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woroni
issue 1, 2019
WO R O N I T E A M CONTRIBUTORS
CONTENT SUB-EDITORS
Jerome Arrow Ashlea Arulanandam Hasnan Bachtiar Hamish Blackmore Nick Blood S. Bloomfield Geoffrey Bonning Nicholas Carlton Abby Flynn Joshua Green Emma Hartley Emily Heaney Greta Kerr Peter Lang Ben Lawrence Kida Lin Phoebe Lupton Cathy McGrane Jonathan McGuane Stella McRobbie Lucy Pennington Zoe Ranganathan Vaishnavi Rathinam Wren Somerville Sara Tanovic Jonathan Tjandra Andy Yin Arabella Young Haoyi (Jason) Zou
Josefine Ganko Canada Gavin Seren Heyman-Griffiths Stefanie Kam Kida Lin Phoebe Lupton Abigail Manning Riddhi Mehta Luke Minihan Alisha Nagle Ruth Purcell Erin Ronge Soumyadeep Sengupta Andy Yin
ARTISTS Abigail Border Georgie Kamvissis Maddy McCusker Adrian Schmidt Tanya Thongpanich Eliza Williams Famida Zana Section page illustrations by Millie Wang
CONTRIBUTE
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WORDS TO: ALISHA@WORONI.COM.AU ART TO: GEORGIE@WORONI.COM.AU
1
contents 5 NEWS
6 News Flash 7 Student Careers
8 CAMPUS 9
How Not to Die in O-Week: A Guide for First Years
11
here
Give up hope, all ye who enter
27 7 Days 28 for my part 32 Campus map
34 ARTS
35 We Kept the Holy of Holies in a Barfridge (It Still Tasted Alright)
48 DISCOVERY
49 Tracing History 50 The Wall Isn’t New: It’s Just Not Metaphorical Anymore
52 A Walk on the Far Side 36 Subway 36 The Four Corners of the Earth: 54 Why I’m Striking for
12 The Rise of Intersectionality Heart 15 NUS NatCon 2018: Why the 37 Afternoon Poem for Satumin ANU is Missing Out 38 Other 17 Spill the Tea 40 Song for Daybreak 18 The Case for Socialism 40 January Twenty-Sixth 20 Ghosting, No More 41 CULTURE 22 Slowly Vanishing 24 Let Them Speak, Even When 42 How the Triple J Hottest 100 They Have Nothing Valuable to Say
Defines Australianness
26 Artwork by Famida Zana
43 Another Despot on Another Wall: An ‘Evita’ Review
FAMIDA ZANA
45 Becoming Michelle Obama 46 A Love Letter to Film
the Climate
56 STATION F: pioneering incubator of the ‘start-up nation’ 58
The Sustainability of Farmers Markets
60 On Medical Cannabis 62 Life in the Outer Pleiades 63 Adorn
2
E D I TO R S
NOAH YIM
ALISHA NA GLE
BELLA DI MATTINA
JONATHAN TJANDRA
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
CONTENT
NEWS
MANAGING EDITOR
BEN LAWRENCE
GEORGIE KAMVISSIS
STEPH DAVID
JULIA FARAGHER
DEPUTY EDITOR-INCHIEF
AR T
RADIO
TV
EDITORS’ WELCOME
Thank you for picking up a copy of Woroni. A lot has changed during this break: we’ve moved from a newspaper to a magazine, Kambri is open, and we’ve moved from our office in Barry Drive to the Di Riddell Student Centre. I am Woroni’s Editor-in-chief, Noah. 2019 is our 69th year of serving as ANU’s student media association. Over these years, we have continued to evolve with the ANU campus community and the media industry. Our team works to bring opportunities and content to the ANU campus thorough our five portfolios: TV, radio, news, content and art. Woroni fosters an environment for debate, information and entertainment. We’re the most comprehensive and broad student media organisation in Australia. I encourage you to get involved in Woroni, whether that be through writing an article, submitting artwork, hosting a radio show, making a video, or becoming a news reporter. Woroni is full of unique opportunities for anyone who wants them.
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cal e n dar MO NDAY
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
S UND AY
S ATURDAY
FR IDAY
THURSDAY
WEDNESDAY
TU ESDAY
C A N B E R R A DAY
E N L I G H T E N F E S T I VA L 1-16 March
PA R S A B I G DAY
A RT, N OT A PA RT 2 0 1 9
WEEK 4
CANBERRA C O M E DY F E S T I VA L 18-24 March
4 // ARTWORK : GEORGIE KAMVISSIS
5
NEWS FLASH ANU Executives Step Back into Academia
Off Campus Students Stuck in Waiting Game
Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic), Marnie Hughes-Warrington, has resigned. Her resignation was intended to“let new ideas happen and to grow” she said in a post on Tumblr. In her seven year tenure, she navigated long-term projects such as the Kambri Precinct construction and changes to the admissions process, to begin from next year.
Many students left the ACT at the end of 2018, expecting their commute would change the following year. Fortunately or unfortunately, transport in the ACT did not undergo the rapid transformation expected. The new Bus Timetable has been delayed until after April.
Pro Vice Chancellor (University Experience) Richard Baker stepped down on 7 February. Baker spearheaded Indigenous Reconciliation projects, the Respectful Relationships Unit, and other projects resulting from the AHRC report of 2017. Both Hughes-Warrington and Baker are academics and will return to research and teaching at the ANU. Hughes-Warrington has attained a lucrative deal for her interdisciplinary book on history and philosophy. The 2019 change in personnel is hopefully the end of a wave of staffing changes for the Chancellery. Mid-2018 saw Grady Venville appointed as Pro Vice Chancellor (Education), and Professor Keith Nugent will become the new Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation). The loss of four executive members is significant for the ANU Chancellery, as they embark on new projects. There are still major building works, and the response to the AHRC report are still being felt. There are also academic changes: the PhB is being significantly altered, and a new major in Astronomy and Astrophysics is available.
The new timetable was expected to provide more frequent access to the city (and thus ANU) for those off-campus students based near Gungahlin, Tuggeranong and Queanbeyan. The introduction of the new timetable was pushed back due to delays to the new Canberra Metro. The light rail project has been slowed by safety concerns. However the delays are not universally derided, as it means the delay to proposed cuts. Of particular concern was the planned removal of the #3 bus. The bus is the only service to stop in some postgraduate areas of the ANU, including the John Curtin School of Medical Research and the College of Asia Pacific. The bus also services the Calvary Hospital in Bruce. Following long discussion with members of the ACT Legislative Assembly, PARSA condemned the move. “PARSA believes that in order to support a vulnerable portion of the Canberra community, the ANU campus must be adequately serviced by the number 3 bus route or a suitable, accessible alternative.”
Kambri is Open (A Bit) After a publicised 7 February opening, the Kambri Precinct finally opened on 11 February, in time for the Kambri Concert. However the Precinct is far from finished. Many vendors are left waiting for their premises to be finished and furnished. Others are subject to near-overnight moves from the Pop-Up to Kambri.
6 // NEWS
Sustain Your Rage AUTHOR // Bella Di Mattina When you google Di Riddell, the top links are to a life coach. ‘Di Riddell brings out the best in people,’ her website reads. For the new ANU Student Centre in Kambri, this seems like a wonderfully aspirational namesake. But the first Di Riddell has no links to ANU. Dig a little deeper, and a second Di Riddell appears. Di Riddell, born Diana Gould, moved to Australia in the early 1960s, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A friend’s request that she fill in a week-long vacancy at the ANU Student Association led to a 30 year career at ANU. At the time she joined the Association, it was the only association with a leader elected democratically. During her time, she placed herself at the centre of a David and Goliath struggle for student representation at ANU Council. In doing so, she became an important advocate for students. She facilitated campaigns for health services at ANU, particularly during drug crises. She also took a stand against the lack of condoms in Canberra. In 1972, she organised a condom vending machine to be brought from a brothel in Sydney, to enable safe sexual practices for students. In a 1977 edition of Woroni, one student publicly thanked Di for helping him find emergency housing. She became known for averting crises, organising food and beds for activists and negotiating with the police. She established strong relationships with ACT officials while bailing out mass arrested students. “When a student demonstration was pending,” Detective Sergeant Ron Dillon told The Canberra Times in 1995, “I knew Di would be putting aside the Bail Money.”
Di Riddell’s administrative tasks ultimately spread across almost all social and political campaigns of the late 20th century. She was at the heart of ANU’s campaigns for women’s rights, against Vietnam War conscription, and even the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. She organised blankets for fasting East Pakistan protesters in Canberra in the 1970s, and facilitated boycotting of the Springboks. In 1990, the Student Association was dissolved, and Di moved to the ANU Arts Centre. The Arts Revue was what drew Di to the Student Association at first instance in the 1960s. As time went on, her interest in the Arts increased, and led to her eventual nineties move. The lessening of student activism in these years was clearly another motivator for Di’s move. Speaking to The Canberra Times in the 1990s, she said “They couldn’t sustain their rage… They’re only interested in themselves.” Today, essential places of community engagement and grassroots activism are indebted to Di Riddell for their institution at the ANU and in Canberra. The Drill Hall Gallery, the Food Co-op and Radio Station 2XX all have links to Di’s tenure. The ANU Naming Committee’s choice to have the Student Centre adorned with Di’s name pays homage to the strong role ANU has historically played in activism and political engagement throughout Australia. Her influence has continuing significance for activists on campus today. The Di Riddell Student Centre is home to Admissions, Access & Inclusion, Overseas Student Health Cover, ANUSA, PARSA, Student Experience & Career Development, Global Programs, and Woroni.
Home is Where the Heartbreak Is AUTHOR // Bella Di Mattina PARSA is once again campaigning for equitable housing for ANU postgraduate students, amidst changing infrastructure and new data. The Home Away From Home campaign, which also ran in O-Week of 2018, considers the nuances of homelessness among postgraduate students. The timing of the campaign is not random. 2.5 per cent of postgraduate students experience homelessness when they first arrive in Canberra. When surveyed, 8.6 per cent of postgraduate students did not have secure housing. The campaign continues despite the ANU ceding to some of PARSA’s demands. It will implement a first year postgraduate Accommodation Guarantee from 2021, and Fenner Hall’s South Wing is being repurposed to provide postgraduate housing from this year. The repurposing of Fenner Hall was the third suggestion listed in the Home Away From Home report, published in 2018. Speaking after the announcement, PARSA President Zyl Hovenga-Wauchope said “We thank the university for reconsidering the situation and making a decision in the best interest of students, though we are sad that this came at the expense of the former residents’ culture.”
PARSA’s latest action came only three days after the Gowrie Hall announcement on 6 February. It joined 13 other ACT based organisations to protest unfair evictions, calling for better legislative provisions to protect against evictions without cause. Hovenga-Wauchope said “Postgraduate students, by virtue of their limited income and lack of local knowledge are already hamstrung by an ultra-competitive rental market… The provision for evictions without cause is unnecessary, and unfairly targets vulnerable populations.” Other recommendations from the 2018 PARSA report remain to be implemented. These included greater transparency from the University as to the likelihood of attaining a bed on campus. “Students need to be made aware that they should be looking for other places even while waiting for a response, and that they are unlikely to be successful with their application.” “Students therefore come to Canberra completely unprepared for how dicult finding accommodation is going to be. They can feel stressed, betrayed, and this damages their image of Canberra and the ANU.”
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campus
ARTWORK : GEORGIE KAMVISSIS // 9
How Not to Die In O-Week: A Guide for First Years AUTHOR // ARABELLA YOUNG These are some words of guidance from an experienced science student who managed to survive their first year at the ANU. Although it’s written in the frame of science, this article is applicable for anyone trying to survive this O-Week! 1. Try and figure out where all your classes are going to be. Instead of running 30 minutes late for your first ever mandatory lab, make sure you actually know where everything is before Week 4. Go on a tour, download ‘Lost On Campus’ or figure out how long it takes to get from your favourite lunch spot to your lecture theatre. This will be incredibly helpful next week after your seven-day hangover.
Or… you know, O-Week is still fun without drinking. 3.
Talk to people!
From my experience, there’s an incredible number of interesting, smart and diverse people at the ANU, who are engaged in not only science but all areas of study. Maybe you think that free breakfast on the first day of O-Week is a dumb idea, but you’re likely to meet other people there who will agree that gelato is a good idea for breakfast, and what more could you ask for in a potential life-long friend? 4. Go to at least one event related to your degree. It could be a Science Bonfire, a first-year camp or just turning up to Market Day and talking to someone at the ANU Chemistry Society stand. It’s worth getting to know other people in your degree – not only for the sake of support, but also to save you when you forget you have a tutorial in Week Three and they’re messaging you like crazy asking “Where are you????”. 5. Make or join course-related group chats as soon as you can.
2. Drink lots of water, please. And maybe even drink responsibly?! (What an idea.) For many of you, this will be the first week in your life where there is a party you could go to every single night of the week. Whether you’re planning on only going to Friday Night Party or everything from your College Mixer to ANU Trivia and then Mooseheads, make sure you’re drinking plenty of water before, during, and after you start consuming any kind of alcohol. Your liver and brain will thank you for it.
Out there, someone in one of your courses (maybe you!) is going to have the bright idea to make a group chat. Yes, it will eventually be filled with random spam. Yes, you might not like using Facebook Messenger, but your first-year group chats will save you time and time again.
10 // CAMPUS | UNI LIFE 6.
Go to Market Day. Just go.
If you feel like you might have trouble meeting people, or are really confused as to what is going on in O-Week – go to Market Day. Chemistry and Biology students – buy your lab coats and glasses from your respective society ASAP. You will be grateful when you forget you even had labs, and you already have all the stuff you need for them. It might cost $5 to join and $5 for the lab coat and glasses, but the study sessions held by many societies later in the year will make it well worth it. They don’t stock the hugest range of sizes so if you’re an extra small or extra tall make sure you get there nice and early. (You will thank me sometime.)
7.
Participate!!!
I know, after 12 years of mandatory education (and maybe a gap year for those of us lucky enough to travel), that hearing someone urging you to participate isn’t what you want. However, getting involved is the one thing that I’ve seen consistently make people’s university experiences 1000% better. Chat to your course convenors, ask questions, go to available lectures, mixers, and parties, and adventure outside of your comfort zone. The people around you and the experiences you have are going to be the thing that makes or breaks this year – be yourself and do it proudly. 8. Don’t forget that everyone else is starting out fresh. Even if you already know people at ANU, the start of each year is exciting and different for everyone. Don’t forget that university is a fresh start, and a place that will
have heaps of incredible opportunities and friendships to see you through. Listen to advice from peers, do what makes you happy and prepare your body, mind and soul for some of the best years of your life! Now go forth, and live long and prosper.
