On Dit Edition 82.11

82.11

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contents

VOLUME EIGHTY-TWO, EDITION ELEVEN.

E NS

3 4 8 10 12

E OF ‘L FTY ISSU E

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IN D EF E

ELECTION RESULTS CORRESPONDENCE PRESIDENT SPIELS WHAT’S ON

VOX POP

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WEIRD WORLD OF ROLEPLAY ACCIO WOMEN’S RIGHTS FEATURED ARTIST BORGIAS & THE BEAUTIFUL INTERVIEW: FLAMINGO SCIENCE ADELAIDE’S BIKE PROBLEM

16 19 23 26 30 33 36

CREATIVE WRITING COLUMNS REVIEWS DIVERSIONS RECIPE

39 40 44 46 48

Interwebs: auu.org.au/ondit. Thanks to Malcolm Turnbull for the web design; he did invent the internet, after all.

Editors: Sharmonie Cockayne, Daisy Freeburn and Yasmin Martin.

Front and inside front cover artwork by Carly Harvy.

On Dit is a publication of the Adelaide University Union.

On Dit is produced and printed on the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the land.

Published 7/10/2014

editorial

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T

he most important piece of advice I received throughout my entire secondary education was from my year eight geography teacher. The class that day was taking place on the oval because we were learning about weather, clouds and cloud cover in particular.

‘People always look down at the ground,’ he said while we all looked up at the blinding white sky, imprinting our poor corneas with rainbow splodges. ‘They should look up more often, there’s so much to see! So much gets missed!’

I don’t think he was trying to be inspirational; I mean, it was just a class about clouds. But he was right.

There are some damn amazing things above eye-level. Seriously, clouds are really fucking cool. Just think about it – it’s a huge mass of water droplets or ice crystals, sometimes hundreds of thousands of kilograms in weight, sweeping through the sky.

I digress. Yes, clouds are fascinating – but what they are a part of is even

more fascinating. The huge weather systems that blow across the Earth (westwards in the northern hemisphere, eastwards in the southern hemisphere) affect us all in so many ways, as I’m sure you all know.

And, as I’m sure you all know as well, those weather systems are changing and shifting. Rapidly.

In my classes, the professors and tutors really emphasise the gravity that our job as future designers will have – mitigation projects have begun to take the limelight, such as Bjarke Ingels Group’s proposal for a green belt around the edge of Manhattan to protect the city from storm surges. It’s almost as though architects and urban designers have given up on changing people’s minds through efficient, environmentally friendly designs, and gone straight on to trying to make sure the climate change transition will be as smooth and comfortable as possible.

I can see why though. Carbon emissions continue to rise, the situation is dire, and it all looks pretty

bleak. The UN have even resorted to hiring a beautiful man, Leonardo DiCaprio, to do all the talking, because it seems that people only listen to chunky hunks of man-candy.

For someone that was left to die in the freezing cold Northern Atlantic one time by his so-called lover (fuck you, Rose), he seems far too keen on keeping it that cold.

What an oddball.

But honestly, LISTEN TO THE BEAUTIFUL MAN IF NO ONE ELSE, FOR GOODNESS SAKE. Damn, do we have a nice edition of On Dit to distract you from the woes of the world for a moment, though.

For all those curious as to what my favourite cloud is, I really love a sky full of heavy mammatus.

daisy (and Yasmin and sharmonie).

2014 Elections Provisional Declaration of Results AUU Board Directors: 1. TAN, Ian (Yiran) 2. LU, Zhao (Joe) 3. MORPHETT, Georgina 4. WILLIAMS, Rhys 5. RAI, Adi On Dit Editors: McDONALD-STUART, Leighton MILLBURN, Daniel SUN, Zhuocao

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Student Radio Directors: WANG, Yang BELL, Matthew NUS: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

RUSSELL, Hannah BOUGHEY, Joshua PAECH, Gemma KENNY, Vivian GILCHRIST, Thomas DAVIS, Sam PACE, Mark SRC :

President DU, Renjie (Renji)

Mature Age Officer WANG, Yawei (Vivi)

Disability Officer WILLSON, Belinda

International Student Officer LI, Ziang (Troy)

Education Officer NEWTON, Jack

Women’s Officer VEITCH, Maddison

Social Justice Officer HAINES, Alyona

Rural Officer EMERY, Cameron

Queer Officer KAVANAGH, Bobbie

Ethno-Cultural Officer GUO, Brad

Environmental Officer YU, Peng (Paul)

Postgraduate Student Officer LU, Zhao (Joe)

General Secretary RUSSELL, Hannah

Welfare Officer BOUGHEY, Joshua

General Councillors 1. LIENERT, Jack (Daniel) 2. FU, Yu (Richie) 3. KOU, Xinyuan 4. PACE, Mark 5. DANIEL-RICHARDS, Edgar Nicolas 6. NIKIAS, Kyriaco 7. RITSON, Felix 8. McHENRY, Max

Authorised and published by the Returning Officer, September 2014. Please Recycle.

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correspondence 4

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Dear On Dit, Congratulations to the SRC President for her heads up on mood disorder [Eds: Former SRC President Lucy Small-Pearces’s column in Edition 82.9]. When I was an undergraduate in the early 80s the Counselling Service was in the hands of zealots campaigning against ‘the Medical Model’. (Hopefully things are different now and the Counselling Service adopts a more balanced approach.) There were no Disability Action Plans back in those primitive days. Consequently my Honours year in 1983 was undergone without benefit of medication or appropriate academic adjustment to my lasting detriment. The only oversight in Lucy’s column was a failure to refer to the Medical Service and the role of pharmacology in the management of the all too common major disorder of manic depression or bi-polar disorder. I am one who can attest to the efficacy of pharmaco-therapy allied with supportive medical counselling.

Dr David Faber Visiting Research Fellow School of Economics Dear On Dit, Hi, my name’s Bridget Fahey Hodder. I’m an Adelaide Comedian and a reader of On Dit. After reading the piece ‘Mastering Hilarity’ by Miriam Cross I’d like to voice a few issues.

Firstly, Miriam didn’t really research to see how much local talent we actually have here in Adelaide, let alone Australia. Granted, she did mention Demi Lardner, who is a talented and hard working individual, but it would have taken one google search to find out more.

Secondly, she makes no intention to inform people on where to go and what to do if they want to start doing comedy, this also would have take one google search.

However, I understand that there isn’t enough information being circulated to inform people, which is why I want to rectify this.

I started doing stand up in 2011 at One Mic Stand.

One Mic Stand is an open mic night that occurs every Monday at the Rhino Room, 1/13 Frome road, Adelaide CBD, 7:30pm. All you have to do to get five minutes of

stage time is to bring three paying customers.

If you have a bit of stage experience already, you could contact Craig Egan, who runs AdelaideComedy.com at craig@adelaidecomedy.com.

Adelaide Comedy nights run every Wednesday at The Marion Hotel, Thursdays at The Tea Tree Gully hotel, and every Friday and Saturday at the Rhino Room.

Other comedy rooms include Eddie Bannon’s Laugh Inn, every saturday at 9pm at the Austral, and Cranker Comedy at The Crown and Anchor, every 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month.

There are also always projects happening throughout the year, run and performed by Adelaide comedians including podcasts, sketch shows and improv gigs.

If there’s anyone who is keen but has questions please contact me at brickenbrackdiy@gmail.com or on Twitter @brick_en_brack. I understand it can be daunting and scary as well as a completely alien experience, but I fell in love with comedy and want to help others who love it.

Kind regards, Bridget Fahey Hodder Dear students, On Dit. Those two simple yet oft mispronounced words mean so many things to so many people. To Daisy, Sharmione [Eds: it’s Sharmonie] and Yasmin I’m sure it evokes memories of late caffeine powered nights. To me it sends a shiver down my now disturbed sleeping pattern and to many of you it’s the magazine you see floating around university and read on the bus/train/ tram/uber/shank’s pony home.

Most of us love On Dit. I love that it’s written by students for students. Our generation is often labeled apathetic in the mainstream media and yet consistently On Dit (and The Economist & The Guardian) is there to show people otherwise. Every fortnight many passionate individuals spend hours slaving away over a keyboard fleshing out how they feel towards an issue of concern to them.

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So often in On Dit those slaving away are from the ‘left’ of campus. We always see pieces on the oppression of some newly identified gender, on the extremes of the feminist movement, and on how much of an evil and nasty person Tony Abbott is. My problem lies in the fact that we rarely see anything published from the ‘right’ of campus. There are two possible (and reasonable) explanations for this: 1) Either the editorial team of On Dit is inherently biased against right wing individuals or, 2) Only left leaning individuals feel comfortable writing for On Dit. I’m sure you’d agree that neither of those situations is ideal. On Dit should be a neutral publication that encourages contribution and debate from all sides of politics as well as all sides of the university. Be you a conservative engineering student or a Marxist law student, you should have the same opportunity and incentive to write for a publication as well respected as On Dit. I do not base either of those explanations on some figment of my imagination. Consistently On Dit has featured advertisements that favor left wing groups with the NUS anti-Abbott protests being a fine example. Compare that advertisement to an offer from the Australian Defence Force (ADF) several years ago.

There, the ADF agreed to pay all costs in return for an advertisement in the magazine. It was rejected on the basis of political grounds.

It’s plainly clear that the On Dit editors have for a long time been from the left. If anyone was looking for further proof of this they need only look at the ‘IndyGo’ ticket that runs for student elections at Adelaide University. As many know, ‘IndyGo’ is a loose collection of left wing individuals not necessarily keen to be associated with Labor tickets ‘Activate’ (Labor left) and ‘Fresh’ (Labor right). Current editor Yasmin Martin ran for (and won) SRC Ethno Cultural Officer whilst also appearing on the ballot paper as a candidate for an NUS delegate spot in 2012. Former editor Casey Briggs was an IndyGo Adelaide University Union President and Stella Crawford ran as IndyGo’s women’s officer this year.

Further, two of the candidates for the defeated On Dit team have strong ties to the left. One was a Greens candidate for the seat of Port Adelaide in the State Parliament while another has rather strong ties to the socialist movement on campus. Political ties are not an inherently ‘bad’ thing. I myself have strong political ties. However the fact that the editors and favored candidates for On Dit have strong ties to the far left and to the far left only does write an interesting narrative.

That they bring their inherent left wing beliefs into the content of the magazine has long been the elephant in the room that few have been willing to discuss.

That demonstrated left wing bias and affiliation is perhaps the biggest reason for near non-existent right wing (or even centrist) commentary in the magazine.

Adelaide University has a strong right wing campus presence with groups such as ForU! (Liberal), Fresh (Labor Right), Progress (nominally right international students) and the Democrats taking out a number of AUU Board, SRC and NUS positions as well as Student Media. Despite this obviously large presence it is telling that anyone to the right of Deanna Taylor is hesitant about writing for On Dit. It’s true that the current editors have approached the Adelaide University Liberal Club for comment on previous occasions. But it is interesting to see that anyone not on the left has to be approached to contribute. In a university where a properly independent student magazine existed, it would be the clubs, parties and individuals approaching the magazine, not the other way around. While Generation Y is said to be more conservative, On Dit’s established preference for left wing content is clearly discouraging the contribution of anyone who disagrees with the left wing opinion of the day. This needs to stop and I am glad to report that next year On Dit will launch with a renewed focus on all students free of the inherent bias that has plagued its past and stymied its potential.

Leighton McDonald-Stuart is one of the editorselect for On Dit in 2015. In the interests of disclosure, Leighton is the Treasurer of the Adelaide University Liberal Club and the Administration Director of the South Australian Young Liberal Movement. Read on for On Dit’s response.

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Dear Leighton, Thanks for writing to us. It’s nice to finally see you published in the magazine! Congratulations on your election, we’re sure you and your teammates are very excited.

certain candidate from your On Dit ticket claiming that we had rejected and suppressed right-wing articles due to our alleged left-wing bias [NOTE: we have never rejected an article or pitch on political grounds, and the offending campaigner issued a formal public apology].

You’re right, On Dit does evoke memories of late caffeine powered nights. In fact, we’re writing to you from one of those caffeine powered nights right now.

