They`re coming: to invade our beaches

THE UNAUSTRALIAN
$0.00
MONDAY,
SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au | DON’T LOOK BACK
They’re coming: to
invade our beaches
Care factor
zero point
three,
survey finds
DAVID HESLIN
In shocking news, a study
has revealed that a small
minority of Monash University students care about
campus politics.
The survey — conducted
by the Pravda Institute —
found that as many as 0.3%
‘gave a damn’ which party
was elected to represent the
student body. 69.2% ‘did
not give a damn’, whilst the
remaining 29.5% failed to
respond, instead offering
comments such as ‘I’ve already voted’, ‘fuck off’, and
‘go branch stack an electorate, you miserable turd’.
Glen Haywood
Immigration
experts
have warned that “hordes
of unwelcome visitors”
from dreary, lawless nations on the other side of
the world are on their way
to Australia.
These so-called ‘refugees’
are said to be escaping unemployment, social alienation, harsh government-imposed austerity measures
and rioting that have beset
their homeland recently.
Immigration department
head Andrew Metcalfe
warned in a background
briefing for journalists last
week that “London and
Paris-style social unrest
would break out in Australian cities” if this influx of
“queue-jumpers” were allowed in.
These masses of British
visa-over-stayers are likely
to over-crowd Australian
beaches this summer.
A government source,
in an exclusive interview
to The UnAustralian, has
blamed this coming influx
of refugees on the soft refugee policies of the Gillard
government.
The government source
alleged that policies of offshore processing and mandatory detention are providing English plane people
with cheap accommodation
on Christmas Island, with
post-card perfect views of
the Indian Ocean. Gillard
is luring them from overseas, especially the recently
unruly and riotous British
Isles.
“All they have to put up
with is razor wire, beanbag
bullets, capsicum spray and
the denial of medical treatment, which is a treat for
some of these Brits,” said
the government source.
The recent High Court of
Australia decision to scrap
the Malaysian people swap
and potentially outlaw offshore processing in other
locations such as Nauru
and Manus Island are said
to make the forthcoming invasion “inevitable”.
Minister for Immigration
Chris Bowen said that the
Malaysian solution was designed to “break the people
smuggler’s business model”.
However, an industry insider said that “the business
model of Australia’s major
airlines is still intact and actually quite profitable” despite the recent safety regulator’s decision to ground
Tiger Airways and Qantas’
decision to cut staffing levels.
Australians are becoming
increasingly unhappy with
this ‘invasion’.
Local businessman Bruce
Hutchinson said that “their
culture is incompatible with
Australian culture”.
“After sporting events,
they are always rowdy,
uncouth and what’s worse,
they play football with a
round ball,” Mr Hutchinson
said.
Frank, a local business
owner from Brighton says
that “their English is barely comprehensible”.
“They should be made
to learn our language if
they’re gonna come here,”
Frank said.
Some point to Australian citizens of British origin
as examples of immigrants
who have successfully integrated into Australian
society, while others such
as Frank argue that “Australia would be better off
without the likes of Tony
Abbott and Julia Gillard”.
A Defense of the Menzies Building
THOMAS WHITESIDE
I’m not a student of Architecture*, I’m an over-opinionated Arts student, but
I nearly chocked on my $6
wholefoods dhal when I
read Lot’s Wife’s Commander-in-Chief, Joshua Kenner’s article denouncing the
Menzies Building (or the
“Ming Wing” as mum used
to call it) and calling for its
destruction (Edition 6, 17th
August). Whilst I’m not too
worried about that actually
happening (no one actually
pays any attention to the
MSA, let alone Lot’s Wife) I
found the notion both hypocritical and an affront to
my sense of Monash’s, for
want of a better term, ‘culture’.
Firstly, Lot’s Wife is
practically the only office
Monash’s party machine
Go! didn’t get their hands
on this year. As readers may
know, it’s run through a coalition between Switch and
Left Action, both socialist
groups, and here’s what’s
really grinding my gears…
the Menzies Building must
be the most Communistic
building in Clayton!
Its brutal, modernist,
structurally unsound and
painfully (almost ironically)
utilitarian ‘shove in as many
people vertically as you can’
concrete slab design is pure
Stalinist architecture. That
its anachronistic style has
been rendered permanent
because of the University’s
initial huge outlay of capital
to build it in the early 60s,
thus dooming it to a life of
patch-up jobs and band-aid
measures, is just “saa soviet”! And let’s give big Joe
some credit too; the Menzies building is not even
cool in a grandiose, gothic,
baroque, constructivist or
even Russian Orthodox
way (like the Seven Sisters
and most of the Kremlin).
It’s dull as dishwater.
However I’m fine with all
this Stalinist architecture
shtick, and here’s where my
appeal to Monash ‘culture’
kicks in, for in my eyes the
building is an icon, though
perhaps ‘anti-icon’ would
be a better term. In a nutshell, Building 11 is that
friend you really hate but
couldn’t live without. And
don’t forget that if we get
rid of it, it will that leave
the student collective consciousness with a devastating void of things to
whinge about.
So sure it’s a concrete,
cancer-ridden mess of an
eyesore, I’ll agree it’s a
frustrating perpetual work
in progress, and yes ok,
it’s a shit box with weird
window shutters, insufficient lifts and freaky feuxcorporate ‘knock you in
the face’ rotating doors,
but its our shit box!
*If I was I’d spend most of
my time at Caulfield anyway, and this letter would
be totally irrelevant.
Richard ‘Trotsky’ Harris,
leader of the Socialist Auxiliary, welcomed the findings. “It just goes to show
that there are students out
there who care about who’s
running our campus.”
“It gives our movement a
great deal of relevance,” he
said.
Christine Curtin, member
of Monash student body
You!, agreed. “I think this
institution of student elections gives us a fantastic
opportunity to hone our
political skills.”
“I feel like I now understand what it is like to be
part of a faction. It’s been a
great learning experience.”
Jeremy Humphrey-Jones,
prefect of the Grammar
Old Boys party, concurred
with a disdainful glance. A
fourth party could not be
reached due to suspected
conflict of interest issues.
This week marks the 51st
campus election at the university. In celebration, candidates have promised to
be more obnoxious, manipulative and vile than ever
before.
An anonymous prospective MSA representative
urged students to get involved in the fun.
“It’s great that our country has such a thriving democracy at the moment,”
she remarked.
“All we want is to be able
to replicate that standard at
a campus level.”
2 THE NATION
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au
Lake free
car park
RICHARD PLUMRIDGE
A damp end to winter
has resulted in the rare
sight of flooding across
one of Monash University’s
grandest lakes. The usually
dry Lake Free Car Park, on
the corner of Wellington
and Blackburn roads has
been awash as a result of the
late winter rains, attracting
rare waterbirds and other
wildlife, including camels
and Monash parking and
security officers. University
students who usually use
lake space for parking have
been forced to either move
to higher ground or practice swimming.
Members of the Monash
University Lake Free Car
Park Yacht Club have been
making the most of the inflows, taking to the water as
frequently as possible.
“We’ve had people coming from as far afield as
Caulfield and Berwick for
the sheer spectacle,” said
Yacht Club president Robert Nicholson. “This weather has been a real boon for
the ducks and the yacht
club.”
It is not all good news,
however, for university
members. The unprecedented extent of the lake’s
flooding and ever increasing numbers of Monash
students seeking to utilise
the formerly dry lake bed
for parking has led to some
desperate students parking vehicles in no-parking
zones. In some cases, this
has resulted in infringement notices being issued
by the swarming Monash
parking and security officers.
Tourism operators are
expecting an influx of tourists from all over Monash
and the city. However, the
best way to see the spectacle is from the air. Flights
have begun operating from
Moorabbin Airport and
provide the broadest possible view of the environmental phenomenon.
Flight bookings can be
made through the Monash
Clayton Parking and Security Office, Building 61 on
(03) 9905 3059.
Calls for Royal Commission into
‘unAustralian’ dismantling of
Harbour Bridge
STUART KELLS
The decision to deconstruct the Sydney Harbour Bridge (Lot’s Wife,
LI(V)) has drawn a chorus
of ardent criticism and
sparked four separate inquiries. But the sponsors
of the deconstruction project have hit back at accusations that it is unAustralian. A spokesperson
for the project team said,
“There will be no net loss
of Australian icons. We
are simply swapping one
icon, the bridge, for another, the Holey Dollar”.
As previously reported, many examples of
that now famously rare
coin were used as washers in the construction
of the bridge, to save
money during the Great
Depression. The coins in
the bridge structure now
represent a treasure trove
and will be recovered and
sold.
Controversy about the
project flared as soon as it
was announced, sparking
a government inquiry that
kicked off in June this year.
That inquiry was soon followed by a second inquiry
with the same scope and
the same terms of reference.
A third inquiry was then
launched to monitor the deliberations of the other two
inquiries. The fourth inquiry, launched this week,
will have a free-ranging
mandate that may or may
not include all details of the
project, from inception to
proposed completion.
Crucially, the fourth inquiry will inquire into why
there are so many inquiries. The proliferation of inquiries has led to calls for
more scrutiny and a judicial
review. “This is a tangled
mess,” said the principal
of the ‘Save Our Bridge’
organisation (S.O.B.), “and
can only be untangled by a
Royal Commission into the
whole enterprise”.
And what of the bridge
itself? The preferred option
is to convert it into ingots of
scrap metal for sale to the
Chinese. But other options
still on the table include
re-building much of the
structure atop Uluru, or at
an unspecified location on
the Nullarbor Plain. A more
ambitious plan, favoured
by some members of the
project team, is to tour the
bridge around Australia,
putting it on display at
town halls and regional gal-
leries.
Despite the merits of some
of these options, opponents
remain worried that other
Australian icons may also
be taken apart. “What is
there to stop these vandals
from cutting up the Eureka
Flag, or even Phar Lap?”
one S.O.B. source said. In a
setback for S.O.B., however,
the preliminary report from
the first inquiry found that
Phar Lap had already been
partially dismantled, and
that the Eureka Flag was
frayed around the edges.
Dutch push to revise
the map of Australia
STUART KELLS
The descendants of an
obscure Dutch navigator have launched a
campaign to rename
some of Australia’s most
beloved geographical
landmarks.
Anders de Groote
(1602–1660)
travelled
with Abel Tasman and
was a senior official in
the Dutch East India
Company. After an acrimonious dispute with
Tasman and his cartographer over the outcome of a card game,
de Groote’s role in the
great Dutch voyages
of discovery was all but
erased from ship journals, and thereafter
from the historical re-
cord.
Groote Eylandt, in the
Gulf of Carpentaria, is
the only remaining place
on the Australian atlas to
indicate that de Groote
was anything more than
an anonymous sailor and
a sore loser at cards. But
hints of de Groote’s importance can be found
elsewhere on the map,
and these hints have
been deciphered with
some success by de
Groote family historian
Peggy de Groote.
“Most Australians have
all but forgotten about
de Groote, or they were
never taught about him
in the first place,” said Ms
de Groote, “and yet they
speak of his discoveries
every day.” Ms de Groote
blames the dispute with
Tasman, followed by a
process of cartographical Anglicisation, for the
near eradication of de
Groote’s name from Australia’s history.
“One of his greatest
discoveries illustrates the
point,” she said. “On the
Tasman voyage of 1643,
using a very powerful telescope, de Groote saw
parties of Aborigines going on holidays along
what is now the southwestern coast of Victoria.
The journeying Aborigines
used a well worn track
that De Groote named
in his journal ‘De Groote’s
Ocean Road’. But, thanks
to the influence of the
English language on Australian history, we now
know this, erroneously, as
the Great Ocean Road.”
According to Ms de
Groote, a similar process
accounts for the names
of the Great Australian
Bight, the Great Barrier
Reef and the Great Alpine Road – all of them
formerly de Groote’s. “He
was the first European to
see these and to recognise their importance,
long before Cook or Flinders or Mitchell,” she said.
Dutch community organisations have rallied
behind the de Groote
family’s campaign and
are funding an open letter in all major Australian
newspapers to help put
de Groote back on the
map. If they succeed
in this, their next project
will be ornithological:
to pursue the renaming
of the Great Auk as ‘de
Groote’s Auk’.
ALP of tomorrow
MIKE GLEESON
Given the latest polls, any
unAustralian reader will
know that Labor will be
forced from many of its seats
in the next election, and it’s
possible the party will lurk
in the shadow of Liberal
governance until the end
of the decade. By the time
they manage to claw their
way back, it’s quite likely
that many of today’s leading figures in Labor-based
student parties and Youth
Labor will play prominent
roles in a future iteration
of the ALP. The question
begs to be asked, given the
current character of their
leadership, what qualities
will they bring with them?
Here, in no particular order,
is a list of lessons learned by
some potential future Labor
leaders.
1. Be exciting and progres-
sive.
Also, be vague and try
not to clearly define what
you stand for; allow potential followers to make
your party stand for
whatever the hell they
want.
Progress means doing
something new even if,
actually, especially if, it’s
completely insane and irrelevant. Doing insane irrelevant things is an area
with bipartisan support.
2. Dream big.
Who cares about realistic goals? Case in point,
International
Student
Concession Cards. If it
takes the government 50
years to give a university
the possibility it may one
distant day be the site
of a rail station that they
promised at said university’s inception, what’s
the likelihood that a
group of activist students
will convince them to
give non-citizens a cut of
their budget, particularly
given that it’s already in
the red? Oh, and there’s
still a magical internet
superhighway called the
NBN to pay for. Not sure
how much that’ll cost.
But, that’s OK, no one is,
especially not the people
running up the bill.
Time to come about
from that change of tack.
3. Tact.
A competent student
politician can ratfuck
their way out of a brown
paper bag. A good student politician will ratfuck someone else into
the aforementioned bag.
4. Unity.
Ha.
5. Punctuation!
With the correct punctuation, you can show
that your student party is
fun and progressive, and
also justify always shouting its name. Hence, Go!
and Stand Up! Which
aren’t affiliated with the
ALP. Of course.
See what I did there?
Punctuation at work. For
a better tomorrow!
Now, some may say (or
think, whatever floats your
vessel) that the writer is just
some bitter, cynical, bastardly character with a chip
on their shoulder. How apt,
indeterminate number of
readers.
I might make two counterpoints, though. One,
what sort of mechanism
would cause a person to
feel that way about student
politics? Hmm? Secondly,
no one cares.
In fact, if there is a takehome message from all this
nonsense, it’s that people
aren’t disturbed by the simple truth that no one cares;
for the greater part, people let their apathy guide
them away from any form
of involvement in the political process. Come election time, a lot of students
that vote won’t be doing
so because they want to. If
there’s one thing student
parties capitalise on, it’s
the apathy and ignorance
of potential voters. The less
aware a student is, the more
capable a campaigner can
make the party look, and
so it comes down to which
campaigner can reach a potential voter first.
When students have a
problem with an aspect of
their university life, they
shouldn’t hesitate to bring it
up with their elected representatives from the student
union, because believe it or
not, it might be possible for
them to effect change.
If you have a message,
make sure it gets heard.
Don’t just bitch about it to
facebook or twitter. Martin
Luther King Jr didn’t tweet
“I have a dream” to 200,000
followers.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au
THE NATION 3
Keep calm and riot on
kimberly doyle
world news editor
GANGS
control
the
streets of London, raiding
and pillaging public finances, plunging Britain into an
age of austerity and ‘balanced’ budgets.
Hundreds of thugs ran
riot across the city, looting social benefits, setting
fire to the welfare system,
livelihoods and pensions
with the democratic wishes
of the majority apparently
powerless to stop them.
Witnesses observed rioters waging unprovoked
attacks on innocent pensioners, the disabled, the
unemployed and the working class, spurred on by
dangerous
unregulated
gangs of speculators and
neoliberal fundamentalists.
Wilful destruction has
been wrecked on the NHS;
cutting health spending
by over £20 billion and the
state education system;
there is a 60 per cent cut in
capital spending in education, as well as malicious
destruction and naked profiteering, some £7 billion a
year will be taken from the
poorest people in society.
Disability benefits are also
under attack.
Looters can be seen brazenly stalking the financial
district, the ‘Square Mile’
and Canary Wharf, identifiable by their sinister black
suitcases and aggressive
pinstripes.
One of the most notorious
of these gangs is the ‘Chipping Norton set’, which
has been described by Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne as “an incestuous col-
lection of louche, affluent,
power-hungry and amoral
Londoners, located in and
around the Prime Minister’s Oxfordshire constituency.”
Gang related activities include polo, horse riding, out
of control garden parties,
underground tea drinking
circles and overexposure
to the Tuscan sun, as well
as wining and dining with
corrupting influences - such
as the Met.
Favourite viewing of the
average rioter such as BBC
Business and Sky News is
thought to encourage antisocial behaviour.
Most of the rioters have
never sought gainful employment and cannot balance their own budgets;
wiping untold trillions off
the share market and created damage worth billions
more, wantonly destroying
their own country.
Ordinary people have had
their lives turned upside
down by this mindless economic thuggery, a leaked
letter from the government
warned that these savage
attacks on social spending
could make 40,000 families
homeless.
Their reckless destruction has spread as far as
Afghanistan and Iraq. Rioters admit that destruction
is fuelled by their own self
interest, as one notorious
rioter David Cameron was
quoted: “I think we need
to just be very clear about
what we’re trying to do in
Afghanistan... we are simply there for our own national security.”
Some speculate that these
riots have been triggered
by a profound alienation
caused by democracy, equal
rights and social welfare.
Regardless,
politicians
and the media have been
quick to condemn the rioters with moderately loud
tut tuts and mild handwringing. Financial regulators and legislators have
gone further, administering
light wrist-slaps.
It is believed that most
are serial vandals, being
involved in similar riotous
behaviour during the 1980s.
However, attacks on innocent bystanders have far exceeded those inflicted even
under the Thatcher era.
British MPs have scandalously squandered millions
of tax-payer funded expenses on chandelier-cleaning,
hedge-trimming
around
private helipads, the construction of floating duck
retreats and the dredging
of private moats on country
estates.
One of the scroungers,
MP Sir Anthony Steen, who
claimed £90,000 for the removal of dangerous trees
and the rabbit-proofing of
his country estate, defended his thievery:
“I’ve done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful
thing, and do you know
what it’s about? Jealousy.
I’ve got a very, very large
house. Some people say it
looks like Balmoral... It’s
not particularly attractive, it
just does me nicely.... As far
as I’m concerned and as of
this day I don’t know what
the fuss is about. What right
does the public have to interfere with my private life?
None.”
Anyone who believes that
Australia is too civilised for
this kind of barbarous behaviour will be shocked to
learn that one of the gang
leaders is Australia born
Rupert M*censored*, who
has a criminal record spanning decades and continents, setting up organised
crime rings to pay off police
and hack the phones of innocent victims. Individual
Australians have also been
implicated in provocative
and disorderly behaviour.
Mining magnate Gina Reinhart boasts of never having
done an honest day’s work
for an honest day’s pay,
accumulating her stolen
fortune by kicking Aboriginals off their native lands,
amassing stolen property
worth $10.3 billion.
Formerly largely a movement of middle-aged white
men, however rioters insist
the movement has come to
represent a wide range of
a tiny privileged minority.
Many of these people feel
disenfranchised, discriminated against and neglected
by police who refuse to stop
and search them, convict
them or even acknowledge
their crimes.
This double standard was
vividly illustrated when
amateur rioters were favoured in media coverage
with their recent unsuccessful attempt to match the
damaged wrecked by banks
and elites. Media coverage
was still bias towards these
amateurs, even though the
highest estimated cost of
these riots was only £100
million, not even close to
the £900 billion+ looted
from taxpayers to bailout
the banks and corporate
elites.
A forgotten over-class of
people, the elite are neglected and underrepresented
in all forms of public life,
in media scrutiny, in the
courts and in prisons.
These people have become so alienated and insulated from the vast majority of society that it is
little wonder that acts of
lawlessness and antisocial behaviour are not only
considered normal but obligatory if you wish to fit in
with this privileged band of
cutthroats. Shifting of private debt from banks to the
working class and poor is
nothing but opportunism.
Excuses such as being unfairly hamstrung by democracy and civil rights are no
licence for lawlessness. This
is criminality, pure and
simple.
***If you suspect a friend
or family member of being
involved in the riots, it is
your moral responsibility to
report them to your nearest
corrupt police station
A growing network
of metal illness
ELIZABETH KAY
A spokesperson for Beyond
Blue yesterday confirmed
that a new publicity campaign would begin next
week for a serious new
strain of mental illness. ‘Internet Induced Depression’
(also known as ‘Facebook
depression’) has seen its
rates rise significantly in
the past five years to become a serious social issue.
The symptoms of Facebook
depression are apparent happiness with their
reasonably good life in
real-life situations, but
eruptions of cryptic despair, miserableness and
profound unhappiness on
social networking websites. Warning signs for
Facebook depression are a
higher frequency of status
updates; particularly cryptic or self-pitying statuses,
increased use of emoticons,
and rapidly declining
punctuation (for example –
“I promise myself it will all
be better tomorrow <3”).
Sometimes this can become
so severe it can be mistaken for another internet
phenomenon known as
‘trolling’, defined by Urban
Dictionary as the act of
‘purposefully antagonising
people on the internet’. Status updates such as ‘WAI
ME’ and ‘MY LYF SUXX’
are easily mistaken for
‘trolls’, but in truth, these
people are so thoroughly
struck by the sword of Internet Induced Depression
that proper spelling and
grammar has ceased to be a
concern for them.
Notable also is their ten-
dency to respond to comments expression concern
with phrases such as ‘don’t
worry about it’ and ‘it’s
nothing’.
(A tragic example of this
new disorder)
“The tendency is for people
to ignore people with this
problem. It has a heavy
stigma, and this means
that people with Facebook
Depression are slipping
further into their illness because they feel like no-one
cares,” said a recovered
victim of the mental illness.
A distinguishing feature
between people with Internet Induce Depression and
Chronic Depression is that
the former tend to flourish in everyday life. The
removal of access to the
internet has been found to
have a 99% recovery rate.
The campaign will emphasise the subtle nature
of Facebook Depression
and steps that can be taken
before people get too far.
“Teaching the practice of
‘fishing’ will help them to
become more open with
their feelings and maybe
realise how their firstworld problems are related
more to feelings of boredom and a need for attention than a genuine mental
illness,” said Beyond Blue’s
spokesperson yesterday.
“Depression is a big issue,
and the growth of mental
illnesses is something we
certainly want to nip in the
bud.”
4 WORLD
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au
Internet truly Orwellian
(leaked piece by North Korean spy [protected])
In an UnAustralian exclusive, we translate a rare piece that was not hacked – but intercepted from a North Korean spy who lives in Australia –
it was sent via a USB stick, ironically admiring arguably the West’s greatest invention: the Internet.
Liam Molenaar
A single person has underlined the undemocratic
secrecy of the global Internet. Australian Wikileaks
(organisation that released
a few workings of the outer
party) founder Julian Assange in the UK Guardian called the Internet the
“greatest spying machine
the world has ever seen.”
For context, the Internet is an extreme version
of our Intranet. Facebook is
a ubiquitous Internet ‘social networking’ site where
people voluntarily spiel the
details of their private lives.
It is like a mix of e-mail
and private chat – all visible by default to the public. Google is now copying
Facebook’s social thing, but
is best known for its searchable database of the entire
world’s websites.
As Facebook and
Google make spying simple, unsurprisingly they
both have close links to the
CIA. The CIA’s venture
capital arm, In-Q-Tel was
an early investor in Facebook and funded keyhole –
what became Google Earth.
Assange argued in Russia Today that “Facebook
in particular is the most
appalling spying machine
that has ever been invented.
Here we have the world’s
most comprehensive database about people, their
relationships, their names,
their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their
relatives, all sitting within
the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”
“Facebook, Google,
Yahoo [search engine] – all
these major US organisations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence.
It’s not a matter of serving
a subpoena. They have an
interface that they have developed for US intelligence
to use.”
This was unreported in the Australian mainstream media – highlighting how little they know
and care about the biggest
Internet corporations. Facebook claims it “helps you
connect and share with the
people in your life.” But nobody here has shared with
me anything about how
Facebook works. Google
abides by the motto “do no
evil.” But no one knows if
its algorithms are not nudging results in its favour.
There is an asymmetry between how little people
know here about these corporations and how much
they know about them.
People here use
the Internet constantly,
even on mobile telescreen
phones. Recently, Facebook
has extended its tentacles
throughout the web with
its like’ button (there is no
dislike button, which keeps
advertisers likeable). Also,
this is transmitted to Facebook ‘friends’.’Friend’ can
strangely mean their greatest political enemy (especially in student politics).
Irrespective
of
whether they are a Facebook
member or not, on websites
with a Facebook ‘like’ button a ‘cookie’ is created that
records their web browsing history. If they have
a Facebook account, this
cookie records every website they visited that had a
like button – even if they
do not click on the button.
A similar process occurs if
they don’t have a Facebook
account through sites with
‘Facebook connect’, but the
data connections are limited to each internet device
you use. Few here know
about this self-survelliance.
And even if they are careful with the software they
use and eat their cookies up,
the Bluecava corporation
is linking everyone to their
unique hardware devices.
Ignorance is truly strength.
They have a corporation
exclaiming the importance
of ‘connection’ and ‘sharing’ in a social network at
the same time as opaquely
monitoring all Internet users. All this data allows
corporations to personalise
their product to users.
What turns up in their
Facebook ‘news feeds’ [like
a virtual newspaper] is a
selection of the material
published by their social
network. The Edge Rank
algorithm selects material
based on how often they
interact with their Facebook friends, the weight of
the material based on comments and likes, and how
old it is. This is the new
buzzword – personalisation
– also called ‘the filter bubble’, where news increasingly agrees with the user,
with irrelevancies filtered
out.
By signing up,
members give Facebook a
“non-exclusive,
transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license”
to their intellectual prop-
erty. So what they exclaim,
they’re getting a free social
networking platform for revealing a little about themselves? Actually, read a lot.
Read: they are the product being bought and sold
by advertisers. Read: they
are the unpaid advertiser.
Read: freedom is slavery.
And even if they delete
some of their content or
their account, it still exists
in a retrievable recycling
bin. Some users have rejoined Facebook years after
deleting their account to
find their contents are still
there.