// 11
Give up hope, all ye who enter here AUTHOR // PETER LANG There is no royal road to geometry: let no one who does not know geometry enter. The title of this article is supposedly written over the entrance to Hell, if you believe Dante’s Inferno. The two lines above are what Euclid said to Ptolemy, and what Plato had over the doors to his academy. The standard culture trope is that full time study is like a full time job: you’ll need to spend 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday on it. But it’s worse than that. Learning is a damn chore, and it isn’t ameliorated by being paid to do it. All lecturers and all tutors teach in different ways. And all students learn in different ways. And, if, by some fortunate coincidence, there’s an overlap between the two, then someone (usually the student, but not always) learns something. But most of the time lecturers call their students lazy and students call their lecturers hopeless. Neither of them realise they’re working at cross-purposes: that the lecturers want the students to learn all the things, and the students want learn enough to pass. There’s also the phenomenon of the ‘pons asinorum’, which makes teachers forget the how difficult it was when they were learning their stuff for the first time. Yes, this stuff is simple and straightforward and the kids are idiots for not having spent every day for the last 30 years thinking about it – if only they had, they’d understand that the assignment wouldn’t even take an afternoon – including breaks for tea and knocking off early to go to the pub – and everything would be rainbows and lollipops and what the hell are they bitching about now? Every combination of lecture, tutorial, workshop, group work or seminar, ‘criteria fail exam’, continuous assessment or ‘take home exam’ has been tried and none of them work. All of them are treating the symptom, not the cause: that learning is hard, and no-one can do it for you.
Back in the bad old days you had to go to the lectures and make your own notes. Lectures weren’t turned into PDFs: when doing your homework you used log tables and slide rules. And why not? Log tables and slide rules put a man on the moon. These days it’s all on the Internet or Blackboard or “in the cloud”. And none of it makes a difference. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” and the same goes for less savoury allusions. It does cost less (if you ignore the cost of the hardware and hardware support), so there’s that. I came to this realisation while taking a tutorial in which the tutor an unintelligible accent and a worse attitude, the room had a nasty echo, my fellow students were blithering to each other and the tutor was raising his voice to drown them out. The echo was turning what my ageing hearing could pick up into gibberish and I couldn’t read the board because my failing eyesight couldn’t resolve the out-of-focus projector and – in the words of the Midnight Oil song ‘The Power and the Passion’ – it was “...just enough to make you want to cry”. And yet our University is supposedly one of the best engineering schools in the country. How crap must the rest of them be? I had to go away and do it myself. As it happens, I ended up getting a credit for that course. That’s uni for you: like Morpheus said to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You have to walk through it”. Or something like that. Include citation in best Harvard style here. Peter is a mature-aged engineering student, who is caught between appreciating what a bloody awful job lecturing is and how much work is involved, and being on the receiving end of some bloody awful teaching. He is looking forward to Kurzweil’s singularity, where all the things can simply be downloaded directly into one’s brain.
12 // CAMPUS | COMMENT
The rise of Intersectionality AUTHOR // STELLA MCROBBIE “If we aren’t intersectional, some of us, the most vulnerable, are going to fall through the cracks” – Kimberlé Crenshaw Intersectionality has become one of the biggest buzz words of recent times. In modern social movements it is often seen as shortsighted to talk of an issue without mentioning the multilayered experiences of those who contribute to these movements. As much as it can be easy to associate
intersectionality with social media, call-out culture and social activists that make you feel bad about forgetting your keep cup at coffee, intersectionality has been useful and important to social movements, well before Twitter. It is simply that the growth and development of social movements have moved the theories of intersectionality into the forefront of modern discourse on marginalisation.
ARTWORK : ELIZA WILLIAMS // 13 The concept of intersectionality is about the convergence of different identities in addressing issues of marginalisation and exclusion. The idea has been around long before the word. It has also been around long before the social movements of the 1960s. However, the term was originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, as a description of analytic thought within feminist theory. Crenshaw brought the idea of intersectionality forward to both dismantle institutions that solidify societal power relations based on prejudice and to address how discourses in resistance movements (e.g. feminism and anti-racism) can reinforce hierarchies. Intersectionality has grown and developed from the 1950s and beyond, making clear the importance of recognising the multidimensional factors that can negatively impact those most vulnerable in society. The era of social movements reached its peak in the 1960s but began before that. During the 50s, many of the mainstream civil rights movements we are familiar with began to develop their main ideas and buzz. The free love scene, the modern art scene, the civil rights movement, feminism, the peace movement and more, all began to develop in the 50s. These movements were separated into neatly defined issues, yet to develop the nuance of a discourse that involved the multidimensionality of these issues. James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir both published during the 50s, beginning to develop ideas and a voice in talking about the social issues of the time. Then in the 1960s these ideas and “buzzings” of political engagement developed a groundswell of support and created the “cycle of protests”, shaping the era into one of major social activism. These were still single-issue movements, with little literature or activism aimed at the intersections that occur within marginalised groups. This era did allow for the diversification of voices in the public eye, and groups that were previously excluded from issues of politics were now being given clout and their own agency to shed light on inequality and pursue equal rights. However, these
separate issues were not identifying the multiple layers of social injustice. The 1970s opened up academia, literature, art and general community discourse to flesh out these ideas, allowing for more introspection than a slogan on a banner allows. This is where intersectionality, as a concept, began to add to the discussions on invisibility, marginalisation and exclusion. Second wave feminist academia began questioning the notion of a “universal women’s experience”, leading to the question: “Which women’s experience?” This questioning contributed to the growing acknowledgement of the multiple different factors that contribute to an individual’s disadvantage. This also created an awareness that within these movements based on the social advancement of historically marginalised groups, the organisations had their own social hierarchies which acted to impede the very social advances they were looking for. Born out of this discourse on the intersections of disadvantage came advocacy groups that aimed to directly dismantle the single axis issues that although, worthy in their own right, were not able to fully capture the intricacies of multilayered discrimination that plagued society, and still do. An example of these expansive advocacy groups includes the Combahee River Collective, a black, feminist, lesbian organisation founded in 1974. This group released a statement which is now a key document in the history of contemporary black feminism, discussing the intersection of different individualities in identity politics. Then, in 1978, the National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG) was founded to provide advocacy for people who were excluded from politics even in the time of a large push for plurality. But the most formative story to come out the 70s that directly influenced Crenshaw’s writings on what would be called intersectionality included one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the US. In 1976, Emma DeGraffenreid and several other black women sued General Motors, claiming discrimination in its hiring practices.
14 // CAMPUS | COMMENT
But the court found that GM hired African Americans, and they hired women. However, of course, GM hired only African American men and only white women. The court ruled against the women. A show of ignorance for black women’s experiences and the added discrimination they faced resulted in inaction for the women who needed it most. It wasn’t until 1989, after these previous movements, that Kimberlé Crenshaw named the concept of these advocacy groups aimed at a larger form of empowerment, as ‘intersectionality’. An acknowledgement of the importance of empowering different voices from different backgrounds with different stories is necessary for movements to be based in the reality of our world. Exclusion and invisibility of marginalised groups only continues without a proper discussion, and that includes within the movements themselves. Even now, movements are based in ideas of progression while also acknowledging internal hierarchies and privilege. ‘Time’s Up’ is mostly known as a movement based in Hollywood, but the core of the movement is giving legal and other support in cases of sexual misconduct in the workplace to those who are financially disadvantaged. ‘Black Lives Matter’ is known for its campaign against African American deaths in custody or by ‘vigilantes’. Its website cites working with communities that have been “marginalised within Black liberation movements”, naming peoples who are queer, gender fluid, disabled, undocumented, women and people with criminal records. These popularised movements have managed to both engage with the concept of intersectionality and continue the work of those further multidimensional advocacy groups of the 1970s.
Even in an era of great change like the 1960s, the feminist dialogue remained in the stronghold of mostly white, middle class women or those with the wealth, status and clout that often accompany leadership positions in these movements. We see this is still an issue, in modern movements of today. Social advocacy is often led by those who have the time, money, and in some cases, fame to speak for these movements. Any publicity for civil rights is important, and anyone who has a platform should use it to fight for these just causes. But, at the heart of these revolutions should be those who are not able to speak of their oppression. They don’t have time to protest or read James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir or Kimberlé Crenshaw. They remain in silence. The most vulnerable people within these communities are the people most in need of empowerment and political and social action. To perpetuate their invisibility is to continue the path of inaction for those who need it most. Social movements without recognition lose validity: it is one of the most important factors in bringing about meaningful social change.
ARTWORK : ELIZA WILLIAMS // 15
NUS Natcon 2018: Why the ANU is missing out AUTHORS // ZOE RANGANATHAN and ABBY FLYNN
CONTENT WARNING: sexual abuse/assault; sexual harassment Disclaimer: both authors are members of the National Labor Students Faction. Zoe Ranganathan is the Co-convenor of ANU Labor Left and Abby Flynn is the Secretary of ANU Labor Left. The National Union of Students National Conference: the pinnacle of student politics, the most widely discussed event in the stupol calendar, and also the most controversial. But what is NUS NatCon really? What happens during those four days when all your stupol hack friends disappear to an obscure uni campus? And why is it so widely seen and reported as a negative and controversial event? The National Union of Students (NUS) is the peak body that represents students on a national level, engaging in campaigns to ensure accessible and equitable education for all students. It also engages with other issues that concern students such as welfare or women*’s issues. Each year in December, students from many universities around the country travel to a national conference (NatCon) to participate in a four-day discussion on what policies the NUS will endorse and promote for the following year. Some of these students have voting rights – these are the people who have been elected as NUS Delegates during their campus elections. As ANU is not an affiliated uni, our NUS Delegates unfortunately do not get voting rights. Despite attending the conference and being largely affected by the policies the NUS votes on, ANU currently does not have a say in any of these policies. By not being affiliated with the NUS, ANU students miss out on the wealth of resources and campaigns run by National Office Bearers, who act on the policy voted on by students at conference. The Women’s Department We Will Not Be Silent campaign has taken momentous steps towards tackling sexual violence at universities, inciting the government
to construct an expert-led taskforce following bipartisan meetings with the Minister for Education and the Shadow Minister for Education and Women. Unfortunately the NUS, and in particular NatCon, tends to be seen as non-constructive and at times negative. This view is often a result of the actions of one or two factions at the conference, who in previous years have derailed conference floor to such an extent that some policy areas were not able to be discussed. The same was close to occurring in 2018, where due to a lack of respect for others and non-adherence to the code of conduct, factions made a concerted effort to stall proceedings. However, at the 2018 conference, despite such disruptive behaviour, every policy chapter was able to be voted on. Further to this, policy discussion in the Indigenous Chapter remained very respectful and constructive: it’s a great example of how effective and progressive policy can be passed in such a forum, and a testament to the work of students in pushing for reform and change on a national level. Policy written and spoken on by ANU students in the Unions, Women’s and Ethnocultural chapters included: endorsing the Change the Rules campaign for its benefit for student workers, a push to make Consent Matters modules multilingual and a call for the creation of a national network of autonomous departments. Unfortunately, students who did not attend NatCon are likely to remain unaware of such positive outcomes of the conference. The NUS, as the peak representative body of students nationally, holds immense power to enact crucial change to improve the lives of all students. Despite the irrefutable problems associated with the Union, these issues
16 // CAMPUS | LIFE & STYLE stem largely from the four days of conference, rather than the whole Union itself. They do not create enough of a reason for ANU to distance itself from NUS as it has done so recently. At the most recent national conference a large number of motions were written, proposed and debated by ANU students, even though we may never reap the benefits of such motions without affiliation. There is no doubt of the need for improvements, such as better enforcement of the code of conduct, to be made to NatCon so that the conference is more productive and safe for all attendees.
We must, however, acknowledge that like any organisation, the NUS will never be perfect. Rather than complaining about it – as seems to be the case after every year’s NatCon – we can only work towards improving the union from the inside. ANU’s non-affiliation to the NUS will only prevent its departments from accessing national support, knowledge and funding – these are resources we cannot afford to miss out on if we want ANUSA to be the most well-informed representative body of all students that it can be.
ARTWORK : ELIZA WILLIAMS // 17
SPILL THE TEA AUTHOR // BEN LAWRENCE, Life & Style Columnist Think back to the last time someone asked your opinion on something. Did you tell them the truth? Or a half-truth? Maybe it was to protect their feelings, or perhaps it was self-preservation. Truth is complicated. There’s a time and a place because ignorance can be bliss and the truth hurts, but it hurts more when things are kept from you… I’m sure there are many more applicable clichés, but really, I think that the key ingredient is trust. It’s probably morally right to be truthful all the time. But the truth has consequences, and knowing whether it’s better to get it all out there and the way to do it is a bit of minefield. When one of my friends offers up a brutally honest opinion or perspective with me, I usually find it refreshing because it grounds me and reminds me not to be so self-indulgent. I’m not saying it doesn’t sting a little, but I think the occasional ego check is valuable. Trust is important. For a functional relationship with friends there should be a level of fundamental trust that you have each other’s best interests at heart. Actively thinking about this is often what separates the close friends and those ‘situational’ friends who fall out of your world when the context changes. The other thing total honesty says to me is that the person actually gives a damn, that they appreciate my perspective, or that they value me. They are in no way obliged to give advice or to spill the tea to me, but they trust me and they trust that I care about them enough to be receptive to them. So yes, you should tell your friend that they have something in their teeth, because it shows that you trust each other. It was because of trust that I could say to my friend that their clothes looked like pyjamas. By being honest with them, not only were they made aware of their crime
against fashion, but the friendship was strengthened by the knowledge that they could rely on me for frank and honest advice. When there is good rapport and trust in someone, there is a basic understanding that you support each other and say things from a place of love and respect. Recently, I was interviewing people for roles at Woroni, and candidates would generally describe one of two different methods for giving criticism. The first involved a criticism sandwich – where the critique would be preceded and followed by positive comments, and they would have to prioritise particularly important feedback so as to maintain the happy ratio. The others would pick up every detail and put it all out there. All I will say is that I think that it shows in the output. How can you address the problems, the issues, the irritants if you don’t know what they are? Why is it that people feed and eat the criticism sandwich? I propose that it has to do with the level of trust in each other, and the sandwich cart comes out when either of you are not confident that whatever you’re saying will go down well. The criticism sandwich sugar-coats the taste of the filler, which is the important stuff. It’s actually somewhat demeaning of the good things which are lumped together, which appear as though they are only being highlighted for the sake of offsetting the negatives. Nobody likes it when there’s a compliment followed by a ‘but’. It takes time and actual effort to get to the stage where you can serve a pointblank criticism without a second thought. But it’s worth it, because then you know that you’re in each other’s corner (and you spill all the tea then). So next time you don’t feel like you’re getting the full opinion on your outfit from your ‘BFF’, follow it up! Don’t eat the criticism sandwich, drink to honesty and spill the tea.