We don’t recommend Red Bull, that stuff is poison.

As you acknowledged, we have gone out of our way this year to engage Adelaide University Liberal Club members, and On Dit has certainly published rightwing pieces in recent times. In fact, this edition was originally to include an article by the President of the Adelaide University Liberal Club Rob Katsambis, but unfortunately the piece fell through.

We’re writing back because you made a few mistakes in your letter, and we wanted to set the record straight.

You say in your letter that the we On Dit editors have brought our ‘inherent left wing beliefs into the content of the magazine’, based on a few assumptions you’ve made on our political leanings. We cannot speak for any editorial team besides our own, but we thought that it may interest you to know that Sharmonie, Daisy and myself ran to be editors of On Dit on the platform of being politically unaffiliated and independent. We were, as you know, successful in our campaign. Since then it has been our great pleasure to produce this magazine, and it has been one of the single most rewarding experiences of our lives.

It’s true that Yasmin ran for the position of SRC Ethnocultural Officer and NUS delegate with IndyGo in 2012. Your description of IndyGo is only slightly inaccurate. Certainly, many individuals that run with IndyGo are, as you say, ‘left wing individuals not necessarily keen to be associated with Labor tickets.’ What you missed is that the ‘Indy’ in IndyGo stands for ‘independent’. Many students that run with IndyGo (like Yasmin) run with them because they are not a member of any political party, but would still like to contribute to student issues.

We’d also like to note that your assertion that one of the candidates of your opposing On Dit team has ‘rather strong ties to the socialist movement on campus’ is factually incorrect. We fished around after we read your allegation, and the closest link to the socialist movement we could find was one of the candidates saying they’ve had classes with a couple of Socialist Alternative members, and doesn’t actively hate them.

As you said, political ties are not an inherently ‘bad’ thing, but exaggeration can be pretty harmful. We’ve been hearing a lot of rhetoric about On Dit’s supposed ‘left wing bias’ since election week. We even busted a

What troubles us the most about your letter is your assertion that On Dit is a kind of lefty rag with mostly left-wing contributors. You said: ‘So often in On Dit those slaving away are from the “left” of campus. We always see pieces on the oppression of some newly identified gender, on the extremes of the feminist movement, and on how much of an evil and nasty person Tony Abbott is.’

Your comments prompted us to have a look at our beloved magazine throughout our term as editors thus far. We looked at Editions 82.1 to 82.9. We didn’t count 82.10, as it was Hearsay (a creative writing anthology) or this edition.

So far, we have published works by 128 different contributors, many of whom were first-time contributors that we met during O’Week earlier in the year. We have published roughly 171 articles so far, not including regular columns such as editorials, SRC and AUU President spiels, and student politics news.

Of the 171 articles, a total of five have been about feminism in some way (one was about female comedians on YouTube, another was anti-feminist). We found seven articles that contained a hint of criticism of the current federal government (three were about how the budget would impact students, one was about the Racial Discrimination Act, one was about the government’s relationship with the ABC, one was about the Woodville High School kids, and the other was about sex education in schools). We have yet to publish anything about ‘some newly identified gender’, but we did publish an article demystifying asexuality in SexualiDit. We’re sorry if this was too much for you.

So what did the left-wing overlords of On Dit do with

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the other 158 articles (about 92 per cent of the year’s content)? Well, we let students write about whatever they wanted to write about. We’ve had articles about social media, Kickstarter, photography, memory deletion, health, music festivals, Tinder, skate parks, and many other topics. We’ve had dozens of interviews with prominent Adelaide University alumni and students, and this year we created dedicated spaces in On Dit for creative writing and art.

We did count approximately 21 articles throughout the year that discuss social issues such as LGBT rights in India, human rights in Ghana, sexuality and religion, and mental health. We don’t believe that these topics are exclusively left-wing issues, and for more on the dismissal of social issues as ‘left-wing’, check out Alyona Haines’ article on page 14.

On Dit isn’t a political mouthpiece to serve the agenda of whoever makes the right preference deal. It isn’t just a message board for political ponderings, and we’re proud to say that we haven’t treated it as such. To say that On Dit is suffering from a left-wing bias in its content is factually incorrect.

We cannot say for certain where on the political spectrum all 128 of our contributors fall. We can say that our contributors have been incredibly diverse in culture, gender, religion and style. We reject the notion that all or even most of them are of the left of campus simply because they’ve contributed to On Dit. To paint 128 individuals with the same brush based on a highly exaggerated claim about the editors is an unfortunate mistake to make. On Dit is a professional, independent student magazine that should be run by emerging journalists and editors. Despite your misconception that On Dit is ‘plagued’ by a left-wing bias, we are pleased that you are committed to a focus on un-biased content.

We wish you the best of luck.

Regards, The Eds

got your knickers in a knot?

Write to us. Our correspondence page is waiting to be filled with your rants and raves. Send us an email at ondit@adelaide.edu.au with the subject line ‘Letter to the Editor’.

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glorious leaders

state of the union Sam Davis, auu president

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watched by our own university’s administration very closely. It is likely that we’ll see our university make similar moves to them.

But there still is an opportunity to change this. This week in the Senate, the Higher Education Reform bills will be discussed, and there is still an opportunity for these bills to get defeated. The Liberal government is pushing very strongly to get these laws through, however, Labor and the Greens have both pledged to fight the laws. This leaves two South Australian Senators left: Senators Nick Xenophon and Bob Day. If you want to stop the massive expected increases to the cost of our education, you can contact them and let them know how you feel.

Well it’s starting to really heat up on the fee deregulation front. For those of you who don’t know what fee deregulation is, basically the cap on what universities can charge students has been liften, meaning it is now up to universities to decide what their fees are.

Last week, we saw the first cab off the rank, with the first university revealing what their new fees will be in a deregulated market. University of Western Australia (UWA) announced the maximum cost of a three year degree – a cool $48,000. This more than doubles the current cost of what some students are paying for their education.

But why is UWA’s decision so important to us?

They’re half a continent away, what could it possibly mean to us? Well, it’s an important university for us to keep an eye on. UWA is approximately the same size as our University in terms of student numbers, it has similar global rankings and is also a member of the elite research intensive universities, the Group of Eight. Whatever moves that university makes will be

There are also rallies happening across the country on October 16th, with thousands of students rallying for a fair education system.Keep your eyes out for those rallies, and come down to Adelaide’s National Day of Action.

Unaffordable education is a very bad thing for students. It makes students less likely to get a higher education, it can prevent you from being able to buy a home for yourself in the future, and it makes it especially hard on women who choose to start a family, who are prevented from working but continue to rack up massive debts.

It’s also interesting to note that this is an entirely different course of action to what most of our major competitors are doing around the world. The week our government decided to see how much money they could shake out of their students, Germany ended all student fees.

Now is your opportunity to fight for the education system you want.

glorious leaders

student representative column sophie wyk, SRC president

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As many of you would have heard (and may have read in Sam’s column), the Liberal government has recently proposed a set of cuts to higher education within their budget. As I am writing this, the legislation for higher education reforms has passed in the lower house and we can only hope that the senate will block this horrible policy. From the perspective of students and from the perspective of the future of this country, these cuts will be absolutely devastating to the state of our society.

One of the major issues with this budget is the proposition to cut even more public funding from universities, on top of what the Labor government has already cut in the past few years. When you also consider the increasing number of university students, this will have an enormous effect on the way that universities are run. At this University we have already seen cuts to tutorials, larger tutorial sizes, lack of money for casual tutors, a decreased level of feedback for assignments, and so much more.

If these are the issues we have already faced, we have to wonder – how much worse is it going to get now that even more money is being pulled out from under us?

Another part of this policy that will undoubtedly have huge impacts on students’ lives is the proposed change to deregulate university fees. Currently there is a cap on what Universities are allowed to charge for courses, which is a check on keeping Universities more accessible for people from a variety of backgrounds so that they can attend more based on their merit, as opposed to rich they are. With the deregulation of fees we face the possibility of an American-style two-tiered system, where the most prestigious universities are able to set the prices of courses at ridiculous levels that will leave students in crippling debt, whilst the less prestigious universities will face decreased value of their degrees as the gap between the resources of more and less prestigious universities is widened.

As students are facing an increasingly unstable future, where many are questioning their job prospects, their ability to buy a home, and their ability to not live on a week-by-week basis, the solution is not to make their future even more unstable by cutting money from a sector that benefits us all. Moreover, the impact this will have on whether or not someone from a low socio-economic background or someone from a rural area, or someone who is a single mother decides that the level of debt is just too much to bother to go to university, is something to be ashamed of. If we are truly a country that is interested in equality of opportunity, in fairness, then we should condemn these cuts and all the changes they will bring with them.

what’s on

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hey there, stranger.

On this page you’ll find all of the events, info, strange things people say sometimes, news, bake sales, pub crawls, tarp-surfing competitions and anything else you could possibly want to know about the University of Adelaide. Did we miss anything? Let us know at ondit@adelaide.edu.au.

textbooks Marksenfest What: The Student Co-op Bookshop When: 10am - 4pm Tuesdays and Thursdays Where: Level 4, 230 North Terrace

What: St Mark’s College’s German beer and cider themed festival When: 10am - 5pm, October 12th Where: St Mark’s College, Nth Adelaide

art adelaide uni e x h i b i t i o n s mech expo Bilingual exhibition of contemporary photographs of the Canadian Arctic.

When: Sept 20th - Oct 12th Where: South Australian Museum EDEN by Emma Hack When: Sept 18th - Nov 14th Where: Adelaide Town Hall Technicolour Dreaming byAmy McNamara When: Oct 16th - Nov 11th Where: Carclew Foyer Gallery

free brekky What: Weekly free breakfasts to keep our keen eyed students healthy and happy on campus.

When: Every Tuesday (excluding holidays), 8.30am – 10am Where: The Fix Lounge (next to Unibooks) Brought to you

by Student Care and the SRC.

What: The School of Mechanical Engineering presents its 20th annual Honours project exhibition, showcasing the knowledge and skills of more than 200 mechanical, aerospace, sustainable energy, sports and mechatronic engineering students.

When: 6pm - 9pm, October 29th and 10am - 4pm October 30th Where: Adelaide Convention Centre

uni bar Crooked Colours and Northeast Party House When: October 11th, 7pm Comeback Kid When: October 17th, 8pm Kingswood When: October 24th, 8pm Gossling When: November 8th, 8.30pm

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Ride2uni

AdLelaide Z o m b i e Wa l k

What: Ride2Work and Ride2Uni Day in the city.

There will be FREE breakfast and prizes!

When: 7-9am, October 15th Where: Hindmarsh Square More: www.bicyclenetwork. com.au/general/programs/996/

When: October 11th, 3pm 10.30pm Where: Meeting at Rymill Park for food and amusements, then walking through the city, and finally returning to Rymill Park for a zombie party.

Cost: Free

Brett Gooden The Friends of the University of Adelaide Library invite you to an event with Brett Gooden, titled The Development of the Spacesuit.

When: October 30th, 6pm Where: Ira Raymond Exhibition Room Cost: $5 More: www.adelaide.edu.au/library/ friends/Gooden.html

film festivals p o e t r y stress less day let uni stress get you down!

Transitions Film Festival p r i z e Don’t Come down to the lawns and enjoy a Australia’s largest sustainability film festival.

When: Oct 24th - Nov 16th Where: Mercury Cinema

Five Islands Press is delighted to announce its inaugural Poetry Prize!

The prize will be awarded to a single poem of up to 30 lines, and is open to anyone over the age of 18 years.

Japanese Film Festival - The largest Japanese film festival outside of Japan.

When: Oct 10th - Oct 19th Where: Mercury Cinema Feast Film Festival - South Australia’s largest LGBTIQ curated cultural festival When: Nov 15th -30th Where: CBD Metro and SA Regions

fa s h i o n Fashion Icons Where: Art Gallery of South Australia When: October 25th - February 15th Cost: $25 Adult, $20 Conc

the festival of

NO W Enlivening Rundle Park on World Mental Health Day When: October 10th, 11am Where: Rundle Park, Corner of East Terrace and Rundle Rd, Adelaide More: thenownow.net/ festival-2014/

Entry fee is $20 for the first poem and $10 for subsequent poems.