They’re also expected to follow a number
of commitments. Facebook can censor a large list
of content – but does not
provide any definitions or
guidelines as to what each
term like ‘hateful’ really
means. Instead, it leaves
unaccountable discretion
to some white conservatives in Silicon Valley. Facebook’s algorithms have
censored countless activists
– from queer to the environment in ‘error’ – including
briefly a well liked Boycott
BP (big polluting oil company) page.
Their giant Ministry of True Information,
Google, does this too – with
its control of 70 per cent of
the search market. Since
December 2009 Google’s
search results have a personalisation
component.
Previously, only the Page
Rank algorithm determined
results – based on how
much each site was linked.
Now Google results are not
universally the same but
tailored to 57 flags that they
expose by using Google,
including their location,
browser, operating system
and search history. They
don’t even have to have a
Google account.
Monopolies
are
controlling them. Google’s
new Google+ social network, like Facebook, gets,
unsurprisingly,
mostly
good stories on Google
News. Google is acquiring
more and more conflicts
of interest with its acquisitions. Its purchase of Motorola means it is vertically
integrated with mobile
phone software through
Android and now hardware. It is also purchasing
content producing companies, such as local service reviewer Zagat and
it owns the biggest video
site, Youtube – so why not
preference these sites in its
results?
The founders of
Google, Larry Page and
Sergey Bin originally said
“[w]e expect that advertising-funded search engines
will be inherently biased
towards the advertisers
and away from the needs of
consumers.”
Recent Arab uprisings have sparked praise
of social media for spreading dissent. However, this
ignores the obvious lack of
Internet access – in 2009
only one in five Egyptians
and one in three Tunisians
had Internet access: Historically, word of mouth
has spread organised dissent quickly without the
Internet. And where’s the
Facebook revolutions in the
most connected places like
the United States. Why are
the 46 million Americans
on food stamps not taking
to the streets? Ditto for me
in Australia and the 24.2
per cent of Australian 15-24
year olds who are unemployed or underemployed.
Could this have something
to do with factors other
than social media?
The Internet can
facilitate violence for different ends. Norway’s
mass murderer of future
politician, Anders Breivik,
spent countless hours on
the Internet, especially Facebook, gathering contacts
for his manifesto. Assange
has mentioned in the UK
Guardian how earlier Facebook dissent in Egypt
ended up with people being
rounded up to jail or killed.
Facebook has been great for
the police in the recent UK
riots. Some have been jailed
for 4 years for inciting violence. For social media, war
is peace.
And it’s more like
anti-social media for addicts. A statistically sound
survey conducted in 2011
by Relationships Australia
found people who used
more social media were
more likely to frequently
feel lonely. Despite 18-24
year olds being the most
connected, they were least
likely to never feel lonely
(4 per cent), compared to
the closest age group (9 per
cent) for 25-34 year olds.
Could it be possible that social media can become antisocial?
Again,
without
them knowing, ‘cookies’ are
created as they browse the
web, like GPS trackers on
their mobile phones (which
also tracks them, with data
sent to the US) – they record where you go on the
Internet. They tailor advertisements to their previous searches or simply just
build a profile of the sites
they have used – everything you have clicked on.
This data is sold to virtually
unknown global marketing companies like Acxiom.
These ‘middlemen’ companies gather data from
a variety of sources, and
practically fund
Internet
spyware (more tracking
things, called spyware because its not big business).
Federal liberal MP Andrew
Robb was a previous chief
executive of Acxiom and in
1999 defended the company
as “seeking to give people
control over the data that’s
made available.”
But they do not
know what data is available. Acxiom knows details of at least 500 million
people globally, with over
1,500 lines of data for each
person, including their address history and family
members. Data can be auctioned, as such the person
who wanted a cheap flight,
and through behavioural
retargeting they are harassed wherever they go
around the web. Businesses
share their data, as behaviour now is a commodity.
No wonder the most connected feel most lonely.
Google CEO Eric
Schmidt said in 2010 that
the Google search box will
become extinct, “[t]he next
step of search is doing this
automatically... when I
walk down the street, I want
my smartphone to be doing
searches constantly – ‘did
you know?’”.The key aim
of Facebook and Google+ is
as Schmidt said – to be the
ultimate real “identity service”.
They will have one
identity. Facebook CEO,
Mark Zuckerberg put it
best: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”.
Zuckerberg has rationalised
personalisation to staff with
“[A] squirrel dying in front
of your house may be more
relevant to your interests
right now than people dying in Africa.”
Facebook has rolled
out facial recognition in its
database of photos. This
seems to be just the start
– and end of background
anonymity. As computing
power increases, and privacy norms continue to be
eroded, all images and video will be scanned by computers. Everyone everywhere will be identifiable.
The main drawback seems
to be from a noisy minority
that thinks Facebook wants
to – and should allow people to control their privacy.
The online world
will further record the
real world, as Coca Cola
have demonstrated at their
Amusement Park, with battery-less RFID microchip
bracelets (same technology
as ‘smartcards’) that automatically liked Internet connected like signs with hand
gestures – straight onto
their Facebook account.
This is augmented
reality. Already in nearby
Japan, there are advertising
telescreens that personalise
according to the viewers’
visual appearance. Lack of
privacy is becoming normalised. In Australia, there
was a lack of an uproar
when Google made Street
View high definition in
July.
The founder of the
Internet, Tim Berners-Lee,
has warned in Scientific
American of the danger of
these internet monopolies,
“Once you enter your data
into one of these services,
you cannot easily use them
on another site. Each site is
a silo, walled off from the
others.”
“Yes, your site’s
pages are on the Web, but
your data are not. You can
access a Web page about a
list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items
from it, to another site.”
However, trends suggest
people do not mind. China
has recently unblocked pornography, demonstrating
how distraction is the new
form of second-order censorship.
Kim Jong-il should
be proud of his choice to
stay away from the global Internet. On second
thoughts, the Internet (at
least our own internal filter
bubble) may be a good idea
to fully realise our North
Korean utopia. I love the Internet.
A PLUS
THE UNAUSTRALIAN
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au
FEATURES | COMMENTARY
Dysfunctional Inversions take
enfant terrible to new heights
STUART KELLS
St Kilda’s Immaculata
gallery is hosting a new
exhibition by the infamous
art-world ratbag Giuseppe
Foggo, who first shot into
view in 2008 with his
‘Inversions’ fashion range.
Though there were many
highlights in that spectacular debut, critics especially
relished the zippered hotpants that were more zipper than fabric; the jersey
vest with three enormous
clanging celluloid buttons;
the gossamer-thin belt with
a massive pendulous buckle; a Swiss-made watch
with a huge band and microscopic, unreadable face;
and stylish sunglasses held
together with oversized
screws and supported by
bouncy pneumatic noserests.
The success of that range
paved the way for Foggo’s
Inversions Homewares
and Interiors. The cognoscenti rushed to buy light
switches that were six feet
wide and required the
homeowner’s full weight,
deployed shoulder-to-thewall, to be turned on or
off; and Foggo’s metrelong chrome door handles,
beautifully complemented
by kitchen cabinets with
enormous protruding
knobs.
Foggo’s philosophy is
simple: make the other the
I; make the antipode the
centre; make the invisible
visible, then use it to beat
the audience over the head.
Which brings us to Dysfunctional Inversions, 2011.
Only Foggo could outdo
Foggo. Visitors to Immaculata will encounter floor
tiles that are mostly cracks;
a range of sack-sized socks
held together with stains;
a hairnet made from holes
tied together with string; a
chair with someone already
sitting on it; a swollen
key that opens no locks;
a keyboard with no keys
except Scroll Lock; and the
artist himself, for sale to the
highest bidder. So far there
have been no takers, and
Foggo promises to return
in 2014 with an ensemble
that will truly knock our
giant filthy socks off.
In defence of
the Flat Earth
Society
Top Dog
Males have fought for the alpha position for centuries, but are today’s
young men having their efforts squandered by simple biology?
JENNIFER SMITH
Walk into the kitchen
of your average male and
you are bound to find three
things: meat, milk, and protein powder. Protein products are the new substance
of choice for young Aussie
males. From blended and
breakfast, to egg, rice and
whey, the range of protein
powders available is endless. And so is the size –
powder is now available in
tubs ranging from the size
of drink cans to the size of
oil tankers. But the question is, are these products
actually working to their
intended ends - manliness?
As it would seem, the
proof is in the protein.
Walking past Monash
Sport, it is quickly evident
that protein does not a buff
man make. By a simple
analysis of the ratio of bony
prominences to muscle
mass, it seems that our
young men are actually
losing kilos. ‘Emaciated’ is
the new ‘lanky’ and what
was once considered ‘buff’
seems nigh impossible to
find in the mass of hipster
slimness.
The cause of this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon has yet to be scientifically proven, but current
evidence suggests that
oestrogen, a ‘female’ sex
hormone, may be at least
partly responsible.
An increase in oestro-
gen may not only explain
changing body type, but
also an increase mood
affect, behavioural disturbances and emotional
outbursts in young men.
Traditional saggy-daggy
boxers are being traded
in for more revealing,
feminine briefs or – for the
truly adventurous – ‘mankinis’. Trousers and slacks
are ancient remnants of
fashions past, having been
replaced by crotch-hugging
skinny jeans and pants that
stop halfway down the
calf. Voluptuous head hair,
absent genital hair, and the
egregious overuse of ‘aftershave’ (known popularly
as perfume) are further
evidence for change in
male grooming habits. The
women of the 80s turned
to shoulder pads to express
their innate masculinity
– are these new fashion
trends marking the beginning of a second sexual
revolution?
Where once men were
closed-off, stoic and unemotional, the males of
generation Y are proving
to be emotionally overreactive. Sensitivity scores
are reaching heights never
before seen in this demographic. For the first time
in human history, men are
rating more highly in the
‘pansy’ category on psychological assessments.
Even television and music preferences are experiencing notable changes.
Gray’s Anatomy, Gossip
Girl and Farmer Wants
a Wife are no longer the
entertainment choices of
middle-aged women and
homosexual professionals;
your average straight male
is keen to get in touch with
his feminine side.
Just as black is the new
pink and orange is the
new red, it seems that man
is fast becoming the new
woman. The stereotypically
mother’s club discussion of
fad diets, weight concerns
and clothes is now the
bread and butter of male
bonding. On the one hand,
these are welcome changes
for a generation of women
who had to listen to their
men talk about sports and
cars. On the other, is it possible that the woman inside
every man has an evolutionary downside?
“Definitely,” says one
young female student, “if
my boyfriend brings up
the carbohydrate content
of potatoes versus sweet
potatoes one more time,
I’m becoming a lesbian”.
Others have a more positive outlook on the new
generation of man, “if I can
find a man who I can share
clothes with, I’m set”.
Only the future will tell
whether young men can
find a new alpha-male
niche, or whether the
dynamics of human society are being irrevocably
remoulded…by protein
powder.
DAVID HESLIN
Consensus is a dangerous thing. Once, not so
long ago, it was assumed
knowledge that men were
superior to women; that
ethnic background determined behavioural patterns; that hanging was an
appropriate punishment
for picking gentlemen’s
pockets.
Science, too, has often
been prone to erroneous logic, sometimes
persisting for centuries.
Scientific thought has, at
various times, entertained
alchemy, exorcisms, and
frivolous application
of leeches. Worst of all,
however, has been the
sustained misconception
of Round Earth Theory.
It may seem incredible
that, in this era of advanced technology and intellectual thought, the vast
majority of us remain unaware of the dimensions of
our own planet; and yet,
apart from a small, 152
year-old organisation, few
dare to suspect that their
geographical assumptions
are radically incorrect.
Established in 1849 by
scientist Samuel Rowbotham, the Flat Earth
(formerly ‘Zetetic’)
Society remains the sole
voice of rationality in the
field of terrestrial discourse. The organisation’s
principles lie in research
and common sense, attributes exemplified by
its founder. Through
pioneering experiments
in water level measurement, Rowbotham was
able to prove conclusively
that the world was flat (as
stated in Isaiah 40:22) and
that Globe Theory was fallacious. He concluded that
the “Bible, alongside our
senses, [supports] the idea
that the Earth [is] flat and
immovable [...] and this
essential truth should not
be set aside for a system
based solely on human
conjecture”. The world, he
summarised, was cylindrically shaped with a flat,
circular surface; the Arctic
circle in the middle, and a
vast ‘wall’ of ice (known
by round earthers as the
imaginary continent of
Antarctica) encircling the
perimeter.
Indicatively, Rowbotham’s findings were
strategically ignored by the
scientific establishment,
who, to this day, continue
to suppress knowledge
about the world’s actual
dimensions. The extent of
the conspiracy is breathtaking. For decades, NASA
and other so-called space
exploration agencies have
manufactured fantastical pictures of a spherical
Earth in space, leading
many well-intentioned
people to believe that these
images are an accurate
reflection of reality. Meanwhile, school textbooks and
television documentaries
reiterate myths of moon
landings, space probes and
solar systems as fact.
It is saddening to see
how much scientific endeavour has been wasted
on account of this false
premise. Our understandings of astronomy, evolution and geology must all
be reexamined from a flat
earth perspective. Indeed,
even the most basic laws
of physics must be challenged by these discoveries. How can we accept
any established scientific
theories in the knowledge
that they are tainted with
a process so misconceived
that it considers Round
Earth Theory axiomatic?
A healthy, open-minded
skepticism can be the only
way forward.
Thus, let us not subject future generations to
further blind indoctrination. With guards patrolling the ice wall on a daily
basis, and so-called space
agencies producing highly
convincing images, it is
near inevitable that the
Round Earth fallacy will
continue to be perpetuated. Whilst it will be hard
for adults to reject such a
deeply-held understanding
of the world, there remains
the opportunity for our
children to be reached;
thus, let us at least ‘teach
the controversy’. Let us
campaign for an education
curriculum that, at the very
least, teaches Flat Earth
Science side-by-side with
Globe Theory, allowing
children the chance to think
for themselves. The contemporary Flat Earth Society remains marginalised,
mocked and overlooked —
yet, with time and education, the number may yet
grow and gain clout.
20th Century visionary Charles K. Johnson
remarked that the society
could “help establish the
United States of the world
on this flat earth, [and]
replace the science religion
with sanity”. Perhaps,
indeed, it will be the mass
knowledge of the Earth’s
nature and our place in it
that will bring us together
as a human race. We are
not prisoners placed randomly around some sphere
spinning meaninglessly in
space; we are one, fixed,
equal on a plane — eternally connected to this flat,
beautiful world.
More information on the
society can be found at http://
theflatearthsociety.org
6 COMMENTARY
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
www.theunaustralian.com.au
Drugs and society, Part 4
Alcohol is the most
Australian drug there is.
It is fundamental to our
very way of life. What
else do you drink with
dinner? Water? Screw
that; we’ve got a limited
amount of that stuff in
this country and wasting
water is unAustralian.
What else are we supposed to do when we
go out? Alcohol is the
ultimate social lubricant.
Without it things like
music, sport, and talking to other people just
wouldn’t be fun anymore.
In fact, it’s the key to
our procreation. Without alcohol men and
women would never
get along long enough
to have sex, and our
bountiful alcohol-related
mating rituals have such
valuable cultural impact
– drunken dancing to
horrible music, endless
conversations about
nothing at all, liquid latenight city street art, lust,
gluttony, greed, sloth,
wrath… oops, that’s a
different list.
Anyway, without
alcohol no one would
ever watch cricket! That
would be really unAustralian, even though
cricket came from England.
But so did we of
course, at least those
of us that are true blue
Aussie. We come from
a proud line of Irish
whiskey-drinking convicts
and English beer-swilling
sailors. Alcoholism is
part of our distinguished
history, and it would be
unAustralian to turn our
backs on the noble ancestors who founded this
fair country.
Marijuana, by contrast,
is supremely unAustralian. For one, marijuana is
anti-business. People get
that shit tax-free! Traitors. Whereas when you
buy goon or VB you are
supporting our economy, and the deluge of
alcohol-related illnesses
supports our public
health system by providing perpetual patients,
or… wait, that doesn’t
work.
Well at least it supports
the pharmaceutical
companies. Not like marijuana. Free medicine,
HA! What a ridiculous
idea. Isn’t marijuana
supposed to cause cancer? Why do they treat
cancer patients with
it? There’s some sort of
scam going on there. It’s
probably the Chinese.
Next they’ll probably
invade with their industrial hemp economy.
They’ll threaten the loggers because we won’t
need to cut down trees
for paper anymore, but
not just them. Hemp is
way too useful. Hemp
seeds can produce a
wide range of nutritious
foods; the fibre can be
used for all sorts of durable textiles; and the core,
in addition to paper, can
be used as a source for
the production of plastics, and even turned
into biofuel; plus cannabis has a thousand and
one medicinal uses. All
our Aussie businesses are
under threat.
Marijuana is a fraud.
Weed is unAustralian
because it doesn’t kill
brain cells. A lot of people think it does, maybe
that’s why so many people use it, but it doesn’t
really. And here in this
country we like our drugs
to make us stupid, like
alcohol, because we
don’t like intellectuals
here. So if you haven’t
drunk enough beer to kill
at least half your godgiven brain cells by the
time you’re 21, you are
unAustralian.
Also marijuana brings
people together. This is
dangerous. If it ever became legalized it might
get so bad we won’t
even be able to recognize who is unAustralian
and who isn’t. More of
those bloody asylum
seekers might sneak in.
And finally, marijuana
is unAustralian because
it doesn’t provoke
violence. When people
smoke weed they just sit
around, listen to music,
watch funny movies, and
philosophize. Jesus, can
you imagine?!! But my
point here is that humans
are angry, violent, petty
animals like any other on
this planet and we need
our occasional excuse
to go ape-shit. Choose
alcohol, be Australian.
Manifesto of the AntiNon-Un-Australian
League (ANNUL)
We, the Anti-Non-Un-Australian League, refuse to not
be unready to fail to not defend UnAustralian values.
Moreover, we negatively reject non-adherence to
an absence of unpreparedness to not uphold these
values. We embrace the triple negative, without not
asserting that it is not the unsolution to not living those
values. But conversely we do not accept not wholeheartedly rejecting the corresponding non-assertion
of values we fail to not reject.
I
LOT’S WIFE
don’t look back
student newspaper
Edition VII
Culture
David Squire ~
Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus by P.G.
Wodehouse
Book Recommendations
Rebecca Harrison ~
Homage to Catalonia by George
Orwell
Amber Evangelista ~
Of Love and Shadows by Isabel
Allende
David recommends everything written
by Tom Sharpe...
‘superb black comedies’, for eg. Wilt
Michal Klein ~
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Northern Lights by Philip Pulman
Consider the Birds: Who they are
and what they do by Colin Tudge
Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick
O’Brian
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Our special book recommender this issue is author Kate Holden. She has written two
memoirs, In My Skin: A memoir (2005) and The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days
(2010). Kate pens a weekly column for The Age and regularly writes reviews, essays
and short stories for a variety of publications. These are her recommended books ~
Josie De Costa ~
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Fiction:
A Place of Greater Safety / Hilary Mantel
Fugitive Pieces / Anne Michaels
The Owl Service / Alan Garner
The English Patient / Michael Ondaatje
Praise / Andrew McGahan
Fingersmith / Sarah Walker
Flight from the Enchanter / Iris Murdoch
House of Incest / Anais Nin
Lots of poetry in general!
Non-fiction:
Anything written by Jan Morris or Geoff Dyer
Rome and a Villa / Eleanor Clark
Wild / Jay Griffiths
Footstep / Richard Holmes
Book Review
The First Time by Kate Monro
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz
Zafón
Virginity loss can’t be defined by a single definition; it is as subjective as sexuality
itself. This is what makes Kate Monro’s anthology of virginity loss so intriguing. As
I read through the stories I couldn’t help but think of my own, my friends, my first
lovers’ experience. The man I lost my virginity to was also a virgin and I always found
it odd that he said he lost his virginity at a different stage of our relationship than me.
His loss was when he penetrated me for the first time; mine was my first orgasm…
months later. It is clear from the beginning that Monro is passionate about her subject
matter. She pursues the stories with a sense of importance, “unpacking the past can be
a powerful experience”. Her book is not just about sex and first times, it’s about social
history and putting these stories into context. But despite this, her opinions lack authority and make her reflections on some stories irritating. Monro is skilled at categorising the experiences so that there is a natural flow from one to the other. Even if you
overlook Monro’s self conscious intermissions, you will find the insight into these men
and women’s virginity loss heart-warming and memorable but tragic at the same time,
just like your own.
By Clare Taylor
RRP $26.99
8
Creative
Writing
Dunhill
Hands so like the smoke of cigarettes
Escaping from parted lips:
Languid and sulfur-sharp, curling in the spaces
Made by your teeth marks in my skin.
Time melds and separates, in tandem
With the tangling of our limbs.
I wonder, between the staggering of my gasps,
If the nicotine will stain.
Memory flaunts your acupuncture hands—
Cotton sheets turn rough as cat’s tongues.
You bring a haze to these transitional days,
So thick and sweet and acrid.
Press into me; burn me with the dying embers
Of your fingers—mark me as yours.
With every match you strike, I flare,
Your pilot light.
By Ayona Sur
by Michelle Li
Embodiment of nature
Intent to Outline
Isn’t there a benediction to understanding
buoyed too out of the time existing as it was?
We’re flower-arranging, but my mother
touches me on the arm
and tells me to go outside with her.
The outside of the house is very bright
to be the unapproachable part of the garden.
The leaves are full of brown spangles, the grubby waves of sunlit
lariats;
they are like informal slippers, too full of the smell of feet
to walk around in. Did you play the silence
picking up blunstones swabbed in boxers?
Our garden is full of the smell of feet.
Or are we too used to a dusty household
wrangling the linen out of cordoned shelves,
walls all like skirtings?
Hearing them round the corner loud as bothered ghosts. We’re
smothering cigarettes, asking
who carries cigarettes, confronted
by liars asking for lighters, carrying like stars thrown forward
a detonated sun.
Her arms grow hair. Her lips persist, smiling. They do not
evaporate into her jaws. I remember a child
light like the albatross patrolling
the mooring of a four-wheel drive, fresh gravel,
and jumping seeing
manacles weighed with full plastic bags – seeing
the bags and thinking not of food
but of the smile of she who’d found them first.
I grow old enough to dream forward my own smile.
We think about today slapping peaceful balloons; we’re
all thinking, the blunt collar of a happy daddy.
I dream their gestures. I do not mean
that their gestures are not real, but I buzz them
into my mind, and manifest, at my own pace,
acknowledgement. Like
we rent words from a house
full of smeared trees
whose sterling worth, amiably garbled, is sustained in me.
The annihilation of the green beauty is hard for me to see
Sometimes, I wish, from this devastation I could flee
I crave to save greenery, to become the creature
Where my face, my body has embodied the nature.
Nature is divine, nature is god’s gift
I fail to understand why man is creating this rift
I feel dazed when something meets my solitary gaze
Forests everywhere around me set ablaze.
The world is turning into a house that’s dilapidated
Where human is the ivy, everywhere, disintegrated
He can marvel all he wants at what he has made
But he can see, not, the end is near I’m afraid.
Nature will have revenge, there will be an innuendo
Such shall it be that it’ll send mankind to inferno
No one will help him, not even the mighty lord
For he is walking on the edge of the sword
Look at my dry lips, for something behind them is suppressed
The pain is such that it cannot be expressed
I have forgotten how it used to feel
For the nature today has become so unreal
Every breath I take is another toxic fume
Everything is dying, every petal, leaf and plume
Cannot we co-exist, is there not enough room ?
Why are ye so adamant to meet your own doom ?
The time, the time of reckoning has come
For the pagan gods are angry and they shall spare none
Take another step forward and fall into an endless well
Where darkness resides and no one dwells.
Stop hurting nature, stop hurting me
For, I promise, it will be restored, the tranquility and serenity
Help me bloom, help me grow
For I am nature and you will live to see tomorrow
Let me be, set me free
Forever let it last, the cool breeze, the clean sea
Mother earth was not yours, it never was thine
It was ours, yours and mine.
The annihilation of the green beauty is hard for me to see
Sometimes, I wish, from this devastation I could flee
I crave to save greenery, to become the creature
Where my face, my body has embodied the nature.
shirt feels worn,
Constantinos Karavias
well worn
The colours bleed like chalk
not a spot neglected
whilst
sunset drapes
upon it
Ani Pochesneva
Mandala by Gooey
Creative
Writing
Choice
There’s a little girl who walks the peripheries
of my consciousness
tracing the lines of a cage
pressing at the bars
Nudging me towards the exit.
9
Five Words by Kimberley Taing
The five words he said to me keep resonating in my head. This awful little man has just said words which
alone don’t mean anything, but strung together have created complete disarray in my mind. How can
one person change my entire perspective on my life with five little words?
Her glance is always lonely
and her feet are always cold.
There are three voices in my head
Each with something wrong,
All with something right
When I was a child, I forever aspired to be a grand writer. I would lose myself in books and when I let my
imagination run wild, it was certainly wild. I was always the heroine who saved the day; from bullies to
social injustices, my entire existence was to be the bringer of goodness to the world. Each story had a
clear plot, moral and me as the warrior in the misadventures of everyday life. As time went by, though,
I gave way to hormones and teenage angst and become the sidekick in my own fantasies. I would be
stricken with a terminal disease, to have male suitors lingering around my hospital bed, vying to be the
one to hold my hand as I took my final breaths. I would whisper my last wishes and look deeply into his
eyes before the final beep of the heart rate monitor struck. It was a marvellous place to be, away from
the world.
As an older teenager, I was constantly told that education is the key to success. It would allow
me to unlock any door and all I have to do is know what I want. I fancied being a prominent spokesperson on behalf of females in a male-dominated industry, or the local GP who was recommended by word
of mouth throughout the community. I had so much potential and I genuinely believed I could achieve
anything.
Who’s putting who in this corner?
Am I pushing?
Are they dragging?
She knows what I’m doing
And she’ll keep staring
Till she feels the guilt in my pulse.
A heartbeat behind,
Her glance is always lonely
And my feet are always cold.
