. I work with them and am friends with many of them. What is lacking here is not necessarily the eligible and desirable menfolk.

The difficulty I think lies in the fact that, from infancy, as girls, we are spoon-fed variations on this idealised romance where our own particular Prince Charming will ride in on a white horse, or maybe a Harley or Nimbus2000, and sweep us off our peep toed feet and refuse to ever let go. We are bombarded with literature and rhetoric informing us that if the Man isn’t the one making the moves in a relationship he will feel emasculated and lose interest. As females, in many ways, we are still expected to look demure and pretty, avoid saying anything too intelligent or provocative, and merely sit quietly, crocheting love hearts and wishing, with all our emotional space, that some contemporary variation on Prince Charming (Read: Edward Cullen/ Christian Grey) will find us enchaaaanting enough to be bothered to chase us.

Some girls will argue that this particular, archaic notion of romance is empowering, even in a 21st century space where collectively women are more educated, employed and autonomous

than ever. “Don’t waste the pretty” one could contend. Simply go around doing your generally awesome thing, as you always do, and eventually the perfect man will fall into your elegantly crossed legs on a hot summer’s day in union court and live up to your wildest fantasies. Why waste time and energy chasing the male species when your efforts will inevitably be considered nothing but repellent? After all, who on earth would be attracted to a girl strong and self-assured enough to take the reins to her own love life and actually ask guys out herself?

Regardless, we are conditioned to be attracted to male confidence. My girlfriends and I call this the “guy complex”. It’s that certain je ne sais quoi that makes an ordinary looking lad butterflies-in-your-stomach sexy. We are innately attracted to the menfolk with personalities strong enough to be able to seize the object of their desire and not take ‘no’ for an answer.

My point here you may ask? Dating at uni is indeed often a depressing and fruitless pursuit. However, in many ways this is a monster of our own creation. We are habituated in this game of love in ways that are contradictory and damaging. For example, I cannot reconcile my personal feminist principles with the traditional fairytale narrative where some joker in a crown predictably chooses an incapable, conventionally beautiful damselin-distress-and-a-ball-dress, carries her off in his well muscled arms to live in love induced bliss for eternity. What if, instead of a crown, the joker wears a leather jacket over a white tight-fitting v-neck shirt and burgundy skinny jeans? What if instead of being a damsel-in-distress-and-a-ball-dress it’s a damsel in a super cute polka dot onesie with Diana Ferrari ankle boots and a nice soft FcUK cardigan? I digress again… Our insatiable female thirst for the “guy complex” is self destructive and even borderline masochistic. Perhaps beloved, awesome, gorgeous girlfriends we are premature in lamenting the futility of the scene. That is, until we have offered a few proposals of our own.

lachlan pini

stills from how to pick a wallflower, blank face and welcome to spectre lachlanpini.tumblr.com/

1.Wearing a white belt and/or white shoes ever. They’re disgusting and I hate them.

You’re not at an 80’s prom.

2.Being bad at sport. If I have to come watch you, you could at least not be shit.

Since when is being the team waterboy sexy?

3.Liking nature. I hate nature and I’m pretty sure nature hates me in return. So next time you want to go for a fun hike, count me and my ankle boots out.

4.Putting more effort into hair removal than me. Are you gay?

5.Not getting my West Wing references. You may hate the show, but you better be intelligent enough to at least appreciate its genius.

6.Liking children. Because children are the worst. They’re smelly, they cry, they use improper grammar and they’re always in the way. None of which are particularly appealing attributes.

7.Judging me for drinking too much. Since when did you become boyfriend-no-fun?

8.Wanting to introduce me to your parents. I know that I’m charming and fabulous but I still don’t want to have to suffer through stories about your youth and how funny you were. I barely like you now; I would have hated you then.

9.Ordering for me. If I’m not old enough to choose what I want to eat, then maybe you shouldn’t be going out with me.

10.Having poor text messaging chat. If I wanted that I’d go to UC, but I don’t, so they should be witty, charming and not have numbers where letters should be.

11.If you can’t grow a beard. I don’t even like facial hair but being unable to grow it leads me to ask: Are you pre teen?

12.Being needy. I’m not your mother and we’ve already established that I don’t really like you that much anyway.

13.Mocking me for my taste in music. I know it’s bad but I like it anyway. So suck it up bitch.

14.Man jewellery. It’s never ok.

15.Being Vegan. Everyone will hate you and judge me. It’s never going to happen.

DEALBREAKERS emilia schwalb

ross caldwell photography facebook.com/ross.caldwell.creative

BENJAMIN LAW interviewed Woroni caught up with Australian author and columnist, Benjamin Law, at the 2012 National Young Writer’s Festival (NYWF).

He gave the low-down on researching for his latest novel, ‘Gaysia’ (hint: it involves whooping cough after being stranded overnight at a Japanese bath-house); the future for Australian writers; and answers the ultimate Would-You-Rather question: would you rather be Beyonce or go to space? To find out, listen to the podcast at www. woroni.com.au/podcasts.

[W]: How are you enjoying NYWF? [BL]: I love the festival. I’ve been coming [to NYWF for] between 5 and 10 years. A lot of the friends important to my life I made here, so it’s nice to see everyone coming back.

[W] You hosted a panel talk this year on the topic of writing memoirs at a young age. You’ve written a memoir (Family Law) – what compelled you to write it, and was it premature?

[BL] [Laughs] The panel was called, “Memoir When Young”, but an alternative title could have been, “Here Are Four Dickheads Who Thought That Writing a Memoir Under The Age of 40 Was A Good Idea”. So you had myself, Michaela McGuire, Marieke Hardy, and Luke Ryan. It’s interesting; we’re all young, and people ask, “What experiences could you possibly have to write about?

You haven’t been through war or famine or anything like that.”

But you don’t need to, and a lot of the memoirs I read aren’t about the most dramatic things… I mean, people like David Sedaris grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. You find the tragedy and humour in everyday life. Every life is monumental and epic. Even by the age of 20, you’ve probably had somebody die on you, you’ve been overseas, or you’ve had your heart broken. A lot of the stuff I wrote about was that coming of age period from puberty, until I finished high school – and, that was pretty tumultuous, but looking back, sort of funny as well. One of the reasons I wrote [Family Law] was because.. and I only realise this in hindsight.. to read the memoir I wish I could have read around that time.

[W]: Just on David Sedaris, you mentioned at the panel that he refuses to write about sex, because he doesn’t want his audience to imagine him or his partner naked. Is there anything you won’t write about?

[BL]: I don’t really write about sex either. I mean, I write about my dysfunctional and potty-mouthed family… but no sex. I don’t

think I want to subject anyone to imagining that. I’ll talk about it on an academic level, but I don’t think anyone needs to hear about the stuff I do.

[W]: Can you tell us a little bit more about your latest novel, Gaysia?

[BL]: Gaysia is a book that took me to seven different Asian countries looking at seven different queer issues. I went to Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, Myanmar, Malaysia, and India, and in each of those countries I focused on a different LGBT issue. So in Thailand I went backstage for a month at the world’s biggest transsexuality pageant. In India I looked at the queer rights movement. Because I’m not a news journalist, my instincts are to write longer feature narratives that focus on people. I’m always curious to hear about the human dimension of these stories. If in China, gay men are seeking lesbians for sham marriages, what sort person are you to get into that situation? So a lot of it was sitting down with people and getting that human side of the narrative.

[W]: Sounds like you really got into the thick of things. You went to a nudist beach in Bali; you got gastro in India. What was the weirdest thing that happened while you were researching Gaysia?

[BL]: So many things… I hung out with an aid worker in Burma, whose job it is to help sex workers… In Japan, I got blind drunk in Tokyo, and ended up on a train two hours in the opposite direction to my hotel. So I had to check into an overnight bathhouse. I ended up contracting whooping cough (which I didn’t even know I had at the time). It was just the kind of book that was likely to land me in strange situations… I just couldn’t anticipate what kind of situations. In a way, you hope that strange things will happen to you. It’s almost a consolation, when you’re shitting yourself half to death in a public toilet in Mumbai… you think, “You know what? I’m writing about this. This is gonna be funny.”

[W]: Do you have any advice for young writers?

[BL]: Publishers are always on the look-out for young, new voices to turn into books. The main thing you have to keep in mind is to simply keep on writing. Writing can’t be a private act; the more you write the more people will understand 1) you’re a writer; and 2) what kind of writing you do, and hopefully they will pair you up with someone who will champion you.

[W]: And finally, a Would-You-Rather. Would you rather be Beyonce..

[BL]: I already am Beyonce.

[W]: So you don’t need to hear the rest [laughs]... but the alternative was: go to space.

[BL]: Space would be quiet, so I’d get a lot of work done. I’d rather see Beyonce, than be Beyonce.

Well I met a pretty number, she’s 0.25 She is less than one in three but she is more than one in five And now I’m feeling better, and I’m glad that I’m alive And when I kiss her, I’ll say plus oh point two five.

So when I made it to Canberra and I got to ANU I did my best to ascertain which of these claims were true And then this new and cocky Buck got a date on that first day But how I wish it went some other way

Cause if I had a girlfriend it was nothing but a Because I had a pretty girlfriend, but we didn’t fluke When I think about myself back then I make really work So she left me for a jock and then she left him me want to puke I was so arrogant and ignorant and sure that I for a jerk But now I’m feeling better and I’m glad that I’m knew best Man I wish she’d dumped me earlier, would alive And when I kiss her, I’ll say plus oh point two have saved me much distress And looking back I’m not impressed five.