A shortlist of 4 poems will be posted on the FIP website and the winner will be announced on February 15th, 2015.

Enter by November 30th at fiveislandspress.com

chess in the hub The University of Adelaide Chess Club is hosting a massive chess day in the Hub! When: October 16th Who: Students of all skills & ages are welcome to play!

Adelaide fashion festival An iconic annual event, showcasing South Australia’s dynamic and innovative fashion industry.

When: October 17th to October 26th Where: Everywhere!

More: adelaidefashionfestival.com.au

petting zoo, bouncey castle, massages, manicure stalls, ice tea and much more!

And there’s no need to stress the wallet - it’s all completely free!

When: October 29th, 11am - 3pm Where: Barr Smith Lawns

yarn bombing

sturt Street Help yarn bomb the tree at 152 Sturt St When: October 20th -26th Where: Out the front of the new ‘Vietnamese Laundry Bar & Street Food’

cheese fest Australias biggest Cheese Festival.Q When: October 25th and 26th Where: Rymill Park, Adelaide Cost: $15 More: http://cheesefest.com.au/

you had me at hello.

Email: ondit@adelaide.edu.au Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onditmagazine Twitter: @onditmagazine Instagram: @onditmag Snail Mail: On Dit, c/o Adelaide University Union, Level 4 Union House, University of Adelaide, 5005 In Real Life: Pop into our office on the West side of the Barr Smith Lawns. Yep, you’ll have to walk down those gloomy looking stairs. Sorry.

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vox pop 12

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wan li // masters accounting & marketing

mengjie // alumni economics

jo // alumni magic

1. A foodcourt.

1. I’ve never bought one.

1. Lucky Lupitas.

2. Best: Provides residents with good environment and food.

Worst: Increase university course tuition.

2. Don’t know.

2. Worst: Human rights abuses.

Best: Leaders to make fun of.

3. I don’t know.

4. Haven’t heard it.

5. Good. Safe. Clean.

6. Today is hard, tomorrow is difficult, but the after tomorrow is perfect.

3. No! 4. Great!

5. I love it!

6. Get out of water :)

3. I’d like to think I wasn’t.

4. Haven’t watched it, but all of my friends said it was brilliant, and I trust their judgement.

5. One without idiots.

6. Stay underwater.

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On Dit popped these students’ voxes and asked: 1. Best place to buy a burrito?

2. Best and worst things about our government?

3. Were you an accident?

4. What did you think of Emma Watson’s UN Women speech?

5. Sum up the world in which you live right now in 3 words.

6. If you could give a fish one piece of advice, what would it be?

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chloe // 4th year

Sorubini // 1st year commerce

bill // 5th year medicine

1. Zambreros!

1. Zambreros.

1. Don’t eat ‘em.

2. Best: Our freedom to vote.

Worst: Too many people not doing actually that much.

2. Best: Cities are kept clean and user friendly.

Worst: Education system and refugees.

2. Best: Abbott.

Worst: Nothing really.

3. Nope. :)

4. Didn’t hear it...

4. She’s awesome. Salute her!

5. Not so good.

5. It’s awesome. Yeah.

6. Don’t drown.

bca

3. Haha... I wish. I was a surprise?

4. Who run the world? Girls!

5. Creative. Inspiring. Changing.

6. Enjoy these short seconds of memory you have, Goldie! ...Wait, is it a goldfish?

6. Live life for this moment, I mean for now. Don’t think about the future.

3. Good question?

feature

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SAY WHAT?

In defence of left wing transgender vegan feminists words by alyona haines art by anthony nocera

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ith student elections out of the way, after the feelings of exhaustion, annoyance and certain other descriptive expletive words I shall refrain from using, we can now sit back and assess the train wreck that was election week.

This year, all parties’ campaign promises focused on the same issue – the relevance of student politics and student media to actual students’ needs. And lo and behold, for some parties more than others, this angle worked spectacularly well. But while the notion of ‘relevancy’ was repeated almost as many times as ‘axe the tax’ and ‘stop the boats’, what does it actually mean? I guess we’ll find out next year, but to occupy us in the meantime, some harmless pondering is in order.

One of the most outrageous accusations making circles through election crowds was

that student media caters only for left wing transgender vegan feminists (#crushtheleft), and that it’s not actually relevant to students. Now, myself being at least a couple of those things, this was an unpleasant yet tiny hit to my ego. So let’s break it down, shall we?

Left Wing

Yes yes, I know, you’re probably tired of hearing about the unruly left.

But whether you like it or not, ‘left’ leaning students constitute a large proportion of the students at the university. Simply discarding their opinion because they are the opposition, or because there is a perceived over representation of left students in student politics is nonsensical.

Slogans such as the above mentioned #crushtheleft, or hate achieve nothing. First of all, being on the left (left or right faction be damned) or the right is being on a spectrum, which is not necessarily a definitive right or wrong

kind of thing. Many students who identify as left are more socially and economically conservative than those who identify as being on the right, and visa versa.

Secondly, mere over representation of one community in a particular sphere does not in itself constitute a basis for censorship. If students from one side of the political spectrum choose to contribute more to a particular medium, it does not mean that the other side is being silenced.

What this can mean, however, is one of two things. It’s either the other side is apathetic or indifferent about participating in that particular medium, or they want to save up their whinging about their underrepresentation in media until election week. But feel free to make up your own mind about that.

Transgender

Not being a transgender person myself, I’m probably not the best authority here. That said, any

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rational person should be able to imagine that being placed in an ‘irrelevant’ category based on your identity and/or sexual orientation is insulting.

Transgender people face enough stigma and discrimination on a daily basis, they do not need to be used as an ‘illustration’ of leftist agenda and piled into the ‘do not care’ basket.

Some might argue that being transgender makes you a very small minority and therefore being not relevant to overall university life.

But here’s the thing, university is an educational institution. And those of us who pay attention to the surrounding world will notice that some people suffer more than others, and we might, just might, leave university with a better sense of social responsibility. So if putting minority issues such as issues of transgender people makes at least one person more aware of the struggles faced by others, then perhaps it is relevant to student interests and their life education.

Vegan

Unlike identity and sexuality, being vegan is indeed a choice. What makes it different from choosing to wear one pair of jeans over another, is the amount of thought that goes into it. People who choose to eat vegan don’t do it because it’s delicious (it really really isn’t), they do it for a vast array of reasons, all of which deserve discussion.

There is the obvious argument of animal rights and whether or not animals are persons rather than simply sentient beings. Prominent philosophers such as Peter Singer have long been arguing the immorality of killing other species. If we are the master race with infinite intellectual capability, surely we can find a way to stop relying on the suffering of others for our own gastronomic pleasure?

Others choose to be vegan because they realise that meat is unsustainable. It takes a lot of feed and energy to raise one animal, and the nutritional output of that one animal

does not represent the amount of actual food that went into it. It is inefficient, and there are simply not enough resources to accommodate all of us eating meat all the time.

And then there is me, who is fully aware of these arguments yet I still eat meat. Why? Maybe I’ll write another article about that sometime later, the point here is that being unaware and unable to discuss issues such as this can render you a less functioning member of society.

You’re paying big money to get educated, so here’s a wild idea – get educated in areas other than your speciality. Next time you’re having dinner with vegans rather than talking about them behind their backs, you can openly challenge and discuss their views.

Feminists

This one really got my lady knickers tied in a knot. Feminism not relevant to student interests? Oh gosh, it only affects at least half the student population, how could it possibly be relevant?

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Here is how it is relevant - there is still widespread discrimination against women everywhere, full stop. Women are less likely to gain employment in high end positions and less likely to have fair salaries, despite being equally qualified.

There are still very strong stereotypes about women which exist in workplaces, regardless of whether you believe it or not. Women are either perceived as less able, or as a potential liability simply because they possess a uterus.

Sexual harassment, assault, and domestic violence are rife.

Prosecution rates for such things are pathetically low. Rape culture and female objectification are all around us, including in student life.

Young students are only just starting to learn about these things, and in no way should we be shutting out the conversation.

Feminism has become a dirty word, because its understanding has been distorted over time. Here’s what it’s about – it’s about equality. And no, we can’t call it ‘people ism’ or whatever rubbish people say these days. You can’t fix inequality by giving the same amount of attention to the unequal and the privileged. It’s called feminism because it focusses on women, because we need to focus on women. Once women stop being objectified, once women are able to

gain employment without discrimination, once they stop being stigmatised for their ability to bear a child, once rape and sexual violence stops being downplayed, maybe then we can all hold hands and focus on discrimination and abuse of both sexes equally. Until that day, we’ll be called feminists, thank you very much.

Here’s the thing about all of these ‘minority groups’ – all together they make up the majority of the population. Most people have defining differences, it’s what makes them interesting.

Very few are able to truly empathise, it is incredibly difficult to fully feel what a person with fundamental dissimilarities might feel. It is especially difficult when you deliberately try to shut off those who challenge your ideals.

This is why we write, and we hold events, and we organise social media campaigns about these alleged minorities – to educate people of the complexities of our world. A world which is home to a kaleidoscope of personalities and struggles. All of these issues are relevant to students, because students are just a subset of a very colourful population called humanity.

Alyona Haines is a left wing bisexual meat eating feminist hippie.

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WORLD DU JOUR:

roleplay, storytelling and communities

words by justin mcarthur art by jack lowe

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alf of the elevators are broken, level 4 belongs to the iguanas, and level 83 is home to Fort Scion, the blanket fort armed and defended by kids left behind after the fiasco of this year’s ‘Bring Your Child To Work Day’. Welcome to Stackswell & Co – we shift units!

Stackswell is the fictional business at the heart of Generic Office Roleplay, a Facebook page that

seeks to replicate the banal environment of a 1990s office. Through generic email signatures, WordArt, and a building with a seemingly limitless number of floors, GOR mostly revels in unwieldy corporate jargon – that, and the promotion of synergetically maximised workflow!

relatively organic gamespace, an electronic table upon which collaborative storytelling can flourish, and Facebook users, being already adept at using Likes to reinforce ‘proper’ use of broader Facebook tools, have an effective method to reward good storytelling.

Amongst other things, Generic Office Roleplay gives an excellent example of innovative media interaction. Facebook pages provide a

But is GOR really ‘roleplay’? Also, what the hell is ‘roleplay’?

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ROLEPLAY & MAKING BELIEVE

In a very general sense, everyone plays roles – we present different facades at different times to please different people, and indeed to please ourselves. To quote Kurt Vonnegut: ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’

Which is all very well and good, but doesn’t really drive at the core of ‘roleplaying’, as it’s generally conceived.

After all, in this Vonnegutian sense, poker, chess and Cheat are all ‘roleplaying’ games – they are, at least in part, about bluffing opponents, and some of the more serious players take on a different character for the purpose of the game. For example, a significant percentage of online poker players pretend to be a different gender in order to obfuscate their style of play. But even with all this pretension, a player in a non-roleplaying game is still fundamentally playing as themselves; the game is understood to be, conceptually, taking place in the same space as the player; and though the games attribute value to certain kinds of play over others (for example, by establishing ‘win-states’ – the circumstances under which the game is won or lost), the value attributed is not connected with an overarching narrative that guides and contextualises future gameplay.

When you play poker, even when playing with the same people week-to-week, you don’t really end up with a story – just a series

of anecdotes, and perhaps a somewhat emptier wallet.

These often-collaborative story elements tie together games that contain roleplaying, and this has proven so important to gaming that much of the video gaming industry can be considered a roleplaying industry.

Though fantasy and sci-fi games are still most readily considered ‘RPGs’ (computerised roleplaying games), roleplaying is a key part of everything from Grand Theft Auto to Pokemon, from Halo to Minecraft, from Zelda to Skyrim.

After all, all of these games encourage players to represent themselves as characters, and to make choices, in the context of those characters, that lead them to discover narratives (whether those narratives are scripted by the makers of the game, as in Pokemon, or emergent through open-world play, like in GTA). Most directly, ‘tabletop’ or ‘pen-and-paper’ roleplaying games can be seen as influences for massive, multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like Runescape or World of Warcraft, which essentially attempt to automate the dynamics of traditional tabletop play.