18 // CAMPUS | POLITICS
the case for socialism AUTHOR // NICHOLAS CARLTON Disclaimer: author is a member of the Socialist Alternative political party. Precisely three decades ago the Berlin Wall fell and the ideologues of capitalism pronounced the death of socialism. The US was the lone superpower, presiding over a unipolar world order during a period of relative economic stability. Fast forward to today and the leader of the British Labour Party is a self-identified socialist, and the Democratic Socialists of America saw two candidates elected to Congress at last year’s midterm elections: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Julia Salazar. These electoral gains reflect a shifting mood among their younger constituents. In a recent poll Ipsos found that the majority of millennials believe capitalism is a failed system and that socialist ideals are worth striving for. So what went wrong for capitalism? Firstly, the Global Financial Crisis made clear that severe economic crises were not merely a relic of the past but a feature of the system. Rather than tending towards equilibrium, as Adam Smith argued, the unplanned and anarchic nature of the market led to severe overproduction. Millions of people were evicted from their homes and lived in tent cities on the outskirts of cities, while vast numbers of houses were unoccupied simply because rentiers could not make a satisfactory profit. The ‘recovery’ from this crash could be more aptly described as a recovery for the capitalist class: working people, the homeless, and the systemically disenfranchised were forced to endure sadistic austerity measures designed to restore profitability. According to the OECD, income inequality has been rising steadily across the globe since the GFC. Such inequality has become
especially acute in Australia, where the richest 1 per cent make the same amount of disposable income in one fortnight that the poorest 5 per cent will make in an entire year. Inequality is like a biomarker for capitalism: it is a measure of the underlying dynamics of a society stratified by class. Phrases such as ‘the haves and the have-nots’ are one way of referring to the separation of people into classes based on their level of control over the economy. Most people in the world own very little and are therefore compelled to sell their labour to survive. The compulsion to work for most people means that the small minority of people who do control the factories, the mines, and the media make all the important decisions about what should be produced, how it should be distributed, and whether that process is sustainable. These decisions are made without any democratic oversight. The lack of input most of us have over the economy is reflected at the level of government policy. Given than 64 per cent of Australians support taxing the rich to pay for more infrastructure and services, 71 per cent of Australians support a ban on the Adani coal mine, and 88 per cent of Australians support free tertiary education, it is curious that both the Labor Party and the Liberals are opposed to these measures. The revolving door between politics and big business goes some way to explaining why our political elites are so out of touch. The fact that the rich are already well-represented in the halls of power is another. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the CEO of the National Australia Bank Michael Thorburn was seen arm in arm with Scott Morrison and Mike Baird at a 2017 dinner. And it comes as no surprise that political pundits have picked Baird as the likely successor to
// 19 Thorburn. The doors to the Labor Party are also wide open to the bosses: it only cost $3300 for business leaders to purchase an exclusive boardroom lunch with Bill Shorten. But the determinative factor for deciding national policy comes from the fact that all capitalist nations must compete economically and militarily. Competition between capitalists is not driven by moral depravity, although that is certainly not lacking, but rather from the profit motive. If a capitalist is not prepared to drive wages down and ride roughshod over environmental regulations, then their rivals will. If a left-wing government makes even meagre reforms that undermine profitability, then the bosses will exercise their economic clout to discipline the government. For instance, the threat of capital flight looms ever-present over politicians who might implement redistributive policies. The IMF and World Bank invariably make investment conditional on the introduction or continuation of neoliberalism. And when protestors stand in the way of securing new resources and new labour markets for corporations, governments use repressive institutions like the police and the military to achieve their aims. In 2016, Indigenous protestors and their supporters set up camps at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would pollute local water sources with oil from the Alberta Tar Sands – the dirtiest oil on that continent. The government reacted by deploying three hundred riot police, who attacked the protestors with tasers and pepper spray. In the Indian town of Tamil Nadu, eight environmental protestors were shot dead when police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of hundreds. The precarious rule of the rich and powerful can only be maintained by regularly relying on the state’s monopoly on the use of armed force. Socialism is invoked by its supporters and detractors to refer to all kinds of things. The word is mired in definitional disputes and historical controversy, but it retains as much relevance today, when the global
working class is at its largest size in relative and absolute terms, as it did when Marx wrote about socialism in the 19th century. Throughout the 20th century, the word socialism was distorted and abused by totalitarian regimes like the USSR and the state bureaucracies in the Eastern Bloc, much to the benefit of the ruling classes on both sides of the Cold War. The downfall of these dictatorships was a step forward for the socialist movement. On the other hand, socialism is not simply capitalism with a smile, or a series of progressive reforms stacked one on top of the other. Socialism is about challenging the fundamental relations of capitalism, such as the market and exploitation, it is the majority of the world’s population taking democratic control of our economies and our political process, and above all else, it is a project of human liberation. Often ignored in debates about socialism is how simple the solution is for many of the issues we all want to see resolved. In Australia, there are nine unoccupied houses for every homeless person. Homelessness only exists as a result of artificial scarcity which drives up demand and therefore profit. Global food production exceeds what is required to feed ten billion people, and yet upwards of thirty per cent of food is wasted because it cannot be sold. The massively productive forces created by capitalism make possible a society based on meeting human needs for everyone, but that can only be achieved by completely dismantling all the institutions and organisations that support the capitalist class. Courts, parliaments, bureaucracies and militaries the world over exist to protect the property of a privileged few. The rise of the far right internationally and a looming climate crisis that poses an existential threat to us all makes it more important than ever for the left to put forward a compelling case for socialism.
20 // CAMPUS | SOCIAL MEDIA
Ghosting, No More AUTHOR // HAOYI (JASON) ZOU, Politics & Queer Columnist
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of homophobia “Message Not Sent – This person isn’t receiving messages at this time.” When I saw this notification on Facebook Messenger, I realised my relationship with ‘gym buddy’ and his classmate had clearly come to the end. I’d been deleted by both of them quietly after texting about how happy I was for receiving a job offer a couple of minutes ago. I did take some initial deep breaths, yet somehow I felt surprisingly numb about it. Such deadpan emotion is learnt only by taking a few steps of self-introspection, which I would like to share with my beloved readers who have been ghosted by someone before (or are yet to be). Firstly, I realised that my over-enthusiasm towards our friendship had clouded my judgement and affected my behaviour poorly. This would certainly be the major reason for their gentle click on ‘Delete Contact’. I could guess their private chatter: “That Chinese gay is mental! Can’t he just respect my peaceful summer holiday at home without checking texts and calls from anyone else in the school? Ten essay-like messages in the last three months, Geeez!”
“Yeah, clearly he can’t ever get over it that you already have a girlfriend! Better to just delete him than ignore, cos I don’t think he understands privacy.” Hear, hear! I’ll admit that my naive actions have caused irreversible damages. And I’m sorry for that. But frankly I don’t think we shared the values to build a strong friendship in the first place. I am a moderate American liberal and an atheist gay man, born and raised under a conservative culture on sexuality in China – and he’s a deeply religious Catholic boy who had never heard of the word ‘condom.’ He is proud of being a model believer and a patriot, and I consistently fail to sustain friendships with people I used to have a crush on. Plus, I would never consider myself as a patriot anymore. Maybe I was just pretending to read the Bible so I could go to church with him more often. Or maybe he didn’t mean it when he said: “We don’t discriminate”, while never agreeing to introduce any of his friends to me because “I like to hang out with different friends privately like this, and I don’t think they are gay.” What a blind fool I was.
ARTWORK : TANYA THONGPANICH // 21 However, pure finger-pointing in this valuable magazine is simply childish and worthless. Which leads to my second line of thinking: is deleting people on social media simply a convenient guilt-free act? I am not here to lecture anyone in ANU’s ‘Morality 1001’ class, because I delete people as well – one-time met strangers, spamming sellers as well as angry nationalists – so that I can have a neat and productive social network. I don’t normally delete friends or old connections, but there’s one exception: years ago, I ghosted my gay buddy from high school, because he used to advertise his ultimate pleasure and experience of bareback sex, and I’d thought he wasn’t taking any responsibility for himself or others. So I deleted his WeChat and quit our mutual group chats quietly. I always felt like I did the right thing and ignored the damage I caused to him. Somehow, I’d felt morally superior to him as a rational and mature gay man and I had voiced less hatred towards groups who held contradicting opinions with me than he had. I am a moderate person with a progressive, open mind, and I’m proud of it (just like that model believer). But was I? And am I? Coincidently, I began to reflect on my potential hypocrisy when this high school buddy sent me a friend request on Facebook the very night before the ‘Sorry Not Sorry You’re Deleted on Facebook’ incident on the part of gym buddy. After long hesitation, I texted this ex-friend on Messenger to ask if he had meant to click and didn’t by random accident: “…If it’s yes, as much as I believe in a second chance on both of us, I still think we need to talk about what happened before.” We had a difficult conversation that night, but at last I chose to continue our friendship. He also texted: “Let’s have a new start” with sincere kindness. Then the next day, my late Karma arrived in the most satirical way. After what happened, I picked up the phone and messaged him with the screenshot of how I was deleted: “I can absolutely understand how much I hurt you before right now. I just want to tell you a very late sorry. Hope you can forgive me.” He replied: “It’s okay, all history now.” and
sent me a hugging gif. During that last 24 hours, I’d had the privilege to mend old wounds, have a good job offer, and then briefly felt abandoned, and spent some time of introspection on my social skills. It was suffering, exciting, and also extremely valuable. So what have I learnt from this exclusive roller-coaster life lesson, before I close this chapter and move on for good? One: Being deleted by two friends without any explanation is tough, but life goes on. I will find much better, new friends and become a better person. And so will you. Two: Under my definition, ‘friends’ are people who share mutual interests, who care about what they think of one another because there’s mutual trust and support. If this isn’t the case, such a relationship is less valuable than one with a stranger. Noticing some small details could really help your identification process. Three: The social network is not a dating/hookup app where you can unmatch people when you suddenly lose interest. Ghosting people comes with severe consequences on both sides, one way or another. Things can get salty when these duo still interact in one community, but the ghostees always suffer the most. So whether you’re a socialist, feminist, vegan, Muslim, or Christian – if you really have to delete a friend someday, then I would at least write a text like this: “It has been a great pleasure to hang out with you, but I don’t think we can be friends any longer because xx…, it’s for our mutual best interest to have a decent goodbye. God has taught us to love everyone equally, for people were born equal and deserve equity, not because the Bible said so. I wish we will live in a world where all are respected rather than ghosted. You can delete my contact before midnight tomorrow if you want. Farewell my friend, never stop learning and best of luck!”
22 // CAMPUS | MEMOIR
Slowly Vanishing AUTHOR // Hamish Blackmore
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of mental illness, heavy drinking and self-harm I met a girl in a Galway pub, once. She would always say that she saw me, and I with spotting her. We gossiped for a while about life in Europe, as eighteen-year-old Australian travellers always do, and after a while I offered to buy her a drink. She replied to me, teasingly, and with a smile, that she could buy her own drinks, thank you very much! Then she looked into my eyes, and said, “go on, then…” It was the first time I ever bought a girl a drink. The whole thing was a fairy-tale. Eighteen months later, I am carving her name into a tree on the side of Black Mountain with a blunt knife, piss-drunk and sobbing for the first time since primary school. I had not been a person to feel very much. Growing up, I never really struggled with depression or anxiety, or anything like that. I have always considered myself to be an emotionally strong person. I’ve had close family members struggle with things like addiction, cancer, and suicidal thoughts, with some of them dying as a result. It makes me feel guilty then, to realise that breaking up with that girl has hit me much harder than anything else in my life. It feels almost like a betrayal to them all – and yet, it’s the truth. Over those months I had truly come to love her and when she was suddenly gone from my life, it was traumatic. Heartbreak often is. And for a rather masculine bloke such as myself, this took me completely by surprise. It was a different, deeper type of hurt. In all the other losses, those loved ones never really wanted to part from your company. The end of a relationship is a rejection of you at your most intimate and personal. It is humiliating. It cuts deeply into who you believe you are. Heartbreak is traumatic in
any capacity, but the more you love someone the worse it is. My heart was completely broken, and in turn, I was as well. It seemed at the time as if everything I had built my life around had suddenly fallen away. I felt completely alone. My guts always felt as if they were tying themselves in knots and I wanted to cry all the time. I began to drink – and I was a heavy drinker before the split. Now, I was rarely sober. I was drunk every night, and every morning, and even during classes and lectures. To my horror, I later found out that there were weeks where I perpetually stank of goon, and that my bottom lip was almost always stained red. At the time it felt as if intoxication was my only escape from the crushing sense of loss. For months, I found that I physically couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat because my appetite had disappeared, and all I would do was retch while trying to keep anything down. Often, I would walk into the bush across the road late at night so that my neighbours wouldn’t hear me cry. I didn’t even get an erection, provoked or otherwise, for what was eventually a 44-day period – which, for a young adult male, is near absurd. A few times in the middle of lectures I rudely pushed through my friends to get outside, feeling that my chest might implode if I couldn’t get away. There was rarely a quarter hour that I didn’t think about this girl: where she was, what she was doing, who she was doing it with. None of this was helped by the fact that two weeks into the break she hooked up with two blokes, fully aware that she was within a metre of me and in my full view, and left upstairs Moose with one of them. I was never suicidal, but I was very, very depressive.
// 23 Months passed by. I began to completely open myself up to people, just because, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I couldn’t cope with it all by myself. I wrote a lot, too. I filled a whole exercise book in an attempt to understand just what I was feeling. I tried to go sober for a week, and it was only on the second attempt that I managed. I saw a councillor once or twice. All of these helped me in little ways – but it was like trying to scratch your way through a granite wall. I was still not sleeping. I was eating better, but only when I was forcing myself to. I continued to drink a lot, even if I had cut it down. And all the while, I still could not help but dwell upon thoughts and memories of my lovely ex, and how terrible she had made me feel. Looking back, I think I was in denial – how could I love someone so much, and have believed that they loved me so strongly, only for us to break up like this? Nowadays I ask myself whether or not she really did ever love me. The answer I come to is: probably not. It’s a horrible reality to suffer through, certainly, and as much as it hurt, in retrospect there was nothing I could do. But at the time, I still had hope. It wasn’t anything in particular that helped me get better. Sobriety definitely assisted, allowing me to actually confront what I was feeling, as terrible as it felt when I was doing so. Ironically, drinking in and of itself also helped me cope through the worst of it. Writing gave me a way to express and understand what I was feeling, and my friends reminded me that I wasn’t actually so alone. But in the end, none of these things were the antidote to my heartbreak. They certainly assisted, and yet really it was just taking the time to comprehend what had happened, and the reality of my new life, that was the remedy. Although it took months for me to emotionally process my scorned love, once my mind gradually appreciated the fact, an odd kind of peace began to gently settle over me. Slowly, my nights began to become much more peaceful. My appetite returned. I no longer had a crushing sense of grief whenever I thought of her. There was finally an understanding within me that what had happened was inescapable, and all I could do was try to move on.