It’s like I failed a basic test Cause I got caught up in the mess And then I’ll kiss her again and again and Of her homesickness and her stress again It wasn’t worth it for those breasts And then I will be whole It wasn’t worth it for the countless nights With her lips bringing together Of wondering if she was alright All those fragments of my soul And wondering if we were alright But if it doesn’t work, and I still hurt And not knowing if each kiss would be the Even after she’s kissed me I’ll go back home and cry a while and change last my strategy But the past is in the past, the past is in the You know, perhaps I’ll kiss a girl who doesn’t past. do the PhB And why the fuck would I care about any of You see that shit anymore? Because after all, When I lived in Townsville, I was something of I met a pretty number, she’s 0.25 a geek When I saw a girl, I’d freeze up when I tried to She is less than one in three but she is more than one in five speak And now I’m feeling better, and I’m glad that So I went on Wikipedia, and read a couple I’m alive books And when I kiss her, I’ll say plus oh point two They told me girls are after confidence not plus oh point two looks plus oh point two five

0.25 buck sleg

LOVE AND TRUTH IN THE AGE OF CONCRETE: OR WHY ANU NEEDS GOTHIC ARCHES daniel mckay “When we build, let us think that we build forever.” This was the view of the now largely forgotten nineteenth-century Polymath, John Ruskin. In his book The Seven Lamps of Architecture, he expressed the belief that good architecture was as much about moral truth as it was about proportion and tasteful window lintels. Beauty for Ruskin was a combination of the aesthetic and the moral. He believed that beautiful architecture was enduring and that such beauty transcended individuals and societies.

“When we build, let us think that we build forever; let it not be for present delight, nor present use alone; let it be such work as our descendant’s will thank us for” as “there are but two conquerors of the forgetfulness of men; poetry and architecture”.

I suppose by now, you’re sitting there wondering “what on the hell is he going on about”? and “what’s all this stuff about buildings got to do with Love, Truth and human values?” Well my oration is partly an opportunity to gallop around on my hobbyhorse, spruiking the merits of remodeling campus in a neo-neo gothic style. And while I have a lot to say about buildings, at its heart I am talking about love, and truth. As well as reflecting on whether we as individuals, and as a society really value them.

The enormity of a temple, the scale of a palace or the extent of a slum, tells us more about people than we care to admit. As something so intractably linked to our daily lives, hidden in plain sight if you will, we so rarely discuss how the built environment reflects what we value, what we love and what we hold true. We are as often unaware of the bigger picture as we are of the intricate detail. Perhaps we deliberately ignore it, because it paints such an unsettlingly truthful picture of ourselves: a Dorian Gray type portrait that shows us as we are, not how we’d like to be seen.

So let us take a few moments to become conscious of where we are and what it says about us. We’ll start with the foundations.

Though often unseen, foundations are the beginning of any building, whether it’s a skyscraper or a semi-detached bungalow.

When ruin falls on a building through age or neglect, it is often only the foundations that survive. In all we do, in all we believe, it’s important that the foundations are strong. To paraphrase an old hymn, our hopes should be built on nothing less, all else is sinking sand. If we truly believe that truth and love and the other great human values on which we build our society on, then we need to sink the foundations deep. And when we build, think that we’re building forever.

Lately, truth has suffered PR problems. A century of turmoil and upheaval led to serious questioning of “universal truth”.

And rightly so, for we come to truth only through questioning; when we fail to question, truth becomes something which it’s not meant to be: unquestioned fact.

The word truth comes to us from an old Norse word trú, which doesn’t mean fact, but belief and faith. The truth of Human Goodness is therefore a belief and faith in Human Goodness; the truth of Peace, is the belief and faith in Peace. The truth of Democracy is a belief and faith in democracy. Truth isn’t universal because we cannot know all things, but for the practical and pragmatic running of society we must still have truth; we must have principles and values that as foundations we have belief

and faith in. But not blind faith, it is a reasoned and interrogated faith. All foundations from time to time need their structural integrity inspected.

Let us take the truth of education as an example. If we truly believe that education can unleash the potential of individuals and societies, if we have faith in the transformative qualities that education can have., then shouldn’t the educational foundations we build reflect this? The question is: have we built with stone or concrete? I would argue that whilst our education is by many standards to be remarkable. Its long term sustainability could be questioned. Putting aside the Prime Minister’s proposed new funding model, have we been lured by a quick, cheap option with the illusion of permanency, but the potential to crumble? Or to put it more bluntly, are we getting value for money? If university funding is always dependent on the whim of a budget, is this establishing an enduring security for the future? Simply look at the financial endowments of Australian universities compared to the United States. Harvard’s endowment is $30 billion; ANU’s is $1.2 billion. Endowments are meant to be legacies handed from generation to generation to enrich, invest and reinvest in education. They rely on the generosity of private citizens and the community. The Americans do philanthropy much better than we do; indeed they have taken the idea of educational endowments and applied it to communities, with community endowments now found all over the US. However, foundations aren’t everything; walls are by most estimations generally required for successful buildings. But even then, foundations and walls are fairly standard, but not all need arches, and this is where gothic comes in. Gothic is much more than scowling teenagers hanging around cemeteries with caked on mascara, and over-thumbed copies of Wuthering Heights.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Gothic architecture as the ‘infinity made imaginable’. Gothic is all about inspiration, and of upward momentum, I believe that gothic is beautiful because is the embodiment of human creativity and ingenuity, stone carved to float above ones head, a miracle engineering and skill and at the same time poetic and inspiring. What ANU really needs is some Gothic arches, some pointed sandstone arches with a some smatterings of castellation, cloisters, towers, and dreaming spires.

Whilst the Chancellery Building certainly has the fortress-like quality of a medieval keep, it’s not really the same.

Gothic buildings have something that sets them apart. All good buildings need something that sets them apart for it to be enduring. The principal material needed to achieve this is love. Love is what binds it all together; if truth is the stone, then love is the mortar. Without mortar none of it could stand. Those vaulted ceilings could not rise above our heads, nor could the spires soar to heavens to unknown.

Buildings don’t only reflect the love of individuals, but society.

As human history demonstrates, individuals may show remarkable and courageous love in the darkest, grimmest, starkest of places that humanity has erected. The trenches; the slums and ghettoes; the camps, and gulags. Notice how none of these places are permanent. They are built for purposes devoid of love and aren’t built on foundations of truth and so cannot have permanency.

As an example more close to home, one of the greatest indictments on our society, are the places where we house and care for our elderly. This I have discovered from painful and personal experience. Over the past year, I have lost two dear grandparents who lived on the farm where I grew up. When my grandmother died of a stroke, I distinctly remember someone commenting, that at least she didn’t have to go to a nursing home, as that was her greatest fear. As grief and dementia diminished my grandfather physically, the decision was made to put him in a nursing home. I soon became aware of what my grandmother had good reason to dread. Though the staff are kind and attentive, the places we shut away our elderly are bleak. They are cheap, grim and utilitarian spaces with no sense of proportion or light or beauty and with little connection with nature. Do we not value our elderly? Should not we build palaces, halls full of light, demonstrating our love for those whom we care?

“When we build, let us think we build forever.” Wanting to build things that last, is not incompatible with change. Change is natural; it’s neither inherently good nor ill. But in going through change, we can easily forget those things that as humans we hold dear unless they are built with love upon firm foundations of truth. Even if we don’t build in gothic (despite my eager hopes) we should still build things that endure. In an age of concrete, it’s easy to forget that something’s just need setting in stone.

steph mangos sculpture and design arts stephaniemangos.com

Collecting cuttlefish for your canaries to sharpen their beaks and cleaning out the Avery (the one in your garden) before your forgetting started Orderly tea set; tray of biscuits dunked in that tea cup before your forgetting started Then the knights and rooks transported you away: the bishop matron that once was Because the King and the Queen were already dead Liquorice allsorts lined the windowsill set with centimetres of perfection (they were--were always your favourite) ants danced upon them As you remind me to move the chair, that chair-right there Remember me, remember me As you remind me there is no tomorrow--fractured moon mirrored curtain Curtailed reminiscence Watching behind the glass, your stasis stagnant and sallow; Remember me.

STATIC amanda taplin

tara bromham illustrations and textile design gypsythief.tumblr.com

People tell me that because I am a migrant, my stories will all be the same.

That they will be filled with reinvention, acclimatization, and the necessity to forget.

That they will talk of other lives I have simultaneously lived and not lived.

And muse on hopes harboured, failures (personal or otherwise) fulfilled.

That they will laud carefully constructed performances “we” use to appease “them”.

And that they will laud at the times we and our parents ever thought new beginnings were possible.

But how else can I convey the disappointment and desperation to say I have left a part of myself behind?

How do I say that this does not make me sad just willful? That perhaps not daily but regularly, I both struggle against and disdain an urge to claw it all (though I know I cannot) back?

And how, despite all this, do I say that I find a shapeless comfort in aridity?

MIGRANT POETRY zid niel mancenido

THE WORST CHRISTMAS EVER raphael kabo

Santa Claus was lying in our fireplace. Dead. Very dead. The little brown tiles he had landed on, head-first, were covered in a growing pool of ruddy blood. His huge booted feet were still up the chimney. A grimace of sudden shock was plastered across his jowly, bearded face.

“I don’t think that was supposed to happen,” said Mina. She was not my identical twin, but looked a lot like me anyway. She was tall and blonde and bright, and standing in the middle of the living room in her pyjamas and looking at Santa’s body.

“No, I don’t think so either,” I said. Santa smelt like pine needles and wet fur and reindeer musk.

“Oh, the reindeers are probably still up there on the roof!” I moaned. “Reindeer? Reindeers?”

“Who cares? Think, Sam, we have to get rid of the body!”

“We do?” I said. The corpse grimaced at me painfully. I was perfectly happy to climb into bed and pretend nothing had happened.