A narrative revolution in gaming is largely owed to these tabletop roleplaying games. The first commercial roleplaying game (or at least, the first to be called such) was a 1974 game called Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, which I play and will therefore proceed to nerd out about for the next several paragraphs.

(Don’t worry, D&D players include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stephen Colbert, Dame Judy Dench and

Vin Diesel , so it’s probably a cool thing that cool people do. But even if you decide to skip the next several nerdy paragraphs, please take a moment to imagine those three guys sitting down to play a tabletop game together.

Anyway, onwards.)

THE NEXT SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS

What helped D&D to stand out against other games of the time is that it focused on building individual characters, rather than on wider battlefield strategy. Directly taking inspiration from Tolkien’s creatures, landscapes and character-based stories of Middle-earth, D&D redistributed the statistical focus of military strategy games to allow for a collaborative, yet individualistic, strategic gamespace.

But D&D was not just a game of numbers and dice. Most importantly, D&D took the storytelling of children – that inherently youthful capacity to ‘make believe’ that astounds even adults – and gave it the structural integrity to make it worthy of those with an extended attention span. Though the game allows for improvisation, it is remarkably fair to its players, by restricting the likelihood that certain actions will be successful – every character will have different skills, but it is universally unlikely, for example, that a player without any diplomatic ability will successfully convince an angry dragon to turn around and walk away. The commonality of the rules leads to a common experience of the game world, and the game orchestrator, or Dungeon Master, has lasting control over the gamespace. It is

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the DM’s job to officiate these rules, in order to preserve the reality of the artificial world. (And no, for the last time, ‘Dungeon Master’ is not a sex thing.)

Take chess, and now think of yourself as one of the pawns, with individual strengths and motivations. You’re up against the king, and you only have three other pawn buddies alongside you. What do you do? Do you run in and try to push a bookcase on top of him? Do you try to do a double backflip, vault over the enemy defense, and behead the king with a 720-degree facial tornado kick? Are you that jerk that always tries to convince the king to be your friend?

D&D is at its strongest when it is a game about characters and their interactions. Even the elements it borrows from its predecessors – military strategy and battlefield micromanagement – are reframed as choices about character interactions, whether compassionate or spiteful. Decisions are rarely made based on the numbers alone; rather, snap decisions require players to understand and define the motivations of their character, and often, to play favourites amongst one’s friends. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that tensions can sometimes run high within adventuring parties that have wandered for while. But then again, if you’re whacking a bunch of nerds together in a room, what do you expect?

We are yet to see a computer game that can match the storytelling capacity of an improvisational tabletop game like D&D, and it is unlikely that we ever will.

The rules of a computer game, by their very nature, are programmed before the game is played, and so

if the programmer didn’t consider a course of action, you can’t do it – the frog from Frogger can’t hijack one of the cars and use it to run over the snake. Yet in pen-and-paper gaming, this kind of goofing off can make or break a game. And so, in turn, characters are never fully formed, because the resident showrunner can change the story on the fly to present new challenges and teach new lessons.

OH YEAH, WE WERE DISCUSSING SYNERGY

Some might consider Generic Office Roleplay a good case study in these kinds of emergent narratives – these people might argue that, through user engagement, it responds to the narratives people want to tell and sidelines stories that aren’t as interesting to the group as a whole, giving the overarching narrative a sense of direction. This user feedback response explains how micromemes continue to be formed within the page: oft-repeated ideas like WordArt, and iguanas, and even the company motto itself, ‘We Shift Units’, were all at one point part of popular posts on the page. The format lends itself to collaborative storytelling in interesting ways, and this certainly is a part of its success.

Yet others might question whether Generic Office Roleplay is a good example of ‘roleplaying’ – there are certainly different characters that arise in the context of the gamespace, but the focus is more on the story itself than on the escapism of individual characters, and this limits the significance of individual roles as they are played. One of the strengths of tabletop roleplaying games and

online RPGs alike is the capacity for people to invest time and energy in a vivid alter ego that inhabits the space, and yet the crowd interactions in Generic Office Roleplay rarely reward efforts to tell personal stories. Perhaps this is why Generic Office Roleplay hasn’t really held onto a single base of regular active participants, but rather seems to rotate through different social groups in order to maintain its buzz of activity. Its systems reinforce interesting stories, but these stories aren’t necessarily ones in which its users are invested enough to be truly creative, to evolve and innovate and challenge, and process their own thoughts and emotions.

Like them or loathe them, roleplaying games like D&D and World of Warcraft help their players exorcise real life demons, deal with real stress, and even respond to complex emotional issues. They help people to create lively, breathing characters, and explore impossible situations. Maybe most importantly of all, they’re really fun. And in a world that, ironically, probably contains more warcraft than Azeroth, there’s a lot to be gained from a little bit of roleplay escapism.

Best, Justin (aged 21) Ambassador to Fort Scion on Level 83 Contact: The Vents, level 81 allhailscion@stackswell.net ___________________ Stay green, read on the screen!

When not writing under the non de plume ‘Justin’, half-elf paladin Dr. Stephen Thompson is known for his spiritualism and poetry.

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accio women’s rights The United Nation’s report on sexual and domestic violence shows some disturbing findings.

‘It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict. There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power.’

This quote is from award

winning actress and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Angelina Jolie at the recent Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict.

She went on to say that the international community is responsible for shattering the culture of impunity and making justice the norm for survivors of sexual violence.

The conference was co-hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague in June and it recognized that for too long the perpetrators of rape and sexual violence in conflict have not been held accountable, with their crimes leaving communities devastated. The statement of action released by the conference says that ‘every individual has a moral responsibility to speak out – locally, nationally and globally – to demand a change in how the world perceives and responds to these crimes. We owe it to future generations to end one of the greatest injustices of our time.’

This conference is just one of many campaigns, reports and speeches on the issue of violence against women and children in recent months. Most recently actress Emma Watson launched UN Women’s HeForShe campaign, which promotes gender equality. The campaign describes itself as a ‘solidarity movement for gender equality that brings together one half of humanity in support of the other (half) of humanity.’ The campaign asks men to commit to take action against violence and discrimination faced by women and girls. In her speech, Watson encouraged men to also take a stand, saying, ‘I want men to take up this mantle. So their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice, but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too.’

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The HeForShe campaign has faced some criticism, including from popular writer and feminist {Eds: and On Dit editor in 2005!} Clementine Ford. She was critical of the campaign for its focus on the impact gender inequality has on men and the lack of acknowledgement that men are also the beneficiaries of patriarchal structures within our society. Despite this criticism, there is no doubt that the campaign has garnered international media attention and put the spotlight on gender inequality.

Thanks to campaigns such as these and celebrity attention we have all heard that violence against women is a problem. Even our Prime Minister (who is also the Minister responsible for women’s policies and programs) is a White Ribbon Ambassador. But just how bad have things become?

The 2013 National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey was recently released

by VicHealth and it showed some shocking statistics. For example, 38% of Australians believe that often women who say they were raped led the man on and later had regrets. 19% say that if a woman who is raped is drunk or affected by drugs she is at least partly responsible and 21% believe domestic violence can be excused if the violent person regrets it.

There were some encouraging results from the report, which show that community attitudes are improving in specific areas.

For example, 96% of Australians now believe domestic violence

is a criminal offence. This figure has risen from 93% in 1995. Only 4% to 6% of Australians believe that violence against women can be justified. It was also shown that young men and people aged 16-25 are more likely to endorse attitudes that are supportive of violence, and are less likely to understand what constitutes violence against women.

There has been improvement in this area since 2010, with 10% less young men holding attitudes that support violence against women. But even with these improvements, it is still an overwhelmingly grim report.

The authors of the report say that our attitudes to violence against women are important because they influence how we respond to violence. Our attitudes also help to determine what we think is acceptable behaviour.

So how do these views compare to reported incidents of violence against women? White Ribbon, a national organisation that campaigns to end violence against women, says that between one quarter and one third of Australian women will experience violence by a man during their lifetime. A current or former partner kills one woman every week in Australia. In any given year, between five and ten per cent of women will experience physical or sexual violence by a man.

This is not a problem that is limited to Australia. A paper recently released by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre found that during their lifetime thirty percent of women worldwide will experience some form of intimate partner violence.

While the paper estimates that only 16% of homicide victims are female, 43% of female victims were killed by a current or former

intimate partner. They estimate that the cost of female homicides comes to $105 billion per year.

Perhaps a more surprising finding in the report by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre is that the cost of interpersonal violence is more than six times higher than the cost of civil war violence, sitting at two percent of global GDP. So in addition to the personal pain and suffering that violence against women causes, it also has a huge economic cost. Given that campaigns have so far failed to end or significantly reduce violence against women, it will be interesting to see if these economic figures are used as a new tactic to attempt to bring some change in this area.

On a national level, the National Council to Reduce Violence Against Women and Children estimated that in 2009 the cost to the Australian economy of violence against women and children was $13.6 billion. Perhaps more worrying than the economic cost, though, is the emotional and physical toll that violence takes on women. The National Council to Reduce Violence Against Women and Children found that some of the main economic costs came from the depression, anxiety, suicide, alcohol and drug use and physical injuries that resulted from violence against women. It is important to remember that these factors all have a significant impact on the victims in their own right, without taking their economic cost into account.

Violence Against Children

Violence against children is also a growing area of concern, with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently releasing a report on this issue. The report, Hidden in Plain Sight, found that in 2012 the deaths of 95,000 children worldwide were caused by homicide. About 70% of these victims were reportedly boys and

flickr.com/foreignoffice

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the statistics

30% girls. Male victims were more likely to be killed by strangers, whereas 47% of the female victims were killed by family members or intimate partners.

UNICEF found that the level of violence experienced by girls varied widely, with the highest incidences being in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea, where over 40% of girls experienced violence since age 15. Parents and caregivers are cited as the most common perpetrators of violence against girls.

Around four in five children between the ages of two and fourteen are subjected to violent discipline.

Disturbingly high levels of sexual violence were also noted, with 12% of girls aged 15 to 19 reporting that they had been exposed to sexual violence within the last year. The perpetrators of sexual violence against girls were reported to mostly be intimate partners, with relatively few perpetrators being fathers, teachers, employers, religious leaders, police, soldiers or strangers. In comparison, boys who experienced sexual violence reported that the most common

perpetrators were strangers.

Violence against children is particularly concerning because of the consequences it can have throughout their lifetimes. For example, children who experience violence are more likely to have mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, to have lower educational aspirations, to have periods of unemployment and to live below the poverty line. In addition, they face greater risks of physical injury due to the violence.

What you can do

If you want to take action to prevent violence against women and children, and promote gender equality, there are a diverse range of organisations and campaigns that work on these issues. Some examples include the Central Domestic Violence Service, White Ribbon, HeForShe campaign, the One in Three campaign, Plan and the Foundation to Prevent Violence Against Women and their Children.

There are many more out there, so do some research and find a campaign or organization that aligns with your views, and sign up to help out.

Tali has completed a Bachelor of International Studies and is currently in the final year of a law degree.

• 9% of Australians believe that a woman cannot be raped by someone she is in a sexual relationship with.

• 22% believe that domestic violence can be excused if people get so angry they lose control.

• Most people no longer believe that domestic violence is a private matter that should be handled within the family and they recognise that women should not stay in a violent relationship to preserve the family unit.

• Reported cases of sexual violence cost $67 billion per year, or 0.08 per cent of global GDP. This is a conservative figure, as cases of sexual violence are often not reported.

• One in five adolescent girls who reported sexual violence said it occurred for the first time between the ages of 10 and 14, while the majority of girls first experienced sexual violence between the ages of 15 and 19.

• Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to specific forms of physical violence such as forced sterilization.

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featured artist

carly

harvy I am in my third year of studying Chemical Engineering and Physics.

I primarily paint portraits of my friends and family, in bold tropical oil paints. In my paintings I try to capture an element of the sitter’s personality that might be unfamiliar to them or how other people perceive them.

Recently I’ve been drawn to expressing a person’s cultural/familiar history and how it has been incorporated into their daily life and in modern society.

