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ARTWORK: Yige Xu
If you called your dad, he could stop it all SARAH GREAVES EDITED BY KAROLINA KOCIMSKA “I wanna live like common people” is the ongoing refrain of Pulp’s 1995 aptly titled tune Common People. The song details Pulp’s lead singer, the one and only Jarvis Cocker meeting the antagonist of our song and her repeated desire to “do whatever common people do”. Not only is Common People an absolute banger, it highlights oddities of economic tourism and a ‘poor is cool’ mindset. Our antagonist, despite taking Cocker’s advice to “Rent a flat above a shop, cut your hair and get a job, smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend you never went to school” is still confronted with inevitability of her privilege when Cocker quips that “if you called your dad, he could stop it all.” The sentiment of this song was something I felt repeatedly when arriving at ANU. I was acutely aware of my own privilege as a Melbourne private-school attendee. However, I found myself uncomfortable around people’s constant attempts to ‘live like common people’ with repeated lamentations of financial woes, discussions of work, the buying of second-hand clothes, and the odd sprinkling of ‘Oppression Olympics.’ Nevertheless, it gradually
emerged over the course of the year, that a large proportion of students, whilst diverse in their backgrounds, were still overwhelmingly privileged. Just like the “chips stains and grease” referred to in Common People most of these woes could “come out in the bath.” I was certainly not alone in attending a private school and far from the only student receiving financial support from my family. Yet a continual desire to come across as struggling or in some way wronged by society persisted. It is evident that social mobility in modern Australia is no simple feat. The funding allocations of our education system combined with other factors ranging from tax law to negative-gearing have stratified society unjustly. This has created a growing awareness amongst progressive youth that just maybe, we may have encountered our fortune at least in some part due to luck, making it quite difficult to justify that anyone truly ‘deserves’ or works for the riches they have. This gaping hole in Australia’s obsession with meritocracy is a confronting idea for many.