“Yes, we do!” she whispered angrily. “We can’t just leave him!

Our parents will notice! There’ll be questions!”

“They might not notice… they don’t believe in him…”

“Sam, you moron, it doesn’t matter how much you don’t believe in someone if his body is crammed up the fireplace and bleeding all over your tiles! Ugh.” “Right. Is he heavy? Can we take him somewhere?”

“Where?”

I thought for a bit. Somewhere with no people. Or reindeers.

Reindeer?

“Ooh!” I remembered. “The skip at the back of the supermarket down the block. There’ll be nobody there.”

“You sure?”

“I swear.”

“Alright. Let’s drag him.” We grabbed an arm each, after shifting the Christmas tree, and pulled him out of the living room and into the hall. His head dripped little rubies of blood onto the carpet, and his body smudged them into wet stains as we pulled.

He was heavy, after all — very heavy, like a sack of bricks, and just as bad to pull. Mina’s pulling helped more than mine and I kept trying to pull harder to catch up to her. We managed to get him through the living room door, past our parents’ room and past little Maddy’s — I think we woke her up, but little Maddy is the sort of really quiet kid who doesn’t ask questions at two in the morning, so she just stared at us with big pale eyes from her bed and then lay back down.

The hardest part was dragging him out of the house. Just when we thought the coast was clear, a big gang of drunks came wandering down the road, and I felt scared even though I had Santa’s corpse with me. But after they left, we still had the whole block to go to get to the shops. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life — harder than the beep test, harder than a marathon or a hundred metre race or anything. My arms felt numb and pained and blistered all at once, and the fact that Santa’s expression changed at one point — we must’ve bumped him against the path really hard — really didn’t help make me feel better. We dragged in silence, panting and puffing. Some of the reindeers trotted with us, a few steps behind, and even though they seemed concerned and friendly, it made me feel uneasy.

But finally we got him to the skip. It smelt awful, and we had to have the heavy metal lid of it open for so long, while trying

to lever and push and pull Santa’s body into it, that I felt like I’d smell of old fish and sour milk and vegetable peelings forever. It wasn’t easy, but we managed it in the end. When we’d finished, you could only see the tip of one of Santa’s shiny boots sticking out a corner of the skip, and we both decided we weren’t keen on the idea of climbing in there with Santa and rearranging his limbs so he’d fit better, so we just walked home. The reindeers stayed behind, all big and silent. I felt desperately tired. But when we got back home, we still hadn’t finished, because Mina handed me a sponge and we had to clean the carpet. It did very little. You can still see the stains pretty clearly, but our parents never asked about them much.

When school started, the next year — we were in year six, which was fun because we were finally in different classes so people stopped asking us if we were twins (yes) and were we identical (no) and how come we looked the same (don’t know) and did we have to share our clothes (only our school jumpers, sometimes) — we asked around how our friends’ Christmases were. Most of them seemed better than ours. We decided ours was the worst Christmas ever. But then Frankie Black came up to me at the end of lunch and said Santa had had a heart attack on his nice living room sofa, and Annie McClaren told Mina that Santa had fallen off her roof and gotten impaled on the garden fence — so we worked out it happened to some kids some years and some kids others. But Santa definitely won’t be coming to our place again.

Except maybe for little Maddy. But I really hope she’ll wake us up when she finds him dead, because she’s very small and not very good at walking to the shops by herself.

MONEYBALL joshua chu-tan You’ve all seen them, you’ve all heard of them. The rich sporting teams that seem to buy everyone, and dominate everything.

Manchester City Football Club, the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Lakers all have this in common. They seem to just have unlimited cash in their hands and an obvious unfair advantage over other “poorer” teams. Money equals power in the business world, but what does it equal in the sporting world?

Brad Pitt’s brilliant portrayal of Billy Beane in the film Moneyball showed how important money really is in the world of sports, well at least in Major League Baseball. So let’s dive into the statistics of this all. We’ll primarily look at the salaries in each team for 2012 and if or how it affects the teams. The values were compiled by Nick Harris, editor of sportingintelligence.com and recently published in ESPN The Magazine addressing the “Money Issue.” All monetary values are in US Dollars (1 USD = 0.96 AUSD).

Let’s begin with the European soccer giants, as there are no salary caps in this sport. Barcelona and Real Madrid have the highest average salary for their players in the world, not just in soccer. The players for Barcelona earn an average annual pay of $8,680,569 whereas Real Madrid’s players earn a bit less on average with $7,796,637. How do they stand in their league? Well, it’s safe to say that when you think of the Spanish league, Barca and Madrid are the only teams that come to mind. In the past decade, there has only been one season where the champions were not one of these two teams. Madrid and Barcelona have finished top two of the league in every season bar three. The Catalan giants have won five titles and Madrid four. The drop-off in terms of average salary from the top two is immense, with Valencia being then next highest at around $3M. Interestingly, Valencia is the only team in the past decade that has won the league title aside from Madrid and Barca.

Moving onto the English Premier League, Manchester United and Chelsea have been the top paying teams in the premier league since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea. However, Manchester City is now in the mix with their new owners from Abu Dhabi. As of 2012, Man City have the highest average salary, $7,403,754, Chelsea come next rounding in at $6,795,899, and Man Utd third at $5,521,423.

While Chelsea shocked the world by beating Barcelona and then Bayern Munich in the Champions League last year to win the title, considering the amount of money that they spent, statistically speaking this should not have been a surprise.

Chelsea and Manchester United are also consistent top four finishers, and are always challenging for the title. Arsenal come in fourth with their average player salary being $5,280,108, followed by Liverpool, $5,230,525. Arsenal and Liverpool used to round out the “Big Four” in English football, however Liverpool have dropped significantly since then, despite their salary spendings still being fifth in the league.

In the past decade, Manchester United has won five titles, Chelsea won three, Arsenal one, and of course it only took the new, loaded Manchester City three seasons to develop a team to win

the most recent title. The Big Four have finished top four in the league every season bar two, until Man City emerged and Tottenham began challenging. Still, Liverpool was the only team to drop out of the top four in the past decade while the top spenders above them have never failed to qualify for the Champions League.

In European football, the drop off from the rich teams to the “middle class” teams is very significant in almost every league.

This may change soon due to UEFA’s proposal of instigating a “Financial fair play” system that essentially acts as a salary cap.

We’ll move on to North America, but before we do, let’s take a moment to look at salary caps first. The Major League Baseball (MLB) is the only league in the US where there is no salary cap, every other major sport does. However, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has what is called a “soft” salary cap as opposed to the National Hockey League (NHL) and National Football League (NFL). It gets complicated, so I’ll give an abridged version of what this entails. The soft cap gives several exceptions for teams to go over the salary cap in order to sign players, whereas the hard cap does not. That is why you will see a few teams in the NBA (LA Lakers) that exceed the salary cap. However, these teams will have to pay a “Luxury Tax” to the league. Due to the hard salary cap on the NHL and NFL, all the teams have similar salary spendings, and so I won’t be mentioning them here.

In the NBA, the LA Lakers pay the best at $6,540,690. The San Antonio Spurs come in next at $5,450,135, and the Chicago Bulls, Boston Celtics and Miami Heat round off the top five all averaging within $200,000 of each other. All of these teams made the playoffs last season with the Miami Heat victorious in the end.

Venturing out of the top five, the trend continues. The next six richest teams all made the playoffs that year as well. The remaining four teams were ranked 17th, 18th, 20th and 26th in a 30 team league. So the eleven richest teams in the NBA all made the playoffs in 2012.

If there’s a league that doesn’t show a correlation between money and success it would have to be baseball. Apart from the Yankees of course, the teams that make the playoffs each year vary quite a lot.

The New York Yankees pay the best in the MLB at $6,186,322, with the Philadelphia Phillies coming in second at $5,817,652.

To round off the top five, the Los Angeles Angels come next at $5,327,075, followed by the Boston Red Sox at $5,093,724, then the Texas Rangers coming in at $4,635,037. Surprisingly, three of these teams didn’t make the playoffs this year, the Phillies, Angels and the Red Sox. The remaining teams to fill the playoff spots were the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, Cincinatti Reds, Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves, Washington Nationals and Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics. These teams rank 6th, 8th, 9th, 16th, 18th, 19th, 24th and 30th respectively on the salary rankings (there are a total of 30 teams in the MLB). As you can see, the teams making it into the post-season are more spread out than in any other league.

Now if we look at all these numbers, apart from a few exceptions in the MLB, there is a very clear correlation between money and success of a sporting team. Every once in a while you’ll have an outlier, but as you can see, the richest teams consistently place among the top of their respective leagues every, single year. The poorer teams almost have no chance, unfortunately. There’s no question that in sport, money equals success.

sabrina baker braids, stills from a performance with jute sabrina.baker3@gmail.com

CATS, DOGS AND LIFE james waugh In his Interhall Public Speaking Competition winning speech, James W uses the age old Cats v Dogs debate as a platform to implore us all to chill the fuck out and get along a bit better.

Last night was Unilodge’s public speaking heat, a gladiatorial event to find out which esteemed lodger would represent us all at Interhall Public Speaking. It may shock some of you to find out that last night I was victorious. I don’t think i won because i had the best speech, l think won because i had the only speech.

Yes, at a college of over two thousand residents I was the only one who managed to write a speech. Obviously this doesn’t cohere with Unilodge’s outstanding reputation for participation, so who is to blame?

I blame IAC. this year’s topic’s were truly awful. Topics about lying, weed, cliches and cats. This is IAC’s fault because they gave public speaking, an event about wit and humour, emotion and communication, to Johns.