I like the surface of my paintings to be tactile, by sculpting the oil paint on the canvas.

I am inspired by filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Miranda July for their incredible imagery. I’m also inspired by painters like Ben Quilty, Abbey McCulloch and Abdul Abdullah that push portrait painting and colours to the extreme.

Bill Murray is my hero (isn’t he everyone’s hero?).

When I’m not painting I like spending my time going to music festivals, trying to cook edible food and to not kill my house plants.

To see more of my work go to www. daisy-gold-art.tumblr.com, or www. carlyharvy.carbonmade.com and I am open to commissions.

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To see these artworks in all their splendid technicolour beauty, go to auu.org.au/Blogs. Carly’s work is also featured on the front and inside front covers of this issue.

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thetheborgias & beautiful

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words by Luca Ricci art by Jack Lowe

W

hen one of our peers mentions the Renaissance, most of us probably think of lively paintings, silky dresses and awkward music. Someone might call it boring. Someone else might comment on how daunting it would be to live in an era in which Christian morality governs almost every facet of public and private life. However, if we take a moment to stop and think about life during the Renaissance, it may not be as boring as it first seems.

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that began in Italy in the late middle ages, spreading throughout Europe till the 17th century. The term Renaissance comes from the Italian term Rinascimento, meaning “rebirth”.

The Renaissance was thought to be a rebirth from the backwardness and superstition of the medieval world, and Europe saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits. But what was this foreign, historical period of social and political upheaval really like to live in?

Hold on to your hosen, readers, and I will try to bring those obscure and distant Renaissance characters to the modern world. I will describe how we can imagine life in the Renaissance as very complex soap operas. Suspense, intrigues, betrayals and murder are elements common not only to the most fervid imagination of soap opera writers, but also to the minds and lives of the Renaissance.

The soap opera that was the Renaissance wasn’t just about the rich. Lucrezia Borgia is not the only rich lady who led an intriguing life (marrying thrice and even becoming pope for a while, if the rumours are to be believed). When we immerse ourselves in the lives of the normal people, we can see the daily struggle to survive, but that isn’t the only drama. Life was not an easy place for the common person during the Renaissance, but they always had the latest gossip about the priests’ sexual adventures and the imminent end of the world, or the threat of neighbours (generally female) who could become a most dangerous witch.

Finally, we will conclude our fictitious voyage in the world of art, which still attracts many of us today to the several museums to stare at the marvellous depiction of semi-naked nymphs or drunken satires.

A GLASS OF WINE WITH THE BORGIA Despite living 400 years after the Borgia’s, the homonymous painting by John Collier offers the best example of the most posh and theatrical family of the Italian Renaissance. They’re your typical Bold and the Beautiful family: an old father, whose name is Rodrigo, and two children, respectively Cesaré and Lucrezia. What makes them so special? Well, firstly, Rodrigo was one of the most prominent figures of his era: he was a pope.

Known as Alexander VI, he held one of the most prestigious CEO positions of the Renaissance. He not only had a huge quantity of money at his disposal (art lovers have him to thank for some of the

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dramatic renaissance and the force of soap opera

best collections of artwork in the world), but he was also known for his numerous affairs.

Rodrigo’s son Cesaré was a bit more ambitious than his father. Despite his father making him a cardinal at a very young age, he also took the chance of a more secular office.

The dilemma of juggling two jobs is much older than one would think!

In fact, although most would have simply contented themselves with a bureaucratic job, Cesaré decided to start his own little kingdom.

Assassin’s Creed was not all that wrong, was it? Of course he didn’t act alone. In fact, Daddy was always supporting him in his territorial expansion. And, as it usually happens, as soon as Rodrigo died, Cesaré started tumbling after him until he was killed in an ambush.

Every family has their black sheep. For the Borgias, the black sheep was Rodrigo’s daughter, Lucrezia. Lucrezia certainly did not conform to the ‘normal’ practices of a Renaissance lady. I’m sure that replacing your father as Pontiff

cannot be seen as an acceptable action in the customary sphere. She may have been a great controversial lady of the Renaissance soap opera, but she was also deeply involved in the political machinations of her father’s reign. As much as historians like to think that she was a lascivious figure, we must also remember that she was an intelligent character who knew how to take advantage of the political situation. The House of Borgia had all the drama you want from a Renaissance soap opera about one of the most powerful families in Europe: wars, intrigues and fights to the last breath were commonplace to the rich and famous. Nevertheless, this does not mean that common people were not enjoying the dramatic features of soap operas in their smaller realities.

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES: SEASON OF THE WITCH As much as one might think that the Renaissance was a period of incredible scientific enlightenment, we must not forget that it was not

so in the more isolated areas. If you think you have problems with your social group, try and imagine what a poor villager from the Renaissance went through if she (it was usually a she) didn’t fit in.

It all begins when the old woman of the village becomes a burden.

Perhaps she doesn’t contribute to the local economy anymore, or she might just be disliked. Like Brooke Logan in Bold and the Beautiful, Renaissance women were also demonised and outcast from society on a whim. Unlike Bold and the Beautiful, however, the second part of the Renaissance story usually involves the charge of sorcery. You didn’t even have to be caught in the act to be accused of witchcraft. Most cases of witchcraft were prosecuted many years (10 or more) after the supernatural event was alleged to have occurred, and, as exciting as it is, generally included a cow which had stopped producing milk.

It’s safe to assume that most people enjoyed watching the process of conviction, as much as we now

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enjoy watching sports. Although, I hope I am right when I say that football does not entail severe tortures nor death at the stake. Sentencing served as a social performance in much the same way as Saddam Hussein’s execution video. Of course, whereas the authorities probably thought of public punishment as an admonition for the rest of society, attendants were likely enticed by other elements.

Gore, burning flesh, the display of pain – humans turned these charming incidents into leisurely pastimes early on in their history.

One certainty is that witches provided a means through which people rendered their lives more fascinating and spicy.

When you live in a village with a tiny population of 150 people, someone with supernatural powers is bound to influence your life in some way, and possibly the productivity of your cows. You’ll want to do everything you can to keep Bessie safe. As naïve as this may seem to us nowadays, this intrigue and fear was at the heart of village life.

THE CULT OF APPEARANCE AND METAMORPHOSIS It’s impossible to talk about drama in rural life during the Renaissance without talking about religion.

As we’ve seen before, the rural areas were the stage for spiritual manifestation and dramatic appearance. The celebration of Catholic Mass was attacked by Protestants as being baroque, full of rites, and thus too theatrical. Think about the physical appearance and scenic movements involved in traditional Catholic rituals.

Firstly, the people attending Mass were presented with a priest who would don an incredibly varied set of garments. Despite having a theological meaning (which wasn’t probably understood by the average person at the time), the priest’s sartorial display was probably perceived as a multicolour costume. Now imagine someone wearing colourful clothes and muttering in an unknown language (Latin). Mass involved a series of complex moves in which you were required to take part. The

whole focus of this ritual was the transubstantiation (complex term, I know), through which bread and wine became the flesh and blood of Christ. In the eyes of the average person, there was no difference between this “legal” miracle and the magical manifestation of witches. Thus, even in the actual Mass, we can see how people in the Renaissance were surrounded by theatricality and drama.

RENAISSANCE, BODY AND THE MAKING OF MANKIND Every year, thousands of us are attracted to the most famous museums in Europe (like the Vatican Museums or the Uffizi Gallery) to appreciate the works of the best painters of the Renaissance. They used painting as a means to express themselves and the society in which they lived. It is not surprising, then, to see how, even in their artworks, the authors included many of the dramatic aspects which characterised the Renaissance.

One of the best examples is provided by Botticelli in his

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Primavera (Springtime). Primavera is often considered to be one of the most controversial and popular paintings of the Renaissance, and depicts a group of mythological figures in a garden. Spring stands in the centre, represented by a youthful girl in her prime. We can see here how much attention was paid to displaying the perfect body.

The body was so fundamental during the Renaissance that most pictorial and sculptural representations involve nude characters: David by Michelangelo, The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo.

Even the Sistine Chapel had nude figures before the pope asked Michelangelo to cover all the naked bodies (he wasn’t as keen on nudes as Alexander VI).

Our relationship with the naked body today is as complex as ever, but the importance placed on achieving the ‘perfect’ body remains the same, only the qualities that determine perfection have changed.

As citizens of the Renaissance had paintings to give them physical ideals to aspire to, we have television (including soap operas) and mass media to promote the cult of the perfect body.

REBIRTH The Renaissance we’ve been discussing is, of course, not the only time a culture has experienced a ‘rebirth’ of sorts. Historians now also discuss the Bengal, Tamil, Harlem and al-Nahda Renaissances. Cultures the world over revolutionise themselves for different reasons at different points in history. Who knows, future historians may talk about our ‘Global Renaissance’ in coming centuries.

Luckily for them, we’ve already given them soap operas to compare our lives to.

Luca is a student of classics and history. He spends most of his summer holidays roaming across his beloved Italian countryside looking for archaeological sites to visit.

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the next big thing to come out of the university of adelaide

(of the luscious lead vocals), Benny and Oli (the beatmaking wunderkids), spend their days writing essays, banging their heads in frustration at group assignments and drinking copious amounts of bad campus coffee, just like us.

delaide is an ever-growing jungle of innocuous jamborees. Even the somewhat newly instated 3am venue lockouts can’t entirely silence the live music scene in our state. Recently, the “quiet” city has g ained momentum as a forefront exporter of high quality music acts, with the result being that many of the coolest up and coming acts from around Australia, like Rüfus and Tkay Maidza and The Kite String Tangle, have flocked to out boarders to put on massive shows with our very best exports on support.

Though the trio have only been a thing for just over a year, they got noticed pretty damn quick. In just April of this year, Australian radio bigwig, Triple J, hand picked them to play at the iconic Australian music festival, Groovin The Moo. From there, they went on to support the likes of Bonobo, North East Party House, Yacht, Giraffage, Classixx, Rüfüs, Kilter and The Kite String Tangle. Oh, and then played at this year’s Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay. So what are you doing with your life?

And which local band is currently making huge waves around the Australian music scene? Flamingo.

The electronic three piece, known for their lush brand of alternate electronica and sultry vocals, are comprised of three young uni students, two of which are studying at our very own institution. Yep, Kacee

Their successes haven’t come without a decent amount of hard work though. While we’re curled up in bed watching GoT or sipping vodka raspberries out in da clerb, these guys are the dudes mixing the tapes and stacking the decks at the coolest venues (like Rocket Bar, duh) and performing sold-out shows.

A

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FLAMINGO words by jennifer nguyen

Without question, we can all agree that rock n’ roll lifestyle can result in slow burning mornings the day after. The real challenge for students leading the double life (actually, just students generally) is writing last minute assignments for submission later that evening.

Flamingo’s latest single is coincidently titled ‘Slow Burning’ (which, might I add, has already accumulated more than 20,000 SoundCloud plays and counting). I asked how this soul-warming tune came together.

‘We wrote the song in one day and finished it the next.

It was a bit of a creativity steam release for us. We were jamming and we enjoyed it and we felt like it needed to be put out there. Usually we like to methodically calculate things and plan for releases. But we had the song there and decided one afternoon “let’s just release this tonight”’.

This certainly isn’t the only Flamingo approach to writing songs. The writing processes for their debut EP, Heavy Steps, was a cautious process, which helped the band define their sound. Oli credits the success to his kickass work ethic: ‘when something needs

to be done, I can get it done’. (Fun fact: Oli actually mixed and mastered ‘Slow Burning’ in 10 minutes using an analogue 8 channel mixer.) Commitment is also a trait these boys have down pat. The boys are committed to completing their degrees and say that they ‘could never let themselves drop out,’ though wouldn’t rule out deferring to do more touring. A law student, Oli tells me that getting through the arduous amounts of readings and finding time to be involved in music is a feat that requires a dogmatic approach to organisation. Well, that, and the wonders of the World Wide Web. Apparently ‘increased access to information’ has helped him balance his passions.

Who would have thought?!