Of course, I still have pangs of sadness over it all. Love like that doesn’t just disappear overnight. And what’s more, you never really forget about it. Every new step in moving on will bring memories from before. Often, they will be painful. I cried in the cinema during the first film I went and saw after the split, because I remembered that she was there next to me the last time I’d seen one. Other times memories simply just resurface. There are still nights where I can’t sleep because some kind of intense and seething emotion reappears and leaves me rolling around the bedsheets in a hot sweat. Some days there are just hours where I dwell upon what happened, and all of those passions return to haunt me for a while. But equally, there are days where I don’t. It seems to me that the more time passes, and the more familiar I become with these feelings, the less effect they have on me. It is a slow progression, and even if you won’t ever forget, things do become easier to handle. In the first weeks, I felt so horrifically crushed and alone that I would often drink myself senseless, just to avoid feeling anything at all. It was near impossible to push her out of my mind, and out of my dreams – on the rare occasion where I did sleep. I felt as if I would never get better until we were together again. And yet, as time passed, and as I allowed myself to psychologically process those emotions, I began to come to terms with it. It is simply a matter of pushing through, and of understanding what you’re feeling. With myself, eventually it began to stop being trauma and drifted into merely a painful memory of quite a shitty first love. It really is only time that helps with a broken heart. Perhaps illustratively, the other day I walked up to that tree on Black Mountain, where I had cut her name into its trunk all those months ago. The bark was peeling with the season, and the words were literally flaking off the old sapling. What I had intended to be a monument that would last forever was, quite literally, slowly vanishing.
Let Them Speak, Even When They Have Nothing Valuable to Say AUTHOR // KIDA LIN “All three of the greatest Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically shameful, immoral, and indeed depraved or depraving. That is to say, all three rejected the linchpin of modern ‘gay’ ideology and lifestyle…” This is how Oxford-based philosopher, John Finnis, argued solemnly in his 1994 essay, ‘Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation’’. You will be excused for rolling your eyes at the use of ‘gay lifestyle’ and the fact that ‘sexual orientation’ is put in scare quotes. But some people went further than that. Last month, more than 600 students and staff at Oxford signed a petition calling for Finnis to be removed from teaching duties. This episode involves more details than can be adequately addressed in this article: such as whether academic freedom covers retired faculty and whether it protects non-contractual teaching activities. It’s also difficult to make a meaningful contribution to the already cliché and polarised debate of free speech. What I find interesting is the fact that the two sides of this debate share a surprising and often-ignored common ground. Those who are critical of the Oxford students often argue that participants in conservation should learn from each other and that’s why deeply disagreeable speech should be tolerated. They sometimes also make the case that the best way to
convince those who one disagrees with is through speech, and therefore suppressing speech is counterproductive. In a similar vein, proponents for imposing limits argue that some speech is so grotesque that there is no value to them. What both sides agree on is that free speech only covers something if engaging with it produces positive value. A speech can have value either because: its contents contribute to the marketplace of ideas or; the engagement itself brings about the greatest value among all available alternatives. We can call this view the positive justification for free speech. The problem with this view is two-fold. One is epistemic. It’s often tricky to antecedently adjudicate whether a speech that one deeply disagrees with has any value. There is also the more significant principle problem. It can seem inappropriate to hold that speeches we do tolerate all have some positive value to them — think, for example, climate denial, white supremacy and religious fundamentalism. Unless one is willing to bite the bullet and accept that all of these should be criminalised, one is left concluding that there is somehow something positively good about engaging with these speeches. The positive justification for free speech can be inappropriate not only because it contends that all speech we do tolerate brings some positive good; it also draws an inappropriate and potentially untenable line be-
ARTWORK : TANYA THONGPANICH // 25 tween the speeches that we do tolerate and those that we do not. Most who endorse relatively extensive limits often only argue that a teacher who espouses racist views should be fired; few go as far as advocating that those who champion lower taxes or dismantling universal healthcare should be subject to the same treatment. But it is at least not clear that engaging with the latter policies will be more productive, given that they can — in some worldviews — do as much harm to those whom they affect. Again, there can be rejoinders; some of them might be satisfactory. So be it. My point is that the issues I raised above, at least on the face of it, gives us some reason to consider an alternative justification for free speech. On this alternative view, the negative justification, free speech is not contingent on and cannot be wholly explained by the positive contribution it may make. People have free speech, to use an often-ambiguous term, because they have a right to it. Of course, there is a further question as to what grounds such a right. To give an example, ‘contractualists’, as they are commonly known, argue that people have a right in general, and therefore a right to free speech, because this is something that cannot be reasonably rejected. Nevertheless, the distinct character of negative justification (as per Rawls) is that it is formal and not substantive. That is, the negative justification presents only formal criteria which identify what kinds of speech should be limited; and it is not substantive in the sense that such formal criteria, ideally, will not be reasonably rejected no matter what one’s substantive commitments are. To put it in a less abstract language, most people — progressives and conservatives — would agree that shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre should not be protected by free speech. Moreover, this doesn’t mean that free speech should only be restricted in instances where people with diverse substantive commitments can readily agree on. For ex-
ample, one can plausibly make a case that speech should be limited in cases where it impacts on its audiences in certain ways. There can then be a further discussion on what sorts of impact justify imposing limits. The key is that such discussion should pay no regard to and remain neutral among a diverse range of substantive views. To be sure, there are difficult questions plaguing contractualists and by extension, those who advance a negative justification for free speech. The chief among these concerns is whether there exist things that people cannot reasonably object to, and what happens if we disagree about what can be reasonably objected to. Nonetheless, this view allows for the possibility that we can tolerate a wider range of speech without necessarily making any substantive judgments about them. Namely, it allows us to hold that some speeches should be protected even when we are hesitant to ascribe any positive value to them. This, I believe, is a desirable implication. As for the case of Finnis, I am inclined to think that his published views, albeit being deeply objectionable, should be protected by free speech. At the same time, I also tend to disagree with the insistence that students should necessarily engage with him or debate him. As Sophie Smith succinctly puts it in her London Review of Books commentary, “[w]hen I read my straight colleagues telling everyone else to give Finnis the ‘respect’ of engaging with his opinions, to ‘make arguments’ in response, I wonder how many times they have had to ‘make the argument’ for their happiness, for their home and their partner, for the life they’ve built with the people they love. At times, I’m not even sure what I am meant to be making the argument for...” As a gay man myself, I share Smith’s sentiment all the more profoundly. The thing is – at least this is what I hope to show – that we can let people speak even when they might have nothing valuable to say.
26 // *SECTION OF MAGAZINE*
FAMIDA ZANA
ARTWORK : MADDY MCCUSKER // 27
7 days AUTHOR // JONATHAN MCGUANE A fourth-year medicine student recounts the experience of working at a fertility clinic in Adelaide for his medical elective. I arrive at 7:15am on Monday morning at the Adelaide fertility clinic where I’m doing my medical elective placement to observe the first surgery of the day. In the theatre, I scan the list of times, doctors, and notes, and my eyes alight on an unfamiliar acronym under ‘Procedure’ for the last case: ERPC. With a sudden sadness I unravel the meaning in my mind: Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception. In the general population, some women are not even aware that they are pregnant when fetal demise occurs very early in pregnancy. For others, there is no way to know if fetal demise has occurred in the absence of fetal movements in the first trimester, and the miscarriage ensues naturally. For women pregnant through IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies however, frequent monitoring means early detection of fetal demise and the option of removing the conceptus surgically.
her sympathy – the patient looks up briefly and they share a momentary connection. She has had some bleeding this morning, so my supervisor explains that she will need to perform a scan to determine what, if anything, remains in situ. The patient is lain upon the surgical table and the procedure commences. I see the patient wince slightly as the ultrasound probe is introduced. As she studies the ceiling, a single tear leaves her lateral canthus and streaks her left cheek. The radio is on, and in the quiet of the theatre, a new song starts: ‘7 days’ by Craig David. As I watch the patient I suspect that this experience is searing into her memory. She seems to be listening to the music, possibly to distract herself, and I wonder if she’ll ever hear this song again without thinking of this moment. The chorus swells: “...I met this girl on Monday Took her for a drink on Tuesday We were making love by Wednesday And on Thursday and Friday and Saturday We chilled on Sunday”
On a practical level, this means that a woman can begin another treatment cycle sooner, and potentially give herself the best chance of a successful pregnancy in the face of a ticking biological clock. On another, and according to my supervisor, once women have learned of the demise of their baby, most prefer to have it removed. The idea of your baby being essentially dead inside you and having to wait for it to pass unpredictably in the days or weeks ahead is understandably unappealing.
And it strikes me how much life has changed for this patient over the course of the last seven days, and how volatile the healthcare journey can be for patients dealing with infertility:
Around 12:30pm, after a dozen or so routine oocyte collections, the ERPC patient is brought into the theatre by the anaesthetic nurse and introduced to the surgical team. She appears wrung out and tired, and is taking small steps like an elderly Parkinson’s patient, although she is young. She struggles to meet any eyes in the room.
The uterus contains fetal material, and the patient is put under sedation for the ERPC.
My supervisor introduces herself and expresses
Blissfully pregnant on Monday Had some spotting on Tuesday No fetal heart seen on Wednesday And on Thursday and Friday and Saturday We cried on Sunday
Afterwards, as I help the nurses clean the theatre, specimens are prepared for histology and karotyping, and I watch as she is wheeled into recovery. I hope that the next seven days are a little easier for her than the last.
28 // CAMPUS | REFLECTION
for my part AUTHOR // GEOFFREY BONNING I feel my mind racing running thousands of models an hour trying to answer the ethical problems of our day the results unsatisfactory every time somebody somewhere gets fucked over you can’t get the taste of blood out of your mouth in the days of moral absolutes it was easy to justify the atrocities we commit we only served a higher power, the blood was not on our hands, the flesh not in our teeth we’ve been thrown back into the time stream the myth of progress smashed before us we were told as children that the world was getting better the evil empires were falling the arrow of time would take us somewhere good at least, I lapped up that myth but now that veil’s lifted and we’re told that everything we do is wrong these problems are our fault they forget that they raised us so we hide look for petty distractions from the world that we’ve inherited part of the result is an absurd fixation on “maturity” “haha i don’t know how to adult” on the one end and a cynicism that sees hope as a childish dream on the other these complaints have been voiced so many times before and I’m not adding anything new but I need to pull them out of me, at least to better orient myself we’re disoriented everybody is we’d just learned to walk when the ground started shifting or at least, the speed with which it moved increased but not everywhere at once some things hoon irresponsibly along a trajectory set by Moore’s law while others maintain their incremental changes, the steady accretion of facts with the passage of time a process familiar to those who lived a thousand years ago I see polls saying my generation is disenchanted with democracy increasingly socialist the conclusion made by conservative pundits is that we are all Stalinists that we see no value in competition I’m tired I don’t want to write the thing I started writing, it’s indulgent I have answers to this inside me, so do you I know that there is a way to navigate from within to reach out with compassion and to simply do your best acknowledging that your decisions will have negative repercussions but ensuring that you have consciously made that decision, and not simply fallen into it to be sincere
ARTWORK : ABIGAIL BORDER // 29
everyone claims to be the bearer of Absolute Truth, but nobody has it all you can have more or less of is self-honesty an ability to point a cold and surgical light onto yourself and others, and then act with love even when it feels cold to the touch we’re adrift, yada yada yada we always have been the world’s going to hell yada yada yada maybe it is do what you can it’s not your fault it’s nobody’s in particular we make the mistake of thinking we’re separate from nature, that we’re fucked up we are doing exactly what nature taught us but that doesn’t mean a new nature can’t be discovered life once acted on impulses from gene expression alone then the brain evolved, a tool for manipulating the abstract laws of the universe that matter follows into performing calculations to its own ends none of us know where we’re going but very likely we’ll keep going for some time yet we can’t control how the whole behaves, only how we do it is funny though, how an individual can emerge from a physical field at all one field, unity but nature was already doing that each relativistic frame of reference can’t communicate perfectly with another despite their both being part of the same fabric I write this to soothe myself there are two classes of things those we can control and those we can’t I wonder that our problems as a society and the anxieties of my generation emerge from forgetting this so much information coupled with a sense of responsibility we’re like Guan Yin, who shatters when they hear all the cries of the world and are unable to help but we don’t have gods to grant us more arms we have our two arms and a mind to decide what they do we have to get used to making hard decisions it remains true that you can’t get the taste of blood from your mouth your continued being means preventing something or someone else from coming into being the ending of another state of matter to continue your balancing act even if we one day can nourish ourselves from rocks alone it’s destruction of one kind of order to maintain another what we can do is try to make sure that we are worth maintaining
30 // *SECTION OF MAGAZINE*
ANUSA’S
IMAGINARIUM 18-22 18-22 FEBRUARY FEBRUARY 2019 2019
monday 8-9am Welcome Breakfast 12-1pm How to Adult #1 - Housing and Tenancy 12:30-2pm Departments Fete 2-3pm Feast of Strangers 4-5pm How to Adult #1 - Housing and Tenancy
19 oo--wweeeekk 220019
Wednesday 9am-4pm Market Day 11am-12pm How to Adult #3 Employment 12-2pm Universal Lunch Hour 4-5pm How to Adult #3 Employment
6-9pm Food Fare
5-11pm Esports/CSSA Video & Board Games
8-11pm Film Night: Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse
6-7pm Free Pizza
9pm-Midnight Mr. Moose’s Imaginarium: Welcome Party!
