Letter From the Editor

Where are you?

I am writing to you from my bedroom in a res hall apartment, from a global programs exchange briefing I should be following more closely, and from the Woronioffice I have spent an inordinate amount of time in ever since I started university. The semester is wrapping up and the libraries are full. Winter is coming early, as it always does, and every wind chill feels like Canberra settling back into itself. For those of you staying over break, I hope you are ready for the long cold months ahead.

As someone who lives, works, and studies on campus, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ANU as an environment. I have come to decide that many of its most important features may never make their way to publication in an official history.

In a 2003 discussion paper, providing recommendations on heritage management to the NSW government, Byrne, Brayshaw, & Ireland note that each new generation inherits the symbolic landscape of the generation before them, and then spend a lifetime reworking its meaning by attaching memories, emotions, anecdotes, and constructions to the space. They define the social significance that makes a place worth memorialising or preserving with this landscape. What makes an environment important comes from a place of grassroots value which lingers throughout the distance of time.

The mark generations of students have left on this university is all around you. My personal favourite: walls hang heaving with posters on the walk in and out of Copland courtyard. If you pass by at the right time in the University’s maintenance schedule, you’ll see the layers of paper and wheat paste peeled back to reveal what is underneath. Last year, I noticed an invitation to protest housing unaffordability and unavailability dating from when Paul Keating ran the Budget. Some things about the student experience never seem to change.

This is important to reflect upon as we find histories repeating in some ways, manifesting in rhyme in others. No space is ever neutral or passive; it will interact with you as you interact with it.

Environment plays into every contemporary concern in one way or another, from the obvious – the climate crisis, for example – to the more figurative meanings of the word: the structures that surround us and guide decisions and outcomes in a way so embedded as to be almost invisible. From HECS debt, to family histories, to the shoulders of giants on which academia supposedly stands, you are part of the ecosystem.

It is well worth asking: what have you done to your environment? What has it done to you?

This edition of Woroni features myriad explorations of how the environments we inhabit shape us, and how we shape them. In this magazine, you’ll find the local, the relational, the academic, the spiritual, the scientific – a true examination of every meaning the talented students featured could wring out of the word ‘environment’.

To the editors (especially the hardworking duo of Lizzie Fewster and Jasmin Small), to the incredible Woroni team, and to every contributor who has been a part of this magazine: the environment you have created is one of creative flourishing. One of the things I am proudest of about this organisation is the welcome it shows anyone willing to take part.

Reader, do you see yourself in these pages? Send in an article or artwork, host a radio show, apply for one of our teams. Woroni is a product of its environment. You, the student body, are its environment.

I hope this issue leaves you asking:

Where am I?

Virginia Plas Head of TV