It’s funny that you can be so naive and it can be snatched away from you so violently, that your entire
gravity is pulled out from beneath you. I feel like a stranger to this suddenly alien world. I thought I
would be successful, I thought I could make a difference. I asked the world to take me on board the
influence train and spread the word that I was here and I was going to change everything, one policy at a
time. My first goal on my to-do list, as a doe eyed student, was to create an even ground for females and
males in the workplace. My next goal was to instigate changes on the environmental front to save the
world from the clutches of global warming. The final goal was to educate the world, one child at a time
so that illiteracy was a thing of the past. After those five haunting words, I needed to step back and ask
myself, how tall are you, poppy? There is only so much cutting down that you can take before your head
gets chopped off.
Disappointment after disappointment dotted my life and this was the final straw. I guess he just put my
life into perspective and that dreaming big does not equate to doing big things.
by Elizabeth Kay
I should have punched him in the crotch or kicked him in the shin or even just thrown my sandwich in his
face. But I didn’t. I just pushed past him and the five words which hung in the air like helium balloons.
How dare he say something like that to me, forcing me to sit here and re-evaluate everything that I stand
for. If this is the opinion of one man, then there must be plenty more where it came from. I guess I’ve
fallen into the depths of cynicism and I’m finding it difficult to climb out. What would warrior me have
done ten years ago if this was just another misadventure? Melodramatic sidekick me would roll over and
die, so it’s no use asking her. I play the entire episode again. He stood there with his jaw clenched and
announces to the world, “You mean nothing to me”. I stood there dumbstruck for about three seconds
and pushed the helium balloons aside and held back the tears filled with my identity and everything that
I stood for until that moment in time. The five words, “you mean nothing to me”, kicked up a storm in my
mind and I’m waiting for the dust to settle to find out who I really am; a girl with big dreams or a headless poppy?
Soul Mate
by Joshua Kenner
If there were a soul like mine,
so akin we bond like twine.
And if we were somehow to meet
and make our broken halves complete.
Despite all endless space and time
the light from our two stars entwine.
A meeting birthed in destiny;
a quirk of quantum chemistry.
I find my other finally
to be
none other than a bee.
Dear Michael…
Venus
We sit on a rooftop, watch
Venus appear
The guilty voyeur is how I imagine her.
Seeming aloof
while she watches you.
(As we suppose within this tryst
the fantasy that souls exist,
it seems innate to ideate
that they as well reincarnate.)
Pouring your heart like honey
the trust thick and gold,
as we casually
unfold our secrets and examine them
Despite our different forms and size,
across the cross-species divide,
our symmetry is plain to see
in compound singularity.
Pinned up on indigo blue,
Here
we might better solve the maze
of indirect routes to the truth.
Beguiled by the sweetest nectar,
propelled along pre-destined vector,
we court in gyroscopic dance
in pollinating this romance.
Another roof, another man in despair.
So trapped in his mind
in the poisonous vines.
Though cruel kismet prevents us kiss
(not least my lover’s proboscis)
we find our own intimacy
by sharing in my honey tea.
The absence of what is his life,
only measured
over perilous heights
against what it is not.
Building our trust with precarious bricks
Yet some desires I cannot sate,
and when my honey bee’s out late,
I start suspecting where its been,
attending to its insect queen.
We two can never procreate,
which leads me to a jealous spate.
I fear my love anthophilous
can never be monogamous.
and
injecting love in this tiny now,
wondering how Venus
I’ve been starring at the your calendar
(It’s been up since the summer of ‘08)
And its official, your whimsical bullshit
Has gone from “great” to “grate”
Joy, cynicism, and bitterness
All expressed at the same time
But that’s it - I’ve had a gutful of Mr Curvy
And your vaguely political rhymes
I simply think you’re past it, man
Your relevancy needs a nip’n’tuck…
So sorry Mr.Leunig, but I no longer give a fuck.
My second revelation is that
I’ve never ever seen you crack a smile
I also jumped onto wikipedia and
Had a good trawl through your file
Turns out you’re a pinko and a monarchist
How Typical! You contrarian prat!
And of course you went to MonashUni
(Not that I can argue with that)
You’ve been walking in muddy gumboots
And I think you’ve finally got stuck…
So sorry Mr.Leunig, but I no longer give a fuck.
Consumerism, US Imperialism
Both earn your condemnation
Yet you’ve conquered every fridge, coffee cup,
And noticeboard across the nation!
A suburban doctor’s wifes’ wet dream
Ruffled clothes and scraggily grey hair
Owned and tamed by no one
The loner rebel, a species oh so rare!
But there’s strychnine in the wonderwhite,
Its time to kill the sacred duck…
contrasts our young revelations
So sorry Michael Leunig, but I no longer give a
fuck.
the orange the blue, from her safe universe
by Thomas Whiteside
And then one fateful night in bed
I roll and squash my soul mate dead.
It’s stinger wakes me with a start,
forevermore lodged near my heart.
with the other realities..
The lesson from this
to conclude
is fate’s verisimilitude
by Kirsten Hillman
if I were her I’d come a bit closer and give in to
gravity.
10
Music
Shock Records
Neon Trees live at
Prince Bandroom
leigh macdonald
harry morrow
The Gin Club - Deathwish
The Gin Club have taken
a different direction with
their fourth studio-album,
Deathwish. The eightpiece folk-rock outfit,
based in Melbourne and
Brisbane, have amped
up the guitars for their
latest release.
“It was just where we
were heading,” said cellist Bridget Lewis. “We just
had a bunch of songs
that were louder… There
are still moments on
there that are quieter,
but we certainly had
more songs that were a
bit rockier.”
For fans of The Gin
Club’s earlier album, it
will be a relief to know
that none of the lyrical
quality has been compromised in this style
change.
The album peaks with
Adrian Stoyles and Gus
Agar’s balls-out countryrock tune ‘Choppin’
Wood’, so much so that
it’s difficult to move on to
the rest of the album.
campbell mcnolty
radio monash
radio monash
The title track showcases Conor Macdonald’s
devastatingly sincere
vocal delivery and his
knack for songwriting.
‘I Am My Own Partner’
provides more of his
heart wrenching balladry.
One might assume that
eight separate writers
would clash fiercely, but
the album maintains an
unexpected continuity and flow. “We have
really similar ideas about
the stuff that we like,”
said Lewis.
With her only songwriting contribution for the
album, ‘Milli Vanilli’, Lewis
sings a haunting story of
the Australian floods.
Deathwish follows on
from 2008’s doublealbum Junk. While it still
contains brilliant songwriting, one criticism of
Junk is that it’s difficult
to give each of the 26
songs the time they
deserve. Deathwish is
more manageable with
13 tracks, which thrive on
second and third listens.
The album was recorded over two sessions, at a Rockhampton
cattle property in 2008
and in suburban Brisbane
18 months later. They
produced over 30 songs,
but managed to prune
this number back for the
single-disc release.
Dan Mansfield’s guitardriven ‘Shake Hands’ is
almost reminiscent of
classic Aus-rock bands,
such as Powderfinger.
Mansfield, who was
largely responsible for
the engineering and
production of Deathwish,
said, “The Gin Club have
always done things our
way and stuck to our
guns. We trust our instincts. This album epitomises our self-sufficient
approach to our art.
It is something we can
genuinely say is ours,
and we’re very proud of
that”.
And so they should be.
Neon Trees are a fourpiece alt-rock/MOR
band from California,
currently residing in Utah.
At the Prince Bandroom
on the 9th of August they
delivered a strong set to
an adoring audience. It
was almost entirely down
to the charisma of one
man: Tyler Glenn.
The man is, on stage,
a Californian Michael
Hutchence. The crowd
of largely females hung
of his every movement
and followed him across
the stage. Glenn, the
born front man, backed
up his bravado with tight
vocals all night. He had a
good interplay with guitarist Chris Allen who created a suitable framing
for Glenn’s persona and
melodies. Elaine Bradley
and Branden Campbell
giving the group a good
footing in an early Killers’
(who they toured with in
2008) style with Bradley
also providing back up
radio monash
vocals.
Glenn performed
atmospheric and dark
spoken word interludes
over jazzy accompaniments in between songs,
told the audience to
dance with him, where
he would then whip
himself into a rhythmic
frenzy of limbs and jerky
movement. He could
scream like he were in a
70s new wave of British
heavy metal band and
the fans would start to
go weak at the knees.
He roped the crowd into
his world on stage and
brought the room to it’s
feet to hang off his every
word and note. He handled stage invasions and
jingoistic flag giving and
chanting with grace.
He was a deity amongst
mortals. The fact that the
room waited so eagerly
so long for what was
eventually a four song
encore says it all.
Nero - Welcome reality
MTA/Mercury, 2011
Luke Redgen
I’m not all that familiar
with dubstep, picking up bits and pieces
around the place that
sound like nothing more
than speaker-stress-test
demos, lacking in any
real emotion or resonance. Maybe you just
need to whoop up to
its level, maybe it grows
on you like fine wine,
but one can’t help but
feel James Blake has
distilled the best out of
the genre over the last
couple of years, leaving
the schlock and cheese
behind to the bombastic nerds who obviously
didn’t find The Prodigy
or Pendulum anywhere
near bombastic enough.
Nero here has built a
sonic slaughterhouse,
one where subtlety has
come to die.
But what stands out is,
for a duo hell-bent on
producing as much noise
as humanly possible,
melodies are few and far
between. And that’s the
biggest problem with the
genre: being obsessed
with gasps and thrills. At
its best (not surprisingly
on the radio singles) the
dystopian soundtrack
actually locates a little bit of colour – rave
anthems custom built for
pulsating across dance
floors spazzing out with
glow sticks, like progressive stand-out ‘Guilt’
(although the vocalist
employed here sounds
mildly robotic). But even
if it thrills, even if it’s fun, it
still refuses to ever touch,
to move, to dig deep.
The best track on
here is arguably the
thunderstruck ‘Me and
You’, recalling 90s drumand-bass with expert
precision, but never as
exciting as, say, Sleigh
Bells. There are no
sonic boundaries being
pushed; it’s difficult to
find a purpose for this
music. If it’s supposed to
be blissful or euphoric,
it never incorporates
enough colour in the
pastiche, the pastiche
itself discounting the likelihood the duo wish to be
pioneers. ‘Crush on You’
could almost be pretty,
but is ruined by the same
ruddy excess dripping
everywhere. In fact, the
second half of the album
is all like this, as the duo
pay homage to drumand-bass cutely enough,
but with utter disdain for
good taste (‘Must be the
Feeling’, ‘Promises’).
The bad tracks on
here are utterly disposable. ‘Innocence’ is
a stock-trance track
dressed up as something
more sinister, leaving a
fierce craving for AraabMUZIK’s more diverse
palette. Filler is abundant
throughout on throwaway cuts with too-coolfor-school dystopian titles
like “Fugue State” and
“Doomsday”, titles com-
The Radio Monash
Launch party last month
was funky as hell. Saskwatch played to a
packed house and
warmed up the bodies
nicely for a stomping set
from Candice Monique
and the Optics. Everyone who came down
had a riot.
If you want to get
in on one of the Radio
Monash parties before
the semester is over you
have a couple more
chances. We’ll be holding a night for some of
our DJs to strut their stuff
at Barbaras Lounge on
the 29th of September.
Then we’ll be ending the
semester with a open
mic night at Sir John’s
Bar immediately after our
AGM on the last Friday of
the semester. Get down
guaranteed!
Check out our website
for more information, or
look at your inbox if you
are a member. You’ll be
hearing from us soon. If
you want to get more
involved at the station,
nominations for next
year’s committee will
be opening soon. It’s an
awesome way to have a
blast and get experience
running a radio station
All the best for assignments and exams.
Keep tuning in at radiomonash.fm
plimenting the bravado
of an album apparently
keen to serve as some
sort of soundtrack to the
apocalypse (something
about the year 2808 and
the end of the world),
which invites another
comparison: prog-metal
bands of yesteryear vying for the same motifs,
resulting in products just
as schlocky.
It’s not unlistenable music, it’s just undesirable.
It seems inessential but
it’s also selling like hotcakes, a business model
built around drowning
listeners to deaf and
getting the most out of
expensive sound systems.
Albums like this are the
Avatar of music, pretty
but hollow, revolutionary
in style but not in substance, and ultimately
forgettable. The script
doesn’t match the skillset, so your best bet is to
stick to Klaxons or even
whatever The Chemical Brothers are doing,
or maybe you’ve been
brainwashed too.
cliche, and Kanye serves
as a disclaimer of the
risks and pitfalls attached
to mega stardom and
success. And no matter
what your political beliefs
are or your world view
is, it’s difficult to criticise
a couple of guys advocating the virtue of hard
work.
No single quote or quip
is worth highlighting here
because the whole thing
sounds like a highlights
package. Instead, what
stands out are themes
and motifs. RZA collaboration ‘New Day’ is
a chilling insight into the
worries and concerns of
parenting for moguls. ‘Lift
Off’ features a sensational Beyonce hook
detailing brash superior-
ity. Justin Vernon features
amusingly on a dedication track that only rap
superstars could convincingly author, ‘That’s
My Bitch’, teeming with
attitude, yet still strangely
resonant, cute in its own
ugly way.
Outkast garnered comparisons to Lennon and
McCartney, the introspective genius and pop
superstar, but Jay and Ye
more closely resemble
Roxy Music, Hov the Ferry
style croon to Yeezy’s
Eno-esque loon. One
thing’s for sure though:
Kanye brings out the
best in Jigga; always has,
always will.
Jay-A and Kanye West - Watch The Throne
Roc-A-Fella, 2011
Luke Redgen
The incredible hype
surrounding the release
of this album is a tad
mysterious. It’s probably
a further illustration of
Jigga’s unbelievable
marketing prowess, but
at its infancy this project
appeared to be nothing more than a low-key,
split EP victory lap for two
of the hottest, if not the
two hottest names in the
game. At some point the
pair must have realised
the potential for a project of this nature given
the ludicrous amount of
commercial and critical
success cred they continue to rack up.
The album itself sounds
a million bucks, maybe
even a billion, a worthy
companion piece to
Kanye’s 2010 magnum
opus boasting similar
production technique,
with the occasional
retrospective reaffirmation of earlier, soulful
times (‘Otis’) and some
traditional Jay-Z oldschool bombast (‘Murder
To Excellence’). Kanye
has creative control but
there’s a reason Jazz’s
name comes first on the
billing; Kanye might be
at the front of the pack
right now but Jay-Z created him, and he is still
the businessman powerhouse he lambasted on
the Diamond’s remix on
which he kicked Yeezy’s
ass.
The guys pack in the
most decadent samples,
beats and collabora-
tors to bolster up their
untouchable facade.
Beyonce obviously
comes as part of the
package (in and of itself
a glorifying omen) but
also an ever-solidifying
Frank Ocean, a lavish
Justin Vernon (who must
be having the time of his
life), RZA, Swizz Beats and
a triumphant sample of
the late great Otis Redding juxtapose deliciously with the barrage of
self-adulation – two guys
revelling in their own and
one another’s glory, with
the status symbols to sell
it.
Certain commentators have panned the
duo’s lack of empathy
and tact by grandstanding and bragging about
their excessive success,
but this is honestly a
misnomer. It’s not up
to them to wallow and
pander to anybody who
might hit up their jams
but might also be struggling. It would be condescending and depressing
to listen to.
What stands out about
the project is its unwillingness to compromise,
to stay the course and
keep doing what the
pair know and love,
and it sounds infinitely
better for it. Because at
Yeezy and Hov’s crux
still remains a personification of the American
dream: for Jay it’s the
age old, rags-to-riches,
‘anything is possible if
you put your mind to it’
Music
11
Road to destruction - Elliot Brown
andrew wright
music editor
One of the most recent
CDs to grace my desk,
Elliot Brown’s second album got a fair few plays
in my boombox. I’d not
come across the NewZealand based songwriter before, but a little online research shed some
light on the man. He’s
a self described “’altcountry’ underground
singer” of 26, residing on
the North Island. When I
saw ‘alt country’, images
of Beck flashed into my
mind, until I realised that
Beck was only defined as
such on Futurama and
doesn’t actually incorporate that much country
style into his music. Funnily enough, Elliot Brown
and Beck do share
something in their eclecticism – though in distinct
ways, as we shall see.
A low budget release
cobbled from live tracks
and stints in various
studios, Brown’s material is strikingly diverse.
In the first half hour of
the record, we’re taken
through traditional English folk (opener ‘Cruel
Mother’), sinister swamp
rock (‘Please Mister Paramedic’), and, of course,
American country with
plentry of nasal twang
(‘Banjer Pickin’ Man’).
What’s interesting is that
Brown capably handles
all of these styles, seamlessly fitting into character and delivering a
sincere performance
each time.
There is a downside
to this kind of genrehopping, especially for
younger artists – lack
of cohesion. Road To
Destruction, despite the
strength of its songs, does
suffer a little from abrupt
shifts in style and delivery. The loud pops and
clicks between tracks, no
doubt a mastering error,
do not help. Don’t let
this put you off Brown’s
latest offering though after a few listens these
issues tend to slip into the
background as you get
used to each song arriving after the previous.
Most prominent of
Brown’s lyrical concerns
are turps and debauch-
ery – the album touts
“alcohol, poverty and
general wretchedness”
as its prevailing discussion topics. Brown sings
with an air of experience, though not one
of lament, and often a
sense of humour (‘Soldier’s Joy’ is genuinely
hillbilly). Lyrically, Brown’s
songs are carefully written and show a genuine
talent for penning a
word or two. Just listen to
a few of his fast paced
tales and you’ll realised
how hard it actually is to
get words to sound so
smooth at such a speed.
‘Road To Destruction’
is probably the album’s
defining moment, certainly a standout track.
Using a tried-and true
chord progression and
built on the rockier
side of things, it really
deserves a fancy production treatment and
release as a charting
crossover single.
The sound of the album
leaves a little to be desired, particularly in the
mastering department.
But, while not specifically a ‘lo-fi’ release, it
does lend a little charm
to Brown’s home-grown,
hard life image. The
packaging too, at
least on the copy that
I received, is very basic
(a single fold card) but
contains some interesting
liner notes.
However, I doubt that
many will worry too
much about the packaging – indeed, I’m sure
that the majority will
be exposed to Brown
through the miracle of
the internet. The artist
himself expressly encourages the free distribution
of his music, with the only
possible payment involved being a donation
to his PayPal account.
So, get online and
check out Elliot. He might
not be your cup of tea,
but he’s a breath of fresh
air in the realm of electropop indie darlings and
the shellac moaning of
C.W. Stoneking.
guitar. Klinghoffer, whilst
being skilled enough
to fill Frusciante’s shoes
almost effortlessly, lacks
personality. The only
areas where he doesn’t
seem to imitate his
predecessor’s style are
the (disturbingly Navarroesque) drones added on
a couple of tracks. Listen
to ‘Look Around’ though
– it’s like wound the Chili
Pepper Axegod dial a
bit too far back and
started to channel Hillel
Slovak. Maybe if he’s
given a little more room
by fans, Klinghoffer can
bring something new to
the table. He’s already
brought the piano.
Real piano, not just
‘Mellowship Slinky’ toy
piano. From the tender
chords of ‘Police Station’
to the bizarre march of
‘Goodbye Hooray’, the
piano works remarkably
well in context. More
musical experimentation
in ‘Ethiopia’, to uncertain
effect – to my knowledge, the only pop song
to pull off 7/8 time was
Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’.
Also, expect a little more
innovation in the form
of some African-inspired
polyrhythms (but we’re
not talking Remain in
Light here).
The Chili Peppers pull
off an album that grows
on you, maybe not a
legendary piece of influence, but something
nice and solid that will
satisfy fans for a while.
I listened to it through
headphones and drifted
off to sleep. Believe it or
not, that’s a good sign.
Pick up a copy when
you get a chance, and
upgrade your internet
connection for when
the tour tickets are released…
I’m With You - Red Hot Chili Peppers
andrew wright
music editor
With it being five years
since their previous album, expectations were
pretty high for the new
Red Hot Chili Peppers
LP.With five years of apparent inactivity, and the
loss of their much lauded
guitarist John Frusciante
to his solo projects, few
could argue that the
Chili’s are now in the
league of U2, who are so
big and impressive that
they can get away with
such lengthy delays. With
their thirtieth anniversary
looming and an upcoming Australia tour, the
Chili Peppers look set to
jump back into a music
world quite different to
that of 2006. Will they
continue their success,
or start the slow path
towards fading out? Let’s
check in on I’m With
You…
Over their career, the
Chili Peppers have produced a trilogy of what
are arguably amongst
the best pop records of
all time: Blood Sugar Sex
Magik, Californication
and By The Way. All three
have very different feels,
ranging from raw, dry
funk to lush soundscapes
and vocal harmonies.
What do they have in
common, besides their
quality? The same lineup, with production courtesy of Rick Rubin and
Flea, Chad Smith, Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante on the instruments.
If the group can pull off
another of these with
newbie axe-handler Josh
Klinghoffer on board,
I’d call it an excuse for
international day of Chili
Pepper recognition.
Sorry to say, though,
I’m With You simply
isn’t that great. Don’t
get me wrong, it’s very,
very good and certainly
worth picking up, but
doesn’t fulfil what was
a tall order in the first
place. The impression
that I get from this album
is that of being culled
from various points in
their career, much like
the latest R.E.M. offering Collapse Into Now
(though not as blatantly,
thankfully), with the bulk
of the material continuing from where they left
off with Stadium Arcadium.
Let’s take a look at
some of the tracks.
Opener ‘Monarchy Of
Roses’ starts off with a
atonal bunch of rehearsal noises, seguing into
Kiedis-vocal-vocoding
and then into an obscenely catchy disco
chorus. (might just be
me, but it’s very reminis-
cent of ‘Warped’ from
One Hot Minute, their
last Frush-less album…).
Some innovation here,
though – some great
female backing vocals,
which also appear to
great effect on ‘Did I
Let You Know’ and next
track ‘Factory of Faith’.
Ah yes, ‘Factory of
Faith’. Anthony Kiedis is
probably the last person
who you think would
write a song praising the
virtues of monogamy,
but he does it here.
Here’s where another
little criticism can slip in
– Kiedis’ lyrics are a little
lacklustre on a few of the
songs here, and his vocals have an occasional
tendency to sound tired
and un-emotive. Not
enough to lend to serious complaint, though,
which is good. He’s just
not 26 anymore.
Now we get to the
12
Music
Veri.live is a bimonthly black and
white coffee table-style music and
culture magazine featuring Gonzo
70s-style journalism with a strong emphasis on live music photography. Focussing on both national and international artists, as well as live venues and
music culture around greater Melbourne, veri.live delivers indepth artist
interviews and live reviews that cover
a broad cross-section of music genres,
as well as industry related editorials.
Avenged Sevenfold at Festival Hall
andrew wright
music editor
Avenged are one of
those bands that you either love or hate, like U2
or Smashing Pumpkins.
Plenty are turned off by
their authentically American in-your-faceism, or
maybe their following of
Flinders Steps scene kids
and thick necked bogan
rockers. But, as usual with
any band that isn’t Bring
Me The Horizon, there’s
more to be discovered
beneath the surface.
I was introduced to
Avenged Sevenfold
by my girlfriend, a confirmed metalhead. I’m
not, by upbringing, a
metal kind of guy, but
I’m always willing to
venture into any and
all genres. It took me a
while, but I was pleasantly rewarded when I got
into Avenged. As you do
when concert tickets for
your girlfriend’s favourite band come about,
I snapped up a pair to
their August appearance
at Festival Hall.
The five-piece started
as a metalcore band
around twelve years
ago, and released two
albums replete with
lengthy, break-neck
guitar solos from Synyster
Gates and plenty of
screaming from frontman M. Shadows. Yes,
they’re modern-day believers in the goth metal
stagename. Their breakthrough came in 2005
with third album City Of
Evil and the Hunter S.
Thompson saluting single
‘Bat Country’. Follow that
up with a self-titled and
last year’s Mark Portnoytoting Nightmare, and
you have their LP discography to date.
I must add another biographical tidbit before
I continue. Their sadly
deceased drummer,
affectionately known
as The Rev, commands
an intensely loyal posthumous following. Fans
walk around with ‘FoREVer’ tattooed on their
back, for goodness’
sake. I can sympathise
though – he was a damn
good drummer.
For the Festival Hall
date though, The Rev
was replaced by capable touring drummer
Arin Ilejay. Nobody in the
mosh seemed to know
his name.
Oh right, the gig. We
took the train from Glen
Waverley station, eschewing the car for a
more authentic experience. Arriving in the
dodgy part of Melbourne
(dodgy for me anyway
– I don’t get out much)
we walked to a lengthy
queue outside the venue
consisting of skinny
teenagers and girls with
far too much mascara. I
removed my Chili Peppers t-shirt, as I thought it
somewhat inappropriate
(though I later saw two
others).
Inside, after frisking
and expensive t-shirt
purchase, we stood in
the centre of the floor
and waited for the mosh
to envelope us. We’d
brought my girlfriend’s
13 year old sister along –
and had to leave the pit
when the pressure levels
began to increase. Oh
well, good training for a
neophyte. Plus they were
playing Master of Puppets over the P.A. Not all
bad, then.
Openers Sevendust
had pulled out one week
prior, to be replaced
with screamo darlings
Dream On Dreamer.
Now, I’d say they were
a poor choice by the
bookers. The audiences
of the main act and support overlapped a bit,
not enough for a cohesive crowd. Needless to
say, there was plenty of
heckling – Dream On
Dreamer received a
barrage of glowsticks.
I didn’t think that they
were very good, myself,
but I’m certain they deserved better treatment.
Then, Avenged came
on and the mosh went
nuts. Opening with last
year’s ‘Nightmare’ and
the self-titled’s ‘Critical
Acclaim’, they got the
crowd going with ease.
An interesting point:
they used The Rev’s
sampled vocals live. This
was followed with a few
fan favourites, leading
up to current Triple M
token metal ballad ‘So
Far Away’. Their centrepiece, the eight minute
ode to cartoonish necrophilia ‘A Little Piece Of
Heaven’, began after
the headbanging trigger
‘God Hates Us’. We knew
all the lyrics.