Tuesday 11am-12pm Scavenger Hunt 11am-12pm How to Adult Series #2 - Self Care
Thursday 10-11am Holi 11am-12pm How to Adult #4 Budgeting and Finance 12-2pm Universal Lunch Hour
11am-1pm Pool Party
1-4pm Bizarre Bazaar 4-5pm How to Adult #4 Budgeting and Finance
12-2pm Universal Lunch Hour
5-8pm Theatre Showcase
4-5pm How to Adult #2 - Self Care
6-8pm Off-campus students event
5-10pm Friday Night Party x O-Week Trivia
visit t he fac eb event for th ook e latest updat es
Friday 11am-12pm How to Adult #4 Services around Canberra 12-2pm Universal Lunch Hour 11am-1pm Farmers Market 4-11pm Friday Night Party
ARTWORK : NAME OF ARTIST // 31
John XXIII College Burgmann College
Ursula H
Forestry Frank Fenner
RN Robertson
Nuclear Physics
H
Florey
John Curtin School Jaeger South Oval
R G Menzies
College of Law
China in the World Chancelry
Anthony Low Baldessin Precinct Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies University and Graduate House
Crawford School
Hedley Bull H C Coombs
Sir Roland Wilson
L
School of Ar
Bruce and Wright Halls
Wamburun Hall Burton and Garran Hall
Hall
Science Teaching Building
n
Psychology Hanna Neumann
Hancock Engineering Chemistry
Fellows Oval
CSIT
North Oval
Kambri
Chifley
Melville Hall A D Hope
Llewellyn Hall
rt
ANU Sport
Haydon Allen Copland
Toad Hall
H W Arndt
College of Business and Economics
Davey Warrumbul Kinloch and Lena Karmel Lodges
Beryl Rawson
ARTWORK : JONATHAN TJANDRA
34 //
ARTS
ARTWORK : MADDY MCCUSKER // 35
We Kept the Holy of Holies in a Barfridge (It Still Tasted Alright) AUTHOR // JEROME ARROW Hear this: Now do I recall Walking with one hand dragging down the wall Of a hallway in a midnight hotel in Paradise, Nevada. I had a song in my head that I couldn’t get out and when I stepped in the elevator Going up The man there in his suit and the lady there in her swimming costume smiled and mentioned that outside the whole world might’ve ended and Sinatra would still be playing in the Sands Hotel and Casino in 1953. Another man told me Jesus loves me and I said even here and he said even so and when I fell in the bathroom with one hand crooked on the side of the tub, heaving over the edge and fell in like Simeon overboard I thought Jesus might have looked away if he had any dignity. Does He watch his son’s disagreeable actions? We certainly do our best to hide them. I heard the voice of a meretrix in the next room (a shame because she was so goddamned attractive) Explain why she was closer to God than her pastor, than any pastor And when I climbed into bed She sat there too, said What was the difference between God and a dime-store call girl? She’ll still be there at the end. I remember her. She could laugh until she fell asleep. She could stay up laughing at the midnight cartoon reruns Of my childhood and Ordering deep-fried room service And she was more real than anything else in all Paradise. Once I took her shopping in the supermarket and she didn’t step outside the candied aisle We ate cereal out of the box with our hands in our mouths And her lips tasted like powdered sugar and Corn starch and lip gloss. I haven’t tasted anything more profound, A Eucharist of modern living, broken, shared out for you and for you and for you And for many. In the morning she was gone And so was my wallet.
36 // ARTS | POETRY
SUBWAY AUTHOR // JOSHUA GREEN there’s a Subway across the street fettered shutters grimy rolls of yellow-green paper roil like snake skins in this little slice of the world street corners are reserved for art suppliers and chic french cafés jewelers Subways have to make do with the lean side-street pickings they can get and unfortunately not all of us can subsist on last year’s sterling silver
The Four Corners of the Earth: Heart
let me see i’m twenty-three years old and i haven’t shaved in five years but mum still calls me her sugar-pea i have a fiancé, i think but i haven’t met her yet dave I used to play soccer with nice bloke he spends his evenings behind bars of 6-inch bread it’s good money, man and I could count the years in his forehead when he frowned in these purple moments just in the cracks between words i think of paris and the cash register groans c’est la vie the streetlamp flickers c’est la vie i wonder if they have Subway in paris malgré qu’on ne sache pas les secondes pensées ont de coutume d’être plus nettes que les premières the glowing maw opens on me now in a salami smile with a tongue of meatball melt i don’t go in eliot would be proud i don’t go in though hands pat uneasily at my stomach with nails rough and stained yellow like a loved tarpaulin i don’t imagine it’s the tarpaulin my mother imagined for me as she held me as the deepest reaches of the morning hold me as I now clutch to my corrugated-plastic 7-11 slurpee
AUTHOR // GRETA KERR In the daytime the body, composed like music, says to itself: “How are you?” to which the immediate response is: “In love.” It sighs like a song about it, then splashes cold water out of a porcelain basin onto purple veined skin. There are many ways to love, and to destroy yourself. I’d list them all but you would only remember two: Talk about sadness, and solitude, as if they were art and when the dotted line asks for ‘Name,’ tell yourself you are much too shy to write the One that first comes to mind. Instead, tell the neighbours that the type of love they’re thinking of wasn’t being made, we were just trying to touch each other’s faces. Tell yourself: I’m never truly here, parts of me exist everywhere, parts of my body hum like music and we’re drowning at the bottom of a bath Bach’s Suite for Cello Solo No. 1 in G playing from another room.
there’s something wicked about the allure of fast-food at 3am when the night seems too flat and too cold and far too old for anything as mundane as a footlong sub
ARTWORK : MADDY MCCUSKER
ARTWORK : NAME ABIGAIL OFBORDER ARTIST // 37
AFTERNOON POEM FOR SATUMIN AUTHOR // HASNAN BACHTIAR
Afternoon, thunderous curse has sworn life anger is his homeland injustice is a sky roof that raises seedings dark clouds of inhumane crime hurricane will become the next night while the police has been foxed the prosecutor has been shamed into doing the judge has been stabbed in his heart and the right has been conjured up to become the wrong otherwise, the wrong is the hero in which now it has imprisoned a poor man who is powerless and innocent Afternoon, a bird has witnessed he will never eat worms or seeds but chop his eyes *For Satumin, while he has been imprisoned by injustice
(Language: Bahasa Indonesia) Puisi Sore untuk Satumin Sore, gemuruh serapah menyumpah kehidupan Amarah adalah tanah airnya Ketidakadilan adalah kolong langit yang menyemai benih-benih mendung gelap kejahatan kemanusiaan Hujan badai adalah malam yang kan datang, tepat di mana polisi kau kibuli jaksa kau paksa-paksa hakim kau tikam nuraninya dan kebenaran kau sulap sebagai kesalahan sebaliknya, kesalahan adalah pahlawan yang kini sedang memenjarakan orang-orang miskin yang polos tak berdaya Sore, seekor burung bersaksi tak akan lagi makan cacing, bebijian atau bebatuan, tapi mencincang bola matanya sendiri *Untuk Satumin, ketika ia dipenjara negara karena ia benar
38 // ARTS | FICTION
OTHER AUTHOR // VAISHNAVI RATHINAM I’m in the cinema bathroom, retouching my lipstick, when Little Me appears. Here we go. Little Me is five years old and an unwelcome yet viciously persistent visitor. She’s about waist high and she stands next to me. She gives me a reproachful look and her bottom lip trembles. “Get lost.” I spit. She refuses. I shut my eyes, count to ten, and open them again. She’s still there. I’m two decades older than her and still she’s able to have a violent effect on me. It’s like I’ve broken out into an instant fever – I’m aching all over, too hot, woozy, and my hands shake as I shove the lipstick into my bag. I want to smash the glass – I almost do, but then a woman comes out of a cubicle and walks over to the sink next to me. Little Me doesn’t budge. I scowl at her and she scowls back. “What did you see?” The woman chirps. What did I see? I just sat in front of a big screen for two hours and now my mind’s gone blank. Whenever she turns up, everything I’ve experienced since five years old seems to just get wiped. She’s selfish – only wants me to feel what she feels. I don’t answer the woman, just turn and walk out. I’m immediately jarred by how crowded it is, the rush of bodies and voices. “Audrey!” There’s a guy walking toward me, smiling. Right, it’s Friday night, that’s why it’s so busy. I’m here on a date. It was a pretty good one, hence the need to redo my lipstick. I stare at him as he comes over and I try to place him. Jack, that’s his name. I’ve been seeing him for a little while. Not for long though. It’s never for long. He leans forward. I can’t stomach the closeness – I turn sharply and start walking. He catches my elbow. “Hey, what’s wrong?” “Don’t touch me,” I bark. A couple of people glance over. “Jesus. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Little Me has gone to stand beside him. I see him through her eyes. The twitch of irritation in his jaw, the narrowed eyes, the way he dwarfs her… I know I’ve always liked him, but now he cuts a terrible figure. “You keep doing this,” he says.“‘Everything’s great, then a switch flicks with you and I’m supposed to just deal with it?” I can’t respond. Little Me has left his side and begun to trail after a little boy about her size. I watch her watch him as he follows his father into the men’s. Little Me is morbid for a five-year-old. She’s filled with a terrible sense of knowing. Being locked into her perception forces me to hear her thoughts as she scans the children who walk past. She follows one for a moment, then latches onto another. Her mind whirls through images of what she’s convinced is happening to them, or of what will happen. She takes me on a chilling ride. My hands shake. “Hey.” Jack’s voice has softened. “Are you okay?” I’m about to answer him, but then Little Me opens her mouth. “It happened.” She stands across the cinema now, surrounded by couples and chattering families, and yet the words reverberate. I look over at Jack and see his mouth move, the worry on his face, but he’s too far away, or maybe I am. “Why don’t you ever listen to me?” She’s even louder now. All I can do is shake my head. She walks over to a bench by the kiosk and I follow her gaze. There’s a man sitting there, tickets in hand, a little girl perched on
// 39 his lap. He’s got an arm around her. Little Me stares at them, then stares at me. “It’s still happening to me,” she says. “Can you feel it?” I have to – she’s holding me hostage to her experience and forces all the distance I’ve tried to put between us to melt away until I am her and she is me. She’s always had the power to make me lose my grip on my current timeline and succumb wholly to hers. Now it’s her agony that pulses through my body, her helplessness that chokes me, her panic that lights up my brain. My eyes are her eyes, full of rage and distrust, staring at the man on the bench with his daughter on his lap. I rush forward and slam past people, not caring, barely able to see them, only seeing him and that little girl. “Don’t touch her!” I shove him hard. The force sends him backwards and tips his daughter off his lap. Good. I get between them, ready to lunge at him again. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” The noise of the current world comes crashing back in, and for a moment I’m completely dazed. When I come to, the man’s right in front of me. “Get away from her,” he says, his voice sharp. I hear a whimper and look down. The little girl’s on the floor, staring up at me again. I step away and he reaches out to her. She throws herself into her father’s arms. Everywhere around me people stare, forming a sea of apprehensive, disapproving expressions. Even Jack steps away from me like I’m insane. Little Me is nowhere in sight, though. She’s taken off. I suppose this is her revenge – periodically possessing me and then leaving me to deal with the wreckage. I suppose I deserve it. I abandoned her first. I’ve spent the last two decades trying to savagely stuff her truth back down her throat and erase her from existence. I know that she’s right, and I’m wrong. It happened. She was violated. Now all she wants is for me to acknowledge it, to tell the truth when someone like Jack asks what’s going on. But I just can’t. I’m afraid to look, really look at her and I’m afraid to let anyone else see her either. There’s always been this awful sense of otherness, like I’m severed from everyone else, marooned on an island to serve out a life sentence. “I’m sorry.” I direct it to the little girl and her father, but really it’s for Little Me. I’m stuck, and as long as I am, so is she.
40 // ARTS *SECTION | POETRY OF MAGAZINE*
song for daybreak AUTHOR // S. BLOOMFIELD I have come to learn that happiness lies in truly living, not in memories of the bronze light that stretches across the birch by dawn, or in the tincture of the celestial blood moon in the ephemeral ruins, nor in freedom from uneasy coexistence. Instead, I consider the ancient Greeks and their lessons on Eudaimonia:* as the day kneels forward, you sing out. As you cast a broken net, oblivious to time and space, and focus solely on the necessities of virtue and wisdom daily, and in face of justice and mercy, you do not flinch, and with the antiquated stories buried, they carry you forward as you unstitch the lessons of the fallen empire. All visions and prophecies teach you that the past does not follow so straight a path. Then you praise existence, the living and the human. *Greek for happiness
january twenty-sixth AUTHOR // CATHY MCGRANE I saw a ghost today, An ethereal spirit Of femininity, Intoxicating confusion, Dressed in yellow, With rounded glasses. In her presence My heart leapt Before choking On its own headrush. In the end, I just gave A half-hearted greeting. But she continued To drift on the current Of the summer wind. I turned around, Went home. Maybe there is something Beautiful in that. I’m learning To feel my emotions And to let them go. Closure doesn’t exist. I’ve stopped Holding on. ARTWORK : GEORGIE KAMVISSIS
41
culture
42 // CULTURE | MUSIC
How The Triple J Hottest 100 Defines Australianness AUTHOR // PHOEBE LUPTON On Sunday 27 January this year, I sat glued to my phone, desperate to know who had won the Triple J Hottest 100. I wasn’t interested in all of the artists who were to feature in the countdown – many of them I hadn’t even heard of! But for me, following the Hottest 100 was a force of habit. It was something I felt I had to do: if I refrained from doing so, would I then have to consider myself un-Australian? The Triple J Hottest 100 has always been for the people. Decided completely through a public vote, the countdown is likely the most accurate measurement of Australian music tastes, more so than the primarily industry-controlled ARIA awards. To have your song come first on the Hottest 100 is to instantly become an icon among Australian music fanatics. Although the countdown has always welcomed independent artists from all over the world, it is the Aussies who have continually dominated the charts. Four out of the last five years have seen an Australian artist sit at the top of the list. In the 2018 countdown, 65 songs originated from Australia, compared with 22 songs from the United States and nine songs from the United Kingdom. The Hottest 100 is decidedly a symbol of patriotism. This is not to say that the countdown’s Australianness is exclusive: for many years, the event was held on 26 January but since 2018, it has been held the following day. Some have considered this change to be unnecessary. But Triple J have recognised the trauma it arises amongst Indigenous communities as a result of celebrating Australia Day on the same date that the British colonised their land in 1788. Their commitment to celebrating Indigenous artists has prevailed. Many Australians were also glad to be rid of the cognitive dissonance they had previously suffered as a result of wanting to celebrate the Triple J
Hottest 100, but not Australia Day itself. Culture and nationality is arguably characterised by its relationship with the arts. Many Australians take pride in our music culture: hence the amount of traction the Triple J Hottest 100 obtains every year. The inclusive and democratic process of compiling the list of songs reflects the importance of having a ‘fair go,’ a stereotypically Australian value that is not evidently upheld in the turbulent political sphere. Those of us who feel disenfranchised by Australian politics are still able to celebrate nationality as it is constructed through creativity. In this way, the Triple J Hottest 100 is particularly attractive to young people in Australia. This year, 80 per cent of voters were under the age of 30 and artists under the age of 18 – including Billie Eilish, Kian and Ruel – were present in the countdown. It is clear to see where the interests of young Australians lie – that is, in music. The Triple J Hottest 100 is integral to Australian culture because it is something we can be proud of. We are proud when a song by an Australian artist tops the chart. We are proud when we see home-grown artists sit side-by-side with international artists on the list. We are proud of Australian music culture and that we are able to contribute to it. But most of all, we are proud to have something about Australian culture to celebrate that doesn’t make us feel excluded or confused. I will never lose interest in the Triple J Hottest 100. Every year, I will be glued to my phone to see all the winners and losers and how many Australian artists make it in the top 10 and I will be proud to be a part of it. Culture and art are inseparable. Evidently, the Triple J Hottest 100 is inseparable from the Australian national identity.