The band have just finished their tour supporting The Kite String Tangle, and say it’s been an incredibly exhilarating experience performing with them. The tour has been somewhat of a safety net for the new band, as ‘every show was sold out well in advance, so there was no worrying about how busy it was going to be, we just had to rock up and give it our absolute best.’ There’d be no fear of an empty crowd there.

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Of their (so far) short but very sweet musical journey, the Flamingo lads tell me that the best thing about it has been experiencing all of it together as a band.

That, and getting paid to do what they love. And having fans sing back their lyrics. And meeting like-minded musicians. And having conversations with fans, which they say to be a ‘very humbling experience’. Alright, there have been a lot of great things. Let’s leave it at that.

What’s next for uprising band? New music in the ‘not too distant future’ and some new music projects with Young Muscle and Jupiter Clique, that’s what. But right this moment (or should I say, semester), they plan on knuckling down for their upcoming final year assessments. Same.

In the mean time, the boys have made On Dit readers an epic mixtape to get us through the end of year blues.

Talented and kind, these guys couldn’t tick any more boxes if they tried*.

IMAGES: FACEBOOK.COM/FLAMINGOAUS

Mixtape ‘Bank Head’ – Kelela ‘Everytime I Go Inside Out’ – Andras & Oscar ‘Tirzah Don’t You Mind’ – Thrupence ‘Biggest Joke Of All’ – Fatima ‘Playground’ – Lxury ‘Test & Recognise’ – Seekae ‘A Tasty Little Fruit’ – Mic Mills ‘Words’ – The Kite String Tangle

*Yes they could, and they have. The above QR Code leads readers to a free download of their EP, Heavy Steps.

Jenny is a super babe who wears cat ears and flower crowns like there ain’t no judgement or ill thought in this world. She is a true Queen.

She also often buys people tea and lip balm.

Why? I already told you. She’s a Queen.

science

Fish have

ears

?

Lauren Fuge visits the marine biology lab art by chih-yi hsiao images by gretchen grammer

‘T

‘You can actually identify fish – definitely to genus and sometimes to species – based on their otoliths,’ Grammer explains. ‘If you can differentiate based on otoliths, you can tell where those fish came from, without having to do genetic analysis.’

When I ask how they form, she explains that ‘otoliths are accretionary like the rings in a tree. As the tree grows, it adds on more cells. The otolith isn’t actually cellular, though, it’s more like a stone. It’s calcium carbonate, like coral.’

Over a fish’s lifetime, calcium carbonate and trace metals are layered over the top of a protein skeleton, one ring for each year. These layers are the reason why otoliths are so integral to ecological research: they can tell the story of a fish’s life.

The growth rate and chemical composition of each ring changes according to different environmental factors, so each ring locks in information about the fish’s environment at a specific time. Just from this one tiny bone, researchers can figure out where the fish lived, the water temperature and salinity, and generally what its environment was like. Each concentric circle is like a chemical fingerprint of that fish’s year.

his is what an otolith looks like up close,’ researcher Dr. Chris Izzo tells me, turning the computer monitor around. The blown-up image looks like a broken fragment of shell, with distinctive lines curving through it to form bands. Tiny text annotates each one, and a red line has been drawn straight through them.

But how do you extract all this information from a bone?

To get a pretty picture like the one shown to me, researchers can slice the otoliths, polish them, and view them with an electron microscope. But the rings aren’t always easy to read, as the patterns are complex. Luckily, a technique exists to chemically analyse the rings.

A moment later, another researcher, Dr. Skye Woodcock, hands me a test tube the size of my little finger. I hold the tube up to the light and squint – a tiny white fragment rattles around in the bottom. This is the actual size of the otolith on screen, they tell me: the ear bone of a fish, and the subject of much of the research that goes on in the uni’s marine biology lab.

‘In my research, I slice otoliths using a low speed saw, like you would a tree so you can see the rings,’ Grammer says.

‘Then I mount them on a microscope slide and run a laser across from the middle of the otolith to the edge, and get a transect across each of the growth rings over time.’

‘Fish have ears?’ is the first thing I ask.

It’s true. Even if you don’t have access to trained marine biologists, a little Googling can confirm that, like humans, fish have inner organs that play a vital role in hearing and orientation.

‘Otoliths are ear bones, and they’re located in a fluid-filled capsule in the fish’s head,’ says Gretchen Grammer, PhD student in Marine Ecology here at Adelaide. ‘The capsule also has little microscopic hairs, and vibrations in the water will move the otoliths against the hairs – that’s how they can sense things.’

Otoliths are found in all fish except sharks, rays, and lampreys, and they vary by huge amounts across species.

The process is called laser ablation. The material that is “blasted” off is put into a mass spectrometer, which separates out individual atoms and molecules based on mass.

‘You can see exactly what elements are within each of the rings, and their concentrations,’ Grammer says. ‘We do that down at Adelaide Microscopy, over in the Medical School. It’s tedious, but it’s quite cool, I think, that you can use a fish to see oceanographic features.’

The information gleaned from otoliths has direct applications in fisheries science. To study fish, you usually have to physically look at them (surprise!), but capture and tag techniques are labour-intensive and pretty inefficient. The otolith acts as a natural tag – what it tells us about the fish’s age, migration patterns, temperature, and even exposure to contaminants can

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help fisheries manage and rebuild fish stocks, guiding conservation efforts.

Grammer’s research is a little bit different. She’s not using otoliths to monitor fish stocks, but rather using fish stocks to look at the ocean itself.

‘I’m using otoliths as a tool to look at the physical properties of the oceans instead of from a biological standpoint,’ she explains. ‘I’m interested in tracking water masses.

I can use the rings in the otoliths to get a record of the chemistry of the water masses in the environment where the fish is living over time.’

Water masses are bodies of water that have the same origin and physical properties. One of these water masses is the Flinders Current, a deep body of water that swirls around the bottom of Tasmania and flows up to SA, where it rises to the surface.

‘It’s a water mass that you can actually track, because it has a very distinctive signature of chemicals when you compare it to surface water,’ Grammer says. ‘Typically, there’s more productivity when an upwelling occurs because phytoplankton blooms and there are lots of things for fish to eat, so they tend to grow better in those conditions. I’m trying to see if I can actually relate the growth of fish to those upwelling tides.’

While Grammer focuses on the physical properties of the ocean, others in the department are using otoliths for a wide variety of research.

‘We’re doing growth chronologies in marine, freshwater, and estuarine fish,’ Grammer tells me. ‘We’re working with mulloway, golden perch and black bream, and comparing their growth to see what the driver of the growth of fish is.

‘One researcher is also working on hypoxic environments, which is where the water is deplete of oxygen. She’s looking at the chemistry of the otoliths to see if she can detect hypoxic events—she knows when they happened in the environment, but she wants to check if she can see it in the chemistry of the otoliths. Then, she can go back through time to when there are no records, and detect other hypoxic events through spikes in the chemistry of otoliths.’

Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Izzo is working with a PhD

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student in archaeology, Morgan Disspain, to compare otoliths from different time periods and see how environmental conditions have changed over time. They’re using otoliths from fish skeletons found in a 3,000 year old Indigenous midden. It’s pretty neat that someone’s ordinary meal can now give clues to ancient oceans and climates.

‘We actually did a whole big experiment down on Goolwa beach with Morgan,’ Grammer recalls. ‘She got a permit and we almost had the whole lab with us. She was trying to see if cooking methods would change the chemistry on the outer edge of the otolith, so we had fifteen mulloway and we built a bonfire and subjected them to different treatments… We boiled them in salt water, boiled them in fresh water, put them straight on the fire, wrapped them up in clay and baked them on the fire, salted a bunch and left them for a month or so… Then later, she cut up all the otoliths and did isotope analysis, and found that some cooking processes do affect the accuracy of otoliths, so archaeologists can’t use those edges as indicators of the environment. She only needed the otoliths, of course, so we ate everything else!’

Another group in the department, led by Associate Professor Ivan Nagelkerken, is looking at increasing ocean acidification and how it affects fish behaviour. Researchers like Professor Bronwyn Gillanders are also investigating the effects of carbon dioxide on fish by looking at species who live near geothermal vents, but that’s still fairly new research.

‘Bronwyn’s lab is especially well regarded within the world of otoliths, so she’s usually on the cutting edge of what’s going on,’ Grammer tells me. ‘We have a little bit of everything going on here in Adelaide.’

And there’s still a wealth of information left to be uncovered. Like ice cores, otoliths can record thousands of years of environmental history, and studying them can help shape future decisions in fisheries, policy, and climate change.

The vaguely fishy smell of the Darling building reminds Lauren of her childhood. She thinks of her first pet goldfish. She cries.

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BICYCLE WARS

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ADELAIDE: the city of cyclist-haters

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words by Blair Williams art by Madeleine Karutz

I

n recent years, bike culture and the number of cyclists have exploded in Adelaide and its suburbs. You might have seen some of the culprits – MAMILS (Middle-Aged Men In Lycra) in their ultra-tight lycra riding at the crack of dawn before work, hipsters astride fixies en route to Ebenezer Place or the University of Adelaide, and, much more frequently, workers of the CBD riding to their offices. You might also see me, frantically riding up Currie Street on my way to university, dodging cars and buses in order to not get inadvertently hit by careless drivers weaving huge mobile hunks of metal between lanes.

I love to cycle and much prefer the trusty ol’ bike to public transport or cars. It’s free, and I don’t have to wait half an hour for a frequently late bus service. Even the Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Stephen Yarwood, rides his bicycle to work.

But how does Adelaide’s growing bicycle culture compare on the world stage? Is it impressive? Or is

Adelaide struggling to emerge out of its sheltered cartopia bubble?

Cycling Culture

I recently travelled to Amsterdam during the university holidays and was in awe of their cycling culture. Bicycles took preference over cars, had their own two-way lanes with traffic lights and were as common a sight as stoned tourists in coffee shops.

Helmets weren’t common – cyclists felt safer than they do here in Australia. An estimated 881,185 (58 per cent) Amsterdam residents cycle daily. Compared to Adelaide, with a public transport patronage of around 9 per cent, and where an infinitely small 1.1 per cent of people rode to work in 2011, cities like Amsterdam are miles ahead.

Despite this, the number of cyclists has been significantly increasing in Adelaide over the last few years. According to the South Australian Government, the number of cyclists who travel to the Adelaide CBD has increased from 6,153 in 2006

to 9,443 in 2011 1. According to Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood, Adelaide has witnessed a 20 per cent increase in cyclists in the CBD in the last twelve months as ‘we are increasingly seeing cycling becoming a more attractive option’. Adelaide is a seemingly perfect city for cyclists; to quote the Adelaide City Council website, it ‘is a great city to explore by bike, with its broad, flat streets [and] beautiful Park Lands’.

So why do so few people ride in Adelaide?

The Problem

The overriding issue is that there is still a resistance within Adelaide and wider Australia’s attitudes towards cycling culture and cyclists.

A recent Conversation article explored how an abundance of Australians, including 1. Women remain underrepresented, however – in 2006, 83 per cent of these cyclists were men.

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television personalities, were “joking” about hitting cyclists and mentions how, earlier this year, a Daily Telegraph journalist bluntly stated that ‘a lot of cyclists [are] ungrateful dickheads’ who should be thankful that drivers do not hit them.

Adelaide is very much a car-loving city. This is evidently due to Adelaide’s lack of efficient public transport, the scrapping of Adelaide’s extensive tram network decades ago and the lack of cycling infrastructure in the CBD. Adelaide’s car infrastructure (and not to forget our historic connection to Holden), is one of the main reasons that people choose this transport method. Unfortunately, when you combine all these factors, it makes for a sense of entitlement to the roads amongst motorists, and consequently a lack of safety for cyclists.

The attitudes of motorists towards cyclists have a great impact on those who do ride their bikes on Adelaide’s roads.

I myself, as a cyclist in the CBD, have experienced abuse from both car and bus drivers as well as the odd pedestrian, shouting how they don’t think I belong on Currie Street on my bicycle.

Abuse is a common experience for cyclists Australia wide, it seems. The Conversation article mentioned previously notes how cyclists travelling within the Canberra CBD endured a ‘significant increase in physical intimidation from drivers, vehicles overtaking too closely, verbal abuse from drivers and passengers, and use of car horns’ in the days following media personalities harassing and threatening cyclists.