The set concluded
with the obligatory ‘Bat
Country’ and their oldest regularly performed
song, ‘Unholy Confessions’, harking back to
their days as metalcore
scenesters. The mosh
chanted ‘one more
song’, ‘Sev-en-fold’ then
‘Cen-tre-fold’ before the
band returned to the
stage with their encore
‘Save Me’. As they drew
to a close, the lights
came on and it became
hot rush to Dudley Street.
I’ll say one thing, then
another. They can pull
a crowd, and keep it in
the palm of their collective muscular hand. The
arrangements might not
be your thing if you’re
put off by what my friend
calls ‘Halloweeny’ heavy
metal, but just listen to
some of the pop-rock
gems on their self-titled
and you may, hopefully, be converted. At
least they don’t take
themselves too seriously,
which I’d argue is one of
the worst things a metal
band can do.
Film/
Games
Ocarina of Time
Project Nim
Nintendo 3DS
estelle pham
alexander james tsolidis-noyce
Earlier this year Nintendo launched the 3DS,
their latest handheld
console and the first with
new game play capabilities since the original
Nintendo DS was released in 2004 (well, 2005
for Aus). Unfortunately
they didn’t launch many
groundbreaking or even
noteworthy games with
the console. Despite
months of advertising a
wide range of big name
games as launch titles,
when the 3DS hit the
shelves all we got was
Pilot Wings, another remake of Street Fighter 4,
and Nintendogs + Cats.
Months after the
launch of the 3DS, Nintendo finally released
one of the bigger titles
they’ve been hyping, a
3D remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of
Time. At this point I feel
I must give just a little
context for readers to
understand the significance of this game. The
original Ocarina of Time
was massively successful,
receiving rave reviews
and spawning an enduring cult following; it is
frequently called (and
voted) the greatest
game of all time by a
number of sources.
Ocarina of Time became a classic for a
reason and like many
games of its calibre it
can’t easily be defined
by the genres that preceded it (which could
be to do with the Zelda
franchise being one
of the first video game
series’, and Ocarina of
Time being the first in a
new dimension). Ocarina
of Time has you control Link (a young boy
who starts off in no way
remarkable aside from
a rather impressive back
flip) the majority of the
game is based from a
third person perspective with controls similar
to what you’d find in a
3D (3D game world, not
visuals) platformer, but
you always have the
option to change to a
first person view to look
around or use certain
items.
The game utilises a
basic targeting system
which allows you to
lock onto an enemy (or
just change the direction you’re facing) by
pressing or holding the
left trigger allowing you
to strafe around your
enemies (this is where
you’re able to do your
fancy back flips and
side jumps) and use any
of your weapons without having to manually
target them. As I said before, Link starts with very
few moves and seems
rather unimpressive but
you’ll quickly start finding all sorts of weapons
and general use items
placed conveniently in
the places where they
are most useful and Link
as it turns out is a prodigy
in the use of each of
these.
The core experience of
Ocarina of Time is puzzling your way through
dungeons one at a
time; these are mostly
sacred sites that have
been tainted by great
evil, which means it’s
essentially a big maze
of locked doors, hidden
keys and puzzles packed
full of mindless evil creatures just sitting around,
waiting for a hero to
attack. Most of the basic
enemies have a weakness you can exploit (often in the form of an item
found early in the game)
and by the end of the
game you’ll know the
quickest way to kill each
of them. Each dungeon
has a unique boss (and
many of them include
an exclusive mini boss
as well) that has to be
fought in a rather different way; these fights are
usually a combination of
Zelda’s combat system
and its puzzle solving
sections.
Puzzles are a key component of this game.
Some of these can be
solved simply by exploring until you find something to help you get
past an obstacle, but
most of the time you’ll
be shown how to pass
a certain type of barrier
only to have the game
present you with less
ideal circumstances later
on forcing you to try to
figure out how to reproduce the original result.
Every dungeon has at
its core puzzles that can
only be solved by using
the shiny new weapon/
item you find in that dungeon but that doesn’t
mean you won’t have
to reuse items for similar
tricks later on in other
dungeons. This is one of
the best and worst aspects of Ocarina of Time;
the puzzles are incredibly satisfying and fun to
solve, but once you’ve
solved them the same
puzzle will often appear
later on in the game and
present no challenge (at
least in terms of knowing
what you’re trying to do).
What’s new?
Apart from the obvious
changes to the aesthetics of the game, it plays
13
film editor
pretty much the same
way it did back on the
N64, with the only noticeable additions being
an updated equipment
layout (allowing you to
have more gear accessible and change
boots without going into
menus), optional motion
controls in the first-person
view and a help option
that acts as an in-game
walkthrough. A questionable change is the remapped controls for the
ocarina; these will probably frustrate people
who still remember how
to play all the important
songs, although you’ll
get used to this before
you finish the game and
it’s not so much bad as
annoying.
The main addition to
the game comes in the
form of Master Quest
which is unlocked after
you beat the game the
first time (or the tenth,
for some of us). Master
Quest is a mirrored version of the game with
harder dungeons filled
with insane enemies and
puzzles, from the first
dungeon on (when I say
insane I mean everything from fighting giant
armoured knights as an
eight year old to whacking cows as a mechanism to open doors).
Some of you might
have heard of (and perhaps beaten) the original
Master Quest from the
Gamecube version, and
may think there’s nothing
new here, but in fact, it’s
a new iteration of Master
Quest. As I mentioned
before, the whole map
is mirrored, including the
whole overworld, all the
dungeons, and even the
lost woods. I’ll be honest,
everything being backwards really threw me off
after a fair bit of playing
with the game the right
way around; my advice
to anyone who knows
Ocarina well enough to
run through the game
without having to ever
stop for directions, is to
think of where you’re
going, stop, and then do
the opposite.
Master Quest does
add a fair bit of challenge to the game and
figuring out the first few
puzzles of each type
is really satisfying, but
again, once you find the
pattern it can become a
little repetitive. That said,
there are one or two really challenging puzzles
in each of the dungeons
that should make you
stop and look around at
what you’ve got to work
with for a while. This is the
At the recent Melbourne
International Film Festival I was on my way
to watch Project Nim
and an acquaintance
of mine that could
not make the session
cried, “I want to watch
monkeys!” (He actually
meant chimps.)
In light of Project Nim,
this comment seems especially pertinent in our
attitudes towards other
species. As we believe,
especially in the discipline of science, that we
can objectively observe
and not subjectively engage with our subjects.
Yet James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim is
more than an observation and commentary on
chimpanzees; it is a perplexing story of a chimp’s
life and those who loved
and loathed him.
James Marsh is the director behind the documentary Project Nim. He
is also well recognized
for his 2008 capture of
the Man on Wire which
won several acclaimed
awards including the
Academy Award for Best
Documentary Feature.
Whilst the idea of communicating with chimpanzees was not new
prior to the 1970’s, the
experiment Project Nim
attracted widespread
attention because it had
the potential to destabilize the popular belief
that only humans could
understand and generate meaning through
language.
Yet from the moment
the experiment takes
place, we understand
that this is not a simple
objective pursuit, at least
not by Nim’s first few
caretakers who learn to
love him more than they
expected as they embed him into their human
life. In his time with his
first family, they literally
cloth him with woolen
jumpers, pass him a joint,
and feed him yoghurt.
Yet throughout most
of his life he is treated
as neither completely
human nor completely
chimp. Thus, what we
see unfolding is a personality that is both familiar
and unfamiliar to us as
humans.
At first we witness
the sweetness of Nim’s
infancy, and the human
qualities that his families
project onto him seem
at first, innocent. Yet as
he grows up, we see the
disturbing implications of
treating him as a quasihuman. The disturbance
that the audience feels
isn’t just about Nim’s
intrinsic chimpanzee
nature, but also our very
own human nature.
This documentary is
not merely an objective
observation of a chimp’s
life, but rather a personal inquiry into our own
nature and relationships.
We end up with a reflection of our human selves
that is projected through
Nim Chimpsky’s eyes.
main trick with Master
Quest: finding the tools
you need to solve the
puzzles. This is a great
way to get that little
bit more out of a great
game, yet it’s nothing
entirely new, just a bit
more of the same.
With respect to graphics and sound, Grezzo
(the studio behind the
remake) obviously spent
considerable time on improving the overall look
of the game and this really shows. Every surface
in the game has much
cleaner and sharper textures, and faces are the
most impressive improvements. However, not
everything looks amazing; it’s almost as if they
just forgot to update
some of the visuals (in
a way I don’t think they
would be as easily forgiven if it was a brand new
stand alone game); the
main offender here for
me were hands (which
looked barely improved
from their poorly-defined
64 counterparts).
The 3D effect is actually quite impressive and
does exactly what it’s
meant to, adding depth
and helping to define
shapes (again, faces
are some of the better
examples here). If you
want to get the most out
of this version of Ocarina
of Time I recommend
playing the whole game
in 3D, but if you’re like
me and Zelda is the first
full game you’re playing
on your 3DS, take it slow
to start with, as excessive
play seemed to cause a
headache before I got
used to 3D. The 3DS isn’t
perfect and so no matter how hard you try to
look at it from the perfect distance the game
won’t look quite as sharp
as it does in 2D but it
really does seem worth
the trade off. By the end
of the game the biggest
problem I had with 3D
was that I got used to it,
so that it became normal
and unimpressive just like
HD had (which meant
playing without it was
missing something).
The music for the game
is great and the 3DS has
surprisingly good speakers which somehow give
an illusion of surround
sound that really help
with the console’s goal
of immersing the player.
Overall, Ocarina of
Time is still an amazing
game for anyone even
slightly inclined towards
any of the genres it
dabbles in, but don’t
expect too much more
out of this version. Pick
it up if you couldn’t get
enough of the original
or you didn’t get it at
all. For those of you who
are already diehard
fans you’re just buying
a much prettier version
with an added game
mode to keep you playing new challenges from
the same game a little
longer.
Screening at the Nova
Cinema from 29th September!
Society for Video Game
Appreciation will be
holding a trivia night on
October 5 from 6:30pm
in Sir John’s Bar.
14
Theatre
Hamlet, Melbourne Theatre Company
19 July - 3 September
Duncan Wallace
Monash Shakespeare Company Presents:
Much Ado About Nothing
Melinda bladier
Love is a tricky beast to
master, as most university
students would know. A
game of art and artifice,
it has the potential to
lead to that fairy-tale
‘happily ever after’ or
lure one into the depths
of despair. Questions of
the heart have been
a part of popular culture for centuries. The
Monash Shakespeare
Company is currently
bringing an old Shakespearean tale of the
trials and tribulations of
love, and how high society gets in the way, to
the Monash stage. Much
Ado About Nothing is a
classic Shakespearean
comedy, focusing on the
problems of two couples
who are destined to be
together but are seriously
in need of some help
from the love doctor. I
met with director Finn
Crockett-Olsen to discuss
the production.
The Shakespeare
Company has chosen
to stage Much Ado
About Nothing as it is,
according to CrockettOlsen, one of the first
real romantic comedies. Crockett-Olsen
has directed before, but
was keen to work with a
Shakespearean text for
the first time because
of the opportunity it
provided for interpretation. Whilst remaining
faithful to the original
text, Crockett-Olsen and
co-directors Zorro Maple-
stone and Tyler Minder
have transposed the
story into a modern setting. As Crockett-Olsen
explains, the purpose of
this is “to make it more
accessible and to bring
it back to the real context of Much Ado About
Nothing – the aristocracy
being completely unable
to deal with matters of
the heart”.
Whilst the notion of
aristocracy seems a far
stretch from the world of
the average university
student, Crockett-Olsen
believes that a modern
audience’s fascination
with programs such as
Gossip Girl indicates
that the context of the
play is still relevant. The
notion of lovers and their
cronies going behind
each other’s backs and
scheming and plotting is,
furthermore, not confined to the aristocracy.
For Crockett-Olsen,
much of the humour in
the production comes
from the language: “The
witty banter is unparalleled”. His respect for
the bard’s skilful use of
prose is clear, influencing
the decision to produce
the play in a way that
lays emphasis on its core
issues; “it’s great to see
literature that defined
modern English in its original context”.
The experience of
directing the play has
been a rewarding one:
“The great thing about it
is that the cast and crew
have adapted to every
possible eventuality…
they’ve taken everything in their stride. It’s all
come together incredibly well”. CrockettOlsen’s admiration of his
team is clear; as I speak
with him people are
bustling around the theatre space still preparing
for opening night. The
energy is tangible.
Crockett-Olsen says
that audiences “should
expect the high-class
comedy people seem
obsessed with, but
slightly classier, less catscratchy”. It is a show
for Shakespeare purists
and new-comers alike,
with its adherence to
original prose and plot
and transformation to a
modern setting. Art-deco
lovers will apparently be
rewarded, as will Peter
Sellers fans: “Come for
the aesthetic, come for
the fun, come for the
company”.
In regards to the question of love, CrockettOlsen agrees with
Shakespeare’s verdict:
it’s complicated. “Especially when it comes to
Benedick and Beatrice;
they so obviously love
each other but just hate
each other!” So just how
is this problem resolved?
“That’s the magic of
theatre,” Crockett-Olsen
explains with a wry smile.
Hamlet is amongst the
most difficult plays to
perform. It’s long, dense
and prone to cyclical
character monologues. It
takes a visionary production team and a
dynamic cast to keep an
audience on the edge
of their seats. Shakespeare’s masterful script
is deeply rewarding of
performances which
capture the metaphysical complexities of Hamlet’s fluctuating personal
dilemmas. Those that
don’t, however, are at
risk of tedious repetition.
Bell Shakespeare delivered an entertaining
but somewhat lacking Hamlet in 2008; its
characterisation of the
protagonist’s general
disposition, much like the
‘state of Denmark,’ was
too rotten, frustrated and
perpetually angry. Hamlet is better understood
as both a melancholy
victim and an impressively self-critical and
intelligent man at a time
‘out of joint.’
MTC selected Ewen
Leslie as the main man
following his tremendous
success in Richard III last
year. Again, he delivers.
Leslie’s Hamlet is fidgety, fluid and flamboyant – everything the title
character should be. His
performance of the allimportant soliloquies and
monologues are refreshing takes on timeless and
inevitably cliché phraseology. In particular, his
physical use of space
is spectacular – he’s
remarkably comfortable
with delivering pivotal
lines whilst lying down
and curling on stage, or
running around chaotically in a desperate fit of
action. His measured
deliveries of ‘Alas, poor
Yorrick’ and ‘To be, or
not to be’ were especially delightful. And
importantly, he never
runs out of puff. Hamlet’s
epic time duration requires a fair modicum of
stamina and endurance
from its protagonist. But
Leslie ensures that our
perceptions of Hamlet
change with the events
of the play; he doesn’t
pigeonhole his character
into being just an angry
coward or a pretentious
philosophiser. By the end,
he wins our sympathy
and appreciation for a
symbiotically intellectual
and emotional tussle
with uncertainty and
revenge.
One of the best things
about Hamlet is that
while the title character
is crucial to the conveyance of its philosophical explorations, there’s
even more room for
moral inquiry through the
periphery of supporting
characters. This is where
MTC’s production gets
interesting. It is, undeniably, a contemporary
adaptation – although
perhaps too contemporary for some. Its suggestions of corporate hierarchy through power suits,
chic offices and casual
fencing are reminiscent
of Michael Almereyda’s
film adaptation in 2000.
The use of techno-style
ambient music is particularly effective as a segue
mechanism between
key scenes. The production is incredibly fastpaced and, whilst some
have criticised its fluid
emphasis on important
moments, delivers an
impressively thrilling and
consistently entertaining
performance of an often
drawn-out presentation.
Three and a half hours
flew by.
Now, enter the most
controversial and stunning feature of all – the
set. Usually I try not to
read too much into sets
and lighting, but they
were artistically definitive
in this production. The
stage featured a set
of glass walls aligned
to create small rooms,
large areas and sneaky
corridors when rotated.
Although furniture and
décor was minimalistic,
the skeleton of the set
was more than sufficient
in allowing seamless
scene transitions, fluent
character interaction
and a visible metaphor
for the divisions and
reflections of the play. It
wasno less than visually
stunning.
Ewen Leslie was, thankfully, not alone in acting
prowess. Polonius was
equally a standout. The
role was expertly delivered with its demands
of vulnerability, cautious
wisdom and a touch of
comic relief. Ophelia’s
perplexing descent into
madness was admirably
performed, while Claudius’ authoritative desperation was confidently delivered. More generally,
the entire cast provided
excellent support, artistic
measure and even an
unexpected interpretative dance before the
defining Mousetrap
scene, in which Hamlet
catches the conscience
of the King.
Altogether, this play
was hip, fresh and bold.
A powerful affirmation
of the need to adapt
Shakespeare to modern
contexts and use accessible platforms, MTC’s
production rightly took
inspiration from its past
successes. Yet its upbeat
tempo never precluded
the communication
of complex emotional
reflection and profound
human interaction. The
standing ovation at its
closing night was testament to its sheer entertainment and, I safely assume, tantamount to an
eager request for more
MTC Shakespeare soon.
where a young teenage boy harshly whips a
female friend. Avoiding
looking contrived whilst
performing this scene
was a challenge; whilst
the production is clearly
non-naturalistic, Virsik
wants audiences to be
able to connect with
the subject matter in a
meaningful way.
Virsik expects that one
of the first things audiences will notice about
Spring Awakening is that
“the music grabs you in
the gut”. Audiences will
be able to relate to the
situations in which characters find themselves
without the performances being patronising.
She states that “whilst
we’re doing some things
similarly to Broadway,
we’re doing some completely differently. We’re
finding our truth. If we do
a good job, if the actors
and band are incredible,
I think we’ll get very positive reactions”.
Those who are not
familiar with Spring
Awakening will be “really
surprised” by the MUST
production due to its
high intensity, theatrical-
ity and emotion. For
those who do know it,
Virsik promises a “really
good production. It’s going to move people and
you’ll be astounded by
some of the talent. It’s
strong, honest theatre.”
MUST and MAPA Present:
Spring Awakening - A New Musical
Melinda bladier
Spring Awakening, a
musical adapted from
the original 19th century
play by German playwright Frank Wedekind, is
an exciting new production by Monash University
Student Theatre (MUST)
in conjunction with the
Monash Association of
Performing Arts (MAPA).
Directed by MUST artistic
director Yvonne Virsik,
with musical director Tom
Pitts and set designer
Jason Lehane, Spring
Awakening is being
performed as part of the
Melbourne Fringe Festival
on campus in The Alexander Theatre.
Spring Awakening has
been performed on and
off Broadway in recent
years, receiving eight
Tony awards and critical
acclaim during its Broadway season. In contrast
to the light content often
associated with musicals, Spring Awakening’s
themes are challenging.
When first performed
in Germany in the late
19th century, the play
was banned due to its
frank depiction of sexuality, and young adolescents’ struggles to come
to terms with it. Whilst
the direction of such a
well-known, thematically
intense piece has been
challenging, director
Yvonne Virsik is highly excited about its opening
at Monash.
The appeal of Spring
Awakening lies, for Virsik,
in its rich theatricality
“there’s not much artifice
in it; it’s about the strong
story and the gutsy performances”. Although
Virsik has never directed
a musical before, she
quickly fell in love with
the music of Spring
Awakening. Although
the musical is set in 1891,
it uses contemporary
rock songs that speak
across generations and
cultures. Virsik describes
soaring harmonies and
a musicality which brings
the production to life,
enabling the audience
to connect with the story
in a personal, non-threatening way.
Virsik believes that
the messages of Spring
Awakening are still pertinent to young audiences
today. “It teaches you
that the terrors of adolescence will be ok… it’s
tough but you’ll make
it through”. Due to its discussion of sexual discovery, rape, homosexuality
and domestic abuse,
Spring Awakening is
“a really good play for
young people to come
and talk about with their
parents”. “Issues are
presented in an exciting
way… it’s not really that
shocking, it’s very emotional.”
In order to successfully
produce such a powerful piece of theatre, it
was important for Virsik
to work with an exciting cast and crew. One
hundred and fifty people
auditioned for a role in
the musical, and Virsik
is “really happy” with
the cast she is working
with. “It’s important
to have absolute trust
and to have a sense of
humour”. Virsik explains
that the vocal talents
of the cast have blown
her away “I used to think
that I could sing…”, and
suggests that the quality
of the musical harmonies
of the MUST production rival those seen on
Broadway.
One of the most
challenging aspects of
directing Spring Awakening has been creating dance routines
with co-choreographer
Krissy Adriaan. Dance
sequences must be
perfectly timed to the
complicated musical
harmonies whilst evoking
a sense of authenticity.
In Virsik’s opinion there
are some weaknesses
in the original play text,
in particular in a scene
Spring Awakening – A
New Musical is showing
at The Alexander Theatre, Monash Clayton,
from September 30 until
October 8 at 8:00pm,
matinee performance
October 8, 2:00pm. This
is the first time in recent
years that MUST has
staged a production in
The Alexander Theatre,
having received support
from Monash Academy of Performing Arts
(MAPA) director Peter
Tregear. Tickets are $24
concession, $32 full and
$2 off with an MSA card.
16
Extras
Samurai Sudoku
The Adventures of
Average Joe and
Malcolm X
Sam Hitchcock and Josh Kenner
Science & Engineering
Crossword
Rf Cafe.com
ACROSS
DOWN
1. A keyboard key
3. Short for synchronous
7. Front edge of a wing (abbr.)
8. ________ Microwave, solid state
switch & attenuator maker in Frederick, MD
10. Digital storage oscilloscope
(abbr.)
11. Upper frequency (abbr.)
12. Multifunctional silicon devices
(abbr.)
14. 1/000 of an amp (abbr.)
15. Type of computer display (abbr.)
17. 6-sided mate to a bolt
19. 30 kHz to 300 kHz
21. Mate to an RX
22. Chemical symbol for molybdenum
23. Related to FM by a differential
25. Boob tube (abbr.)
26. A common lamp tube gas
28. 300 kHz to 3 MHz
29. Ham’s code for “Zero beat your
signal with mine.”
30. Equalizer (abbr.)
31. Unit of time
32. Chemical symbol for neodymium
33. Greek letter (micro)
35. Min-to-max voltage of a waveform (abbr.)
36. Chemical symbol for gallium
37. One component of a complex
number (abbr.)
39. Filter vendor
40. Original Equipment Manufacturer (abbr.)
41. Coefficient of temperature
(abbr.)
43. 300 Hz to 3 kHz
45. Chemical symbol for cadmium
46. Indium phosphide
48. ________ Solutions, cellphone &
wireless RF device manufacturer in
Woburn, MA
49. Unit of frequency (archaic,
abbr.)
50. Study for a test just before taking
it
51. “Texting” (abbr.)
1. It’s the ‘EM’ in EMC
2. Chemical symbol for selenium
4. Yard (abbr.)
5. Stock symbol for National Semiconductor
6. RF power measurement & termination company located in Middleburg Heights, OH (2 wd.)
8. Astronomical Unit (93E6 miles)
9. Chemical symbol for nickel
11. Unit of length (abbr.)
13. Chemical symbol for chlorine
16. Mate to a TX
17. Chemical symbol for holmium
18. Test point (abbr.)
20. Like a crystal
22. 1e3 uV
24. Amp, mixer, upconverter, downconverter manufacturer in Hauppauge, NY
25. Circuit for generating 3x the
input voltage
26. A measure of receiver quality
(abbr.)
27. Non-return to zero (abbr.)
28. Hiram Percy _____, founder of
the ARRL
29. Ham’s code for “Your net frequency is High.”
30. Chemical symbol for erbium
32. Chemical symbol for neptunium
34. Unit of capacitance (abbr.)
35. Max or min voltage of a waveform (abbr.)
36. Electronics manufacturer with
“meatball” logo
38. 1.602E-19 Joules
40. Opposite of I.D.
42. Carrier-to-noise ratio (abbr.)
44. Start frequency (abbr.)
45. Chemical symbol for cesium
47. Last stage in a transmitter (abbr.)
49. Unit of length (abbr.)
LOT’S WIFE
don’t look back
student newspaper
VOLUME LI, EDITION VII
MONDAY, SEPTEMPER 19 2011
FREE
Go! the evil empire
“There’s a big difference between student politics, where being tricky is seen as being clever, and real politics, where being tricky is seen as being tricky.”
– Antony Green
editorial
The Monash Student
elections are, once
again, upon us. From
Monday September 19 –
Thursday September 22
the campus centre will
be transformed into a
quasi-warzone as student
politicians jostle to capture your vote.
The political grouping
Go! has held the vast
majority of positions in
the Monash Student Association (MSA) this year,
and for the past six years
in a row. As elected
members of the MSA,
editors of the student
newspaper, and representatives elected by
students, we feel an obligation to share what we
know about the incumbent political grouping
that controls the student
association.
Go! has for the past
six years run the student
union not in the interests
of students. Not a single
general student meeting has been organised
to give voice to the
Monash student body;
the bar was allowed to
fall within a hairsbreadth
of closure; the Co-Op
Bookshop has been allowed to close this year;
and the Wholefoods
co-operative has been
forced to commercialise.
Go! hasn’t existed to
represent the interests
of Monash students. It
has existed only as a
platform for those who
desire a future in politics
to practice their foolish
manoeuvring at a lesser
level, and their only objective is to win.
The fact that many
students run with Go!
because it has a reputation for winning elections is undeniable; it is
also the main tenet that
underlines the vacuity of the grouping. The
bastardised mixture of
Go!’s hardliners, many of
which are National Labor
Students (NLS) members
– which is aligned with
the left faction of the
Australian Labor Party
(ALP) in Victoria – and
students from all over
the political spectrum,
has led to a grouping
that fails to have a clear
direction and ethos.
The NLS Facebook
page states: “National
Labor Students (NLS) is
a factional grouping
operating within the
Australian National Union
of Students. It is oriented
towards the Socialist Left
of the Australian Labor
Party...It is one of two
Continued PAGE 11
Save the Co-Op!
joshua kenner
editor-in-chief
According to the
notice recently put up
on the door, the Co-Op
Bookshop has been declared closed due to insolvency. This represents
the smallest possible
concession of information from the board, and
simply confirms some of
the speculations made
in the previous edition of
Lot’s Wife. The majority,
and more meaningful,
questions remain unanswered.
For example, what is
to be the fate of all the
books inside the Co-Op
that are still technically
student property? Will
students get the opportunity to reclaim them?
Will they be sold off to
pay the business’ debts?