ARTWORK : ADRIAN SCHMIDT // 43
Another despot on another wall: an ‘Evita’ review AUTHOR // JONATHAN TJANDRA Very few songs have attained the status of Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina. For many, it’s all they know about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera ‘Evita’, chronicling the rise to fame of Eva Perón. In Opera Australia’s production of ‘Evita’ at Melbourne’s State Theatre, Tina Arena as Eva Perón galvanises and seduces the audience as she ascends the socio-political ladder of post-war Argentina.
to the Presidency. Don’t worry, she seems to be saying, I have kept my promises to you and will never leave you. It’s filled with meaningless platitudes.
Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina may seem like a cheesy love ballad, but in reality, it is a chilling masterclass in political manipulation. Arena’s warm tone lulls the assembled crowds into a sense of security, declaring her love for the working class descamisados (the shirtless ones) of Argentina who have just elected her husband, Juan Perón,
The song is a classic example of hortatory, where the nation is addressed directly by a singer to undergo a course of action specified by the singer. Apparently, all you need to capture the heart of a nation is determination, stunning dresses, and ruthlessness.
And it’s certainly true that the people should not cry for Eva Perón. The truth is they should be crying for themselves and how they allowed Eva to prop up her husband’s corrupt regime.
‘Evita’’s stage is sparse, and it marks a
44 // CULTURE | REVIEW return to Hal Prince’s original staging, with a giant screen projecting newsreel-like images and footage of Eva adding a sense of gritty realism to the show. The staging is Brechtian, with props and set pieces being moved in full view of the audience between scenes. Revolving doors, revolving beds, and a game of musical chairs all serve as metaphors for political machinations and manipulation. In a way, this choice accentuates the ongoing narrative that fame and fortune rest on an elaborate but tenuous web of manipulation. Just as theatre audiences are manipulated into suspending their disbelief, so does Eva Perón enchant the whole nation with her charm. Instead, the focus is on the detailed costumes, accentuated by brilliant lighting. Eva’s costumes evolve as she evolves, from a polyester print dress as a lower-class teenager, ever-increasing complexity as we see her climb the pecking order, to a white ball gown as she stands on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, and finally to simple black dresses. The working class, the upper class and the military are easily distinguished by their uniforms, at least until their clothing is stripped from them and they become indistinguishable from all the other poor unfortunate souls. Lighting designer Trudy Dalgeish and sound designer Shelly Lee make excellent use of the State Theatre’s space. The scaffolding, dark lighting, and floor panels work together to create an almost rock concert-like vibe, reflecting across the emptiness of the stage. The use of spotlights draws our attention away from the unsavoury elements of society and focusses it all onto Eva. We follow Eva as she tours Europe, winning over much of the public there. In the song Santa Evita, she even takes on the mantle as Mother of all the children, workers, and oppressed of Argentina. In this scene, she transcends the confines of any mortal illusion and becomes deified, projected on the stage as the ultimate idol and wor-
shipped by her followers. By this point, she had probably even convinced herself of this delusion. She starts a foundation dedicated to fulfilling the dreams of the poor voter, but is she also helping herself to the funds as well? Kurt Kansley plays Che, the narrator, guiding the audience through Eva’s life story. Modelled off revolutionary Che Guevara, he makes it his mission to dispel Eva Perón’s illusion and to demonstrate she was not worthy of the outpouring of public mourning and hysteria. At the end of her life, Eva’s public appearances were short, and her failing body had to be supported by bodyguards, and later on, an intricate wire contraption. Even as she dies, she has to maintain her illusion. Even in modern times, the media is a powerful tool used by politicians and celebrities to manipulate the public into voting for them, whether it be through labelling dissenting views as fake news or by silencing their critics. It’s very revealing that Donald Trump loves ‘Evita’. Perhaps he feels a connection with the story of a celebrity-turned-politician engaged populist techniques to mobilise the oppressed masses against the corrupt elite. Eva Perón uses her status as a celebrity from radio dramas to manipulate the voters who are angry at the establishment. But even though her husband is elected, she never gains the respect of the upper classes. It is her political overreach and an attempt to run for vice-president that sparks a backlash against her influence over the populace. However, even still, she maintains a vice-like grip as the masses genuinely adore and worship her. The end of the musical mirrors Eva’s end – no final martyrdom, no glorious triumph, not even a flashy musical number. Just an embalmed corpse in a coffin, silent mourners, and the lingering afterimage of fame and power. These are the hallmarks of a legacy propped up by extravagant illusions.
ARTWORK : ELIZA WILLIAMS // 45
Becoming Michelle Obama AUTHOR // STELLA MCROBBIE
Michelle Obama has become an icon of our time, a leader in her own right. She’s now held up as a woman with agency, purpose and a voice recognisable beyond the confines of her country. Every other politician and their dog gets to write a biography so why shouldn’t Michelle Obama. Despite being a huge Michelle fan (yes, after the book I have moved to a first name basis), I went in with low expectations. Sceptical that Becoming was going to be less of a biography and more of an exposé into what it’s like to really live in the White House, and be Barack’s wife. But this biography, to my delight, does none of that. It is an unapologetically slow-moving book, so well written you are captivated by every anecdote and detailed description of the various apartments and houses she grew up in. There is no sense that Michelle is in a rush to get to what we all want to know about. She does not hurry mentions of Barack and her marriage, she does not skip details of her education to make space for more White House anecdotes. From the first chapter it is clear, that this biography is her story and hers alone. Becoming has no shame in addressing the effect race, gender and income inequality had in her life. Never ceasing to mention how these identities were carried with her in every moment of her schooling, career and beyond, the stereotypes that were pinned to her, by the media or society in general, are continually dealt with in
an open and candid way. Not pausing to make any reader feel comfortable, it is a fully coloured story of her life. The biography starts at the very beginning, providing many childhood anecdotes that continue throughout the book, adding meaning and context to the decisions and thoughts she has as an adult. Michelle provides a strong message of the importance of her upbringing and her surroundings as a child. The biography effortlessly invites the reader to join Michelle Obama’s journey from a young, hard-working Michelle Robinson dealing with issues of a bad second grade teacher to First Lady of the United States. Beginning with personal struggles, the book later on addresses her place in America, and where she believes American society is today. Nothing is sugar coated: the biography is a lively depiction of Michelle’s character, with various anecdotes that grasp both poignancy and humour. Which, as she points out is much like life. This book is a biography, a self-help book, a drama and an investigation into the socio-economics at play in America today. If you’re not interested in any of that, come for Barack and Michelle’s love story where you can’t help but hear Barack asking Michelle on a park bench: “Can I kiss you?” In his cool but presidential voice. Absolute swoon.
46 // CULTURE | FILM
A Love Letter to Film AUTHOR // CATHY MCGRANE
There are moments in life when you feel invincible and others when the only thing keeping you afloat is knowing you’re alive. These moments, where all you can understand is that you just are feel electrifying, humanising, and important. When I got into film making is when I realised that I could also make these moments immortal. Throughout my life I’ve been scrambling to capture every moment. I’ve kept countless diaries and half-filled notebooks since I was eight years old. In all honesty, it doesn’t help that I have a terrible memory. I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night and Lord help you if you expect me to remember something important you told me just after I’ve woken up. I get this anxious knot in my stomach when I feel like the important moments, the things that make me feel alive, are just passing me by. But film lets me capture those moments. The magic in the air, the laughter, the way someone’s face frowns just so. There are moments when you want everything to slow down for just a minute. There are moments where you need a second to fully absorb the stories behind it all. Filming the world around me creates a peace in my brain that no cup of chamomile tea can. Once I’d realised this, it was only a matter of time before I began to delve further. As I did, film truly began to shape my time ARTWORK : GEORGIE KAMVISSIS
at university. I began going to the cinema more often and watching films I wouldn’t otherwise have watched. I delved into moments that big name directors and indie-producers wanted to capture. I lived through the stories they wanted to tell. Some films changed how I think about the world, others made me feel more connected to pop culture, and others simply became great in-jokes I shared with my friends. I joined Woroni TV in the second semester of 2018, hoping it would give me a push to film more. Not only did it deliver, but it also made me realise that I genuinely did have a passion for the art. Previously I had always been someone who never felt like they ‘got’ hobbies. And I don’t think I would have been for a long time, if it hadn’t been for me pursuing my curiosity with the camera I bought on a whim in the midst of a stressful exam period. I’ve gone to places I never thought I would and met people who are way ahead of the curve of film and media. It has inspired me so much to try and reach my own potential. I love film. I love making moments last. I love getting the chance to truly explore people and culture. I’m enamored by all of the subtleties that go into all of it. I can spend hours talking about camera angles, lighting, and colour. Even now, writing this, I’m struggling to put everything that being behind a camera and collecting movie tickets makes me feel into words. But if you have any interest in cameras, photography, cinema, or like me you just like capturing moments in time, then maybe you will find something in here that resonates with you. It’s fascinating to me that it is the person controlling the camera who chooses exactly what the audience will see, and how they will see it. It’s a beautiful art.
Welcome to easy everyday banking at your new CommBank branch. Our new CommBank branch is now open at the Australian National University and we’re looking forward to meeting you and understanding your goals. Every path is different but they have one thing in common – we’re here to help. Drop by and meet our customer service team soon. They have the inside knowledge on everything from home loans and credit cards to insurance and business banking.
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48
DISCOVERY
ARTWORK : ABIGAIL BORDER // 49
Tracing History AUTHOR // SARA TANOVIC The history of science is filled with many happy accidents. Saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, was discovered when a chemist forgot to wash his hands and noticed that everything tasted weirdly sweet. During clinical trials for a heart medication, researchers noticed that their drug did absolutely nothing for heart conditions, but instead gave the male patients erections – thus Viagra was born. Super glue, LSD, microwaves – these inventions were all made with completely different intentions for their use, and yet now they’re common household items (except maybe LSD). It won’t be a surprise, then, to note that many Nobel Prize-winning ideas were also happy accidents. Take, for example, George de Hevesy. He was a Hungarian chemist famous for many things, including discovering the element hafnium and dissolving two Nobel Prize medals in World War II to hide them from the Nazis. However, it’s a little-known fact that Hevesy’s work on radioactive tracers, which won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, originally stemmed from a stunt he performed on his landlady. Before we get on with this spicy story, let’s think back to year seven Chemistry class. Ernest Rutherford discovered that all atoms have a nucleus of positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons. The number of protons in the nucleus defines that atom’s elemental identity and chemical properties. Atoms with the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons, are called isotopes. For example, carbon-12 and carbon-14 both have six protons and behave in the same way chemically, but the first isotope has six neutrons while the second has eight. These excess neutrons make carbon-14 unstable and radioactive. Back to Hevesy – in 1911, he began working under Rutherford (!!!) in Manchester. The Austrian government sent the lab hundreds of kilograms of lead, which contained at-
oms of the radioactive element ‘radium D’. Rutherford basically dared Hevesy to work out a way to separate the radioactive atoms from the stable ones in this material, and of course Hevesy, young and optimistic, enthusiastically obliged. However, it turned out that the task was impossible since the unknown element radium D was actually just another isotope of lead. Hevesy, frustrated by his research and sick of bland English food, grew suspicious of his landlady. She claimed to make fresh meals every day for her tenants, but Hevesy was sure that she was recycling his leftovers. In fact, he was so sure that he decided to use the lead from his research to prove it. While the landlady wasn’t looking, he sprinkled a bit of the radioactive powder over his meal. Sure enough, when Hevesy came in the next day with a radiation detector he discovered that his ‘fresh’ stew was incredibly radioactive. Either the landlady’s secret ingredient was uranium, or she was reusing his leftovers. After confronting his landlady (who was, weirdly, not angry that he had poisoned her food), Hevesy went on to use the same idea to create the first radioactive tracers. Radioactive lead atoms, like the ones in his stew, behave the same way as stable lead atoms, but with the added superpower of emitting radiation. Hevesy first used these superhero lead atoms as radioactive tracers in broad bean plants. These tracers are absorbed by the plant just like any other lead atom, but then decay inside it and release signals, giving a detailed map of exactly where the lead atoms go. This idea revolutionised the field of chemical and biological imaging, providing scientists with accurate methods to study many different systems. This eventually evolved into the field of medical imaging, which helps doctors diagnose and treat millions of patients each year. It’s funny to think that so much of what we know about science today came from a petty revenge scheme.