This abuse, inadvertence or lack of awareness of cyclists often ends in tragedy. According to a Towards Zero Together fact sheet, 179 cyclists were killed on South Australian roads at the hands of drivers from 1981 to 2010 and in 2010 there were 82 casualties. So far, there has been 66 casualties in 2014.

Furthermore, Miles Kemp,

writing for Adelaide Now, states that four out of every five crashes involving cars and cyclists are caused by the driver of the car. Both the attitude towards cyclists and the amount of cyclists killed or injured needs to improve.

The Solution

I spoke to Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood to find out his opinions on cycling culture and cyclists, as well as how the Adelaide CBD can improve safety conditions for cyclists. Yarwood and I discussed how we both cycle within the city and our similar negative experiences of cars, buses, and a lack of designated bike lanes.

Yarwood cycles to work as he believes it improves both the mind and body, as well as work ethic. On asking him about how Adelaide citizens can improve our attitude toward cyclists, he argued that there is not only one answer. He says we need to employ multiple tactics in order to have a more bike-friendly city, such as ‘education programs,

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effective communication from our political leaders … separated bicycle lanes … lowering the CBD speed limit to 40km an hour. It’s encouraging children to ride their bicycles to school, it’s training programs [and] it’s marketing’. Yarwood contends that Adelaide is one of the only cities in Australia to have a 50km per hour speed limit and he believes that the reduction to 40km per hour would greatly reduce crashes and fatalities among both pedestrians and cyclists. Adelaide also needs to install more dedicated bicycle lanes, such as the new Frome Street lanes, in order for cyclists to have a ‘safe space’ on the roads.

Ultimately, education is the key – educating young children on safe bike practices, educating adult CBD cyclists on how to effectively and safely cycle to work and, most importantly, educating drivers to be aware of and safely share the road with cyclists. With more educated cyclists and drivers on the road, the safer cycling will become because drivers will be more aware and more accustomed to sharing the road with cyclists.

Amstelaide?

Adelaide has the potential to become a place where cars share the road space and cyclists thrive. Cycling will inevitably become a more attractive option as fuel becomes more expensive and congestion worsens with population growth, as it is a sustainable, cheap, and healthy form of transport. Though bike safety and the amount of bike lanes need to improve to foster this attraction, Adelaide is slowly changing to be more “bike-friendly”. What really needs to happen within the next few years, however, is an increase in bike lanes, a reduction in speed limit in the CBD and more awareness and education for drivers

to be more “bike aware”. We need to look to future modes of transport rather than heavily relying on the environmentally damaging focus on cars. Though Adelaide will probably never be like Amsterdam, we can still strive towards being a more environmentally friendly and healthy cycling city.

What CAN I do?

There are things that you, the readers, can do to improve our bike culture. The local Government is responsible for the allocation of funding to bicycle expenditure. The upcoming Adelaide Council elections will be a cars versus bikes election of sorts, as the Lord Mayor candidates are debating over Adelaide’s future of relying on cars or increasing public transport and cycling infrastructure. If you live in the CBD you are able to vote for candidates that wish to increase, rather than decrease, bike culture and cyclist activity within the city. The way forward is a greener, more environmentally friendly future where cyclists are respected and encouraged to ride within the Adelaide CBD.

Blair is a grumpy Honours student who needs to cycle to release her pent-up frustration at the patriarchy.

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the black shuck words by claudia ienco ART BY ANTHONY NOCERA The Black Shuck was a death omen Thought to kill as he crept.

A lost soldier, shot and broken, Saw his shadow and wept.

Attempting to delay her end, She sought to kill the hound.

When close, he did not self-defend; When struck, he made no sound.

He simply fixed his eyes on her And with a saddened stare, The Black Shuck – of torn flesh and fur – Evanesced into air.

But the soldier had languished still, For little did she know: The messenger makes not the kill, For nature will follow.

As that which quietus forgoes, She died in restless pain.

In a new shadow, she arose; The Black Shuck crept again.

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5 simple reasons why you need to get your garage sale face on paige kerin wants you to buy her junk

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Garage Sales are the Mecca of the weird and wonderful. I’d even go so far as to say they’re one of Australia’s most loved weekend past times. Head out on a Saturday morning with a bit of cash and you never know what kinds of books, clothes, lamps, art, toys or jewellery you can find a few streets away.

I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty impassioned about garage sales. And so, here is a list of reasons why you need to get your garage sale face on, that I have loving compiled. Read forth!

1. Finding something unique for your home or wardrobe from a garage sale, rather than the usual chain stores in Rundle Mall, can be just so damn satisfying – both for your style and your hip pocket. $10 for a pair of Tony Biancos? Bargain.

2. These days a lot of people are not only selling their old, unwanted stuff at garage sales, but they’re selling their own handmade products. You might not know it, but your neighbour could be a killer baker, jewellery maker, sewer, artist or up-cycler of furniture trying to make money out of their passion.

Maybe you are yourself?

3. Garage Sales also have the magical ability to make any ordinary item you don’t want anymore ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’. You know what they say -your junk is someone elses’ treasure. You may think your

tired, old, living room chair is hideous, but to the new age hipster, it’s a funky and affordable addition to their pad.

4. Personally, I think one of the coolest motives of garage sales is the community aspect of it- they make it easy and fun to get to know the neighbours in your ‘hood (because everybody needs good ones). I don’t know about you all, but I have no idea who my neighbours are. If I need a cup of sugar, I’m heading down the road to Coles. But if you set up a Garage Sale on your driveway on the weekend, I’ll bet my hat your nosy neighbours will be peeking out their front window wondering what you’re selling.

5. Think of the money you can make. Imagine if you made $200. $200 is 50 coffees, return flights to Melbourne, 22 cold pressed juices, or one hell of a night out!

If you’re new to the garage sale game and think you’re ready to take the big step and have one of your own, man have I got the solution for you. Three words: Garage Sale Trail.

In a nutshell , the Garage Sale Trail is a national event held on the 25th of October where everyone around Australia has a Garage Sale at the same time. Pretty simple.

It’s absolutely up to you what you do with the money you make from your sale. They reckon the average earnings are about $323 (cash moneyyy). Pocket it, donate it to charity or buy a round of drinks at the pub.

Point of the plug? They want to promote recycling, to create awareness about illegal dumping and unite communities all across Australia. I have this vision of the Adelaide Dump being filled with things like Ab-King Pros, paisley armchairs and VCRs - things people think are rubbish but could have been given new homes.

There. Have I convinced you?

If I have, head to garagesaletrail.com.au. If not, read forth.

IMAGE: FLICKR.COM/ ANDEECOLLARD

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resting bitch face syndrome

taylah Minchington is a certified expert on the matter

Resting Bitchface Syndrome (RBS) - A condition present in some people, predominately millennial females, which cause their dominant facial expression to appear upset, depressed, angry or pissed on a regular basis.

What do you call a person whose face says bitch but heart says puppies? Why, you call them a person who suffers from Resting Bitchface Syndrome, of course. To use this word in a sentence one would say, ‘Taylah is not angry at the world, she simply has Resting Bitchface Syndrome, and is actually a delightful person who loves expensive shoes’.

Hi, my name is Taylah and I suffer from Resting Bitchface Syndrome. Although I may look like I’m about to stab someone, I’m actually a really nice person.

Nope, I’m not testing the Posh Spice pout, this is actually just how my face sits.

Resting Bitchface Syndrome is becoming a thing in this millennial age, with females being the most commonly diagnosed. Before I explain this condition further, I just want to make it clear that RBS isn’t just the expressionless Kirsten Stewart face seen in every movie she’s ever made. It’s a stare that gives off an ‘I love to drown kittens for fun’ kind of vibe. For some lucky people, RBS only affects them on rare occasions, but for most, this is a condition that affects sufferers on the daily.

For a proper definition of RBS, we look to the really credible online journal, Urban Dictionary: ‘A bitchy alternative to the usual blank look most people have.

This is a condition affecting the facial muscles, suffered by millions of women worldwide’.

There are a few key signs of RBS and they are:

I apparently looked angry and judgmental, and it wasn’t because I had just endured a politics lecture and tutorial. Soz Benito, please don’t fail me.

Some infamous sufferers of RBS (as evidenced by the prooof supplied by our good mates the paparazzi) include nobodies favorite divas, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, glamazon to the stars, Anna Wintour, and the lady I would wife, so I hate to say it, Iggy Azalea.

So you’ve determined you’re a suffered and want to fix it? There are ways in which you can manage and treat RBS, with the most commonly suggested method (by people who obviously don’t suffer from it) being to simply smile more. If I could do that I wouldn’t have RBS in the first place. Seriously.

I’m not suggesting you get plastic surgery, because that’s just silly, but how about trying not to get defensive and aggressive about your condition, because then you’re at risk of actually having a bitch face. Why not have a calm, go-to response for the dimwit haters. My real bitchface is about ten times scarier, so if you ask me if I’m okay once, I won’t bite. But ask if I’m sure, prepare to feel the wrath of my real bitchface, you fool.

I love my resting bitchface and the perks it brings about. It’s fabulous for warding off people who try to talk to you when all you want is coffee and your pillow.

The full power of RBS is, I find, best harnessed during student elections and warding off unwanted attention in the club.

So, my advice to those who suffer from RBS is to own it and work it. If people are just going to judge a book (aka you) by it’s cover (aka your face) and not stick around to see how awesome you are, then they’re just not worth your time.

You see, our smiles aren’t our default expression, so they’re damn authentic when they emerge.

1. Others often ask if you are feeling okay.

2. People are surprised when you make a joke or laugh.

3. You make shocking first impressions.

And number three couldn’t be truer: first impressions are an issue. One guy thought I didn’t like him because

Taylah lives by Oscar Wilde’s motto of “Be yourself, everyone else is taken”... Unless you can be Carrie Bradshaw, then by all means be Carrie Bradshaw.

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columns

10 reasons to buy a burrito alex cockayne is a certified burrito expert

art by maddi foster

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“… And on the eighth day of the week, let there be burritos!”* Said God after the creation of the earth. Yes, that’s right. God handcrafted these delicious, mouth watering, fluid pumping, sweat inducing tortilla sacks of majestic yumminess. (There’s no better way to describe it) I don’t know about you but just thinking about a burrito makes my mouth salivate more than delicious salt and vinegar chips… And that’s a lot! Here are 10 reasons why you should be eating a burrito right now.

1. A burrito is the food equivalent of a crime syndicate. Only difference is one kills people and the other is wrapped in a tortilla. Both are great to write movies about.

at Zambrero through partners ‘Stop Hunger Now’. Satisfy your hunger – Donate a meal. It’s a win win situation.

2. Layers. Because of the beautiful [hand made] construction, a burrito is naturally divided into delicious layers. One side may provide the warm filling of beans and/or rice and/or meat(s), while the other may provide the condiments of salads of your choosing. Take a leap of faith and take a bite of both and you’ll reach Hogwarts… Trust me.

(Fun fact: Over 3,000,000 meals have been donated)

3. With great responsibility. One must carefully construct their burrito so that a true expression of flavour is displayed. This is usually done by the master craftspeople of a burrito parlour… (I suggest Zambrero, they will never let you down.

8. So you may be wondering what the negatives are of a burrito. There is only one comes to mind, and that is sloppy eating. But that is not the burritos fault.

It is the fault of the beta predator. Become an alpha predator and learn how to eat a burrito properly.

There is a great guide on pedestrian.tv for those of you who are new and uncultured. Check it out. Serious.

4. There may be limited choices in what you may stuff your tortilla with but that may not be a bad thing. I have guesstimated that there are over 100 different combinations to fill a burrito with at one Zambrero restaurant chain. This allows you to bedazzle your burrito like a homemade Christmas ornament. //Bling bling// 5. There is catering for our vegetarian/vegan friends.

No discrimination here. Burritos are the people food of forever.

7. There is no messing around with burritos. It’s a meal. It is not some pesky sub meal like a taco where you have to buy multiple to fulfil your hunger. It is a great breakfast meal, or lunch meal, or dinner meal, or hangover meal. It is a great meal for all occasions.