I had more inappropriate jokes I was planning on making, but unfortunately i’ve been censored by my arts reps because postpoetrygate IAC is twice as sensitive as a nipple.

Instead i’ll have to talk about Cats, and the first thing that comes to mind on such a topic is: I’m really more of a dog person. Because I prefer dogs, this means I can see absolutely no merit in cats as animals at all. I’m now a foot soldier in the eternal battle between cats and dogs.

Because my cockels are warmed more so by one fury small animal than another smaller fury animal I fall into a certain class of person. And a dog person and not a cat person is an important distinction to make, as important to me as not being the sort of person who posts pictures of lunch on Instagram.

I realise how moronic this distinction is, but it’s still really important to me, and because I spend most of my life balls-deep in hypocrisy I feel i can judge people for liking cats, just a little bit.

I am right after all, look at the sort of people who own dogs, Barack Obama, The Queen, Indiana Jones and a pack of teenagers who roam the countryside in a van solving Mysteries. Great people.

Cat Owners have got no one good. Bond Villains, Marie Antoinette, Lennin, The Pope and Taylor Swift. Each one worst than the last and each one the proud owner of a fury little shit head.

I just can’t understand why anyone could be so fond of an animal with only one skill: shitting in a box. And if i wanted to have my affections rejected by something cold-hearted and emotionally distant, I’d spend more time with my dad.

There is even a website dedictated to cats that look like Hitler.

They call them Kitlers. When your favourite animal looks like a genocidal maniac, it might be a hint to find a new pet.

This is the part of my speech where i try and convince you that this isn’t just about cats. Now i make some contrived segue to show that I’m not just funnelling immature jokes but actually making some soaring reflection on the human condition.

Now i say: that the ties that bind us together are stronger than the lines we draw to keep us apart. That we should reject these segregations; Dogs/cats, black/white, Israeli/palestinian. Come together, hold hands and sway to the music of Xavier Rudd. But this isn’t the Food Co-op, and drawing lines is fun.

People are pretty social creatures, and the only thing better than sharing something you care about with another is when you’re actively excluding someone else. It’s probably a better idea to do it with trivial stuff like dogs and cats, than to race or religion.

The sort of thing people occasionally take a touch too seriously.

But remember, there are countless reasons why I could mock you, probably something important like you prefer Harvest to Two Before Ten, or you own a white belt.

Just take it all a bit less seriously.

I WONDER IF PEOPLE APPRECIATE THAT SILENCE IS DEAFENING IS A PUN WITH TWO MEANINGS. NOT A DOUBLE PUN, JUST ONE THAT MEANS TWICE. FIRST, THAT SILENCE IS DEAFENING AND THEREFORE UNBEARABLE. THAT IT, LIKE LOUD NOISE,

IS NOT JUST HARD BUT PAINFUL TO ENDURE. AND SECOND, THAT IT IS DEAFENING AND THEREFORE DULLS OUR SENSES; THAT IT, LIKE A SUDDEN BANG, DULLS US, NUMBS US, DEAFENS US TO THE RISING STORM. zid niel mancenido

dan kim illustrations

the battalion grew heavy Her face was free Flamboyant Dry as hope Killed in a parody Mischief and Sunsets Cool as day A scolded muse A lost tirade A vengeance for high hopes A colourless sin A fraction less state A desire to win Ten temples Fury in the clouds Screaming in a fever A delinquent Prism Unending and unendowed

His fist was tormented A closet nerd Not sure whether to kill Or have his songs heard The paradise Lay relentless He scolded the beast Screaming in doubt A fickle thief

A RELENTLESS PARODY katharina fehringer

anthony lieu photography

hannah winter-dewhirst illustrations hannahwd.tumblr.com

LOLICON dan rose The Lolita complex, that is, an attraction to underage girls, is a particular market that is pandered to by a form of pornographic art known as lolicon – “lolicon” being a Japanese portmanteau of Lolita complex. This art is depicted in both anime and manga cartoons, and while permissible in Japan, the legality of the art form is hazy in Australia.

The relevant legal precedent in NSW stemmed from the 2008 NSW Supreme Court case, McEwen v. Simmons & Anor. The judgement suggests that in regards to child pornography, people can refer to fictional and imaginary characters. The sex offender’s crime was to import pornography depicting characters from the cartoon, ‘The Simpsons’, which is not strictly lolicon, however the judgement established that possession of images of video depicting an imaginary child is illegal. There is presently no federal law against lolicon pornography in Australia.

Lolicon is legal in the USA, protected as a form of free speech.

In the UK, lolicon is forbidden, as it depicts minors illegally.

This issue was famously broached on Chris Morris’ ‘Brass Eye’, when he had the heads of benign images, like a dog with an erect penis and a naked Barbie doll, replaced with the heads of children. He then asked the former head of the UK Obscene Publications Branch to judge if the images were indecent.

Of course, the examples given so far, like nude depictions of ‘The Simpsons’ characters and absurd composite images, seem relatively harmless. Indeed, this is often a defence put forward by supporters of lolicon—that it is a victimless crime. Of course, unlike actual child pornography, there is indeed no child actually being forced to undertake depraved acts, so what possession of lolicon pornography amounts to is a crime of conscience.

Vice Magazine recently interviewed Dr Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist who counsels paedophilic men. His research suggests that paedophilia is an innate sexual orientation, much like we can see heterosexuality and homosexuality. The difference between paedophilia and other sexualities is that it is a one-way attraction, and one that is not okay because children cannot express their sexual attraction.

We can see lolicon as very much a similar sexuality, although one could argue that the risk is slightly mitigated, since those who view lolicon are viewing a simulated act, rather than an actual piece of degradation.

What then, are the reasons against legalising lolicon pornography?

Commonly, the slippery slope argument is used, suggesting that if we allow people to view simulated child pornography,

they will eventually begin looking at real child pornography; perhaps then acting upon their urges to see naked children and start molesting kids. I am not sure that this stands, however, because there is little evidence that in these cases each iteration of change will necessarily follow from another. It groups paedophiles into an abstract entity, ignoring the reason why some prefer to view animated or cartoon porn in the first place.

So why do some people prefer simulated pornography (hentai) over the real deal? This preference has nothing to do with the distinction between real life and animation, rather it is by virtue of the fact that the pornography is simulated, allowing authors to depict forms of rare pornography that would, in the real world, be incredibly expensive to produce, or simply not possible.

Examples would be characters depicted with incredibly large breasts and disproportionate Barbie Doll bodies, as well as sexual acts including gore, scat and snuff. They might also include fantasy or sci-fi elements, sometimes involving bestiality, magic or supernatural elements. Most of the above described elements can be shown in real world pornography, however they might involve high labour costs because of the nature of the work, or else require specialist computer generated imagery, both which add to the cost and lack of supply of such material.

So we can establish that the attraction of simulated pornography is its production virtues—the ability for the medium to depict acts which are either impossible, or very hard to show in real life. No doubt, another attraction of hentai is the fact that its style is derived from popular genre of manga, but this is no different from some people preferring naturalist pornography to modern commercial pornography, or preferring the medium of still photos to video.

It seems that proponents of lolicon are announcing that they are fine with viewing images of underage girls, but baulk at viewing images of actual children. No doubt, real life imagery should invoke a stronger empathetic response in us, while lolicon disconnects the viewer from the brutal reality of infantile sexuality.

We might decry lolicon for the same reasons we might decry the computer game Ethnic Cleansing, featured on the television show ‘Louis & The Nazis’, for the fact that while the person consuming the media is not actually killing ethnic minorities, they are simulating the act, which normalises the behaviour.

If we are to view paedophilia as a form of sexuality, we can have some sympathy for these people. It cannot be argued, though, that their condition is one which has no chance of harming children, and we ought to recognise that the onus is on these individuals to ensure that they receive help. Simply viewing simulated child pornography in itself should be seen as immoral, even if we accept that they will not progress onto harmful activities like viewing actual child pornography or molesting children. The denigration of lolicon should then come from the point of view that the style is immoral in itself, by virtue of it being an analogue for child pornography, rather than finding reasons in slippery slope fallacies.

charlie white alex’s skull and flower cfww.tumblr.com

A SPOT OF TENNIS tom westland “What treasure?” asks the title character of Shakespeare’s Henry V, to which the Duke of Exeter replies, cheerfully: “Tennis balls, my liege.” I think we all know exactly what he means.

The word ‘tennis’ occurs five more times in the Bard’s theatrical oeuvre, which just goes to show that while the age-old themes of Love, Loss and Transvestism weighed heavier on his mind, the playwright reserved a special place for Tennis in his well rounded conception of the human condition. And it’s not hard to see why.

To start off with you’ll need a racquet, a pair of sturdy shoes, and one of those tennis visors that the professionals wear, although the same fashionable effect can be achieved by cutting the top off a Legionnaire hat with a pair of scissors.

Now, the defining characteristic of tennis is its simplicity.

Indeed, once you’ve mastered a few basic rules you’ll be up and

running in no time. All you need to do, really, is hit the ball over the net. Ideally you’ll want to hit the ball into the square diagonally opposite from you, but only when you serve, after which you can hit it into any of the rectangles across the net, except the two side rectangles if you’re playing singles, or the front two squares on the left if it’s a leap year, unless you can provide a statutory declaration from a medical professional or you’re playing in the Netherlands, in which case simply reverse all of the above rules.

The scoring system is equally and refreshingly straightforward.

You start off at zero (and I think it says something rather sweet about the English that this is technically referred to as ‘love’) and you work your way in short order to 15, after which you move to 30, and then to 40.