‘THE WALL’ ISN’T NEW: IT’S JUST NOT METAPHORICAL ANYMORE AUTHOR // LUCY PENNINGTON Throughout America’s history of ‘independent internationalism’, the aim of US foreign policy has been to reap the economic benefit of international participation but remain politically extricated from international crises. US domestic and foreign policies aim to recoil from all foreign ‘threats’ to their democratic system. Over time, these perceived ‘threats’ have appeared under the guise of 1920s’ progressivism, communism, Islam and immigration - all of which were met with an equal yet opposite display of restrictive power to deplete their tainting of ‘traditional’ American values. ‘The Wall’ isn’t new: it’s just not metaphorical anymore. President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall is the physical manifestation of centuries of US self-interested interventionism, behind the façade of isolationism and protectionism. ‘The Wall’ reflects the century-old contradictory aspiration to remain economically in the world and politically out of it. Trump’s measures are drastic, but his ideals are not unexpected when evaluated in light of his historical context, where political isolationism is a key thread woven into the American political psyche. Historically, America contributed to international affairs where it was self-beneficial. However, they tend to do so from behind
their political wall. This is especially seen in the First World War, where the US joined the Allies not only because of President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist beliefs, but also because of their economic ties to the Allied forces and the obvious benefits of involvement in the post-War treaty process. With Europe in crippling debt, America’s emergence as the newfound hegemony following the War brought increased economic responsibility. However, desiring to stay out of another war and distance themselves from polemic or detrimental international affairs, America built their wall. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, the wall manifested as conservatism. Three consecutive Republican Presidents exponentially raised tariffs to protect US business from foreign competition, economically extricating the US from international markets. This was similarly reflected in social policy, where harsh immigration restrictions were put in place. But from their entrance into the War in 1917, the conservative, stringent policy of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), ordering Europe to ‘mind its own business’, could no longer act as the cornerstone of US foreign policy. By negating the hegemonic responsibility to stimulate international trade, the US fell into the Great Depression, proving their economic wall ineffective – as the
ARTWORK : MADDY MCCUSKER // 51 American capitalist system relies heavily on international consumer markets in order to thrive. ‘The Wall’ isn’t new; we’ve seen it before, just not in the physical way we see it today. Economic and political protectionism is not a sin, it only becomes such when protecting one’s own interests eclipses the genuine humanitarian needs of others, domestically or internationally. This was apparent in the Great Depression, where large groups of society suffered as a result of an economic ‘Wall’. It is contemporaneously seen through Trump’s inability to comprehend the sincere needs of those immigrating to the US out of necessity. Here is where the lines between patriotism and nationalism become dangerously blurred, and this is where Trump presently resides. Even when the United States intervenes in international affairs, especially in the Middle East and Latin America, it does so from behind a wall. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a pro-communist puppet government, the US was vehemently opposed. With communism as the primary ‘enemy’, posing a revolutionary threat to US democracy, any country aligning themselves with communist ideals was to be kept on the other side of their wall. As such, the US covertly supplied arms to the Islamic Mujahideen, a loosely aligned group of opposition rebelling against the pro-Soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, as they shared a common enemy with the US. When a war-torn Afghanistan was no longer useful as a Cold War chessboard and in desperate need of foreign aid to rebuild infrastructure, the US put up a wall. No reciprocation. Humanitarianism yields to egocentricity at this historic turn. The Islamic extremist groups born out of the rebels they supported, were now the enemy. ‘The Wall’ isn’t new; those who are on the other side just change over time. The US has always felt a responsibility to ‘protect’ Latin American nations from foreign influence by supporting authoritarian dictatorships that serve their own interests. From the ‘big brother’ mentality espoused
by the Monroe Doctrine, the US adopted a clear strategy of assuming a sovereign role in the Western Hemisphere. Despite this underlying aim, the Good Neighbor Policy era under Franklin D. Roosevelt promised contrary non-interference in domestic exchanges and a reciprocal, albeit short-lived, relationship with Latin America. The beginning of the Cold War saw the total rejection of communism, culminating in a departure from the policy and the micromanagement of Latin American politics to quell the growing influence of communist beliefs. Once again, a wall was built against communism, moving into an era bereft of reciprocal relationships between the continents. From the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to the CIA subversion of dictatorships in Chile and Nicaragua, the US intervened in international affairs to ensure the abolition of foreign influences in surrounding countries, aiming to quell their ability to penetrate their wall. ‘The Wall’ isn’t new. Its methods have changed, but its purpose remains the same. All of this is not to negate the good work of many United States Departments and politicians, who work tirelessly to foster positive relations with other countries. This includes the role of the US in the United Nations and the numerous NGOs working towards reciprocation amongst the contemporary discourse between the US and Mexico. However, ‘The Wall’ is dangerously close to eclipsing all mediation. In the midst of a government shutdown, furloughing hundreds of thousands of government employees, this is the longest outburst in US history. If Trump successfully attains his proposed $USD 5.7 billion for the border wall, it will be a colossal waste of government funds; but it will not be new. It will be detrimental to relations between Mexico, Latin America and the US; but it will not be new. The Trump Era resides in the threshold between the past and future for America’s place as the hegemony, and what happens now will play a significant role in what is found on the other side of the wall. ‘The Wall’ isn’t new – but with the entire country at a stalemate, whatever happens next, will be.
52 // DISCOVERY | SCIENCE
A Walk on the Far Side AUTHOR // ANDY YIN You might think that we’ve exhausted the supply of ‘firsts’ to be reached on the moon. The Soviet Union took the prize for the first spacecraft on the moon with Luna 2 in 1959, while the United States was the first to put boots on lunar soil. Now, many decades after the final Apollo mission, it seems like interest in the moon has waned, in favour of more distant objectives like Mars or Saturn. But, amazingly, there is a first in spaceflight that hadn’t been
achieved until recently. On the third of January this year, the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e Four touched down on the far side of the moon. Previously, no soft landing on the far side had ever been achieved, although the Ranger 4 probe was crash-landed there in 1962. Landing a craft safely on the far side is, unsurprisingly, harder. The key difficulty, and the reason it hasn’t been done until
ARTWORK : ADRIAN SCHMIDT // 53 now: radio signals sent from the Earth to the craft are blocked by the moon. CNSA, the Chinese space agency, surmounted this problem by launching Queqiao (“Magpie Bridge”), a relay satellite that bounces signals between the Earth and the spacecraft. Launched in May 2018, Queqiao has been in orbit since June 2018. Because the relay satellite has to be accessible at all times, it could not have been launched into Earth or lunar orbit. Instead, Queqiao orbits the L2 Lagrangian point – a point in space about 60,000 km behind the Moon, directly opposite the Earth. At that point, the gravities of the Earth and Moon work out in such a way that the satellite doesn’t orbit, but actually stays in a fixed location! That means when Mission Control needs to send up signals, they’ll always find Queqiao in the same place. Chang’e Four – fittingly named after the Chinese goddess of the moon – was launched later, on 7 December, entering lunar orbit on 12 December and landing on 3 January. The craft touched down in the Von Kármán crater, which itself lies in a larger impact crater, the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. Some 2500 km in diameter, the basin spans nearly a quarter of the entire lunar surface. In pictures of the moon’s far side, it’s unmissable: a huge black spot near the south pole. The impact that created it excavated so much rock that the moon’s crust is 30-50 km less thick there than in the surrounding area. One of the scientific goals of Chang’e Four is to study the basin in the hopes of learning more about that ancient impact. On board the lander is a radar for scanning under the moon’s surface, and an imaging spectrometer for analysing interesting minerals. Beyond geology, the lander also carries a low frequency spectrometer (LFS), which is used to detect radio waves between 0.1 and 40 megahertz. The far side of the moon is actually an ideal place for radio-astronomy, because the moon blocks radio interference from Earth – both human-generated signals and natural radio emissions from our atmosphere. Chang’e Four also plays host to a
number of scientific instruments designed by institutions in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. One other curious goal of Chang’e Four was determining the viability of growing plants in space. A soil and water-filled metal canister was placed on board the craft and loaded with a variety of plant seeds – including potato, cotton, grapeseed, and rock-cress – as well as fruit fly eggs and yeast. The canister was intended to be a self-sustaining ‘mini-biosphere’ – the plants would provide food and oxygen for the fruit flies, while the yeast would help decompose waste produced by the other organisms. Potato and cotton, in particular, were chosen because they would be ideal crops for future lunar colonies. Like the protagonist of ‘The Martian’, colonists would be able to feed and clothe themselves with little or no reliance on supply drops from Earth. While plants have been grown on orbiting spacecraft before, the moon’s surface poses additional challenges. It’s constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation thanks to the lack of an atmosphere, and the temperature fluctuates wildly between the lunar day (up to 100°C) and night (as low as -180°C). Despite all this, the biosphere’s chances initially seemed good. Photos sent from Chang’e Four on 7 January show a cotton seed sprouting. However, after the arrival of lunar night on 13 January, it was declared that there was no chance for survival – lacking solar power, the biosphere’s temperature controller could no longer function. Even Chang’e Four itself had to hibernate to survive the cold, shutting down operations and relying on an onboard radioactive sample to stay warm. While short-lived, the biosphere was successful as a proof-of-concept: astrobiologist Charles Cockell calls it “the first technical demonstration that we can grow plants on another planetary body.” And it reminds us that there are firsts yet to be achieved. With interest in the moon returning, perhaps the first lunar colony will be established in a decade’s time – we’ll look back and wonder why landing on the far side was so hard.
54 // DISCOVERY | ENVIRONMENT
Why I’m Striking for the Climate AUTHOR // WREN SOMERVILLE Tasmania is burning and Queensland faces devastation from record flooding. Around the world, there has been a steady increase in the occurrence of ‘natural’ disasters like the forest fires and flash floods here. This has been shown to be the consequences of increases in global temperatures as a result of climate change. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 report, we have 12 years to limit climate change until the average global temperature increases by 1.5 degrees Celsius: the number at which there is a significant increased risk of even more catastrophic ecological disasters. Australia has certainly played its part in creating this catastrophe. It is the 14th biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world and responsible for 38 per cent of the world’s coal exports. This reflects the will of the Australian government, not the majority of people in Australia. A 2018 Lowy Institute poll found that 59 per cent of respondents see climate change as a serious problem and think that we should be taking serious steps to address it, even if it involves significant costs, and 84 per cent agreed that the government should focus on renewables, even if that means investing in infrastructure to make the system more reliable. Yet this seems to be the polar opposite of what the government is actually doing. Neither the Liberals or the Labor Party are offering any substantial action on climate change. What they are offering is bipartisan support for the Adani Carmichael coal mine. The mine was set to be one of the world’s largest coal mines, churning out 60 million tonnes of coal per year, when burnt this will amount to 4.49 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Adani wasn’t able to get the funds needed so had to downsize their plans, but they retain their license for this mega-mine. Not to mention that the mine will wreak havoc on the surrounding eco-
system in the Galilee Basin and the nearby barrier reef. A 2018 ReachTEL poll found that 65 per cent of Australians are against the mine, but that doesn’t matter, there’s a good chance the mine is going ahead anyway. There is no clearer example of how undemocratic the political system we live in is. Ordinary people get no real say on whether or not our world is decimated for the sake of the profits of a tiny minority at the top of society. This state of affairs is not down to a bad bunch of leaders but a fundamental dynamic of this system. Profits have to be kept up and business has to be prioritised, no matter how devastating the costs are for the rest of us. Some argue that it’s in the long term interests of the prevailing system to invest in renewables rather than coal as this will eventually be more profitable. While this may mean that some big businesses invest in clean energy, competition for profits between companies mean that short term profits are the most important thing. Companies constantly need to be earning more than their competitors: otherwise they will fall behind and go out of business. This means that natural resources like coal will not stay in the ground as long as there is even a chance to make a profit out of it. The Adani mine going ahead will not only make vast amounts of profits in itself but also sends a message to any potential investors that the Galilee Basin is open for business and ripe for investment. This is why neither of the major parties will come out against the Adani mine without mass pressure on them to do this, and ultimately this is why we need to destroy capitalism if we want to see the effects of climate change stopped or even slowed down. The market can’t and won’t take the necessary action fast enough to do this.
// 55 As the ecological crisis worsens, politics internationally facilitates and encourages the kind of production that is driving climate change. Tens of thousands of school students here and around the world have walked out of class in response to this profound contradiction. The students recognise that no amount of treaties, bans on plastic bags, or empty gestures from world leaders can change this fact. If we want to see action on climate change we need mass campaigns to fight for our say about how the world is run. This means disrupting business as usual to put pressure on politicians to give us important reforms.
Winning demands like this will build the confidence of our side and encourage us to go further and ask for more. The School Strikes represent an exciting break in politics and are the start of building a radical challenge to the current state of affairs. Not only are thousands of students getting out onto the streets and demanding action on climate change, but they are also doing this during school hours to show that they won’t allow business as usual to continue. That’s why I’ll be striking with thousands of other students in Australia this March.
56 // DISCOVERY | MULTILINGUAL
STATION F: l’incubateur phare de la « startup nation » AUTHOR // EMMA HARTLEY Avez-vous envie d’établir votre propre startup ? Paris vous attend ! 11 Décembre 2017, le président français Emmanuel Macron a annoncé 18 bourses pour des scientifiques du climat pour venir et travailler en France avec son slogan « Redonnons à notre planète sa grandeur », un clin d’œil au président américain Donald Trump. Macron a fait son annonce à Station F qui est elle-même un modèle de la détermination de Macron à rendre la France une « startup nation » du monde. Station F n’est pas une institution publique, mais elle représente ce que Macron envisage pour la France. Inaugurée le 29 juin 2017, grâce à un investissement de 250
millions d’euros d’entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Station F se situe à Paris dans le XIIIe arrondissement et elle se présent comme un « incubateur » et « écosystème » pour ceux qui veulent poursuivre leur propre startup. « On veut devenir une université pour les startups » a expliqué Roxanne Varza, directrice de Station F, pendant une rencontre à Sciences Po. Station F accueille 71 000 startups et 26 programmes qui donnent des nouveaux entrepreneurs la chance de développer leur projet startup. Comme Macron, Station F a hâte à recevoir des entrepreneurs de l’étranger et elle veut faire le passage à Paris aussi facile que possible. Deux programmes existent à Station F pour
ARTWORK : ADRIAN SCHMIDT // 57 aider les startups à trouver leur place dans le monde entrepreneurial : « Founders Program » et « Fighters Program ». Le « Founders Program » fournit une structure pour guider les startups qui avaient commencé à monter leurs premières étapes. En 2017, il y avait environ 4000 candidatures desquelles Station F ont choisi 240 startups. 40 pour cent de ces startups ont été fondés par des femmes. Marwan Elfitesse, directeur startups à Station F, est enthousiaste à voir ces statistiques : « on doit mettre un modèle de diversité », qui est aussi l’approche du « Fighters Program ». Ce programme existe pour aider ceux qui manquent les moyens ou la formation pour établir leur startup – une startup dans le programme vient de Tahiti, une autre de Sri Lanka. Il n’est pas surprenant que l’anglais se prend comme la langue de communication dans Station F. « On n’est pas là pour créer la richesse, on est là pour les valeurs » a déclaré Varza. Cela dit, beaucoup de startups se trouvent leur succès financier à Station F. Pendant la première année de Station F, huit startups ont été racheté qui incluent les startups connus comme Bla Bla Car et Deezer. Station F est encore jeune mais elle peut devenir un modèle pour des autres pays (Australie peut-être ? Pourquoi pas ?) qui veulent puiser dans l’enthousiasme et l’initiative de leurs nouveaux entrepreneurs. STATION F: pioneering incubator of the ‘start-up nation’ Want to establish your own start-up? Paris awaits you! On the 11 December 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron announced grants for 18 climate scientists to come and work in France with his slogan “Make our planet great again”, a nod to American president Donald Trump. Macron made his announcement at Station F, which is itself a model of Macron’s determination to make France a start-up nation of the world. Station F is not a public institution, but it represents Macron’s vision for France. Inau-
gurated 29 June 2017, thanks to a 250-million-euro investment from entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Station F is situated in the 13th arrondissement of Paris and presents itself as an “incubator” and “ecosystem” for those who wish to pursue their own startup. “We want to become a university for startups,” explained Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, during a presentation at Sciences Po. Station F is home to 71 000 start-ups and 26 programs, which gives new entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop their start-up project. Like Macron, Station F is keen to receive entrepreneurs from overseas, and it wants to make the move to Paris as easy as possible. Two programmes at Station F exist to help start-ups find their place in the entrepreneurial world: the Founders Program and the Fighters Program. The Founders Program provides a structure which guides start-ups that have started to climb their first rungs. In 2017, there were around 4000 candidates out of which Station F chose 240 start-ups. 40 per cent of these start-ups were founded by women. Marwan Elfitesse, start-ups director at Station F, is enthusiastic to see these statistics: “we must implement a model of diversity” – which is also the approach of the Fighters Program. This program exists to help those who lack the means or the formative background to establish their start-up; one start-up in the program comes from Tahiti, another from Sri Lanka. It is not surprising that English is the language of communication inside Station F. “We’re not there to get rich, we’re there for the values,” declared Varza. That said, a lot of start-ups find their financial success at Station F. During Station F’s first year, eight start-ups were acquired, including well-known start-ups like Bla Bla Car and Deezer. Station F is still young, but it could become a model for other countries (Australia perhaps? Why not?) who want to tap into the enthusiasm and initiative of their new entrepreneurs.