Why were Monash
students left without any
sort of explanation about
the closure for months
before now? According
to bookshop insiders and
former employees, the
business has been known
to be insolvent for years,
and yet the board did
nothing. Why now, and
so surreptitiously?
These actions are
symptomatic of a general administrative lack of
acting in the interests of
students, and contrary to
the ideal of the Co-Op.
On the board of the
MSA Co-Operative Bookshop sit Gail Morgan,
Lynton Gunn, Imogen
Sturni, Esther Hood, Jenna Amos, Terry Hogan,
and Peta Welch. Aside
from the annual general
meeting held for Co-Op
members, the board
makes all decisions relating to the future of the
business.
Naturally, Lot’s Wife
cannot assume to know
the intentions of the
board regarding the
future of the Co-Op.
They have declared
their intent to organise
a meeting of the Co-
Action On
Rowville Rail?
PG. 3&6
Op members to make a
final decision. However
it is fairly certain neither
the board, the MSA,
nor Monash University
have any interest at all
in saving the bookshop.
The guiding star of the
MSA over the last many
years has been that of
inaction, plus the Co-Op
certainly would not have
a place within Monash
Council’s business
model. A co-operative
bookshop is far from a
financially lucrative en-
terprise, obviously, and
to re-open with a new
business structure would
surely require significant
initial funding. Moreover,
the powers that be have
a convenient excuse in
that many bookshops
have similarly closed
down all over the country.
However, Monash students were only recently
faced with quite a similar
situation.
In 2005 the bar (then
owned by Monash
Global BDS
campaign grows
PG. 10
University’s commercial arm, Monyx) was
scheduled to be shut
down permanently after
Green Week because
it was losing $1,000 a
week. However, on the
Wednesday of Green
Week students staged a
sit-in that ended up lasting for five months. In this
time students ran their
own bar on a donations
basis to keep the occupation going. They were
eventually kicked out by
police, but the following year the university
agreed in negotiations
to lease the space to the
MSA for $1 a year. For
students, by students.
This is precedent! The
bar is a perfect example
of what should now be
done with the bookshop.
And only an alcoholic
might argue that a bar is
a more essential service for students than a
second-hand bookshop.
The student political
grouping Switch is the
only group on campus to
have raised awareness
or attempted any action
relating to the Co-Op
closure.
But YOU must also act!!
If the Co-Op Bookshop
means anything to you; if
your books are locked inside and you want them
back; if once in a while
you’ve been able to
afford that one textbook
you really need only
because it was cheaper
at the Co-Op; if ever
you’ve enjoyed perusing the range of cheap
treasures within and
emerged with something
golden – then you must
ask questions; demand
answers; make sure you
attend the meeting to
be called by the board
whether you are a CoOp member or not and
voice your opinion!
You have a real
chance to make a difference.
Student Action In
Chile Part 2,
PG. 8&9
s
t
n
e
t
taff
list
n
o
C
Editors
03
Campus Life
07
Nation News
08
World News
11
Editorials/Letters
12
Opinion
14
Sport
15
Science
Editors
Joshua Kenner
Timothy Lawson
Graphics
Rachel Leung
Photography
Richard Plumridge
Campus Life
Caelli Greenbank
Nation News
Christine Todd
World News
Kimberly Doyle
Martin Shlansky
Science
Aimee Parker
Sport
Lot’s Wife is your 100% student-produced newspaper
It’s a great avenue to get your work in print, especially
if you’re interested in photography, writing, typesetting,
design or investigative journalism. Anyone can submit
articles, funky graphics, reviews or whatever else that
will print. If you’re happy just to read it, you’ll find a new
copy around campus monthly during semester.
Andrew Mayes
Kiran Iyer
Creative Writing and Books
Anastasia Pochesneva
Music
Andrew Wright
Writer’s meetings: Wednesdays 12pm, Lot’s Wife
Lounge
Film
Estelle Pham
Contact Details
Submissions: Please email content to lotswife.msa@
monash.edu
Apologies
The editor’s would like to apologize to the family and friend’s of last year’s
business manager of the Co-Op Bookshop for any distress caused by
comments in the article ‘Co-Op closed, hundreds ripped off, answers few’
published in the last edition of Lot’s Wife.
We would also like to apologize to Gail Morgan for printing her MSA business details in the same article.
First Floor
Campus Centre
Monash University
Wellington Road
Clayton, 3800
Ph: (03) 9905 8174
Fax: (03) 9905 4185
http://www.msa.monash.edu.au/campuslife/lots-wife/
Facebook group: Lot’s Wife (MSA)
Twitter: @lotswife2011
Thank You
A big thank you to Harry Sabolcki and Martin Shlansky as usual for putting in heaps of time editing;
and also to Rachel Leung for adding a touch of visual design prowess to this publication.
Disclaimer
The Lot’s Wife editors aim to provide content which will be informative and entertaining for Monash students;
and believe that all students should have the opportunity to express themselves. Equally, we recognise the
right of all students to read the publication without feeling threatened or offended by racist, sexist, militaristic,
or homophobic material; therefore we refuse to publish anything of this nature. The views presented in this
publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or the Monash Student Association. Articles that
are submitted are proof read and may be altered, chemically or otherwise.
Meet the Presidents
Voice
TIMOTHY LAWSON
If elected, what major
plans does Voice have
for the MSA next year?
EDITOR IN CHEF
Switch
If elected, what major
plans does Switch have
for the MSA next year?
The first thing would be
a series of inquiries into a
number of concerns that
we have raised; things
such as the sacking of
academic staff, funding cuts, and the closing
of the Co-op bookshop
and why all the decisionmaking is done at the
executive level. I would
also like to look at why
there is no real collaboration between the
parties as it is my understanding that all the
parties are supposed to
represent a constituency
here, yet it doesn’t seem
that any of them go
ahead to try and represent them after election
week has passed.
I see the role of the
president as facilitating
and helping students run
the union. I believe that
we need more transparency with regards to the
decision-making processes.
In your opinion how successfully has the MSA
been run this year?
I don’t know. This answer,
in essence, actually captures one of the main
issues we have identified. The fact is we don’t
really know what the
MSA has done this year
because they are out of
touch with the student
body.
Are there any other
reasons, you haven’t
already mentioned, why
students should vote for
Switch?
We have been engaging
with the student populace to find out how they
would like the union run.
We ran our ‘democracy
box’ for a few weeks
so that people could
put ideas and suggestions forward that would
enable us to formulate
policy and affect meaningful change.
Go!
If elected, what major
plans does Go! have for
the MSA next year?
I think that the most important thing for all student unions next year is
securing a good deal for
the student services and
amenities fees (SSAF) legislation, because at the
moment the money goes
directly to the universities,
despite it being designed
to provide for student
There are many important things that need
to be done to improve
the uni experience of
students at Clayton. If
elected I would have
several priorities. Firstly, I
would lobby for longer
library opening hours at
Clayton. It is unacceptable that the Caulfield
Library in normally open
until 12:00pm on a weeknight but all but a small
part of the Matheson
Library closes at 9:00pm
most nights. When you
consider that Clayton
has more students this is
an issue the MSA should
take up.
Secondly, I would like
to put a greater emphasis on international
students. MUISS does
a great job but they
could do with greater
resources. Monash
Clayton needs to be a
place where international students can feel at
home. MUISS needs more
resources to achieve
that aim.
Thirdly, I’d like to see
the MSA run in a financially responsible manner
so we can continue to
do what student associations do best, provide
services.
Also, we will be ensuring that the quality of
education at Monash
doesn’t decrease with
the introduction of deregulation. There is the
Now arriving at Monash University
CAELLI GREENBANK
Campus Life editor
It’s an unusual sight, but
hopefully one that will
become more common, as three Metro
train carriages bound
for ‘Monash University
Station’ joined the huge
numbers of staff and
students that packed out
the Airport Lounge on
August 30 for the forum
on the Rowville Rail Study
looking at bringing a
train station to Monash
University.
The discussion panel
for the forum, which
was chaired by Monash
University’s Director of
Environmental Sustainability, Paul Barton,
comprised Monash ViceChancellor Ed Byrne,
MSA Education (Public
Affairs) Officer Esther
Hood, who has spearheaded the MSA campaign for better public
transport to Clayton, and
head of the Rowville Rail
Study, William McDougall. After some opening
remarks from Ed Byrne,
the discussion got down
to the meaty bits – so
how do we bring a train
to Monash?
As explained by Mr.
McDougall, the proposed rail line would
diverge from the Cranbourne/Pakenham line
at Huntingdale Station
and head down Wellington Rd, stopping at
Monash Uni, Springvale
Rd (Mulgrave Station),
Waverly Park and terminating at Stud Park
Shopping Centre, with
the possibility of a Park
‘n’ Ride station at Eastlink
as well. Plans are in the
process of being drawn
up to explore how the
train line would interact
with Eastlink should the
Park ‘n’ Ride station go
ahead, as well as with
the Stud Park Shopping
Centre complex.
Mr. McDougall also
commented in response
to feedback on the
study’s website that the
Rowville Rail Study is focussing solely on the implementation of a heavy
rail train line. While light
rail like Sydney’s Monorail
or a tram line are other
possibilities, these will
only be explored should
the study decide that
heavy rail is unfeasible.
There is a down-side
to all of this. The study
as announced by State
Minister for Public Transport Terry Mulder on
February 17, 2011, is
intended to take two
years to complete and
was launched mid-2011.
This means the study
will be completed in
mid-2013, and though I
confess I’m not an Engineering student, I can’t
imagine that, should the
government decide to
go through with it, they
would complete the train
line itself in less than two
years.
Sadly, no matter how
hard we push for it,
chances are we won’t
see this rail line during
our Monash lifetimes.
Instead we have to look
on our contribution to
the study now as an
investment for the future
generations of Monash.
So even though we’ll
never have the glory of
riding even one train all
the way from the city
to campus and back
again, it’s amply worth
lending your voice to the
cause and showing how
much students now want
this train line to pave the
way for students in the
future. With any luck,
those future jaffys will
have the joy of hearing
the magical words of
the Metro announcer:
“Now arriving at Monash
University”.
Rowville Rail Study is online at http://www.rowvillerailstudy.com.au/, on
Facebook at https://
www.facebook.com/
pages/Rowville-RailStudy/245446838805640
and on Twitter at http://
twitter.com/#!/RowvilleRail. Make sure you jump
online and have your
opinions heard!
Campus
Life
services and advocate
for students.
In your opinion how successfully has the MSA
been run this year?
The current administration has done some
good things, but like
any long serving administration I see a lack of
new ideas. How many
students can name a
person on the MSA executive? I would like the
MSA to be a more visible
force on campus.
Are there any other
reasons, you haven’t
already mentioned, why
students should vote for
Voice?
Voice is a diverse group
of students with a range
of experience and fresh
new energy. Clayton
needs a team like that to
make our campus one
of the best for students
in Australia. Our Office Bearer candidates
include many people in
positions of responsibility in a number of clubs
and societies. We also
have candidates who
have served on the MSA
executive before. Let the
Voice of the students be
heard. Vote Voice!
fear that there will be
more lectures and tutes
moved to seminars to
save money, that smaller
classes, which don’t
receive as much interest,
will be dropped and that
the bigger degrees like
Law and Business will be
expanded because they
are cheap, easy to run
and really popular. I think
this is something that the
MSA should really watch
next year.
We are also looking at
expanding campus life,
expanding Music on
Menzies, bringing back
union night, and more
general events like outdoor cinemas. Then also,
of course, jump on social
justice campaigns like
equal pay, equal marriage and all that kind of
stuff.
In your opinion how successfully has the MSA
3
Left Action
If elected, what major
plans does Left Action
have for the MSA next
year?
Left Action would ideally
like to use any position
that we get in student office to further our activist
campaigns – including
the refugee rights campaign, which a number
of our members have
been actively involved
in this year; putting more
pressure on the university
administration than the
current student union has
been able to do regarding education campaigns for things such as
cheaper course fees and
other fees that students
incur.
The propaganda put
forward by other political groups describes Left
Action as a group that
would run campaigns on
wider social and environmental justice issues
at the expense of campaigns and actions that
would improve the lives
of Monash students. This
is false. We have been
involved in both kinds of
activism throughout the
whole year and we have
not just been involved to
opportunistically try and
get into office.
Social justice and education issues are actually
linked, students don’t
exist in a bubble that is
been run this year?
I think that the MSA has
had some really significant wins for students this
year: cheaper student ID
cards, the fact that the
shuttle bus is still free the
601 service; the fact that
we have now secured a
three-year million dollar funding agreement
which will go to more
funding for Clubs and
Societies, events, representation. One of the
best things about the
MSA this year is that it
focuses on everything, so
it focuses on campus life,
on social justice issues;
Monash Clayton; they
have an interest in things
like equal marriage, refugee rights, Palestine and
so on.
In your opinion how successfully has the MSA
been run this year?
Campaigns that Go!
promised to launch during the election period
have largely failed to
involve sections of new
students, unlike the
refugee campaign
which campaigners from
Left Action have been
involved with.
Are there any other
reasons, you haven’t
already mentioned, why
students should vote for
Left Action?
I believe that students
should vote for our ticket
because we are bestplaced to defend student rights and work on
social justice issues, we
are people who have
been active on campus
throughout the year.
Left Action is a ticket
that is also totally unaffiliated with any parliamentary party, which is
not true of the Go! ticket.
Therefore, we have no
hesitations in criticising
or campaigning against
the actions of the party
that governs the nation.
and education and welfare. I think that a good
student union focuses on
all those things.
Are there any other
reasons, you haven’t
already mentioned, why
students should vote for
Go!?
At the crux of Go! is the
fact that we do support
all of those things and
we also have a strong
history of achieving real
wins for students. Knowing when we have to
compromise and all that
kind of stuff means that
we always get the best
outcomes.
Wholefoods Restaurant Now recruiting volunteers!
The Wholefoods Collective
Hi, everybody! For those
of you that don’t know,
Wholefoods is an organic restaurant and
café on the top floor
of the campus centre,
run by students and the
MSA. Issues like fewer
students on campus
have forced us to rethink
how we’re running. And
so, as you may have
noticed, we’re currently
in the middle of making
changes to improve our
restaurant.
Now is an exciting time
to get involved with the
Wholefoods Collective,
find out what goes on
behind the scenes, and
have a say in what our
future direction will be.
Everyone is welcome to
our meetings, advertised
on the blackboards, but
if you’re really looking
to expand your university life (or just cynically
expand your résumé),
please consider applying
for one of our new Volunteer Officer positions!
Volunteers Officer
Help recruit, train, and look after volunteers. Volunteers are swell
Kitchen/Café Officer
Work with staff, look after stock and equipment, and partake in shenanigans
Publicity Officer
Organise end-of-semester parties, fundraisers, working bees, and other delightful
diversions
Grocery Officer
Manage the grocery, sell the grooviest
vegetables on campus
Collective Officer
Arrange meetings of Collective, the managing student body of Wholefoods
Administrative Officer
Assist with rostering, and have your mind
blown daily by how cool you are
*Positions pending MSA approval
Please send applications and enquiries to wf.apply@
gmail.com by September 29. Applications should include what positions you’d like to be considered for,
and how amazing you are (a résumé and/or cover
letter will do nicely).
4
Campus
Life
Notice from the
Co-Op Board
As a result of the concerns of the Co-Operative’s directors that
the Co-Operative may
be insolvent, the CoOperative has closed its
doors and is not currently
trading.
While the Directors
apologise for any inconvenience caused, they
have been required
to take this action, to
ensure the Co-Operative
and its management
complies with its legal
obligations, and to
limit any further financial
exposure for the CoOperative.
The directors are currently considering the
options available to the
Co-Operative. Once
these investigations have
concluded, it is anticipated the Co-Operative’s members will then
be invited to vote on the
Co-Operative’s future.”
Glen Haywood
Chair
MSA Co-Operative Bookshop Ltd
Food Society Diaries
Jessica Turnbull
Try as I might, I couldn’t
think of an ironic way to
write a recipe for cake
(this was meant to be for
the parody edition). So
instead, I’ve dedicated
this article to all food
iron-y. I just can’t wait for
the ‘lame puns’ edition
of Lot’s.
MUSSELS
One of my favourite food
moments this month
occurred after my friend
found Aux Batifolles
restaurant on Swan St in
Richmond that does ‘all
you can eat mussels and
fries’ for $25 bucks on a
Wednesday night. Being
an Asian food supremacist and generally suspi-
cious of anything ‘all you
can eat’, I was not too
excited about accompanying my friend there.
However, the mussels
were steamed with garlic
and other stuff and it
turned out to be very
yum. According to the
internet, mussels are full
of iron and I suggest the
Wednesday night mussel
deal to anyone planning a fancy party or to
donate blood.
markets have this and
all Asian fruit and vegetable markets)
Garlic
Oyster sauce
Oil
Leafy greens also contain a lot of iron (for vegetables). This is a classic
Chinese restaurant dish
that is really difficult to
get wrong.
Method:
Wash and chop up the
kai lan (but not much,
keep it in fairly big bits).
Chop up the garlic into
little bits. Fry the garlic
and the kai lan in a HOT
fry pan with oil and a
generous slug of oyster sauce (about a flat
tablespoon for every
bunch of Kai Lan you
used).
You should eat this
with rice and a fried egg
and drink a big glass of
orange juice too (because vitamin C helps
you absorb the iron).
Ingredients:
Kai Lan (some super-
OK, i-ron out of recipes
now.
KAI LAN (Chinese broccoli) WITH OYSTER SAUCE
Participants say
‘prego!’
MARITA LACOTA
During their mid-year
holiday break, twenty
Monash students attended an archaeological
dig in Italy to study the
ancient Etruscan civilisation. The unit was run
in the heart of Tuscany
under the supervision of
Dr Andrea Di Castro.
“It was the most amazing experience,” recounts Marita Lacota, a
21-year-old History student in her second year
of study at Monash. The
students left Melbourne
on June 23 and spent a
few days in Rome before
getting down to business
at the excavation site in
Pietramarina, about forty
minutes drive from the
centre of Prato. Professor
G. Camporeale and Dr
Chiara Bettini are well regarded archaeologists in
the field and presented
their findings at a conference that the students
attended before beginning work on the dig.
For some students, the
reality of the physical
work that the excavation involved has meant
that it may be time to
reconsider their prospective career in archaeology. Meagan Tomlinson,
a 22-year-old Arts student in her third year at
Monash comments, “I
found a coin but I’m not
sure if I would want to
spend every day on the
site when the findings
are so few and far between”. Other students
could not get enough of
the work, excited to get
a taste of what life as
an archaeologist might
Monash library
defends loan
de-regulation
be like. “Coming on
this trip has really made
me want to study archaeology even more!”
archaeology student
Elise Landry enthused,
eager to get her degree
and be invited on a dig
elsewhere as a volunteer. And the pizza?
“Mmm grazie, prego,”
said Lacota. “I can’t wait
to go back again for the
food!”
Most of the students
returned to Melbourne
on Saturday July 25
somewhat bleary-eyed,
but ready to return to the
busy life of a uni student.
Library and university
staff have defended
their decision to alter the
loan recall policy and
greatly extend book-borrowing rights for university
staff, by claiming that
“items were often mistakenly recalled despite
other copies of the same
title being available on
the shelf”.
The controversial
Monash library loan
deregulation, which
changed the recall
policy and allows University staff to borrow an
“unlimited” number of
books for up to 9 months,
has been reported in the
last two editions of Lot’s
Wife.
Numerous students
have complained to
Lot’s Wife that although
Monash has an appropriate period before
books must be returned
or renewed online, the
lack of an adequate
recall policy means that
a requestor may have
to wait one month or
six weeks for a recently
renewed book.
University library
spokesperson Catherine
Harboe-Reesaid that
the loan de-regulation
was undertaken “after
comparison with other
university library services
in Victoria”.
According to HarboeRee, “before the changes Monash had the least
generous borrowing entitlements of any Group
of Eight (G8) university;
the changes bring us in
line with the more generous, which is the majority
position”.
However, comparison
with some other Australian university libraries
reveals that other Australian university libraries
recall books and then
restrict the time they can
be borrowed until the
queue is exhausted. According to other G8 University libraries surveyed
by Lot’s Wife, adequate
loan recall policies are
essential in providing
equitable access to all
students.
While two undergraduate students at Monash
can now use a requested book within roughly
two months, a seven
day recall policy would
increase the usage to
roughly four undergraduate users per month.
Unlike Monash, all the
other G8 libraries surveyed have recall policies, generally between
7 and 10 days. For example, all items borrowed
from Melbourne University for 28 days are subject to recall if a patron
requires them urgently.
According to Melbourne
University’s website, “if
more than one person
requires them the borrowing period reduces to
one week”.
Under the University of
Sydney and the University of New South Wales’
recall policies, recalled
loans must be returned
within 7 days. “[The] loan
period is changed from
4 weeks to 3 days when
an item is requested by
more than one person,”
according to the UNSW
website. Similarly, at
the Australian National
University, recalled items
must be returned within
10 days.
A lecturer interviewed
said that “after the initial
borrowing period, placing books on short-term
loans should be done
automatically. The loan
period should be automatically reduced to
7 days until all requesters have borrowed the
book”.
According to the
library spokesperson, the
previous recall system,
“which reduced the loan
period if an item was
placed on hold,” was
“unpopular with both
students and academic
staff because items were
often mistakenly recalled
despite other copies
of the same title being
available on the shelf”.
One student suggested
that “if there is a problem
with the recall system’s
computer program,
change the computer
program, don’t ditch the
entire policy”.
The library spokesperson also said that “the
new library borrowing
privileges were introduced in response to
feedback received by
library staff”.
Anecdotal evidence
suggests that while the
loan deregulation may
be popular with Library
users who have books, it
is not popular with those
countless students who
need already-borrowed
books to complete their
assessments.
While putting books on
restricted access is often
necessary and unavoidable, some students
have criticised the idea
that all in-demand books
should be placed on
reserve, since it results
in expensive photocopying. One library user
commented that “it is
always better where possible to allow books to be
borrowed for days rather
than hours”.
The library spokesperson said that “there was
no noticeable effect on
loans when the borrowing privileges were previously increased. [Staff]
do not borrow large
numbers of items just
because they can”.
According to figures
provided by the Library
spokesperson, “only 162
library users had more
than 30 items on loan in
May”. The library spokesperson said that “physical loans are reducing
steadily even though the
collection increased by
1.4% in 2009/10”.
“Loans have reduced
by 18% this year (January to June) compared
with 2010, despite the
increased loan limits,
and renewals are down
by 14% in the same
period,” according to
library figures. These
figures suggest that the
recent changes to borrowing policies are not
necessary as few people
borrow large numbers
of books anyway, leading to questions as to
why there was a need to
change loan policies in
the first place.
Some students and
academics have alleged
that there is a connection between enhanced
research and loan deregulation. An academic
from Melbourne University told Lot’s Wife that
“the attempt to improve
research outcomes is the
only justification for the
deregulation of borrowing by many Australian
university libraries”.
The library has denied
this allegation.
One academic
claimed that “some
people have the assumption that Australian university research
will be enhanced if the
borrowing policies of the
big, private, wealthy,
American Ivy League
universities’ libraries are
adopted here”.
Several former students
of American universities
contacted report that “a
requested book is delivered to the requester
very quickly from an
extensive library system”
in America. This is not
always possible in Australia, especially when
Monash has an inadequate recall policy.
On the other hand,
some American universities are so strict in other
ways that members of
the general public cannot even enter libraries
such as Harvard library.
Such a policy seems
unnecessarily restrictive
and elitist.
Oxford and Cambridge Universities are
still restricting their borrowing to 10 books for
undergraduates and 15
books for postgraduates
with “impressive research
outcomes”.
The library spokesperson claimed that “there
is no foundation to the
statement that the
university is pushing to
reduce re-shelving staff
numbers. The library has
performance indicators
for time taken to reshelve books and strives
to achieve these”.
The library spokesperson also said that “there
is no direct correlation
between the number of
loans and funding”.
Considering the cost
of new books, the cost
of photocopying books
placed on restricted
library access and the
closure of the secondhand Co-Op bookshop
in the Campus Centre,
many students have
argued that library book
borrowing policies must
provide equitable access to all users.
Author’s note: the author
would like to thank the
library for its response
to the previous article
and apologises that the
response did not appear
in the previous edition.
Lot’s Wife encourages
the library to continue
to engage with students
and Lot’s Wife on this
matter.
Cheers,
Jenna
PS See you at Oktoberfest on October 6!
Campus
Life
OB REPORTS
OB reports are unedited
President
Imogen Sturni
After several months of
negotiations we have
finally signed off on a 3
year funding agreement
for the MSA to secure
vital funding for student
services & representation, clubs, & events on
campus! A big thanks
to everyone who helped
out in the ‘I Heart My
MSA’ campaign, as well
as the presidents from
the other Monash campuses. This funding will
ensure that MSA services
such as Student Rights,
student theatre, Sir
John’s, Wholefoods, the
JML, and all of our departments will continue
into the future.
Also, a big congrats to
MSA Education (Public
Affairs) Officer Esther
Hood for getting the Uni
to reduce the cost of
replacement student ID
cards from $60 to $35
from 2012.
Secretary:
Sheldon Oski
Hey Monash students,
I have been busy with
my usual duties of compiling agendas, taking
minutes, organising
meetings etc. For the
Monash Student Association (MSA) overall, it
has been a busy semester with many fantastic
events and programs
run by MSA Departments
and Divisions. However,
one of the most important events is still to
come! MSA Annual Elections!!
From September 19-22,
elections will be on to
determine the composition of the Monash
Student Association for
2012. The MSA represents
all Monash Clayton students, both to the university and to the government, so it is important
that you vote to ensure
you can have a say in
the running of your student union! Have a chat
to every ticket running,
read the Election Guide
and make sure that you
vote for the MSA you
want in 2012.
Education
(Academic
Affairs):
John Monroe and Han- Welfare:
Matthew Polmear and
nah Aroni
report not
Bernadette De Sousa
submitted
Education
(Public
Affairs):
Esther Hood
Treasurer:
Jenna Amos
Hello Lot’s Wife readers!