After that things get slightly more complicated and you have something called ‘deuce’, which from memory is Spanish for ‘Purgatory’, a sort of black hole where you hit the ball back and forth until one of you succumbs to heat stroke. Then you go and retrieve some of the balls you’ve lost, or surreptitiously steal some from the elderly couple playing on the court next you.

And if you’re feeling overwhelmed, fake an injury by choosing a part of the body and prefixing it with the word ‘tennis’. “I’m sorry, friends, I’ll have to call it a day,” you say, lowering your visor, “I’ve got tennis elbow.”

Rain clouds A fickle December A man made story A screaming shroud Docile Under attack Infidels in the sea Jostled like fire Birds in a parody Of silver memoirs A beaten muse Rain clouds The sunlit afternoon Jungles of fire Raging sin Calling the fickle memories And their evil twin To dance the night away Silver shrines White tabernacles Clothed in fright Bemused by the warrior And the silver shrouds A fortress of unedited proportions Droughts of hope Secrets too loud

COLOUR BLIND katharina fehringer

nellie peoples gold and silver design nelliepeoples.com

APING THE ARISTOCRATS dan rose The relentless march of Chinese development has given rise to a new media phenomenon:reporting on how incredibly wealthy and poorly-behaved the emerging Chinese nouveau riche are.

Expensive wines, gaudy fashion, fast cars and the rampaging fortunate sons of Chinese industrialists have all become fair game for the media, but rather than point to an inherit deficit in the culture of this emerging economy, we should look to Western consumer culture as the ultimate cause of this. Our cultural relationship with the Chinese now resembles that of Victorian England’s class antagonism between the aristocratic elites and the industrialist bourgeoisie.

The emerging nouveau riche made their bread during the rapid industrial expansion of China, blessed by cheap labour, mass rural-urban migration and a hungry consumer market in developed nations. Protected by a developmentalist state apparatus, factory owners made a killing in producing cheap goods for the rest of the world, and so have Chinese Communist Party functionaries who often demand a piece of the pie in return for state favours. These conditions have allowed for a new class of affluent wealth-makers and high-level bureaucrats to attain vast amounts of money not just in comparison to their peasant and worker breatheren, but also to a vast proportion of citizens in Western nations. “[Luxury car purchases are] an increasingly familiar story as ranks of wealthy Chinese move from bike to Bentley and Moped to Mercedes in a generation,” explains Jonathan Watts of TheGuardian, reprinted in the SMH. Watts spares no details in describing how fast these luxury cars can go, and how much they cost, before noting that there is no chance to actually let these cars wind out and perform to their potential, “Despite the surge in sales of 300km/h cars, the rush-hour speed in Beijing is rarely above 25km/h.”

“Nothing says “style” in China like a splash of gold jewellery for any wannabe fashionista adorned in her finest “donkey horse fart”,” proclaims the lead of an article from the AFR. The “donkey horse fart” refers to the phonetic translation of the luxury brands, Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Prada, but I suspect that the phrase is deliberately left translated to hint at the vulgar tastes of these “wannabe fashionista[s]”.

This breed of reporting which criticises the Chinese nouveau riche, masquerades as straight news but carries undertones which denigrate the culture and style of the class of Chinese millionares, which according to the Hurun Rich List are estimated to be over one million people. In a population of 1.3 billion, though, they are still the 0.1%. Such reporting often acts as a racist dogwhistle, calling the readers into reaction.

Another particularly poisonous way of reporting on China has been to represent it as a permissive culture lacking the rule of law.

We have categorised a new generation of Chinese: the Rich2G (Second generation rich). These people are the sons and daugh-

ters of the nouveau riche, and are generally reported as being boorish, violent and above the law. An American ABC report, for example, tells of several incidences of institutional cover-up in allegations of wealthy teenagers beating on the poor and powerless, as well as in deadly vehicle accidents in which the wealthy drivers do not face justice. Underlying the whole report is the suggestion that these kids do not deserve their money or status, for they did not earn it themselves. Of all things, the antidote offered by this article is the book ‘Life Is What You Make It’ by Patrick Buffet – the billionaire Warren Buffet’s son.

Immediately we can see cultural imperialism rear it’s ugly head, for as young Patrick inherited a “mere” $90,000, he still followed the American Dream and made a life for himself as a musician.

Implied in the article is that maybe massive familial wealth inheritance is breeding a toxic culture for China’s Rich2G. Regardless of one’s thoughts on inheritance, what is clear is the gross hypocrisy present in such reporting. If ABC reporter Gloria Riviera had bothered to look in her own backyard, she would see a society where a similar proportion of trust fund babies summarily flaunt the law and inherit massive wealth from their parents.

Why is China such a special and interesting case for Western reporters, and how did a culture of Maoist asceticism give birth to a class of people who supposedly consume voraciously and indiscriminately? A taste in high style, fashion and consumer gewgaws cannot grow in a vacuum, so we need to look to Thorstein Veblen’s critique of consumer culture for answers.

Veblen’s ‘Theory of the Leisure Class’ outlines an evolutionary model of social hierarchy, noting that style is not, as classical economics suggests, simply an indication of an individual’s rational preferences; rather, trends are just a manifestation of social emulation – we tend to emulate the style of the social stratas above us as a means of consolidating our place in society. In a market economy, private property and status are closely linked, and style, for Veblen, is a way to express one’s social strata.

Status in society is signalled through using one’s time used for leisure, and on the lavish spending of capital on luxury goods.

Classical rational preference theory cannot explain such behaviour, for it is simply “waste” expenditure. The purchase of a sports car that one might never get to push to its limits is a perfect example of this, for the car has no utility value over, for example, a Prius. What the sports car does signify though, is societal status – the ability to waste money, and the greater that ability, the higher your place in the social strata of a market economy.

Obviously, there are some stark counterexamples to Veblen’s critique, for some styles such as punk peculate from the bottom of society, but the point remains: if we stop seeing style as an expression of individuality and instead view it as social emulation, we can begin to understand the rise of the Chinese nouveau riche. The style of the old Chinese bureaucratic elites, however, is obviously not being emulated by the emerging rich. Our media likes to speak of an appetite for designer brands, luxury vehicles and fine wine in China, not a demand for Communist austerity overalls or the baggy suits rocked by Deng Xiaoping or Nikita Khrushchev.

So we then have to look at the source of the prevalent fashions in the high streets of China. Take for example, “donkey horse fart” - Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Prada. These are all luxury brands from the West, and this is where our critique of Chinese consumer must begin, then. When our media speaks of gaudy, tasteless branded fashion, an appetite for homogeneous cultural artefacts and a growth in demand for impractical automobiles, my mind turns immediately to Middle Australia, with similar aspirations but an equally indiscriminate sense of refinement.

So what is the difference between the Australian middle class

and the Chinese nouveau riche? The key here can be found in an old Hegelian dialectic – the historical antagonism between the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Since industrialisation, the song remains the same: the bourgeoisie challenges the ruling class, the aristocrats react, and eventually the conflict is resolved through a synthesis, with the resolution ending in the nouveau riche supplanting the artisocrats and trampling them underfoot.

As globalisation progresses, this dialectic has grown in scale, moving from a national level in industrial England, right through to the global scale now, with cultural groups challenging each other on the world market. We can only now see that the way we report on progress in China smacks of reactionary ideology, an attempt to mobilise our culture against the supposedly unrefined and barbaric culture of the Chinese tiger economy. Without significant gains in production, the emerging massive Chinese consumer culture will create scarcity in the West, adding to the financial squeeze on the middle classes here.

The key emotional receptor in these stories is appealing to the men of ressentiment. We should view the media’s unease with Chinese consumer culture as merely egoistic scapegoating, transplanting our feelings of inferiority onto the Chinese nouveau riche, demonising them and blaming them for our failure. The emerging rich in China represent a failure of Western culture and a triumph of the surging Chinese will to global power. Tied up in this are feelings of entitlement and casual racism, as we of the West take on the aristocrat’s persona. We created the seed for modern Chinese culture, and without a significant consumer market in developed nations, China could not have industrialised. As the culture that unleashed the awesome productive potential of the markets, we feel that we should inherit the fruits it bears. But as history shows, the aristocrats always lose.

The middle classes of the West are socialised to believe that success comes through effort, and for the gear-and-sprocket salesman with 2.5 kids and a mortgage, the factor of historical luck clashes with his sense of justice. But even Austrian economist and free-market godhead, Friedrich von Hayek, admits that the market is rarely just, for it rewards those with access to knowledge and resources that are valuable at that time in history. The Chinese, we were always taught, would forever be peasants and grimy industrial workers, and the rapid rise of modern China has shocked our sense of self. We have another nail in the coffin of the Australian Dream, an idealism overturned by these Chinese upstarts, a class of people with the financial means to live a life of unbridled hedonistic consumer pleasure.

Western media reporting on Chinese wealth might just be the early signs that the Old World is about to be transcended by the East. Since the birth of the capitalist markets, old money has been progressively displaced in power circles by an innovative and motivated bourgeoisie, and might Nietzsche now instead proclaim, “The West is dead”? Our strive for new markets and cheaper consumer goods has lain the foundation for our own economic eclipse by China, and our resentment is manifested in the way our media reports this fact.

ON THE ROAD kieran pender While great philosophers and writers have deliberated on the virtues of travel for thousands of years, there is never any substitute for the real thing. So following in the figurative footsteps of pretty much everyone, I set out on my own great adventure earlier this year.

Pre-trip I was certainly nervous: would it be a worthwhile use of time and money, or would I be better off staying at university and getting through my degree? Would I get homesick and fly home after two months with my tail between my legs?