9. “Ever have a flying burrito hit you? Well, it’s a deadly projectile, right up there with cannonballs and grenades.” – Rick Riordan. And there you have it, a useful tool for demoralising the people you hate. But I doubt you’ll throw something so beautiful at someone you hate… but I would love to see it happen.

10. A burrito is always there for you. ALWAYS. *Not an actual quote from the biblical God.

6. The ticket to solving world hunger. Zambrero is running a Plate 4 Plate scheme in which they donate one plate of food for every burrito or bowl purchased Alex Cockayne is not related to Sharmonie Cockayne. But he is related to Kanye West.

columns

emma’s dilemmas

Life advice from someone who probably needs to see a therapist

Hi Emma,

Emma,

How do I tell if my breasts are an adequate size?

Because it’s coming up to hot bikini bod season and let me put it this way, I sometimes feel that the only person more flat-chested than me is my 11 year old brother.

- Melanie, 19.

Can you tell me a fail-proof way to hit on girls?

- Ryan, 21.

Look Melanie, you’re going to have to stop putting so much emphasis on your breasts in relation to you as a person. It’s such a small fragment of who you are (urghhh, poor word choice there; did not mean it that way sorry).

Once upon a time a spectacularly tactless family member of mine told me that I had very big feet for a girl of my stature, leading me to have crippling selfdoubt for a number of years wherein I envisioned myself as some sort of monstrously-footed hobbitlike creature. I only realised just recently that plenty of women have the same shoe size as me, but more importantly that it just bloody doesn’t matter. You are beautiful, no matter who you areOkay let’s be real for a second here, because the optimism displayed in the above paragraphs was so feel-good and chipper I feel fuckin emotionally drained.

If you’re not happy with your face or your body, change it! Go on a diet, get a boob job, do a lemon cleanse, clip fake hair into your actual hair and strip every last hair follicle from the places where it counts. Because- here we could make all the arguments that these are cultural expectations loaded onto women from birth etcetera etcetera etfuckingcetera- the truth of the matter is that people in general are a whole lot nicer and accepting towards you if you at least outwardly conform to their expections of what a woman should be like.

So get a boob job Melanie, and reap the social rewards.

You’re worth it.

Ryan, there’s no one way to hit on girls because girls actually have separate and distinct personalities from another so something that works with one girl may not actually work with another. And obviously sometimes a move that might work for one guy might not work for the other. Because, say, the other guy is a fucking loser.

I can however say with confidence that you should learn some magic tricks. When it comes to impressing girls, we love them. It makes you seem mysterious and exciting. Especially that one where you have cards and the girl has to pick out a card and then you guess which card she has picked. Because then the girl is all ‘I am so overwhelmed with a childish sense of wonder at this guy’s magical prowess!’ and also ‘Woah I just wanted to go out or a quiet drink and here I am, enjoying the joy that is magic tricks!’ and also a little bit ‘I definitely want his D in the V tonight.’

Kay, hoped that helped, bye.

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reviews

music

restaurant

the 20/20 Experience tour

jamie’s italian king william st, adelaide Reviewed by sharmonie cockayne

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justin timberlake Reviewed by yasmin martin Justin Timberlake is sexy, and he knows it.

He’s been telling us how sexy he is since he dropped his debut solo album, Justified, in 2002. He’s so sexy, he literally wrote a song called Sexy Back all about just how sexy he really is. So it should be no surprise that he packed out the Adelaide Entertainment Centre for two nights in a row on his sexiness alone. Well, we’re assuming it was his sexiness that did it, because it certainly wasn’t his new album.

Don’t worry, it completely passed me by too. The 20/20 Experience spawned a couple of hits, notably Suit and Tie and Mirrors, but the neo-soul wankfest that is JT’s new album (each track averages out at eight minutes) was never going to keep an arena pumping for a two-hour show.

JT knew this, of course, and wove just about all of his old hits into the show, raising the crowd and inspiring swoons.

Shimmying across the huge perspex trimmed stage, JT is ever the showman.

The theme for the evening was big. Big choreography, big band (his backup orchestra, The Tennessee Kids, had TWO drum sets), and a big flying stage.

JT’s new music may not be for everyone, but the man has definitely still got it. *Image: Sharmonie Cockayne

For a person who earns a decent living, Jamie’s Italian was well worth the hype.

But I’m not that person and, chances are, neither are you.

The food was good. No. REALLY good.

No. SO good. The crispy skin salmon was perfection, the panna cotta was hands down the best thing I’ve eaten in my life, and, drinks wise, the frizzante aperol was ridiculous. We ordered sides of bread and truffle oil chips, which were just as orgasmic as the former.

What was dissapointing was the size of each meal and the pricey prices. Like, I’m a young person who is *hungry. I need food and I need a lot of it. And I’m a student who is poor, so I need it to be cheap. Jamie really sucks you in with the taste and the setting and the ambiance and the cool bathrooms and the infectiously nice waiters and before you know it, BOOM, four orders and a few drinks later, you and your friend have busted over a hundred bucks.

I know, I should have just gone to Dumpling King if I wanted a cheap, filling meal. But what’s the fun in that? *Image: Sharmonie Cockayne

reviews

essentials

interwebs

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double choc tim tams arnotts Reviewed by max cooper I want to open this by saying that I love classic Tim Tams. I would be quite willing to eat Tim Tams to the same extent Homer Simpson eats donuts in hell. By which I mean all of them, for eternity.

But sometimes you have too much biscuit, and you need more chocolate.

Enter the cocoa-y saviour: Double Choc Tim Tams. They satisfy a very specific and powerful craving: chocolate with just enough biscuit inside it protecting a smooth chocolately centre.

However, you’re not ever going to be able to replace Tim Tams properly. If I have to explain their beauty to you I don’t even know where you went wrong.

Protip: the Tim Tam Slam is kind of old hat at this point, but the beauty of the thicker chocolate coating is MORE MELTY CHOCOLATE. It’s beautiful.

(PS: I should probably add that, for those of you better at prioritising their care and compassion for environmental issues etc. over biscuits, that Tim Tams use palm oil, the production of which is pretty nasty in terms of deforestation and threatening to the habitat of animals like orangutangs)

generic office roleplay open facebook group reviewed by casey briggs Dear Generic Office Roleplay, Your performance review has now been completed.

From your entry level position as a fun Facebook group in which 20 somethings with office jobs all live out their fantasies by pretending to work in an office together, there was much room for growth.

You sailed through your probation with flying colours, particular strengths being notices of clubs, fridge cleanouts and loud shirt friday.

However, management fast became concerned at the increased neglect of your core responsibilities, and a drift in the scope of your perceived job role.

May I remind you that Cthulu, black holes and iguanas have no place in a generic office roleplay.

Generic being the keyword. Black holes are not found in fucking generic offices. Also no one ever signs off emails with ‘Namaste’, not even people that work in offices.

I hereby terminate your employment from Stackswell and Co. Yours Faithfully, Casey Briggs Senior HR Team Leader ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Think green: read on the screen ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

regulars

diversions 46 PAGE

colour in pubescent britney

spot the difference

(there are nine)

regulars

Faux-diacs

with Mystic Marge

corresponding from the Oriental Orient (far eastern zodiac edition!)

Rat You will pick an inauspicious dumpling restaurant for this week’s shallot pancake binge and after too many Thousand Year Old eggs, will be cursed with Millennium Bowel. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Dragon You will be cursed with an inauspicious fortune cookie fortune and be destined to a life of unhappiness and under salted food. The heavens frown upon you. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Ox The dragon moon is in your house, so the time is right for a most auspicious marriage. Confucius say student marriage mean better welfare break ;) so look online today at whiteonrice.com. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Snake You will finally complete your phd and Buddha will honour you with good fortune. Sadly, though, this will still not be enough to get you a graduate job. Seek advice from your ancestors as to possible family franchise opportunities instead. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Tiger After another rough night at the Exeter, you will develop a lucrative sideline in manufacturing your own ‘bear’ bile traditional remedies (now vegan/raw/paleo friendly). Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Rabbit You will place your heart and lower back in the hands of a beautiful woman and find love at your local Thai massage parlor. Be careful though – just because you’re not going to Thailand doesn’t mean you’re not going to bang cock. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

targedoku Find as many words as you can using the letters on the Sudoku grid. Words must be four letters or more and include the highlighted letter. Use the letters to solve the Sudoku (normal Sudoku rules apply). There are no repeated letters.

Clue: O, Little Sac of Happiness; life itself drips from thine womb; Bundle of Pleasure, thou make me mouthgasm.

D

U

M I

I N

P

L D

G G

U

M

M

S

N N L

G

P

Goat After an inauspicious diet of ramen noodles, you will develop scurvy and rickets. You will be fated to meet an attractive nurse, however she will be disgusted by your horrible, wasted, ghoulish body. Take the bitter with the sweet. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Monkey Whilst lurching home from the pub like a drunk panda, you will discover a dumpster full of superficially damaged fortune cookies outside of K-Chow. How auspicious! You will live like an emperor on your booty. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Rooster Often described as a ‘big cock’ by your friends and students, you will experience a moment of clarity, and discover that the time is right to give up pursuing chicks to get broody instead. This is auspicious, as you have already received several formal warnings for harassing students, and your wife is about to leave you. Your lucky number is 8.

Your unlucky number is 4.

U P

Horse You will shame your ancestors after committing to another ill-chosen Tinder profile picture and bio combination (‘NOT ALL WHO WANDER R LOST! I <3 music, good food and travel. No timewasters!!) You will never make auspicious match now! Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

M

Dog You are incorrect in your hopes of moving out of home as the Heavens have ruled that you must remain to care for your clingy parents. You’re already doing an Arts degree instead of med, don’t disappoint them any more! Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

Pig You will die a terrible, terrible death. Your lucky number is 8. Your unlucky number is 4.

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gastronomies

48

baked pumpkin risotto

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words by eleanor ludington

IMAGE: FLICKR.COM/MICHAELPHAMS

My recipe this issue was going to be a dhal using a bunch of spices, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the flavour, so instead I present you with a very simple and filling risotto. This dish uses only a few simple ingredients, although you could of course add more vegetables if you wish. It’s a yummy recipe my mum and I like to make on busy weeknights.

• ½ a small-medium sized butternut pumpkin, peeled and diced • 1 onion finely diced • 2 cloves of garlic finely diced • 2 tablespoons butter • 1 cup Arborio rice • around 3 cups of simmering stock • grated parmesan to serve (optional) This semester I started a nine-week rural term in Broken Hill, so finally I’m learning what it’s like to be an independent student with budgeting requirements and a kitchen without a food processor.

This of course means that today’s recipe is truly student-friendly!

While I’ve been here I’ve made vegetable soups, Mexican dishes, couscous dishes, pasta, stir-fries, and curries, all of which have been very satisfying, affordable and healthy! Having done my own shopping and cooking for over a month now, I’ve learnt a thing or two about how to regularly make tasty, nutritious and cheap meals. I’ve discovered frozen veggies are an affordable way to add nutrients to any meal, and that having a tin of beans or lentils around is an easy way to pack protein into almost anything. I’ve also found that one of the most important things in any kitchen is a good spice cabinet – so I urge you all to think about the flavours you like and fork out the money for a few appropriate spices!

1. Pre-heat oven to 180˚C 2. Place pumpkin on an oven tray and drizzle with small amount of olive oil, roast in oven until soft (about 15-20 minutes, depending on your oven).

3. While pumpkin is cooking, melt butter in saucepan and add onion and garlic, cook on low heat until softened. Add Arborio rice and stir for a minute until rice is covered in butter.

4. Add the stock to the rice one cup at a time, stirring briefly between each cup. Bring the rice mix to the boil and then turn off heat.

5. Pour the rice mix into a baking dish (e.g. a casserole dish) and gently fold in the roasted pumpkin.

6. Place in oven for 15-20 minutes until the rice has absorbed all the stock and is deliciously creamy. If the rice is still a little hard to bite into, add some more stock, stir through, and cook for an extra 5 minutes.

7. Remove from oven when done, douse with grated parmesan, and enjoy on its own or with a salad.

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