Over the last few weeks
I have been busy preparing for the 2012
budget season. This
process takes a number
of months and involvesestablishing a way to
balancefinancially sustainable projects while
also ensuring that the
MSA is equipped with the
operational resources
it requires to function
effectively. It is the most
important role of the
Treasurer so I’ve been
putting a lot of effort into
this preliminary planning
stage to avoid headaches in the future.
Also I was very excited
to hear about the reduction in the cost of student
ID cards! Congratulations
to our Ed Pub officer Esther Hood and everyone
who worked on a great
and effective campaign.
There is always something happening on
campus so keep your
eye out for more information on our latest
events and campaigns.
A big thank you to everyone who supported the
McMonash campaign!
From 2012 replacement
student ID cards will
be reduced from $60
to $35, bringing them
closer in line with other
Australian universities.
The Education (Public
Affairs) Department
has now started working on ‘Campus Crime
Stoppers’, a campaign
against illegal course
costs. The costs include
anything that you must
have to complete your
degree, that isn’t in some
way provided by the Uni
for free as an alternative option. Examples
can include materials,
the cost of compulsory
excursions, materials,
and equipment. To help
shape the campaign,
we are asking you to
report your ‘crime’! To let
us know about any illegal
fees you have experienced go to http://www.
msa.monash.edu.au/
and follow the links.
So far this semester,
Welfare put most of their
time into Survival Week in
week 3. We held events
such as the Survival
Week BBQ, a relaunch
for Derelict Ball in conjunction with a census
BBQ, a guest speaker
from the Tenancy Union,
Derelict Ball and a second clothes swap. We’re
also spending our time
and effort on Free Food
Mondays! Feel free to
check it out on Monday
nights during semester
at 7.30pm in the Airport
lounge, or if you want to
help cooking, at Wholefoods at 5pm. Apart from
that, Welfare has started
providing Free Breakfast
on Thursday mornings at
8.30am. It will continue
if people show up, so
keep a look out for flyers
at MSA reception and
posters around Campus
Centre.
Women’s:
Vittoria Careri and
Jasmine Crooks
At the time of writing
we’re currently working
on Women’s week, and
hoping it’ll be a success. Our bar night is in
support of the Women’s
Hospital, and begins
from 6.30pm on Tuesday September 6th at
Sir John’s Bar. The dress
theme is ‘Carnival’.
Contact your Women’s
Officers for more details!
We’re also running
our regular events: the
feminist reading group is
on alternate Thursdays to
Thursdays in Black. Thursdays in Black is part of an
international movement
to end gender based
violence.
Equal Pay Day on Clayton Campus will be run
on Monday 5th of September. It’s been nearly
thirty years since sex
discrimination was made
illegal, but women still
earn 18% less than men
in the workforce. The
MSA Women’s Department invites you to join
us to demand equal pay
for work of equal value!
Environment
and Social
Justice:
Bianca Jewell and Cassie Speakman
report not
submitted
Activities:
James Gordon and
Jenna Conroy
5
Male Queer:
Lance Charisma
The Queer Department
has seen a lot of activity
in recent times, we’ve
continued on with our
regular events such as
our newbie’s tea (still
attracting newcomers
in semester 2) and our
movie nights and ae’ve
also started a Queer
choir that meets in the
West Cellar Room on Fridays. Our biggest event
was of course Semester 2
Queer week, which consisted of fun events such
as a picnic, movie and
trivia night, and some
more serious and educational events such as our
guest speaker on homophobiaphobia, or Red
Aware HIV awareness
event and the always
popular and uplifting
coming out by candlelight. The star event was,
of course, Queer Ball.
Due to some personal
issues I’ll be on leave until
the 10th of October but I
look forward to returning
to Mental Health week.
A cross department
event to support all the
students who have, have
had, or will have to deal
with mental illness.
Female
Queer:
report not
submitted
James and I have been
really busy organising
OKTOBERFEST! 6th October, main dining hall.
Beer, pretzels, sauerkraut,
cider and live German
music! Tickets available
at the MSA reception
and Sir Johns Bar. See
you all there!
Focus on employability for Law students
For graduates of a:
Bachelor of Laws
See Law Faculty website
for a full list of double degrees with a Bachelor of
Laws component: http://
www.law.monash.edu.
au/future.html
The skills and attributes
this qualification aims to
develop:
•Development of
problem-solving skills
and powers of analysis
• Enhancement of
thinking, reasoning
and expressive abilities within legal and
related contexts
• Gaining an understanding of basic legal
concepts and legal
institutions and of the
historical, social, political and economic
factors influencing
their development
• Ability to identify, use
and evaluate the concepts, principles, rules
and methods used in
legal argument
• Understanding of
concepts of justice, a
concern to promote
justice and an appreciation of professional
responsibilities
• Acquiring competence in the skills of
legal research, analysis
and oral and written
communication, and introduction to a range
of other legal skills
• The ability to analyse
and synthesise information presented in a
variety of forms to assist in problem solving
• Ability to identify key
issues, trends and interrelationships of issues
• Ability to place information in a broader
context and identify
likely implications
• Ability to generate
new ideas and creative approaches to
issues and practices
• Understanding how
the institutions of the
Australian legal system
shape the content
and administration of
the law
• Appreciating the
historical, political and
social context of the
criminal law
• Ability to critically
examine both the
general principles of
criminal liability and
the use of the criminal
law as a method of
social control
Previous students who
have completed this degree’s first job titles have
been:
• Associate to a judge
• Barrister
• Community Development Worker
• Company Secretary
• Consular Officer
• Foreign Affairs and
Trade Officer
• Human Rights Officer
• Industrial Officer
• In-house Counsel to a
corporation or government agency
• Intelligence Analyst
• Journalist (legal and
business affairs)
• Judge
• Law Lecturer/Professor
• Legal Officer
• Legal Studies Teacher
• Legislative drafter
• Magistrate
• Management Consultant
• Media and Policy
Advisor
• Migrant Liaison Officers
• Ministerial Advisor
• Policy Analyst
• Political Analyst
• Politician
• Press Secretary
• Prosecutor
• Public Servant
• Registrar of a court or
tribunal
• Research Assistant
• Solicitor/Legal Practitioner
• Speech Writer
• Tax Adviser
• Tribunal member
Note: Further qualifications may be required for
some roles.
You could consider joining one of these professional associations or
subscribing to these,
many of which you can
join at a much reduced
rate for students:
• Young Lawyers Section of the LIV http://
www.liv.asn.au/LIVYoung-Lawyers
• Law Institute of Victoria www.liv.asn.au
• The Victorian Bar
www.vicbar.com.au
• Australia and New
Zealand Law and
History Society www.
waikato.ac.nz/law/
anzlhs
• Australian and New
Zealand Sports Law
Association Inc www.
anzsla.com.au
• Australian Bar Association www.austbar.
asn.au
• Law and Justice Foundation http://lawfoundation.net.au
• Australian Services
Union www.asuvic.asn.
au
• Institute of Legal Executives www.legalexecutives.asn.au
• Law Council of Australia www.lawcouncil.
asn.au
Clubs and societies at
Monash
• AIESEC (All) www.
aiesecaustralia.org
• Law Students Society
(Cl) www.monashlss.
asn.au
• Monash Student Association (Cl) www.msa.
monash.edu.au
• Lots Wife (Cl) www.
msa.monash.edu.au/
campus-life/lots-wife
• Monash Association
of Debaters www.
monashdebaters.com
• Monash Creative Writers (Cl) www.creativewriters.monashclubs.
org
Anonymised data presented here on employment outcomes for
Monash University graduates has been gathered from the national
Australian Graduate
Survey that is conducted
twice a year by Monash
University in association
with Graduate Careers
Australia. When it is your
turn please remember to
complete the form!
6
Nation
News
Ten year effort on Rowville rail finally paying off for Knox counsellor
Kavinda Jayawickrema
The long standing debate
on
connecting
Rowville better using a
railway network is finally
starting to become a reality after people such
as Knox Counsellor Mick
Van de Vreede have
campaigned for years.
I interviewed Counselor
Van de Vreede on August 8 to get his view on
the issue.
Counsellor
Van
de
Vreede has been lobbying for 10 years to get
this issue to the top of
the government priority
list and it seems to finally
be working. The government is investing $2m to
conduct
a
feasibility study into
the project;
this,
after
Knox council
conducted
a pre-feasibility study in
2004 to assess the pros
and cons of
building
a
railway from
Rowville
to
Huntingdale.
This latter study concluded many benefits
economically,
socially
as well as environmentally. It is predicted that a
railway will remove over
2300 cars per hour from
Rowville roads, decreasing traffic congestion
and importantly, lower-
ing emissions significantly.
Travel time to the CBD will
also be reduced to just 30
minutes from Rowville.
This project is estimated
to cost under $500m with
an option under $400m
also available. Counsellor
Van de Vreede said that
the government could
have taken thousands of
cars off the road with this
railway instead of spending over $1.3b on adding
an extra lane to Monash
Freeway.
The best option is to run
the rail line along Wellington/North Road with a
possible terminal at Stud
Park.
This issue dates right
back to the 1960s. “In
fact, they were going to
build it in the 1960s and
they decided not to unfortunately,” said Counsellor Van de Vreede.
“They were always going
to run it down the median of North Road.”
Counsellor
Van
de
Vreede said that the median strip on North Road
between Princess Highway and Huntingdale
station is very wide and
this was designed with
the railway line in mind.
“So you know, it’s not a
new thing.”
Bus route 900 which
travels along Wellington Road and the new
601 bus, express from
Huntingdale station to
Monash University, will be
replaced if this rail line is
built. Counsellor Van de
Vreede would like to see
this money redistributed
to other busses that will
feed the railway.
Complaints
and
questions
have
come
up
from people
living along
the corridor
of the proposed
rail
line. Taylor, a
resident from
Mulgrave,
said that she
would
not
like to wake
up to the sound of a train
rolling past her house
every morning. “The noise
from the road is already
loud enough as it is.”
Adding a rail line will
reduce traffic along Wellington road significantly
and Counsellor Van de
Vreede said residents
should keep in mind that
trains nowadays are engineered to be quieter.
He added that most residents would prefer a rail
line and less traffic on
Wellington road rather
than no rail line and more
traffic.
Rowville resident Hannah said that a rail line
is desperately needed.
“I work in the city and it
takes me 20 minutes just
to get out of Rowville.”
The pre-feasibility study
predicted a 30 minute
travel time to the CBD
from Rowville station.
A Rowville railway will
no doubt bring huge benefits to commuters. Counsellor Van de Vreede is
urging the government
to move forward with this
issue. He hopes to see the
foundation laid in as little
as five years.
For more information go
to www.rowvillerail.org.
au.
Reprieve for threatened Koori
school
Liam molenaar
Melbourne’s only Koori
school, Ballerrt Mooroop
College in Glenroy, has
staved off destruction
of its spirit tree and ceremonial grounds, and
will have its gymnasium
rebuilt. As of September 13 the decision has
been made by Education Minister Martin Dixon.
The College has faced
partial destruction since
2009 after the Victorian
Education Department
planned to impose the
Glenroy Specialist School
for disabled students on
both part of the College
and a public oval next to
the College. The College
gymnasium has been occupied by supporters periodically since late 2010.
10 years ahead of KODE
schools. Mr Foley agreed
seeing low enrolments as
“a major vote of no-confidence on the part of the
Koori community”. Some
Koories saw the creation of KODE as a form of
modern apartheid.
The College in its various forms has struggled
with low enrolments and
support from the Koori
community. Despite this,
Mr Murray is now a Koori
occupation leader. He
said in The Age, “We
want at least one Aboriginal school in Melbourne.
They are trying to assimilate our kids into big
melting-pot schools, but
it’s not working and our
kids are dropping out.”
The College thanks its
existence to the Kennett Government’s Koori
Open Door Education
project (KODE). The College was created in 1995
from the land of a high
school, and served as a
wedge to divide community support for the
campaign to prevent the
closure of Northland Secondary College.
Northland was a historic
loss for the Kennett Government’s policy to close
schools in 1992 – the only
surviving school out of
300 that were closed. The
Government spent over 5
times the estimated cost
fighting court campaigns
against its closure than
it used to justify its closure based on repair bills.
Northland was a school
with the largest Koori
enrolment in Victoria,
which incorporated Koori
perspectives into mainstream subjects.
Koori activist Mr Gary
Foley spearheaded the
successful
campaign
based on racial discrimination, with a Supreme
Court decision forcing
the Kennett government
to reopen the school
in 1996. The campaign
joined Koories and nonKoories together in creating a rebel school in the
interim.
In 1995, Koori leader Mr
Gary Murray said in The
Age that Northland was
Mr Foley is not supportive and prefers to see the
school shut down.
Responding to criticism
of education failure in
2009, the state government decided to force
Koori schools from accepting enrolments for all
levels to only years 7 to
10 called the ‘Koori Pathways model’.
Also in 2009, the government wedged the
school’s expansion plans
by forcing a disabled
school onto both the
College’s and adjacent
land. The government
would spend $750,000
for portable classrooms,
while the disabled school
would receive $18 million.
Ballerrt Mooroop would
lose its gymnasium, ceremonial ground and spirit
tree.
Contrary to a report in
The Age, the College is
not flush with money. On
capital expenditure on
the MySchool website,
the prestigious private
school Scotch College
spent three times more
than Ballerrt Mooroop
College per student in
2009. Failure to enrol
enough Koori students
in the Koori Pathways
schools is a problem partly engineered by the Education Department.
The occupation and
protests revolved around
a simple request for the
disabled school’s mas-
terplan to be moved
only 30m west. Moreland
city council Mayor Oscar
Yildiz agreed with the
proposed
compromise
in January, and the three
groups entered mediation. Moreland council
held mediation between
the two schools and the
education department.
In good faith, the College pulled out of a heritage application, and
entered mediation with
the Council and the disabled school. Disabled
School principal Raelene
Kenny has not supported
the protest. In the Coburg
Moreland Leader she
said, “The issue is that we
have a school now that is
no longer fit for purpose
and we are desperate for
the project to start. The
aim was to be in the new
building for the start of
the 2012 school year, but
that is looking very unlikely”. The land for the disabled school used to be a
popular oval. This has angered the local community, and bolstered support for the College.
On August 9, World Day
for Indigenous peoples,
construction
workers
fenced off the oval and
construction began. The
department claimed the
mediation talks “failed”
and Ms Kenny was relieved. But Mr Murray
said in The Age “To just
come in like they are doing without consideration
of the mediation we’ve
gone through is just an
act of betrayal.”
Since then, mainly Koori
women and other supporters have halted off
destruction of the College gymnasium and
gathering places, while
lacking enough support
to slow construction on
what was previously an
oval. If mediation had
not been undermined, all
parties may have ended
the saga earlier by moving the plans by a mere
30m. There are plans to
turn the gymnasium into
a community hub to
create a safe place for
Koories and the community. It seems this result
may be achieved. However, some College supporters suspect this saga
is part of a campaign to
close all Victorian Koori
schools by the end of the
year.
Nation
News
7
Pressure builds on ALP to
make marriage equal
timothy lawson
editor in chief
The issue of marriage
equality is steadily gaining traction among the
Australia population.
Seventy-five percent
of Australians expect
same-sex marriage to
be made legal a 2011
Galaxy Poll found.
The same research said
62% of Australians support marriage equality;
the number is as high
as 80% among younger
people. The poll also
said 78% of Australians
believe there should be
a conscience vote in
parliament on the issue.
Since 2001, 10 countries have passed laws
to recognise same-sex
marriages. A further
two, Israel and Mexico,
recognise same-sex marriages performed in other
jurisdictions.
Additionally, the US
does not recognise
same-sex marriage federally, but couples can
legally marry in six states
and in Washington DC.
The state of Maryland
recognises same-sex
marriages from elsewhere.
As of June 2011, 12 US
states prohibit same-sex
marriage under statute
and 29 under the states’
constitutions.
In Australia, Socialist
Alternative equal marriage spokesperson,
Sarah Garnam, believes
that that the issue is long
overdue, because most
of the population have
supported it for at least
two years now.
She told Green Left
Weekly: “The rallies have
been getting larger, the
frequency of them has
increased and they have
been happening in more
states and [also] smaller
cities such as Ballarat
and Wollongong — so
there is definitely widespread support for it.”
Father Bob Maguire,
a Melbourne-based
Catholic priest and Triple
J radio presenter, also
spoke with Green Left
Weekly to explain his
thoughts on the equal
marriage debate.
“Why couldn’t everyone be happy with
a nice civil union [that
grants the same legal
protections as conventional marriage],” he
said.
“The answer to that
from the gay community
is ‘no it’s got to be marriage’. As soon as you
drop that word ‘marriage’ everyone is running to the barricades,”
he said.
“We should call it ‘gay
marriage’ to differentiate between traditional
‘marriage’ and then
everyone should be
happy. It really is just
semantics,” he said.
Section 51(xxi) of the
Australian Constitution
gives the government
the right to legislate with
respect to marriage.
The Marriage Act 1961
has had few amendments made to it since its
inception.
The notable exception
is a 2004 amendment by
the John Howard Coalition government, which
sought to define marriage as strictly between
a man and a woman,
thereby removing the
ability of Australian
courts to define the act
to include equal marriage.
An additional purpose was to prevent
lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and intersex
(LGTBI) couples adopting
children from overseas
countries under arrangements involving multilateral or bilateral treaties.
The lower house of
parliament is finely bal-
anced, but on this issue
it is not the Greens and
independents that hold
the balance of power.
The Australian Labor
Party (ALP) is the party in
the middle of this divisive
issue.
With the 74 members
of the Coalition united
against it, the biggest
hope is for the ALP to
change its policy and
vote with the Greens for
marriage equality.
The ALP’s current
policy is that marriage
is between a man and
a woman, but pressure
parliament on the issue.
Garnam told GLW: “I
think that there are lots
of indications that the
plans for a conscience
vote will not actually
lead in a positive direction. So it’s the Greens
and the Labor Left that
are putting forward their
desire for a conscience
vote and I think that a
conscience vote is a
total dead end.”
Should a motion for
a parliamentary conscience vote be ap-
Placard at the August 13 rally for equal marriage, Sydney.
Photo: Peter Boyle
is building ahead of the
party’s national conference in December to
reverse its stance.
Some media reports
have speculated that
ALP factional heavyweights are trying to
stitch up a deal to allow
a conscience vote in
proved at the ALP
national conference, it
would make it very difficult for the legislation to
pass.
Some of the right faction of the ALP are unlikely to vote for marriage
equality if given the
option of a conscience
vote.
The other option is
to force a vote at the
National Conference.
Supporters of marriage
equality would likely win
a vote here, although it
is expected to be close,
thereby changing the
national policy platform.
In theory, this would
allow the Julia Gillard
government to begin
a new narrative about
same-sex marriage.
Some Labor figures
worry that if the motion is
voted down at the conference, the ALP will lose
members.
But in notable progress,
all ALP state and territory
divisions, bar NSW, have
passed motions supporting equal marriage.
However, polling shows
the Coalition in a comfortable position to win
the next election. The latest Morgan face-to-face
poll, released on August
26 with the large sample size of 1526, shows a
two-party preferred lead
of 58.5% to 41.5% to the
Coalition.
If this result was to be
repeated as a uniform
swing at an election held
now, the ALP would be
left with a mere 34 seats
— leaving the Coalition
likely to be in power for
at least two terms.
Ultimately, this narrows
the window for the passage of equal marriage
legislation from sometime between the first
parliamentary sitting of
2012 and the next election, due in August 2013,
for it is difficult to see the
Coalition passing any
such reform to the Marriage Act.
Although Garnam
acknowledges that the
movement is rapidly
gaining support and momentum, she said there
is no place for compla-
cency: “I think that the
idea that it is inevitable is
really wrong, because if
the ALP loses office any
time soon, then there is
no way it will ever happen under [Tony] Abbott.”
Maguire, while not a
supporter of equal marriage, made the crucial
point about improving
the quality of political
debate on equal marriage.
He told GLW: “We
should calm down with
the harsh language because the gay community deserves respect and
civility ... because this is a
brand new day and we
need to learn a new language and the creation
of the new language is
not going to be helped
by the persistence with
the old language, which
is not suited to facilitate
this discussion.”
Maguire also said
that “more education is
needed and I think that
we have to talk for another 12 months [on the
issue]”.
Forty organisations
have backed the call
by Sydney activist group
Community Action
Against Homophobia
(CAAH) for a protest
outside the ALP national
conference in December.
CAAH activist and
Socialist Alliance queer
rights spokesperson Rachel Evans told GLW the
protest would be a “historic chance” to press
the case for full marriage
equality.
“People from across
Australia will attend,”
she said. “It’s crucial we
come out in force and
challenge Labor to end
a policy that institutionalises homophobia and
treats LGTBI people as
second class citizens.”
8
World
News
Chilean students and government begin
negotiations around education reforms
ben convey
The New
Normal
This is an extract from The
Australian Development
Review’s ‘Foreign
Correspondence’
section.
…As you will have noted by my posts over the
last few months, firearms
have
become
more
and more visible here in
Sana’a recently. Apparently, this was the way it
used to be. Apparently,
seeing someone walk
down the street with an
AK-47 slung over their
shoulder was quite normal.
So last night, after the
President appeared for
the first time in weeks,
Yemenis celebrated in
the same way that they
have done for hundreds
of years. The sky was
alight with gunfire and
fireworks. This is the same
way that they celebrate
weddings, although on a
smaller scale.
I watched the spectacle from the safety of my
kitchen window. At least
I thought it was safe and
then my neighbour came
out onto the roof, not ten
metres away, with his
Kalashnikov and started
firing into the air. He had
his family with him. Although, it would be easy
to condemn his actions
as foolishly dangerous,
there are many ways that
we all put our lives and
those of our loved ones
at risk. Often.
I dropped to the floor
and crawled into the
stairwell, hoping I was
safe. I knew that he
wouldn’t fire at me, but
at the same time, didn’t
know the trajectory of a
Kalashnikov bullet. I reflected later, if this wasn’t
what was behind my fear
- the unknown.
During the week, my
colleague and I sit in our
office listening to explosions and calling them
either ‘fireworks’ or ‘gunshots’. Most of them are
fireworks, and this was
also the case last night.
I went downstairs later to visit the shop and
met a couple of the local boys, who also happened to have their guns
out. The cartidges in both
guns were empty, but as
I held one of the weapons in my hands, I felt
fearful that I might accidentally fire it. If I hadn’t
had a couple of vodkas
under my belt, I would
have stayed around and
asked more questions even learnt how to fire it.
So much of our fear is
based in the unknown.
Facing fear is about having the courage to react
with thought, not feeling,
to the reality of the situation, not the fear behind
it.
Currently based in Yemen, Melany Markham is
the Middle East
Correspondent for The
Australian Development
Review
(theADR.com.
au).
If you would like to contribute to ‘The Australian
Development
Review’, you can now
submit work online at
www.theADR.com.au by
clicking on the link: ‘write
for us’.
After mass-mobilisation
on a national scale – including support from striking workers engaged in
a 48-hour general strike
under the catchphrase
‘Chile ought to be different’ – Chile’s Piñera Government was forced to
begin negotiations with
student representatives
about their demands.
The Confederation of
Chilean Students (Chile’s
peak tertiary student
union) created a list of
12 demands in preparation for the meeting.
The demands included
guaranteeing education
as a human right in the
national constitution, an
end to private banks financing education, an
end to structural and legal barriers to all social
classes participating fully
in the education system,
an end to government
subsidies
for
charter
schools, and guarantees
on the educational and
lingusitic rights of Chile’s
indigenous people.
Mainstream
media
coverage of the first
four-hour meeting that
took place on Saturday
September 3 between
the government and the
representatives of the
university student unions
focused on the government’s claims that the
talks were “frank and
useful”. Nevertheless the
secondary students that
have also been a major
part of the student protest movement were not
invited to the discussions.
Piñera appeared on
Chilean national television after the talks describing them as”promising
and fruitful” but he raised
the spectre of a potential recession in Chile’s
national economy that
could be brought on by
continued social unrest.
The government has for
weeks been publicly urging an end to the protests
that have seen their popularity rating plummet to
record lows and created
difficulties for them in
maintaining political authority and legitimacy.
And while some media reports indicate that
Camila Vallejo – President of the Student Federation of the University
of Chile – viewed the talks
as a positive step forward
on the part of the ultra-
conservative Piñera government, President of the
Student Federation at
the Pontitifical Catholic
University of Chile Giorgio
Jackson appeared less
positive. He viewed the
talks as achieving very
little to progress around
student demands.
“The press claims the
meeting was a success,”
Jackson was reported
as saying. In reality it
was relatively tepid.The
government has now responded to the students’
list of 12 demands with
student leaders reportedly unhappy with their
response.
Though it was reported
that Camila Vallejo – who
recently visited Brazil on a
tour to promote awareness about the problems
faced in the education
systems of both countries
– had called for the next
round of protests on September 8 to be cancelled
as a mark of respect for
the victims of the recent
Chilean air crash, the
march still went ahead
and more are likely to follow.
The students of Chile
are
garnering
praise
and support from international media outlets
in the UK and USA. In an
article about the impressive example the Chilean
student movement has
set to the world The Huffington Post said “perhaps
the most important accomplishment of the Chilean students is that they
are delegitimising neoliberal ideology”. While
in the UK a student publication has compared
the student movement in
both countries finding the
Chileans’ approach to
be commendable compared to that of their UK
counterparts.
Meanwhile, in education activism news from
Australia, The Age recently reported that students at Melbourne University didn’t buy their
university’s claims of being too cash-strapped
to offer an Australian Literature program so they
started their own. Now
feeling pressure from the
publicity generated by
these students’ actions
the university claims they
will renew their Australian
Literature program next
year.
The air is cleaner in Santiago
Noam titelman
Chile
During the last three or
four months Chilean students have become the
center of attention. Be
it through massive and
colorful parades or long
lasting strikes, the country has become aware of
the pressing demand for
profound reforms in the
educational system.
Chile has a unique pol-
icy for the roll the state
plays in providing basic
and public goods. A highly deregulated system in
which most of the financial burden falls upon
families (almost 85%, one
of the highest percentages in the world) and
the highest tuitions worldwide has brought an epidemic of endemic debts
and ‘limon’ titles. This
system was first imposed
during Pinochet`s dictatorship and is left practically intact after 20 years
of democracy.