Thankfully everything has gone well and I’m still over here enjoying life. I’ve met hundreds of lovely people over the last five months, and have thousands of incredible memories which I will treasure for the rest of my life. Tank riding in Slovakia, coasteering in Wales, watching the sun set over the Hebrides in Scotland and visiting the Gallipoli peninsular are all moments I hope to one day tell my grandchildren (as the cliché goes).

I think the number of new experiences I’ve had and new friends I’ve made are testament to the fact that it’s been worthwhile, and would certainly do it again if the opportunity presented itself. I already have more travel plans on simmer – trekking through South America, making my way from London to Canberra by train and boat (a rather ambitious idea, that one), and visiting Antarctica – although sadly university and finances may delay these adventures.

While I’m not overjoyed at the prospect of returning to university in February, I’ll certainly return with a new positive outlook (although I suppose we’ll see whether that lasts!) My travels have encouraged me to do more of what I love, stress a bit less and (hopefully) spend fewer hours working.

I’m not going to spout any of this ‘life-changing’ stuff, as I’m not a huge fan of hyperbole, but the trip has certainly made me think about the direction I want my life to take. Time spent on long train journeys is great for that, because so often in our busy lives we are too frantic to actually stop and think.

As such I would really encourage anyone who is disenfranchised, fatigued or plain bored with student life to considering taking program leave. It was easy to apply for and as far as I’m aware is rarely denied. Although I’ve been saving for this trip since school, several solid months of full time work would provide the necessary funds for a very worthwhile trip.

From there the world is your canvas. My decision to tackle Europe was mainly due to childhood dreaming, but opportuni-

ties for excellent travel exist across the globe. Over the last few months I have met people who have travelled to the Americas, Asia, Africa and broader Oceania, and they all had interesting stories to tell.

And remember to leave space for serendipity to play its part.

Originally our travel plans did not include Eastern Europe, and it was only on a whim that we booked a short tour from Prague to Split via Poland and Hungary. Thankfully we had an incredible time and have since been back, exploring the big cities and back roads from Bosnia to Turkey.

For an ‘obsessive’ planner like myself, leaving blank space in a schedule is quite challenging, but in this instance it definitely paid off. Whether these unplanned moments leads you to a new corner of Europe, or, like a friend of mine, to the Democratic Republic of Congo only time will tell. But ultimately, it’s all part of the adventure. Not knowing where you’ll be next week or next month, what language you’ll be speaking or what food you will be devouring. It is what makes travel great.

Because there is no such thing as a mistake in travel, it doesn’t matter which direction you take. Sure we probably haven’t had the ‘perfect’ trip, small things have gone wrong, we haven’t made it to many amazing cities and we probably missed that must-see building, but in a strange way that’s the joy of travel. There is no such thing as the right or wrong journey, no correct way to get from point A to B, and no one telling you off for taking the wrong turn.

Every time I walk into a bookshop – an increasingly common occurrence – I can’t help but browse the travel section looking for new ideas and further inspiration. Travel is rapidly becoming my new hobby, and I’m slightly worried how I will cope with my return home to normality.

Although I was lucky enough to travel reasonably frequently as a child with my family, visiting many parts of Australia, there is simply nothing like travelling independently (or with a travel companion, as in my case). The simple joys of finding an awesome new cafe or shop in a foreign city, or the quirky moment when you realise someone you’ve met on the road actually knows one of your friends from home. Small things, yet things you really appreciate while travelling.

Sure there are downsides: your bed might not be the best, it’s easy to get fed up eating microwave food day after day when your hostel doesn’t have a good kitchen and sometimes everything seems to go wrong at once, but ultimately the joy of travel has no equal.

As Jack Kerouac writes in On the Road, “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” Thanks to everyone for reading the column throughout the year. I still have more than a month of travel left, and will be recounting my adventures at europebyfootball.com.

THE COLONEL & THE SEXYTARY OF STATE tom westland After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, documents revealing his infatuation with former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were found. Here we present an exclusive extract... [...] Condoleeza felt all warm. Perhaps it was the murderously hot breath of the Libyan sun streaming through the palace windows.

Perhaps it was the battle raging outside the compound where she lay in complete post-coital bliss.

Or perhaps it was bodily heat of her swarthy lover Muammar radiating across the bed towards her. Yes, she thought on reflection. That’s probably it. “’Leeza, “ he said, swarthily, “’Leeza, I want to make love to you again!”

“Muammar,” she said in Russian and French simultaneously, since she was fluent in both languages and also a stunning concert pianist, “Muammar, I must return to the State Department!

But before I go, please make love to me one last time!”

His swarthy eyes lit up as though by celebratory gunfire from smuggled Soviet weaponry.

Condoleeza climbed on top of her swarthy Libyan lover and delicately removed his pants.

“May I inspect your weaponry?” she said with a glint in her eye.

He entered her with the force of a Tomahawk missile landing accidentally on a civilian target.

For Condoleeza, this was the greatest moment of her life, even better than the erotic massage she’d received from Kim Jong Il. With one great, last guttural battle cry, the swarthy Libyan dictator’s payload was spent. “‘Leeza, darling,” he cooed, as only a dictator can, “will you lift your sanction and allow me to kiss you upon your lips?” She had given her body to Muammar completely, it was true. But could she surrender herself completely to a Third World despot? What would the Security Council say? [...]

VIOLENCE AND REVERSESEXISM: FORGET THE MALES lev bronshtein Suicide bomber kills 36 male police cadets in downtown Baghdad. Who cares? Colombian guerrillas massacre 73 men in progovernment town. Yawn. Man rapes three girls in makeshift dungeon in American Midwest. Actual news story.

Look at Tom Kelly’s death - despite the outpouring of outrage at this young man’s despicable death, a more sinister context of neglecting violence against males until it becomes lethal lurks beneath it. It seems it takes a murder, manslaughter or a once-ina-year serious assault to bring any decent attention to this physical violence.

Society loves the politics of difference. It takes crimes where members of one demographic commits them against members of another demographic Statistics show that heterosexual rape occurs in similar proportions to homosexual rape. Yet, if you used media attention as a litmus test, male-on-male rape exists only in prison dramas such as Oz or the Shawshank Redemption. This is not to question the greater raw prevalence of women being raped and sexually assaulted but to point out that a horrendous double standard is applied. When the sexual appendages vis-a-vis the victim and perpetrator are different, that’s the point at which society becomes thoroughly concerned.

As I write this, Call of Duty stands as the most popular video game of all time. Its instalment Modern Warfare 2’s infamous ‘No Russian’ level enables players to participate in a Russian ultranationalist massacre of countless civilians throughout a fictional Moscow airport. Though one can choose whether or not to join in shooting these innocent victims, the scene is nonetheless played out in gruesome fashion. Furthermore, to avoid dying, a large number of (male) security guards and police officers must be killed.

Similarly, the Grand Theft Auto series, almost a rite of passage for computer-playing teenage boys, depicts bloody fates as varied as dismemberment, decapitation, shotgun shots to the head or simply being hit-and-run by one of a hundred different featured vehicles.

So cop-killing and airport terrorism are in but what about rape?

I challenge anyone to name a title where rape was even featured in a game, let alone an act a player themselves could perform.

Even if you could conjure one up after hours of research, the rest of us could find fully 5,000 titles in the same vein as the two mentioned before.

Yet what is the actual moral distinction between a game allowing the murder and maiming of the innocent and one allowing their rape? It is nothing but an ingrained, arbitrary and unquestioned choice by society as to what that difference entails.

Our attitudes are understandably against portrayals of rape but astoundingly liberal in the pursuit of gratuitous, invariably maleon-male violence within different forms of media. It thus comes without surprise that laws punishing such violence in the real world are severely lacking.

Victims such as Simon Cowley, Nick D’Arcy’s substitute for a punching bag, face a lifetime of medical misery (not to mention permanently-inserted titanium screws holding their faces together). Their plight is no less disturbing and painful than many rape and sexual assault victims. Yet their right to justice is viewed with comparable apathy. Their aggressors frequently escape with suspended sentences, weekend detention or a myriad of other functional slaps on the wrist.

If we look at the pre-20th century basis for imprisoning rapists, it heavily represented the perceived affront to the honour and prestige of the victim’s father or husband. Though this rationale has thankfully shifted to the right of the victim to be free from such abhorrent behaviour in the first place, there has not been a comparable paradigm shift in our revulsion towards male-onmale violence. Though our legally system theoretically and often practically recognises that such actions are illegal, punishment for them is frequently lacklustre. The overall feeling is that acceptance of 18th-century duelling has been watered down, rather than eliminated.

Of the several hundred fights I estimate I have seen in nightclub districts in 30 major cities across the world, I cannot recall one where it seems all parties were equally at fault. On the contrary, it was usually a case of one fool causing completely unjustified trouble (and intense pain) for the other. Yet the relative passivity with which society takes in this violence suggests that somehow it should be considered either normal or not worth condemning in the strongest possible terms. After all, those with more testosterone than oestrogen probably deserved it.

As regrettable as domestic violence is, it goes without saying that a man will usually hit a fellow man much harder than he would a woman, if he even hits a member of the fairer sex at all.

Though the most bogan form of chivalry, it proves itself in countless examples every weekend. This is particularly striking when, as is often the case, the aggressor male is larger, stronger and/or a more skilful brawler than the more hapless male he preys upon.

So arguing that a man’s greater physical size and power somehow makes male-on-female violence far worse is not only overstated but thoroughly incorrect.

I am fully cognisant that many female victims of violence, sexual or physical, never receive the sort of legal and social remedy they deserve. The same, however, is true of male victims, who even more frequently fail to get such answers. They are portrayed as second-class citizens in the legal system, simply for usually having the same genitalia as the people who wronged them.