58 // DISCOVERY | SUSTAINABILITY
THE sustainability of farmers markets TEXT // NICK BLOOD This article explores the many ways local farmers markets can help promote sustainability. But before we get to that, a little question: Why doesn’t ANU have its own Farmers Market? Canberra itself has a wealth of markets, and yet we don’t? It’s even more baffling when you consider all the university students we offer as potential customers. This is a campus – and a generation – that is often keenly interested in healthy, sustainable eating. So why don’t we have our own on-campus markets like other universities in Australia offer? It’s a simple question, and it comes with an even simpler answer: it’s because nobody has tried to start one up. A few months ago, I grabbed a coffee with the student Mayra Escobedo to talk about an O-Week project the Environment Collective was working on: a guide to sustainable food options around Canberra. Myra said a farmer’s market would be a great way to launch it. I agreed, but was sceptical about pulling it off – the guide alone seemed ambitious, a market seemed like a whole lot more on top. Unperturbed, she pulled out a laptop and shot some emails off.
challenges, one meal at a time.” Let’s see how a farmers market addresses these eight steps, shall we?
1. Buy local and seasonal: Farmers markets provide local, seasonal produce, reducing the distance that food needs to travel, the amount of refrigeration it needs to stay fresh, and the amount of packaging required. Supporting local businesses also promotes sustainability beyond the environmental by building a sense of community, and redistributing wealth away from vast conglomerates towards smaller, more mindful businesses.
That’s how easy it is to start. Seeing it through is another thing of course, but if you want to at least try to make something good happen in this world, you should know how easy it is to take those first steps – as easy as writing an email. You might find out, as I learned from Mayra, that once you start the rest eventually falls into place. Why bother, though? What’s the value of a farmers market in terms of sustainability? Sustainable Table, an environmental notfor-profit that provides Australians with the tools and information to make ethical eating easy, has a useful resource that we can look to for guidance. According to them: “Up to 60 per cent of our personal eco-footprint is embodied in the food that we buy. By following eight simple steps to sustainability, we have the power to overcome today’s environmental
2. Buy chemical free, organic, or biodynamic: Markets specialize in this kind of stuff. Many smaller producers take pride in the fact that their produce is organic or biodynamic! It’s important to understand the downsides of practices like organic farming, such as increased land clearing, but overall it’s still probably better to be buying organic, and it certainly tastes better!
ARTWORK : GEORGIE KAMVISSIS // 59 3. Choose truly free-range eggs: Again, local producers often specialize in this too. Free from the burden of providing supermarkets with huge amounts of eggs, smaller producers can often provide their animals with a vastly better quality of life.
6. Choose ethically farmed meat and dairy: There are some 500 million animals housed in Australian factory farms each year. Life in a factory farm is fucking miserable. Farmers markets help combat that by rejecting the ‘economies of scale’ model and instead raising smaller amounts of livestock. We still need to consume meat sparingly, of course, but also mindfully.
4. Instigate meat free days: Of course, any meat consumption comes with a steep price. One of the most powerful things we can do as individuals to reverse the current ecological crisis is to reduce our meat consumption. Farmers markets provide a more ethical and sustainable source of meat, and yet perhaps their greatest benefit is that they offer an attractive selection of vegetables and non-meat options. 5. Reusable shopping bags: We use 3.9 billion shopping bags every year. The prioritisation of convenience above all else here is just obscene. Farmers markets can help here too: produce usually comes straight from the earth without packaging and is fresh enough to not require it. Markets typically encourage people to bring their own bags, too.
7. Choose sustainable seafood: Okay, so maybe an ANU farmers market can’t help much here. Canberra isn’t exactly a seafood city. Can’t win ‘em all. 8. Reduce waste and compost: We already covered the packaging and plastic reductions from buying local and seasonal. It’s worth noting, however, that smaller farmers typically operate in more sustainable ways to reduce waste and utilize compost effectively. For many it’s an integral part of their business model. It seems, at least according to this list, that a farmers market can do a lot for sustainability when it comes to reducing the environmental impacts from the foods we buy. Avoiding environmental collapse requires even greater structural changes, of course, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook smaller personal changes too – like skipping the major supermarkets for a week and stocking up at a market instead!
60 // DISCOVERY | MEDICINE
On Medical Cannabis AUTHOR // EMILY HEANEY A current medical student discusses the use of cannabis to share her knowledge and dispel some myths. Israel. Cannabis. Not words you usually hear together. Medicinal cannabis appears to be a cureall, or the bane of drug addicts. Its benefits are deeply contested – some believe that medicinal cannabis will lead to the collapse of the integrity of medicine, while others believe it is a challenge to the monopoly of the powerful pharmaceutical companies. But what is there to learn from medicinal cannabis, rather than starting ideological arguments? What has Israel got to do with all of this? And can a millennial like me teach you anything apart from the perfect way to have smashed avocado on toast? Let’s begin with what medicinal cannabis is and how it differs from recreational cannabis. Medical cannabis comes from the Cannabis sativa plant. The same plant from which recreational marijuana comes. The plant contains 80-100 cannabinoids, which are substances that can act on the endocannabinoid system in the body. This system influences mood, memory, sleep and appetite and has been shown to be implicated in disease. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is one of these cannabinoids, present at high levels in recreational marijuana and is responsible for the ‘high’ often given when smoked. Other cannabinoids, such as CBD have been shown to relieve symptoms of disease through anti-inflammatory, antioxidant properties. Examples of diseases that have used medical cannabis as treatment include multiple sclerosis (MS), epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic pain and nausea amongst others.
In medical cannabis, CBD and other similar cannabinoids tend to be at higher concentrations, while THC tends to be at lower concentrations compared to recreational marijuana. In addition, recreational marijuana tends to be smoked or ingested (often baked in foods), while medical cannabis can be given as an oil, smoked, as a nasal spray or inhaled as vapour. In countries such as Canada, The Netherlands and Israel, strains have been developed with differing levels of THC and CBD to give the best response to different diseases. For example, high THC and CBD has been found to be good for treatment of MS. All of these countries have a National Medical Cannabis Programme. Israel is a world-leader in medical cannabis research. Now, to some, this might not be overly surprising. Israel is home to many pharmaceutical companies and its research output and spending per capita is one of the highest in the world. Research on medicinal cannabis is funded both by state and private sector. Its technology sector rivals that of Silicon Valley. So why is its medical cannabis industry virtually unknown? In the 1990s the government moved to legalise its use and production for medical reasons, with oversight by the Health Ministry and has a specific unit dedicated to research, Medical Cannabis Unit (MCU). Money is poured into research and clinical trials – looking at efficacy of different plant strains, effects on pain relief and nausea. Dosing charts have been formulated for each strain of plant, interactions with other drugs have been investigated, pharmacokinetics, or the study of interactions between drugs and the body have been done. Control of farming and formulation of drugs are stringent and overseen by the government. Prescribing measures are strict; different forms of the drug can be given and reli-
ARTWORK : ADRIAN SCHMIDT // 61 gious leaders have been consulted. To gain access to medical cannabis, the individual must have exhausted all forms of conventional treatment if medicinal cannabis is to be used for diseases such chronic neuropathic pain, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, terminal cancer and palliative care. A physician who specialises in the disease which the medical cannabis is requested, fills out a form to the MCU following a rigorous assessment of the patient’s circumstances. Finally, a trained nurse at an authorised pharmacy explains how to take the medical cannabis safely. What sort of companies are researching in Israel? Tikun Olam is the first and largest medical cannabis company in Israel, operating under licence from the Ministry of Health. It supplies medical cannabis, has a large nursing facility to treat patients and has a research and clinical trials wing. It has a substantial international presence, co-founding many subsidiaries, including Medifarm in Queensland, Australia’s first licenced medical cannabis grower. Tikun Olam has developed a dosing schedule and several strains with specific levels of THC and CBD both in tablet and oil forms aimed at adults and children. So, what’s stopping us from doing this in Australia? The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) issued a variety of guidelines about medical cannabis. These were to address tension between patient autonomy and ethical principle of “do no harm” as well as enabling health professionals to support patients who wish to use a therapeutic good that is unapproved. In treating nausea, medication tends to prevent symptoms or treat the nausea itself. Trials with medical cannabis have found that strains with high THC levels can be effective for nausea but only should be used if other treatments have not worked. The TGA reports that there is no consistent reported
beneficial effect of medical cannabis on nausea. Medical cannabis for epilepsy treatment in people under 25 years is recommended by the TGA to be used in addition to anti-epileptic drugs when trying to improve quality of life and reduce frequencies of seizures. Lastly, the TGA recommends a treatment plan should be created with the patient outlining goals and monitoring methods of the treatment. Medical cannabis research has focused on testing the effectiveness of treatments for a variety of conditions. However, an emerging field includes how medical cannabis can be used to reduce the risks of polypharmacy (use of multiple medications) and act on other aspects of disease or treatments. Medical cannabis also has fewer serious side effects compared to opioids and is better tolerated than opioids. Overdose is incredibly rare, with about 680.40kg needed to be ingested. Medical cannabis can also be used to relieve nausea, increase sleep and reduce anxiety that is associated with many chemotherapy treatments. Despite the research performed, the TGA believes that there is a need for larger, higher quality studies to look at benefits, limitations and safety of medical cannabis. This shifts the responsibility onto doctors. Doctors, like in any other profession, must keep up to date with research and innovation. Increased education, including integration into medical school curricula and specialty training is required. Communication between industry and research, government authorities, health professionals and patients, and the public is essential. If we want Australia to continue offering effective health services, catering to more complex cases, we need to follow models like Israel, The Netherlands and Canada, and push for innovation to do the best for all those involved.
62 // DISCOVERY | CONSCIENCE
ARTWORK ARTWORK: NAME : ADRIAN OFSCHMIDT ARTIST // // 6363
ADORN AUTHOR // SARA TANOVIC “Love is free and when one is honest with themselves, they are liberated in this digital world. We’re more sensitive to our peers and everyone’s opinions due to the rate that we are bombarded with them.”
Burley Griffin or going to Enlighten. If you don’t have that new group of friends by the end of first semester, good. You have used your judgement wisely, and second semester provides new opportunities to warm up to good people.
– Miguel at his concert in Dallas, late 2018.
I am yours and yours alone.
Hello, I’m your subconscious.
Take care of yourself, food-wise. It is very easy to neglect your health and your stomach while you worry about your readings or assessment. Listen to your body and its cravings for actual orange and green vegetables and fruits when you need it. Google or test your Medical Science friends on the impact of alcohol on your system within one hour of consumption. And please, complain about how expensive food is as much as you can and hopefully someone will open a Student Soup Kitchen (but also definitely check out the Food Co-Op!).
Make no mistake: getting to university is a big deal. It’s not only about the one or two years of work which got you that special number to apply to your degree. It’s about the entire life journey you have had up until your entrance to university. It’s about the childhood memories; those episodes of ‘Arthur’ which provided the foundation for a need to make good friends and a desire to visit something similar to The Sugar Bowl (Koko Black or Mookie, anyone?); the complaints about year seven assignments; the hormones in your teenage years; the stress of your penultimate year of school and choosing the perfect outfit for formal and graduation. Getting to university is a big deal, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise, no matter where you came from. If you’re from the Bronx of Canberra, aka Tuggeranong, or the northern suburbs of Sydney or the Apple Isle, you will be perceived by your peers in a certain light. That’s okay! Trust that most of the fun of university comes from you defying your own expectations and the assumptions that your first year peers had of you in O Week. Petty? Maybe. True? Definitely.
I am the projector and you are the projection. Whether you are a first year student or a final year student or a staff member, remember what a big deal it is to be at university. A significant part of this big deal is the education, right? We are all going to learn so much, both from our education and the events surrounding university and the outside world. Hopefully this year brings us greater knowledge and understanding of each other and of the world. No point learning in a vacuum! Try to get outside and see how your degree has real-world impact.
Don’t be afraid. And I am always supreme. You might meet people in O Week who are the embodiment of all of the crushes you have ever had. You might meet people in O Week that embody all the traits of people who made you run away from your hometown. From anecdotes and personal experience, it’s pretty rare to find your lifelong best friend in O Week. That’s okay too! Prove me wrong if you can, though. For those who don’t want to go out and party in the first semester of university, join the club (ha ha… irony) and find the lit things that daylight-hour Canberrans get up to: like studying at the National Library on Sundays or walking around Lake
Buzzwords like self-care might have come up a lot during your summer holidays. It’s great that we are talking about mental health more and about the ramifications when we don’t talk about it. University brings its challenges – both from people and the stress of the degree itself – but I promise you, it is nothing you can’t handle. You never get dealt a card that is too much for you to handle. Please be kind to everyone, and give yourself space when you need it. Reach out for help and be receptive to helping others. University is a big deal. Your mental health is an even bigger deal.
64 // DISCOVERY | EXPERIMENTAL
Life in the Outer PLEIADES AUTHOR // JEROME ARROW To the universe Shake about, To ‘cross tongue Feel thrown and and It cheek To the stars roll like
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ARTWORK : MADDY MCCUSKER
Kambri at ANU opens & you are welcome!
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We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the traditional owners of the land on which Woroni is written, edited and printed. We pay respects to Elders past, present future.people, We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and and Ngambri We would also like to acknowledge that this land on – which who are the traditional owners of the land we benefit from occupying – was stolen, and that which Woroni is written, edited and printed. We pay sovereignty was Within and this ongoing echo respects to never Eldersceded. past, present emerging. of colonialism we commit, as writers and editors, We acknowledge that this land – which we to amplify the voices stories –ofwas Aboriginal and Torres benefit from and occupying stolen, that Strait Islander people at our university. sovereignty was never ceded and that no We will honour the diversity their itstories. acknowledgement will everofbring back.