Now, for the very first
time, Chilean society has
said “no more”. And the
message has poured into
the street by the thousands upon thousands of
demonstrators. Students,
professionals,
workers,
mothers,
grandfathers,
everyone has joined the
movement. For the first
time, the air seems to
be cleaner in downtown
Santiago as the students
are giving the government a lesson on how to
govern with justice.
Orangutans critically
endangered
Tamara vekich
In true Australian spirit,
the government recently
failed to pass a bill proposing that all products
that contain palm oil or
palm kernel oil must state
so on their labels. Right
now, palm oil can be
disguised under the tag
of ‘vegetable oil’, which
is deceiving and scientifically incorrect in itself,
since the oil is derived
from the palm’s fruit,
which yields both palm
oil and palm kernel oil.
So what is palm oil and
what’s the big deal?
Palm oil is the second
most widely produced
edible oil in the world today. The oil derived from
the fruit pulp of the palm
tree is used in cooking
and is called ‘palm oil’
while the oil derived from
the kernel is called ‘palm
kernel oil’ and is used in
cosmetics. Each year,
Australia alone imports
approximately
130,000
tons. It has a longer shelf
life than other vegetable oils, which is why it is
so popular with makers
of food and other products such as toothpaste,
shampoo and cosmetics.
Currently, around 50% of
packaged foods in supermarkets around Australia contain palm oil or
palm oil derivatives.
Malaysia and Indonesia
together account for 85%
of the global palm oil production. The production
in these areas is highly
unsustainable. Basically,
rainforests are cleared to
make room for palm oil
plantations, which means
rainforest destruction, as
well as the destruction
of rainforest habitats for
several animals, including the orangutans, only
found in Indonesia, which
are now endangered
due to these practices.
There are two main
species of orangutans.
The Sumatran orangutan,
exclusive to the island Sumatra in Indonesia is the
rarer of the two, the other
being the Bornean orangutang. The Sumatran
orangutan is currently
critically
endangered,
while the Bornean is endangered. Both of the orangutan species share a
remarkable 97% of common DNA with humans,
and have an intelligence
estimated to equal that
of a 5 year old child. Presently, around 80% of the
orangutan habitat has
been destroyed by rainforest clearing. If today’s
trend of rainforest clearing for palm oil plantations continues, the Sumatran Orangutans, and
soon after Bornean Orangutans could be extinct
in the wild within 10 years.
In addition to the threat
to animal biodiversity, the
destruction of rainforests
in Indonesia and Malay-
sia is an obvious addition
to the carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere, with fewer trees
available to convert it to
oxygen. On a large scale,
this is a significant contributor to global warm-
ing, an already enormous
problem.
An obvious way to help
the situation is to avoid
purchasing foods and
products which contain
palm oil, but since the
Australian
government
failed to pass the palm
oil label bill, that is not a
readily available option.
However there are still
ways to tell if you are purchasing products containing palm oil. If the oil
listed on a food label is a
vegetable oil, and there
is no animal fat listed,
but the product contains
saturated fat, then the
oil you are buying is most
likely palm oil, although
it can be coconut oil
sometimes. For cosmetics, palm oil is often given
a different, misleading
name –Elaeis guineensis.
By reducing the demand
for palm oil, the production of palm oil will also
decrease.
For more information
on the palm oil issue, and
how you can help visit
www.palmoilaction.org.
au.
World
News
9
Chilean students lead
citizens to confront a
dark past
ben convey
“I am proud of what is
happening.” This is Belén
Vera speaking, a 20
something former student
of the University of Diego
Portales in Santiago de
Chile. “Chile has suffered
a lethargy that has lasted
more than 20 years, accepting and tolerating inequalities inherited from
a dictatorship. People
are no longer afraid to
dissent, they are taking
to the streets and saying
enough is enough, that
we must do something.”
Belén’s words speak of
a radical new hope that
has emerged out of the
momentous Chilean student protest movement,
the biggest series of protests seen in traditionally
‘stable’ Chile since the
end of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Chile emerged from
that dictatorship in 1990.
From September 11, 1973
when General Augusto
Pinochet overthrew the
socialist Salvador Allende government, Chile’s
self appointed dictator ruled with an iron fist
and surrounded himself
by a web of technocrats
who helped reshape the
country’s entire economic and political system
based on the hardcore
free-market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman.
But it was actually the
eve of the return to democracy when the LOCE,
the Organic Constitutional Law on Teaching,
was rushed through parliament cementing the
neoliberal
foundations
of Chile’s profit-geared
education system. The
LOCE guaranteed bare
minimums of state spending on public education,
shifted the responsibility
for administration of public schools onto resourcestarved local councils
and guaranteed only
minor regulation of the
education system by the
Ministry of Education.
A free-market education system emerged in
which educational institutions operating for
profit began to flourish.
Today as in Australia university graduates face
thousands of dollars in
debt in order to pay for
their degrees, however
these loans are held with
private banks. Likewise,
just as in Australia, there is
disproportionate government support to private
schools, however in Chile
it is not uncommon for a
family to have to make
a choice about which
of their several children
will receive an education because of the costs
involved. Inequities in
the distribution of wealth
in Chile are far more
marked than in Australia.
It is one of the most un-
equal societies of Latin
America.
There have been protests in the past over
Chile’s unequal education system. But only once
before, in 2006’s massive
secondary student led
protest movement that
came to be known as El
Pingüino (named after
the Penguin-like uniforms
of Chilean secondary students) have the protests
reached such a massive
scale. In 2006 the students
managed to compel
the government of the
day to begin a dialogue
about implementing reforms to the unequal,
market based education
system. However very little other than superficial
reform was achieved as
led to record breaking
economic ‘growth’, it has
also deepened economic inequality and social
injustice in Chile.
People have begun
clamouring for a new
constitution and a completely new political and
economic system for the
entire country. The entire political class is being
criticised for its inability to
effectively respond to the
demands of the people.
Says Belén “it’s a transcendent movement in
which everyone is included. I see action, inspired
kids, neighbours conversing, helping each other.”
For the ruling party and
the opposition, a crisis
has emerged. It is a crisis of maintaining the
a result because protests
died down once the government inquiry began.
Five years later, and
after over three months
of sit-ins, protests and a 2
day nationwide general
workers’ strike called by
the Central Unitaria de
Trabajadores (Chile’s answer to the ACTU), there is
now no question that students have led Chile into
a profoundly transformative moment in its history.
Social unrest and citizen
anger about neoliberalism more broadly have
exploded in response to
what began as a student
movement simply calling for free and quality
public education guaranteed as a basic right
for all citizens. It is hard to
predict what will be the
eventual outcome of this
flurry of citizen mobilisation and action.
What is certain is that
the superficial bandages
have well and truly been
ripped off the still unhealed wounds of a repressive and violent past.
Chileans throughout the
country – and the vast
Chilean global diaspora
many of whom were displaced because of the
violence and repression
of the Pinochet dictatorship - are now mobilising
to call into question the
entire reigning neoliberal
political-economic system. And while neoliberalism in Chile is always
spoken about as having
peace and finding a way
to quell the constant cries
from increasingly vast
sectors of the community
for an end to the injustices of neoliberalism.
But for the people of
Chile the crisis never
went away. It is that crisis
and their decision to say
‘ya no más’ which has
caused the crisis for the
political class who are
now concerned with finding a way to put an end
to the protesting, demonstrations and strikes so
that the status quo can
be re-established.
The depth and density
of citizen mobilisation in
Chile has reached such
levels now that it is impossible to keep up with all
of the various ways which
Chileans are finding to
express their discontent.
There have been countless marches across the
entire country, from the
big to the small, the
planned to the spontaneous.
Such spontaneity included a recent protest
in tiny Castro in the mythical southern island Chiloe
where world famous
Chilean author Isabel Allende was called out to
join the protesting students as she was participating in a publicity tour
in the region. She came
out in support of the students with the words “it
was time to take to the
streets. This is just the tip of
the Iceberg.” There have
been family picnic days
(one attended by an estimated one million people), concerts and other
public events in support
of public education –
and more are planned.
There have been YouTube remakes of Grease
and a mass-suicide flash
mob in a downtown Santiago mall with makeshift
tombstones reading ‘I
died waiting for a quality education’. In their recent tour of Chile, Puerto
Rican super group Calle
13 even invited leaders
of the student movement
onto the stage with them,
as a tribute. During this
moment, lead singer Residente linked the struggles
of Chilean students to the
need for a global movement for quality, public
education.
One small group of kids’
spontaneous decision at
a party to begin running
in loops around the Santiago government palace La Moneda for 1,800
hours (representative of
the $1,800 million Chilean pesos some estimate
a fully funded tertiary
education sector would
cost per year) became
a massive community
event – 1,800 horas por
la educación - garnering participation from all
sectors of the community
from young kids to taxi
drivers to police officers
and retirees.
Belén says “I have participated in all the marches. We’ve had activities
in my neighbourhood. My
municipality, the biggest
in Santiago, is mobilising.
My neighbours are taking
to the streets.”
Belén describes a spontaneous action that she
and some of her neighbours participated in recently. “Neighbours from
all over took part in a
batucada (a percussive
ensemble). More than
150 people suddenly out
of nowhere motivated by
their own discontent and
desire to express themselves.”
But the largest action so
far has been the aforementioned general strike
that was called by the
CUT for the 24th and 25th
of August. The strike was
called to show solidarity with the students under the catch-cry “Chile
ought to be different”
(Chile debe ser distinto).
On the second day of this
strike which practically
brought the country to a
standstill, almost 400,000
people were estimated
to have marched in Santiago with hundreds of
thousands more marching in regional cities and
towns.
Unfortunately the general strike also coincided
with an act of police repression that goes far
beyond the tear gases
and water hoses that
had been the main tactic previously. A group of
teenagers who were simply watching a demonstration take place were
shot from a passing police car, killing one and
wounding the others.
Despite
this
unprovoked crime the spirit of
the movement has not
been crushed. Perhaps
realising this, in response
to the massive outpouring of support and solidarity during the general
strike, the weakened
Piñera government has
called the students to the
table to discuss their de-
But with each passing
day such demands become more obviously
the words of a desperate
ruling party struggling to
maintain a grip on power
and re-establish political
hegemony.
Camila Vallejo, president of the student union
at the University of Chile,
said in a recent interview
that the student uprising
ought to be seen as just
the beginning of a years’
long battle. It remains to
be seen whether Vallejo
and other leaders can
agitate Chileans into the
long term with sustained
actions and campaigns
focused on transforming
the political system and
not simply cede their position to fall back on superficial reforms, as has
happened in the past.
But what Chileans do
have now - thanks in
large part to the students
- is hope and vision. The
students, through their
action and their ability
to inspire other citizens
to become involved in a
Belen and friend
mands.
But it would be wrong
to read this as a sign
that the students are
close to winning. The Pinochet regime ensured
that Chile’s parliamentary system is not capable of implementing serious reforms due to the
need to receive support
from the parties of the
right even when they
are not in power. And
the Piñera government is
fundamentally and ideologically opposed to the
anti-neoliberal sentiment
that has emerged as the
common denominator in
the ever expanding public outcry. They’ve coupled their invitation to
dialogue with demands
that the protests cease.
movement for change,
have begun to make
things appear possible
that once were deemed
impossible. In essence,
they are challenging the
status quo by empowering people to take action.
In the words of Belén “I’m
thrilled, because I know
that it is the beginning of
a tremendous change.
Thousands of Chileans, of
all persuasions are taking
to the streets. I have seen
them. We have witnessed
how the police repress
us, how we have been
treated like the enemy
by the media of our own
country. But we have the
conviction that this is the
beginning of a revolution.
A slow one, but a necessary one.”
10
World
News
Global ‘Boycott Israel’ campaign grows
timothy lawson
editor in chief
Despite widespread
condemnation of Israeli
policies by the United
Nations, other international bodies, human
rights organisations and
internationally respected
lawyers Israel continues
to deprive Palestinians of
their rights of freedom,
equality, and self-determination.
Israel’s ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination
and aggressive expansion through colonisation
are well documented.
As the global community has repeatedly
failed to hold Israel accountable for its actions,
on July 9, 2005, a large
section of Palestinian civil
society called upon their
counterparts and people
of conscience the world
over to launch a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions
(BDS) against the Israeli
state until it adheres to
international law and the
universal principles of human rights.
The three fundamental
goals of the BDS campaign its three fundamental goals are: an end
to Israel’s occupation
and colonisation of all
Arab lands occupied
since 1967, including
dismantling Israel’s infamous apartheid wall;
Israeli recognition of the
fundamental rights of the
Arab-Palestinian citizens
of Israel to full equality; and Israeli respect,
protection, and promotion of the right of return
for Palestinian refugees
as specified in United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 194.
The boycott campaign
has targeted products
and companies that
support or profit from the
violation of Palestinian
rights. Consumers are
encouraged not to buy
Israeli goods and businesses are encouraged
not to buy or sell them.
As part of a cultural
boycott, a growing number of artists and musicians have refused to
exhibit their work or play
in Israel.
The call for divestment from Israel refers to
targeting corporations
complicit in the violation
of Palestinian rights and
ensuring that the investment portfolios of institutions such as universities
or pension funds are not
used to finance these
companies.
This is designed to push
companies to use their
economic influence to
pressure Israel to end its
violations of basic human rights.
Sanctions are a crucial
way governments and
international institutions
show disapproval for a
country’s actions.
Israel’s membership of
various diplomatic and
economic forums provides Israel respectability
and material support for
its crimes.
By calling for sanctions
against Israel, campaigners aim to educate
society about violations
of international law.
A big step in the campaign was the first Palestinian BDS Conference
held in Ramallah in 2007.
Out of this conference
came the BDS National
Committee (BNC) as the
Palestinian coordinating
body for the international BDS campaign.
Australia first held its
national BDS conference
in 2010. The campaign
really gained momentum
and prominence here
when the corporate media and other enemies
of the Palestine solidarity
movement made a lot of
noise over a motion by
the Marrickville Council
in Sydney supporting the
BDS campaign.
Media hysteria, especially in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper, has also greeted
the campaign in Australia to target the Max
Brenner stores for its support of Israel’s oppression
and war crimes.
The Strauss Group,
parent company of the
Max Brenner chocolate
store chain, is one the
targets of the global BDS
campaign for its support
of the Israeli Defence
Force.
Until recently, its website said: “Our connection with soldiers goes as
far back as the country,
and even further. We see
a mission and need to
continue to provide our
soldiers with support, to
enhance their quality of
life and service conditions, and sweeten their
special moments.”
It mentioned it had
“adopted” the IDF
Goloni reconnaissance
platoon and a a section of the Giati platoon,
“with the goal of improving their service conditions and being there at
the front to spoil them
with our best products.”
The Golani and Givati
platoons have been implicated in atrocities.
When Israel invaded
Lebanon in 1982, the
Golani Brigade allowed
right-wing militias to enter
the the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee
camps to carry out mass
executions. Thousands of
Palestinians were killed
in what a UN General
Assembly motion termed
“an act of genocide”.
The Givati platoon
were part of the groundforce that entered Gaza
during the Israeli invasion known as Operation Cast Lead, in which
more than 1400 Palestinians died.
The legitimacy of
targeting the Max Brenner chain has been the
source of much controversy in the past few
months.
The Australian has highlighted the arguments
of Reverend Jim Barr,
president of the Australia
Palestine Advocacy
Network.
Barr said he supported
the BDS campaign,
but not the protesting
against Max Brenner
stores. He told the August
16 Australian “that stuff
just discredits the whole
movement”.
However, many
other Palestine solidarity groups and activists
disagree.
Independent journalist and author of My
Israel Question Antony
Loewenstein told the
Green Left Weekly why
he believed Max Brenner was one of a number
of legitimate targets for
the BDS campaign: “[I]
t is very clear it has been
widely documented that
Max Brenner publicly
and privately fully supports elements in the
Israeli Defence Force,
some of which have
been accused of very
serious war crimes in the
West Bank and Gaza, including during Operation
Cast Lead in 2008/2009.
“It seems very legitimate to say that as
consumers in a democratic society, we have
a choice on how we
spend our money, and
ask do we want to spend
money in a shop that actively supports elements
of a criminal army of a
strong ally of Australia?”
On July 1, a protest was
held at the Max Brenner store in Melbourne’s
CBD. Members from a
range of left-wing activist organisations were
involved in the demonstration.
Victorian police used
excessive force to disrupt
the demonstration and
19 activists were arrested. Sixteen of the
activists were charged
and bailed; the charges
included assaulting
police, riotous behaviour,
besetting premises and
trespass.
There were 13 issued
with bail conditions, prohibiting them from enter-
ers (AUT) Council voted
to boycott two Israeli
universities; the University of Haifa and Bar-llan
University.
Bar-llan University was
boycotted because it
runs courses at universities in the occupied West
Bank and is therefore
intimately involved with
the illegal occupation of
Palestinian territories.
The AUT said its members had voted for the
boycott in response to
a plea from a group of
Palestinian academics.
ing the QV shopping
centre or Melbourne
Central shopping centres in Melbourne where
Max Brenner stores are
located.
It is clear that the
purpose of these conditions was to prevent the
protesters from taking
part in further protests at
Max Brenner stores.
Conservative blogger
and author, Pamela Gellar, labelled one of the
organisers, Students for
Palestine, as a “terrorist
organisation” in response
to the peaceful protest.
The protest, as part of
the global BDS movement, is modelled on the
campaign to boycott
South Africa in the 1970s
and ‘80s.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond
Tutu has called on the
international community
to treat Israel in the same
manner as it treated
apartheid South Africa.
He is a prominent supporter of the BDS campaign against Israel.
The global campaign is
truly a world-wide phenomenon.
Haifa was boycotted
because the university had purportedly
disciplined a lecturer for
supposedly supporting a
student who wrote about
attacks on Palestinians
during the founding of
the state of Israel.
The boycott was temporary and was to be
removed when Haifa
“ceases its victimisations
of academic staff and
students who attempt to
research and discuss the
history of the founding of
the Israeli state”.
Both boycotts were
later cancelled. Reasons
cited for this backtracking were: the damage
to academic freedom,
and the hindering of a
dialogue and peace
effort between Israel and
Palestine.
A more far-reaching
academic boycott is in
place in South Africa.
In response to a big
campaign calling for an
academic boycott, supported by more than 400
South African academics, the senate of the
University of Johannesburg voted in March to
cut ties with Ben Gurion
University in Tel Aviv. The
Israeli university’s support
for the IDF was cited as
justification.
The movement in
France developed in response to the Gaza War
in 2008-09.
The British BDS movement has largely revolved around the
boycotting of Israeli
universities that suppress
pro-Palestinian ideas.
In 2005, the Association of University Teach-
In early 2009, a call
for an academic boycott, divestment and
sanctions against Israeli
institutions was published
by the Collective Interuniversity for cooperation
with the Palestinian universities (CICUP) on their
website.
In June that year, a
group of French organisations gathered
to organise a French
BDS campaign against
specific targets like Carrefour, Ahava, AgrexcoCarmel, Veolia Transport
and Alstom, the Association France Palestine
Solidarite said.
Calls for boycotting
Israel are illegal under
French law. Olivia Zemor,
of the group EuroPalestine, was made to
appear in French court in
2011 for posting a video
to the internet of Palestinian and French activists wearing t-shirts that
called for BDS against
Israel.
BDS first took off in
Canada in 2005, when
Israeli Apartheid Week
was conceived in Toronto. It has occurred every
year since, becoming
an international event.
It takes place in many
countries around the
world, including in the
West Bank.
The Israeli government’s response to the
global BDS campaign
has included a law being
passed in the Knesset
(Israeli parliament) in
July that made it a civil
offence for any Israeli
citizen to publicly call for
a boycott against the
State of Israel.
Under the new law,
anyone calling for a boycott can be sued and
forced to pay compensation regardless of any
actual damages.
Moreover, at the discretion of a government
minister, anyone supporting the boycott call may
also be prohibited from
bidding in government
tenders.
The BDS movement
continues to grow worldwide. Many people who
support Palestinian rights,
and are horrified by
Israel’s ongoing crimes,
are increasingly seeing the BDS campaign
as a viable method for
opposing human rights
abuses and its flaunting
of international law.
Go! the evil empire
Editorials/
Letters
11
Continued from PAGE 1
formal factions within
the National Union of
Students associated with
the ALP.”
Go!’s incompetence
and lack of a unifying
vision are mirrored by the
current disarray of federal and state Labor. An
editorial in The Australian clarifies the current
discomposure of the ALP
quite succinctly, it states:
“Labor’s values have
evaporated in the face
of a political machine
motivated by power at
any price. It now risks the
fate that has befallen
the trade unions — a loss
of support that would
leave it speaking for a
minority of Australians.”
Today’s Age/Nielson
poll has Labor at a new
low, with Julia Gillard’s
approval rating at 19 per
cent.
Since roughly 2,000 out
of the 27, 653 students
enrolled at Clayton
actually vote in the MSA
elections, is this perhaps
indicative of what is happening at Monash?
In the forthcoming
election, Go! is contesting the student newspaper concurrently
with most or all other
positions, including the
executive (president,
secretary and treasurer).
With the exception of
this year, they have
controlled Lot’s Wife for
the past five years. This
means they have had
control of the entire student association – which
receives over $1m per
year from the university
and has roughly $7m
in the bank – as well
as total control of the
only means of alerting
students to their spending and actions. China
anyone?
If we look at student
politics at Monash as a
microcosm of the federal
arena; Lot’s Wife as the
Fourth Estate, as a vital
pillar in the foundation
of our beautiful democracy, has been befouled
each and every time Go!
has taken the newspaper and the executive.
The Lot’s Wife candidate statement by Melinda Bladier and Jamie
Blaker in the election
guide state that they
are “serious about steering this publication away
from parochial studentpolitics and back into
the hands of the student
body”.
This implies that the
Lot’s Wife team this year
has had a narrow and
limited scope with regards to content; that its
primary focus has been
student politics and not
on issues that affect
students.
So far this year Lot’s
Wife has published: one
editorial on student
politics entitled ‘A hack’s
progress’, and one
article on the student political groups that campaign on Israel-Palestine
entitled ‘University battle
ground’. This edition will
have some articles on
student politics as the
elections are upon us.
The sad thing is that
we really would have
liked more articles on
student politics, because
the student union should
be an issue that affects
students, but the reality is
not so.
Through our hard work
this year we have conceived a delicate and
thoughtful infusion of
topics covering a plethora of issues that are
directly relating to the
‘student body’. Some of
these include: Monash
staff cuts, the record
my lectures campaign,
focus on advice and
employability for many
faculties, reviews of
many student clubs and
non-political groups, a
student health advice
column, the closing of
the Co-op bookstore,
problems with the library
loan system, the commercialisation of Wholefoods, the shuttle bus
campaign, and student
public transport costs.
If they had been reading the publication they
would like to edit next
year, they would prob-
ably have known this.
Bladier and Blaker state
that they will create a
‘magazine’. Lot’s Wife is,
and has since conception, been a newspaper
– with the exception
of some parody editions. Up until this year
the format was a tabloid newspaper format;
this year it has been a
broadsheet format with
the same dimensions as
the New York Times – one
of the most respected
daily papers in the world.
We would hate to see
Lot’s Wife turned into
Women’s Weekly.
Moreover, the plan to
move to a magazine
format is ill-conceived at
best. This is primarily because the department
is expected to make the
printing costs back in advertising revenue – and
printing on glossy paper
is extremely expensive.
Our own financial modelling has shown that the
publication will have to
be flooded with advertising or under ten pages in
length to be viable in a
magazine format.
Indeed, the most problematic aspect of Go!’s
insistence on contesting
the student newspaper
is their intimacy with the
ALP. Go!’s presidential
candidate for this year is
a member of NLS; since
2006, all of Go!’s presidents have been members of NLS.
This means that the
student newspaper will
be run by a grouping
that has a considerable
conflict of interest since
we currently have a Labor federal government.
At best an NLS affiliated
grouping running the
newspaper would struggle to cover the actions
and spending of the
federal government with
the same level of journalistic integrity as a grouping not led by members
affiliated with a major
political party; at worst
the newspaper would
become a propaganda
mouth-piece for Go! and
the ALP.
Dear Lot’s,
Take a look at Wholefoods. This is what happens to community
spaces in a neoliberal
world.
The community notice board has been
replaced with a space
exclusively
for supplier advertising.
It is not enough
to buy a coffee, but
we are told to keep
buying with branded
mugs and cups.
During University
down time, the space
is closed off because
it is not
drawing financial
returns.
There is a steady
deterioration of a
volunteer ethos with
more paid staff being relied upon to run
the place. This fundamentally goes against
Wholefoods principles
of volunteerism.
At the same time,
volunteers are seen
as nothing more than
cheap, easy labour
(with the latest rumour
being that volunteers
will need to work for
four hours before earning a “free” meal).
Likewise, the Wholefoods Collective has
been banned by the
student union from
being a part of a staff
hiring process. One effect of this is that hired
staff don’t necessarily
need to have demonstrated prior commitment to: Wholefoods
community; collective
and consensus based
organising; anti-hierarchical, open skill
sharing.
Food and drink
prices have steadily
increased to be sometimes more expensive
than other places on
campus. Wholefoods
is no longer the place
for cheap coffee or
food.
The list can go on.
What else has happened that people
are barely aware of?
Wholefoods has seen
innumerable attacks
in the past, but now
is the time to shape
up. Work on making
the Wholefoods Collective strong again.
Deal with problems of
hierarchical organising
head on. Get actively
involved in decision
making. Question
people acting like
bosses. Read and
understand the constitution. Wholefoods is a
unique place on campus: ‘Food for people,
not profit’ is not a sales
pitch.
Ray Harris
12
Op-Ed
Malaysia deal sinking causes
splash
Majella crowe
The comments made by
the Prime Minister in the
wake of the High Court’s
verdict are at best a
petulant dummy-spit. At
worst, they exemplify the
sheer arrogance and
spite that has marked
the government’s performance over the past
year. Yet we should not
let this new political controversy detract from the
issue at hand: our treatment of refugees.