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But my Mac girl is so pretty and so lovely And its not PC to say this, but so thin She defines elegance and flair, kinda like a MacBook air And if theres something I can’t stick in, like an optical cd Cause the windows girl was so buggy and so Then I’ll just have to use a USB, metaphorically glitchy Think about that for a minute I spent half our dates trying to fix something about her that broke I don’t mean to say she’s without her quirks But you know when I gave up on my old and flaws laptop She makes a weird baaaaaaaawh noise I still managed to sell it off to some nerdy when I turn her on bloke Which I used to find off putting and disturbing But now i think I’d miss it if it were gone So I’m sure that she’ll find somebody to love her Someone with plenty of free time for her repair Yeah, I used to date a girl a lot like windows Now she’s gone, you know I’ll never take her You know i used to think that guy was me back But eventually, I withered under her glare She gave me the blue stare of death, and left, So gentlemen, let me just advise you If your girlfriends shit, you should dump her for and bereft, I wept a Mac Well I used to date a girl who’s much like windows But now I’ve found a girl more like a Mac And just like when I threw out my old toshiba No way in hell I’ll ever take her back

WINDOWS buck sleg

knees

print facebook.com/kneesprints

EMOTICONNED farz edraki What can emoticons tell us about human nature? Farz Edraki spoke to Cambridge scholar, Alex Davies, to find out.

Here’s a confession: I don’t like emoticons. I don’t like how they cheapen a perfectly well-intentioned sentence in an e-mail or text message (“I love your housemate! He’s great! XD”). There is a probably an emoticon that encapsulates this sentiment, but given my harrumphing, it would be hypocritical to use it here… sadface.

Until recently, I didn’t really see the value in emoticons, and, to be honest, would have happily accepted if they were outlawed entirely. This all changed when I happened across an article by Cambridge scholar and ANU-grad, Alex Davies.

More than just an unnecessary afterthought to a sentence, the humble emoticon reveals a great deal about cultural difference. “As the internet has developed, we’ve seen emoticons that evolved in different cultures pass across cultural boundaries,” Davies told Woroni.

He uses the “^_^” emoticon as an example of cross-cultural communication. “This was originally the Asian version of ‘:)’ and wasn’t used in Western cultures. The reason for this is that in face to face communication, those from Asian backgrounds tend to look to the eyes for emotional cues, while those from Western cultures tend to look at the mouth,” commented Davies. This explains why it is the eyes that vary in Asian emoticons, whereas it is mouths that differ in Western emoticons. Consider, for example, “:)”, “:(“, or “:/”.

This field of “sentiment analysis” is a growing one, according to Davies. His research at Cambridge focuses on emoticon use and Twitter. By examining data from Twitter users, he was able to make inferences on the level of interrelatedness between certain emoticons and terms. So, the “<3” (heart on its side) emoticon, is associated with love, music, amazing, proud, beautiful, thankful, Jesus, and Justin. (Thank you, Bieberfever.)

Why aren’t there any new emoticons being used in the Twittersphere? If you think about it, we’ve been using the “smiley” emoticon for years. Even those that have been imported to the West from different cultures (like the “^_^” mentioned above) are now a regular part of the standard set of emoticons. Davies points out that that there are developing emoticons, but this isn’t really happening at an “appreciable rate”. “Until we start developing new emotions there’s little need to develop new emoticons ;)” he commented.

Davies’ research also led him to create the world’s first Twitter happiness map. “The map looked at the rate of happy tweets compared to sad tweets for different countries over a couple of months last year,” he told Woroni. Who’s the happiest of the lot?

Germany, apparently. Denmark and Mexico were closely placed after the Deutsch. Where does Australia fit into the picture? Well, we don’t… or at least not yet. Davies laments the fact that he wasn’t able to collect enough Australian tweets over the research period to add to the map.

So before you sign off your next e-mail or tweet, think about the emoticon you’re typing. There’s more to it than you might think. * Look, I realise this makes me sound like an old fogey, but I’m too busy crocheting a doily and polishing my pince nez to care.

georgia stoll illustrations gsstoll.tumblr.com

Being a campus icon, DJ YOUNG has been exposed to many different spheres of music.

Now, having spent hours trawling the internets to construct an array of hits quintessential to the various genres he took pride in defining himself, DJ YOUNG presents his collection “Hectic Eclecticism”.

ELECTRO ENSEMBLE an incongruous assortment of tunes united solely by their lack of words

Mogwai - Rano Pano Paul Kalkbrenner - Aaron Trentmoller - Miss You Lifelike- So Electric HTRK - Eat Yr Heart Daft Punk - Veridos Quo Explosions in the Sky - Your Hand in Mine DAZE - Tokyo 1984 Salem - Frost

HIPSTER ANTHEMS

COLLEGE MASHUP

like flares and the Rolling Stones defined the swagger of 70s music, these are the songs which will forever accompany memories of the iconic ‘noughties hipster.

plays like a haze of DJ Songs beats, $3 Carlton Draughts and a one-night romance with a first year girl

Camel Pouch - Three Minutes Thirty Seven Seconds of Silence The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio Tramspotting - Song No. 3 The National - Afraid of Everyone Double Shot Latte - An English Major The National - Mistaken for Strangers Cold Ass Honkeys - My Burgundy Chinos The National - Terrible Love

Jewel - Rigid Days Jennifer Paige - Loose Nights Asher Roth - I Love College Hilltop Hoods - What a Great Night Asher Roth & Avicii - I Love All Levels of College feat. Deadmau5 John Farnham - You’re the Voice.

Asher Roth & Katy Perry - Last Friday Night (At College).

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(1) At every one of the three tutorials I have attended, it has been stressed that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even if you bring a packed lunch, your mother still had to buy the pickles, didn’t she? Even though she knows you don’t like pickles.

(2) But let’s say you’re in a restaurant and your neighbour leaves half of his salade nicoise on his plate - should you claim it before the waitress comes back? No. As I already mentioned, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Your neighbour has meningococcal.

(3) Say Arnold has five apples, Alison has five oranges, Albert has five pieces of watermelon, and Adolf has fifteen thousand Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifles.

Normally you would think that Adolf wins. However, if Arnold trades two of his five apples for three of Albert’s pieces of watermelon, and Alison takes off her underwear, then Adolf will be so enthralled in Alison that Arnold and Albert will be able to sell all of Adolf’s assault rifles at below market prices, flooding the market and ruining Adolf financially. I think this is called comparative advantage.

(4) Inflation is bad, unless it’s not, in which case it’s not so bad.

(5) Say you want to go to the lost underwater city of Atlantis. But you don’t own a submarine. Now, assume you have a generous friend with a submarine. Furthermore, assume the friend is willing to take you in his submarine to Atlantis, if you promise never to sleep with his sister again. Finally, assume you have gills. As you can clearly see from the intersection of the two curves on the graph, you are now in Atlantis.

(6) The point of money is that it allows you to buy things you want. Orange juice, soap, champagne: all of these can be exchanged for money. Sex can also be exchanged for money. But the quality can vary. This is the origin of the saying, ‘caveat emptor’, which is Latin for either ‘buyer beware’, or possibly, ‘empty cave’.

(7) Roses are red, violets are blue, my demand curve for you shifts up, please proceed to solve for x, showing your working and justifying all assumptions.

SEVEN THINGS MY ECONOMICS DEGREE HAS TAUGHT ME tom westland

MEDITATIONS ON MEDITATION cam wilson

Lower back burning, legs cramping and neck seizing – but calm mind. It’s okay, I say to myself, I only have to hold this position for an hour without moving. I’ve been taught to observe the pain but not to react. Sensation, after all, is constantly changing and therefore fleeting.

What had I gotten myself into?

Over the term break, I completed a 10 day ‘Vipassana’ (pronounced vi-PASH-a-na) meditation course. The technique originates from Gautama Buddha, but he brought to the Western world in the last fifty years by S.N. Goenka. Goenka was a highly successful businessman in Burma, but gave it all up after learning this technique from some Burmese monks who used this business savvy to create the course as a way of teaching the Vipassana technique.

According to their literature, the Vipassana centres around the world train 100,000 people per year in the technique. All courses are free, and the 90 centres around the world are run on donations. For beginners, only ten day courses were offered.

I’d heard about it and I was curious. I’m no stranger to taking rather extreme measures to try to better myself – I didn’t drink for over a year, I routinely delete Facebook (and come crawling back) and I swore off pornography months ago. Many of these were fool’s errands, but there was a noble aspiration behind them. If there is a promise of self-improvement, I’m interested.

So, I took them up on their offer.

I arrived at a train station in the Blue Mountains, NSW, to see my friend, Keita. He was doing the course as well, and as soon as I got off the train, I caught his eye and we shared a grin. Keita is short, muscular, well-dressed and has a shaven head - He looks like Buddha taken from a Ralph Lauren catalogue. The grin was one partly of excitement, but mainly surprise that we were actually doing what some would consider madness. We hopped in his car, and drove the short distance to the centre.

We got lost along the way, but we saw the Nomad along the way. The middle age man had salt-and-pepper hair and a beard, was dressed normally and had a big pack on his back. Keita and I assumed that he was going to the course so we slow down to ask for directions. The Nomad confirms he is going to the centre and that we are headed in the right direction.

‘Would you like a lift?’ Keita asks, observing the sizeable pack.

‘No’ responded the Nomad quietly, and dutifully set off on his way. Keita and I shared a glance and burst out laughing. Was this the kind of people doing the course – more concerned with the journey than the destination?

We arrived at the location, which couldn’t have been more suited to the purpose. Nestled amongst the bush, the Blackheath Vipassana Meditation Centre was set against a beautiful vista of the majestic Blue Mountains. The physical structures were fairly bare-bones, sufficient but not extravagant. We walked into the centre, registered, given our rooms, and told to meet back at 7pm for more instructions.