The comments which
have sparked controversy in the media were
delivered in a press conference the day after
the High Court declared
the Government’s Malaysia deal unlawful and
invalid. The Prime Minister called the decision
“deeply disappointing”,
and personally attacked
Chief Justice Robert
French, stating that he
had faced “comparable
legal questions when
he was a judge of the
Federal Court and made
different decisions to the
one that the High Court
made [on Wednesday]”.
She further critiqued
the High Court for the
“missed opportunity”
in “breaking the people smugglers business
model”.
No branch of government, including the judiciary, should be above
accountability. While
the separation of powers promotes independence and transparency,
it does not necessarily
provide protection from
one branch against
the critique of another.
Indeed, it is one of the
primary functions of
the parliament to keep
the executive in check.
However, it is not so
much the critique of the
High Court, and particularly French CJ, but the
nature of these criticisms
that have once again
landed the Prime Minister
in hot water.
The allegation of an
inconsistent judgement
has sparked fervent
debate in the media
and the legal profession.
Heydon J, in his dissenting judgement, did in
fact use (then) Justice
French’s reasoning in
Patto v Minister for Immigration and Foreign
Affairs, a case heard in
the Supreme Court in
2000. However, in disputing the consistency
of the judgements the
Prime Minister has made
a serious accusation
against the integrity of
the court. She has further
undermined its traditional power to overturn the
judgements of the lower
courts. The 2000 case,
along with many others
like it, was made by a
single judge sitting on the
Supreme Court bench,
and as such, was bound
to follow the principles
outlined by the High
Court as they existed at
the time. Now sitting on
the High Court, French
CJ is not bound to follow
his own decision. It is the
liberty of the High Court
to overturn judgements
where they see error,
and interpret the law as
they see fit. As a former
lawyer, the Prime Minister should well comprehend the basics of court
hierarchy. Further, even if
French CJ had decided
in her favour, it would
not have changed the
outcome. Her comments
are thus purely based in
spite.
It is further unnerving
that the judgment has
come as such a fundamental surprise to the
government, considering
that it came in at a 6-1
majority. If the case for
the government was as
strong as they believed,
one would expect a
much closer result. Yet
the government persists in insisting that they
“received sound legal
advice,” and refusing
to accept that in their
haste to cobble together
a plan, they have again
bungled.
But it is the accusation
of a “missed opportunity” that is perhaps the
most worrying of all. In
these words, the Prime
Minister has thrust upon
the judiciary a role in
politics which constitutionally it does not
possess. It is not for the
judiciary to make political decisions. It is not
the role of the judiciary
to enforce the political
agenda of the government. To claim the High
Court has missed a political opportunity displays
profound ignorance of
the legal system. No one,
including the judiciary,
is above the law. Where
the court reasons something unlawful, it cannot
ignore this for political
purposes. Effectively,
the Prime Minister has
criticised the High Court
for deviating from her
political agenda. This
kind of comment from
a Prime Minister is not
acceptable. The sinister
implication is that the
executive’s decision is
always right, and subject
to no other arm of government.
Whether you think the
Prime Minister’s comments inappropriate or
not, it is undeniable that
they display a characteristic lack of responsibility.
There have been few, if
any, occasions when the
government has accepted full responsibility for
bad policy and bad decisions over the past few
years. Meanwhile, there
have been many occasions where this responsibility has been called for.
The constant excuses are
wearing thin, and many
media reports are calling
this the final straw.
But we should not simply throw up our hands
in frustration and call for
an election. After all, on
the flip side of the coin is
Tony Abbott, who claims
that refugee processing
in Nauru has not been
declared unlawful. It is
likely that, should they
take the reins of government, the Liberal Party
will pursue this policy,
inevitably wasting time
and money on a ‘solution’ that is both inhumane, and on tenuous
legal grounds.
Though they might
claim the High Court
missed the opportunity,
it is now in fact the Prime
Minister and her government that are presented
with the greater opportunity. The collapse of the
Malaysia deal, and the
shaky future of offshore
processing altogether,
affords the chance of a
complete bipartisan upheaval of our approach
to the matter. This is the
perfect pause in which
to reframe and de-politicise the issue.
After all, the refugee
‘problem’ is purely a
political construct. Over
the past decade, the
issue has been inflated
to ridiculous proportions
by both major parties for
political purposes. Whilst
the Prime Minister has
arguably overstepped
the bounds, we must not
let this become another
political dispute which
obscures the real issue.
It is time to re-assess our
approach, end mandatory detention and
offshore processing, and
increase our intake of
refugees. An increase in
the refugees we willingly
take will in itself be the
best tool with which to
fight people smuggling.
This country is wealthy
enough, and it now must
prove itself compassionate enough. This solution
is the most most-effective in the long term, but
more importantly, it is
also the most humane.
And at its core, the issue
of refugees is one of human rights.
Government regulation and the
‘nanny-state’
Angus roche
In 1970 the Australian
state of Victoria became
the first jurisdiction in the
world to make it compulsory for occupants of a
moving vehicle to wear
a seatbelt. Whilst not
something many Australians are concerned
about nowadays, at the
time this was an issue of
huge controversy. Assuming that your actions
do not affect anyone
else, surely the government has no place in
dictating to its citizens
how and when they
should protect themselves from a perceived
danger, no matter how
minor the inconvenience of fastening your
seatbelt is, and even if it
does make you ten times
more likely to survive a
road crash. It’s up to individuals to decide, right?
In most cases, I would
agree. However, when
it becomes abundantly
clear that our society
is failing to adequately
protect itself from a specific threat, I believe we
must make an exception
to this rule. Recently I’ve
become steadily more
frustrated with people
who dismiss any suggestion of increasing
government regulation
of just about anything
as an affront to personal liberty. (They’re far
more likely simply to yell
‘nanny-state!’ and then
run away, of course, but
I’ve paraphrased their
argument for the sake
of fluency). Upon taking
office, a government
accepts the responsibility
for the well-being of its
citizens. So when a certain practice is having
a widespread adverse
effect upon individuals,
the state must have a
place to step in and do
something about it.
Consider the three
most widely discussed
examples, all of which
the government are contemplating regulating
more strongly; smoking,
gambling and drinking.
In theory at least, the
risks incurred from partaking in any of these
activities apply only to
the individual who made
the choice to do so. But
I would argue that the
commercial success of
businesses that profit
from this behaviour relies
heavily upon placing
people in situations in
which they are unable to
think rationally about the
threat they are exposing
themselves to. Nicotine
is one of the most addictive drugs on the planet.
This is the key reason why
tobacco companies
make so much money,
because the vast majority of their consumer base
has developed a physical dependence upon
their product. Gambling
companies, by definition,
make a profit at the expense of their customers,
and over 40% of pokiemachine profits come
from problem gamblers.
Considering that our
society has nowadays
largely recognised the
dangers that smoking
and gambling present,
it is somewhat surprising
to me that we accept
heavy drinking as an
entirely normal part of
our culture. In an age
in which drinking to the
point of vomiting is considered unremarkable
and perhaps amusing
amongst large portions
of the Australian youth,
it’s easy to forget that
alcohol plays a role in
47% of assaults, 34% of
homicides and 30% of
road accidents. Alcohol
is an addictive drug that
changes the way people
behave to sometimes
devastating effects, yet
still in this country companies that produce
full strength alcohol are
permitted to actively
encourage people to
consume their products
through advertising in
public places. Given that
this is the case, surely
one cannot argue that
restricting a select few
of such corporations’
marketing strategies is in
conflict with our individual freedoms.
People often seem to
forget that most of these
proposed laws aren’t
actually infringing upon
your personal liberties in
the slightest. By no interpretation will plain-packaging for cigarettes,
pre-commitment on
pokie-machine losses or
tougher alcohol-advertising laws prevent you
from smoking, gambling
or drinking yourself to
death if you so choose.
We all know prohibition
doesn’t work, and the
prospect of banning alcohol is yet to be a topic
discussed at a meeting
of Gillard’s cabinet. The
point of these measures
is to discourage people
(especially the younger
generations) from partaking in such activities,
not actively prevent
them from doing so.
In the case of young
children, people often
claim that it’s the responsibility of parents to
educate them on the
potential dangers of
drinking. What should we
do, though, if it becomes
blindingly obvious that
they are failing to do so?
Just leave teens at the
mercy of peer pressure
and the brightly coloured advertisements of
alcohol companies, desperate to increase their
profit margin by any (legal) means necessary?
By logical extension,
someone pointed out
to me, I should be all for
restricting the advertising prowess of fast food
businesses because they
‘make people fat’. If a
direct correlation could
be drawn between McDonalds and an obesity
epidemic, then I think I
would agree. Unfortunately though, doing so
would be much more
difficult than in the aforementioned examples.
My proposal does not
imply that government
regulation is necessarily a
good thing or that there
are no other factors that
need to be taken into
account here. All that
becomes clear is that
neither the ‘personal liberties’ argument nor the
‘nanny state’ soundbite
is a sufficient means of
rebutting state attempts
to curb hazardous
practices. The debate
should instead surround
how effective government restrictions like
plain packaging will be
at discouraging young
people in particular from
engaging in dangerous
or anti-social behaviour.
Opinion
13
Journalist unions and
ethical journalism
ben convey
The website for the
Monash School of Journalism, Australian and
Indigenous Studies tells
us “journalism is an essential component of a
free, democratic society, holding to account
powerful vested interests
such as governments,
corporations, unions,
churches and other
institutions.” But after
decades of mergers,
slashed budgets and
gutted newsrooms - most
recently at Melbourne’s
The Age - we now not
only have far smaller
editorial departments
across Australia’s media
industry but far fewer. In
this context of decreasing media diversity, the
public is losing faith in
the idea of a media that
contributes to a healthy,
functioning democracy. Thus to some, this
statement on Monash’s
website may seem more
an idealistic vision of how
things should be and
less realistic portrayal of
how they actually are in
practice.
Yet an even more
interesting aspect of
this quote is the inclusion of unions in the list
of “powerful vested
interests” that journalists are meant to hold
to account. Where
then does the union for
working journalists, the
Media, Entertainment
& Arts Alliance (incorporating the Australian
Journalists Association
(AJA)) fit into this picture? How can journalists
hold unions to account
if they are members of a
union themselves? Isn’t
it a conflict of interest to
belong to a trade union
as a journalist if unions
are “powerful vested
interests” that journalists are actually meant
to be challenging? The
answers lie in exploring
what a trade union actually is.
The recent phonehacking scandal at
News International’s now
defunct News of the
World and the ensuing
debates around ethics
in journalism it has provoked provide a context
for exploring this. In 1944
members of the AJA
created a Code of Ethics
and to this day journalist
members of the Media,
Entertainment & Arts
Alliance are required
to adhere to the Code.
Similarly to Monash’s
statements about journalism and democracy,
the AJA Code of Ethics is
based on the notion that
journalists “inform citizens
and animate democracy” and that they “scrutinise power, but also
exercise it, and should
be responsible and ac-
countable”. As such,
the code establishes
12 basic principles that
journalists must commit
themselves to, centered
on the core notions of
honesty, fairness, independence and respect
for the rights of others.
But why on Earth would
a trade union be responsible for developing
and enforcing a Code
of Ethics in journalism?
Aren’t unions just one
more interest group?
Aren’t they those people that hold disruptive
strikes, stage noisy rallies,
slow down productivity and all in the name
of simply winning more
perks for their members?
How could self involved
people be the guardians of ethical practices
in the Fourth Estate?
On the face of it, if we
accept the increasingly
popular view these days
that unions are just one
of many groups in society motivated purely by
the self-interest of their
members then indeed it
does seem strange that
a union was responsible
for devising a Code of
Ethics in journalism.
In order to understand
this perhaps we should
reexamine the common
view of what unions are.
Unions are about people
coming together united
by what they share in
common and using the
power of collective action to overcome adversity in ways that wouldn’t
be possible as isolated
individuals. As individuals working in an industry
where exclusive information is seen as a saleable
commodity, journalists
can sometimes face a
lot of pressure from their
boss to obtain stories via
any means including unethical ones. Not getting
the scoop or obtaining
those exclusive pictures
because you refused to
breach your ethical principles can be the difference between keeping
your job and losing it.
It is easy to forget that
journalists are workers
too. As individuals who
sell their services for a
wage to the owners of
the increasingly small
number of major media
companies, they need
help and support in order
to not wind up as tools
of big business or other
powerful vested interests.
In a foreword to a report
on the International
Federation of Journalists’s Ethical Journalism
Initiative, the President
of the IFJ Jim Boumelha
observed “it is hardly
possible for one journalist
to be ‘ethical’ on their
own without engaging with colleagues. In
particular, they need the
collective support that is
provided by trade unions
of journalists”.
If you are a student of
journalism and media,
take a moment to reflect
on what made you become interested in the
media. Do you generally
agree with Monash’s
statements about the
important role journalists play in a healthy
democracy? What role
do maintaining ethical
principles play in ensuring that journalists are
empowered to fulfill that
duty? Journalists at News
of the World were forbidden by a loophole in British law from organising
through their union the
National Union of Journalists. Effectively, the
NUJ was incapable of
upholding its own Code
of Ethics at the now
dead tabloid masthead.
Luckily, journalists in Australia still have a right to
join their union.
Once you land
that coveted job after
graduating will you feel
confident enough to
say no to an editor who
expects you to get the
story ‘at any cost’ even
if it would require actions which you feel are
unethical? Or will you
simply be grateful that
you’ve got your foot
in the door and have
scored one of the increasingly scarce jobs in
a shrinking industry? Will
you stand alone or will
you join a community of
professional colleagues
and work together with
them through your union
to ensure that when
people mention the role
of journalists in serving
democracy, they are
talking about the world
as it is and not the world
as it should be?
To view the code of
ethics visit http://www.
alliance.org.au/code-ofethics.html
This is the first in a regular
Lot’s Wife column about
issues in journalism and
media contributed by
the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance. The
author Ben Convey is
both an Organiser with
the Media Alliance and
a student of Monash
University.
For more information
about the union for journalists (and students of
journalism), follow us on
Twitter @mediaalliance
visit the website www.
alliance.org.au or contact the author at ben.
convey@alliance.org.au
or 1300 656 512
Get involved!
elise hendriksen
As many of you may
remember, or may
currently be experiencing, the transition from
highschool to university
can be a very daunting
one. Now think back to
when you were 12 or
13 and experiencing a
similar transition from primary to high school: new
environments, increased
responsibility, and on top
of that you had to deal
with puberty. I remember
just how embarrassing
that word was, puberty.
I was a shy kid. I
blushed a lot and was
somewhat terrified of
talking to people. My
pro-extra-curricular activities parents, who also
encouraged a range of
musical instruments (I still
cannot read music) and
enforced a number of
math tutoring programs
(I still count on my fingers), made the decision
to let me join Scouts.
I still blushed a lot, but
slowly began to come
out of my shell, meet
new people and gain
confidence. Scouts also
enabled me to do things
I will never forget, such
as parascending – being attached to a para-
chute which is attached
to a truck moving
through a large field.
As a 24-year-old, I went
back this year to Scouts
to be an assistant leader
and give back to a program that is entirely run
by volunteers, encourages the personal development of children and
often provides a social
security blanket for that
awkward transition from
primary to high school.
Scouts are children
aged 12-15 who gather
once a week for a couple of hours and engage
in a range of activities,
such as sports/games,
building campfires, outdoor cooking, laserforce,
rockclimbing, knot-tying
etc. On top of this a
number of camps are
run – the next camping
trip for my Scout group is
cross-country skiing.
As a leader my expenses for these camps
are covered, which gives
me the opportunity to
do things that I otherwise
couldn’t afford. More
than that, the experience I gain as a leader,
assisting the growth
of these children is so
rewarding, and getting
to know each of them
one-on-one at camps is
always such a pleasure.
From a selfish perspective, in a plea to encourage more students to
volunteer as Scout leaders, this position enables
me to put volunteer work
and leadership skills on
my resume, learn how
to interact with children,
learn a number of useful life skills such as first
aid and participate at
no cost in a number of
camps such as skiing
and waterskiing. I would
especially encourage
education students to
consider taking a couple
of hours out of their week
to volunteer as a Scout
leader, as what could
be seen as a practice
run for a career in teaching. This might even take
the edge off the fear of
future teaching rounds.
To learn more about
Scouts, visit http://www.
scouts.com.au/
Or to express an interest in becoming an
assistant leader at my
Scout group visit http://
www.1stbentleighscouts.
com.au/
14
Sport
Loyalty in football
Kiran Iyer
sports editor
Football’s worst kept
secret has finally been
confirmed. Tom Scully,
the 2010 No. 1 draft pick
who played two injuryinterrupted seasons for
the Melbourne Demons,
has signed with the new
Greater Western Sydney
franchise. Scully joins
Bulldog Callan Ward,
Adelaide’s Phil Davis and
Fremantle’s Rhys Palmer
at the Giants.
Scully’s departure
leaves a sour taste in the
mouth. In February, Scully
responded to extensive
media speculation that
he had already signed
with GWS by insisting that
he was “fully committed” to the Demons. The
credibility of this assurance was always questionable. After the club
was plunged into instability by repeated reports
that Scully had already
signed with GWS, Scully’s
decision to defer contract negotiations till the
end of the season was
an unwelcome distraction for the Demons. The
responsible course of
action would have been
to either re-sign with the
Demons or announce
his departure earlier in
the season, in the same
manner as Phil Davis. An
early announcement
would have enabled
the club to better plan
for the future. Ultimately,
Scully engaged in a charade which was embarassing for the club.
The more interesting
question is whether Scully
should be criticized for
his final decision. After all,
a $6 million contract over
6 years for a player with
dodgy knees is difficult to
resist. Is it fairer to blame
the AFL for allowing the
GWS to pursue uncontracted players at such
inflated prices?
Scully should not be
unaccountable for his
decision to leave the
Demons. The Demons
invested in his development for two years, despite a number of mediocre performances and
a string of games missed
with injury. A player with
integrity would recognise
an obligation to repay
that faith before seeking greener pastures.
For that reason, Gary
Ablett’s departure to the
Gold Coast Suns last year
was less galling, coming
after two Premierships
and a Brownlow medal.
Furthermore, football
may be a commercial
enterprise, but that does
not mean that players
should not be judged
for making decisions on
purely financial grounds.
Professional sport thrives
because of a compact
between fans and players – the unwavering
loyalty of fans is only
sustainable in the belief
that players reciprocate
that loyalty. Fans make
an emotional investment
on the basis that players
share their dedication to
the cause. For a team
like Melbourne which has
not won a Premiership
since 1964, Scully represented a brighter future,
a reason to attend inevitable drubbings. Scully’s
decision to leave may
not be a surprise, but it
reinforces the harmful
cynicism about the motivation of players which
will ultimately be toxic for
the game.
Science
15
Science Q+A
aimee parker
Science Jokes
science editor
What makes your muscles feel sore the day
after a hard workout?
This is called delayed onset muscle soreness, the
pain or stiffness which
occurs one to two days
after exercise. It usually
occurs when you do a
new type of exercise or
increase the intensity or
duration of your regular
exercise. The pain is due
to very small tears to the
muscle fibers, which can
also cause local swelling.
The soreness decreases
with time and rest and
the muscles rebuild and
become more adapted
to that particular type of
activity.
Will eating green potatoes make you sick?
Green potatoes contain a high level of the
toxin solanine which can
cause nausea, headaches and neurological problems. Potatoes
naturally contain small
amounts of solanine to
defend against insects,
but the amount increases in potatoes exposed
to heat and light. The
green colour is actually
due to chlorophyll, the
same harmless chemical which is found in all
plants. However, solanine and chlorophyll are
produced at the same
rate, so noticeably green
potatoes will contain
more of the toxin. Small
amounts of the toxin are
a useful defense against
insects, but much larger
amounts are needed to
cause harm to a human.
It is estimated that a 50
kg person would need
to eat a large and fully
green potato to notice
any effect. Fully cutting
away the green sections
gets rid of most of the
toxin so the rest of the
potato is safe to eat.
Chuck Norris handles Ebola without gloves on. It
knows better than to try anything.
Is it true that every cell
in the body is replaced
every seven years?
No. All tissues have different cell turnover rates.
The fastest turnover rate
is in the epithelial cells
(the lining) of the small
intestine which are replaced every couple of
days. Some cells, such as
the neurons in the cerebral cortex of the brain,
are never replaced - you
are born with as many as
you will ever have and
those that die are gone
for good. Cardiomyocytes, the muscle cells of
the heart, have a very
slow turnover rate (about
1% per year) so even
when you’re very old,
the majority of the cells
will be those you were
born with.
Chuck Norris has an impact factor of infinity.
Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a labcoat because his
skin is fire and chemical resistant.
Chuck Norris doesn’t understand nociceptor research because he can’t comprehend what pain is.
Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because
Chuck Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures
Chuck Norris has allowed to live.
How to... break a bad habit
aimee parker
science editor
Red-heads: what went wrong?
aimee parker
science editor
1-2% of our population
have it. Scotland has the
most of it. Mummies from
the 2nd millennium BC
had it. Our Prime Minister
has it. You could have
the gene for it lurking silently in your DNA. Some
people pay to get it.
It is red hair and it
has been revered and
reviled across centuries
and cultures. Prejudice
against red-heads ‘gingerism’ - is rife, and
leads to countless jokes,
nicknames and incidents
of bullying. It is not officially a form of racism so
is not monitored by racial
authorities, yet discrimination and hate crimes
against red-heads do
occur, notably in some
recent cases in the UK.
Why so much hostility to
those of the Titian locks?
Red-heads are a very
visible minority not protected by the law in the
way that religion, race,
sexual orientation and
skin colour are. Bullying
tends to be directed at
minority groups and redheads happen to be a
minority which it is socially tolerable to ridicule. As
the rarest of the natural
hair colours, red hair has
gone through phases of
admiration and abhorrence. Modern gingerism
seems to have taken
hold in Britain in the
1800s. The prevalence of
red hair in the Irish and
Scottish was much higher
than in the English, who
believed they were superior. Red hair was seen
as a trait of the ethnically
inferior and the prejudice
has held into modern
times.
What causes red-headedness?
Red hair is the result of
possessing two copies of
a recessive hair colour
allele. For every gene
a person has there are
two alleles, or versions of
it, that work together to
determine the expression
of that gene. The alleles
for the darker hair colours (black/brown) are
dominant and may hide
a recessive allele for the
lighter colours (blonde/
red). Red-heads have
two copies of a recessive allele which contains a mutation in the
melanocortin receptor
1, a protein involved in
regulating production of
the pigment melanin.
The actual colour of
the hair (and skin) is
determined by the type
and amount of pigment
expressed. Pheomelanin is a reddish pigment
and is highly expressed
by red-headed people.
Eumelanin is a darker
pigment which is more
highly expressed in
people with dark skin
and hair. Red-heads also
tend to be pale-skinned
and have light coloured eyes as the level
of pheomelanin is high
while eumelanin is low.
What are the advantages of being red-headed?
One advantage to
being red-headed and
pale-skinned is that
production of Vitamin
D in low light conditions
is much more efficient
than for people of darker
pigment. The trait is advantageous to people
in the Northern climates,
including Scotland and
Ireland, due to the low
levels of sunlight. However, negative selection
against the trait occurs in
areas of strong sunlight,
such as Africa.
Another advantage
is the attention that red
hair brings (can also be a
disadvantage). Red hair
can be a positive factor
in mate selection with
the bright colour holding
great allure. The rarity of
the red can make it a
unique selling point and
a means of making an
impression.
What are the disadvantages of being red-headed?
A big disadvantage for
red-heads is their increased sensitivity to UV
radiation and increased
risk of developing cancer.
The social perceptions
about red-heads can be
another disadvantage.
Being judged for any
one characteristic, physical or otherwise, is not
particularly pleasant and
the stereotypes available
to red-heads seem to be:
geek, devil or sex fiend.
Those with more rounded
personalities may find
such perceptions frustratingly limiting.
Due to the current
prevalence of gingerism
it is also likely that redheads will experience
bullying at some point in
their lives, which may not
be treated as seriously as
incidents of bullying for
other characteristics.
Habits are often unconscious behaviours
which form over a period
of time and become
automatic. Habits can
be quite useful in achieving our goals but many
are negative behaviours
which we’d be better off
without. A habit is distinct
from an addiction as the
person has control over
the behaviour and can
prevent it by exercising
some willpower. It’s not
as easy as simply telling
yourself to stop though,
so here are some tips to
help:
1) Make a serious commitment to changing
your behaviour.
It’s going to require a
lot of time and focus to
recognise and change
that bad habit. Make
sure you’re prepared to
see it through and that
you actually want to
change. Most of these
behaviours become a
habit because we kind
of enjoy them, so you have to be prepared to
give it up.
2) Keep track of when
the bad habit happens.
Write it down whenever
it occurs and take note
of the context of the
behaviour. Is it because
you’re stressed? Bored?
Is it when you see someone else doing it?
the old trigger and override the bad habit.
3) Avoid the triggers
Noting what causes
the behaviour will help
you to avoid it. It’s a lot
easier to avoid the trigger than to immediately
give up the habit. Help
yourself out and avoid prompting the habit as
much as possible.
6) Increase the frequency
Start out slow when
replacing the bad habit
and be nice to yourself!
It takes time to change
so don’t expect it to
happen immediately.
If you start out by recognising and replacing
the bad habit once a
week you can work up
to twice a week, most
days, every day, etc.
4) Replace the bad habit
with a better one
Identify something
you can do instead of
the bad habit. It should
be something reasonably enjoyable to give
you the positive reinforcement to change.
Replacing Facebook
procrastination with
doing your assignment
is a bit of a stretch, so
try something simple to
ease you in, like printing
and reading your notes
for class. Still not much
fun, but at least it’s more
productive.
5) Catch yourself out
Whenever you find
yourself performing the
bad habit, stop it as soon
as possible and start
performing the replacement behaviour. You’ll
develop connections in
your brain which link
the new behaviour to
7) Reward yourself!
Giving yourself some
positive reinforcement
will help the new behaviour to stick. Set a goal
and reward yourself with
something you enjoy
when you reach it (just
not by indulging in the
bad habit!).
Conventional wisdom
states that it only takes
around 25 days to form a
new habit, so it shouldn’t
be long before the new,
virtuous version of yourself takes hold. Be persistent, have conviction,
and work hard until it
becomes easy.
16
Lot’s Wife
Histories