Seven o’clock rolled around, and we sat in the dining hall and waiting for the introduction. We had been already gender segregated – but I had snuck a glance at the women, and as I looked around the room of men, I was astonished. I had assumed I would have been the youngest by few decades, but there were a huge variety of ages. While we waited, I spoke to an older man who said he had done the courses ‘at least eleven times’. As I began to ask him about it, the course organizer started to talk, but before we were cut off, I asked whether he had any advice before it started. He paused, chewed the inside of his cheek, and said thoughtfully ‘it’s worth it’.

The organizer gave us all the logistical details and rules. The day starts 4am and finishes at 9pm. Participants will be fed a vegetarian meal at 6.30am and 11am with some fruit at 5pm for beginners. There is a ‘Noble Silence’, as in no talking, physical gestures or eye contact. No physical or sexual activity. Oh, and a little matter of 11 and a half hours of focused meditation a day.

After this was finished, they took us to the hall to start the course.

There was a nervous energy around the hall, as we were brought in and the Noble Silence started.

The Meditation Hall was a huge, dimly lit room with mats for each person. The Assistant Teacher sat at the front, already deep in meditation. Although he was just the Assistant Teacher, he lead the course. The title Teacher was given to Goenka, who spoke to us through a recorded format for an hour every night as we meditated. I made myself semi-comfortable on my mat in a

half lotus position, and closed my eyes to focus on my breathing.

An out-of-tune droning started in another language. Goenka, the voice, then started to talk to us, instructing us to observe the breath rather than control it. It was about 20 minutes in, when I realized that I was in legitimate pain, in my back. Also, I’d never meditated for more than 10 minutes in a row before, so I was killing it.

The next forty minutes were agony as Goenka spoke to us while there was hot pain in my back, and I kept shifting to find a comfortable position. Finally, Goenka started singing again and then finished, and told us to ‘take rest’. In silence, we all retreated to rooms, and I went straight to sleep at 9pm.

It had begun.

Just the next day, I sat in my room, slumped against the wall.

It was lunchtime, we had a short break and I was dismayed. I’m not even half-way through the first day, of ten days. I didn’t know whether I could do this.

We’d done five hours of meditation that morning, two before breakfast and three since. To break up the monotony of meditation, we alternate every hour or so between meditating in the halls, and having the option to meditate in our rooms.

It was serious, as well. One event crystallised this for me; a man loudly farted in the hall. Being a rather immature 21 year old, it took all my willpower not to burst out laughing. However, aside from the echo that still bounced around the room, the room was silent. Not one other person even giggled. At this point I knew that this course was not meant to be fun.

Honestly, I struggled. It hadn’t even been a day, but the daunting prospect of 115 hours of focused effort over 10 days scared me. However, you don’t get a lot of time to even think about it, so I kept at it. As we were repeatedly instructed to ‘observe our breath’, I trudged through the first day. 9PM came again, and I went straight to sleep.

The next two days passed by without event. We’d get up, we’d meditate, we’d eat, we’d meditate, we’d meditate some more, and we went to bed. Whether it had just settled in or just the meditation, I was okay with it all. Around the middle of day three, an intense throbbing started just started below my nose. I remember wondering whether I had reached nirvana, and whether I was experiencing a ‘soul orgasm’. That isn’t a real thing, but I was oddly proud of myself as I thought I had conquered meditating in just two and a half days. I went to the teacher with a question – the only time that talking was permitted – I asked him what it the throbbing was. The teacher looked at me, and instead of praising

me told me that I should just go back to it. I returned to my mat, defeated.

By day four, the intense concentration was getting to me. In my breaks, I started pacing around the bushland around the centre much like a caged animal. On every lap, I would walk past the car park, look at the car yearningly, and say “not long now”. I found a tree down the back of a track, and I’d carved the numbers from one to ten into it, and crossed off the small amount of days I’d been there. When usually I’d never dream, now I was experiencing pretty intense dreams with recurring images of concerns from my life. While I was enjoying focusing on my breath, half a week of this had really worn the novelty thin.

I’d had enough. It was in the session after lunch on day five, and I couldn’t concentrate. It was in the middle of a session, but I didn’t care. I stood up and walked out. On the way between the meditation hall and my dorm I was stopped by no less than two identical short, slightly paunchy and balding Asia men who had been helping out with the course, to ask me where I was going (I swear I’m not racist but they looked exactly the same. And yes, I know that if you every have to say ‘I swear I’m not racist but…’, you know that you are officially racist). I told them that I needed a break, and despite their insistence that I stay inside the hall I left.

I stood outside, took in the beautiful day, and I chucked a hissy-fit. I stamped my feet, I swore at the gods (just inside my head, of course), I think even a tear or two rolled down my scrunchedup cheeks. This went on for about ten minutes, and was oddly cathartic. I returned to the hall, just in time to learn ‘the technique’.

Vipassana meditation is different to what I knew as meditation.

Whereas I’d always known about controlling the breathing, this technique was more about being an observer to what is going on inside the body. The end intention is that the individual becomes detached from sensation, and realizes that all feeling (both physical and mental) are just our own body’s reactions and thus can be acknowledged, but not necessarily acted upon. For instance, if your back hurts from sitting down too long, a Vipassana meditator would obsever and acknowledge the pain, recognize that it isn’t necessary for action (unless you’re going to die of a blood clot), and carry on with their task.

To prove this point and to develop mental strength, we were instructed that three one-hour sessions of meditation each day were going to be ‘hour(s) of power’. This wasn’t the term, but was the nickname I came up for myself. In my head. So yes, I probably was crazy by this point. The hour of power was an hour in

which meditation went on as usual, however you were encouraged not to move at all to learn to acknowledge but not react to the inevitable feelings of discomfort that come from sitting up straight for an hour.

For the first ten minutes, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. By the end, I was a man, shattered to pieces. I’d had to rearrange myself five times, and every time I did, my movements echoed through the quiet hall as a reminder of my failure. I was told that it wasn’t failure, that everyone is different. In that case, every noise was a reminder of my difference. Still, the new technique had given me hope.

This last day was a whirlwind. We got up at 4am, but for the first time we could gripe to each other about ‘how fucking early’ it was, contributing to the camaraderie already developed from the 10 hard days.

Over the next few days, I worked diligently on the technique.

I started moving less during each hour of power. On day seven, two big things went down.

Firstly, I broke the rules. I had just finished lunch and finished the walk back into my lodgings when I spotted a fellow meditator starting a corner in the room. Walking in, I couldn’t help but notice what he was doing – he was watching a bird who’d managed to get into the room, and was beating its wings in vain as it tried to fly through the glass windows. After watching it for a short amount of time, I tried to scare it outside but to no avail, as it kept missing the door. It was at this point, I broke the noble silence, made eye contact with the other meditator, and gestured for him to go on the other side of the doorway, to funnel the bird. After a few seconds, the bird found its way to freedom and I shared a moment of triumph with the silent, middle aged man – but only a moment before I went on my way. The second event was my first hour of power without movement. Maybe I had to break the rules to learn how to play the game.

I still had one problem. Part of the idea behind the technique was to not care about anything – which is easier said than done.

On day eight, I found myself in a weird feedback loop of knowing that I still cared about something (that was, getting home at some point), which made me upset. I then started to get upset over the fact that I was getting upset, and then I started to get upset about that, repeat into infinity.

Before I knew it, it was day ten. At first it was business as usual: meditation in the morning, breakfast, the hour of power. But then, we received a surprise discourse - what a treat! Goenka taught us the final technique of ‘metta’ – which was essentially

sending out love into the world after you meditate (I’m not so sold on this part), and then once we left the hall, we could talk.

We walked out of the hall, silent. There was a pause, and I made eye contact with Keita for the first time in ten days. We both had a grin on our faces, not dissimilar to the one we shared at the start of the course. This time it was one of achievement and disbelief, never truly believing we were going to make it.

The rest of the day was almost like real life. We sat around, and talked. I met all different kinds of people who had undertaken the course – cops, architects, retired men, drug-fucked hippies, businessmen, unemployed, I even found out the person sitting next to me the whole time was actually from ANU as well. We still did another two hours of power, but the rest of the day was free to reacclimatize to other people. Before I knew it, it was time to go to sleep again, but this time knowing that tomorrow was going to be different.

I trudged to the meditation hall for the last time. This morning, we were given a discourse rather than a full meditation session.

Goenka urged us to keep at it – and asked us to meditate ‘with him’ one last time. To be honest, I could hardly concentrate as I was too giddy with excitement. I finished the session oddly sad that this was the last time I was going to hear Goenka’s out-oftune droning. We finished, had breakfast, cleaned up, and left.

Keita stopped at the service station for some petrol, and I bought the biggest, greasiest servo sausage roll I could find. It wasn’t until I took my first bite that I realized, I was back in the real world. After I scoffed down the roll, I felt the standard service station food regret, but with a bit more. I don’t know if it was that I was sad that I was about to be confronted by the pressures of the real world, or my abstinence from meat for 10 days, but I was a bit apprehensive. I shook this feeling off and before I knew it, we were home.

Am I better person because of it? Not sure yet. Will this curb my masturbation habits? No, if anything it will encourage them to make up for lost time. Would I recommend this? It depends on the person. This is a long, painful and boring course. More importantly, anyone who undertakes it has to have a mind open to what they are offering – after all, why else do the course? If someone was coerced into doing the course, they would undoubtedly hate it. However, if this interests you then I highly recommend it.

Would you give up 10 days for a chance at enlightenment? I would and I did. I’m not sure this is the only path, or even the path at all, but there was only one way to begin to find out.