Anu lss allens peppercorn 2011 issue 1

Edition One 2011

Perhaps colonialism wasn't so bad after all?

Caunt speculates Does alex bruce have a corporeal form or does he exist merely as a perfect being of pure energy?

ALL IS REVEALED

THE DEREGULATOR p-corn welcomes our new VC overlord Liu Xiaobo - Aung San Suu Kyi - The Eruption of Mount Merapi - Cancun Climate Change - Obiter Dictheads Tips for Clueless First Years - Van Diemonian shenanigans - reviews - And... Dave Rowe graces us with his presence from the USA

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Kavitha Burge 4 Tara Mulholland 6 Steve Morris 7 Caitlin Keogh 10 Annabel Joske 12 Alice Crawford 13 David Rowe 14

Cancun Climate Change Tips for First Years Trekking Tasmania’s Southwest Corner Burmese Democracy Liu Xiaobo Presidential Welcome Paying for the JD, USA Style

Angharad Lodwick 16

Mount Merapi Erupts

Leif Eldridge-Smith 19

Dear Alex Bruce

Lachlan Caunt 23 Adam Brereton 25 Reviews 29 Obiter Dictheads 31 Dan Rose 32

Peppercorn is a publication of the Australian National University Law Students Association. All enquiries and complaints should be sent to peppercorn2011@gmail. com. Peppercorn retains the right to publish received letters or emails. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not represent the opinion of the ANU Law Students Society or College of Law. In 2011 Peppercorn is printed by mpd – printing the news everyday Unit E1, 46-62 Maddox Street, Alexandria NSW 2015. We’d also like to give a general shout-out to last year’s editors for helping us make this happen and apologise to the Jessup team for being unable to squeeze in your puff piece. Big thanks also to Sascha Jeffreys for the amazing cover art.

Colonialism FTW Cover Story: The Deregulator Kos, Frawley, Miladinovic, Warren Meet our heroes ANU Cannibalises HvZ

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O-Week

Cancun Climate Change: A Modern Sisyphean Labour Kavitha Burge on the greatest moral challenge of our time In the final months of 2010, delegates from 193 countries met in Cancun, Mexico, as part of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The objective of the talks was to assist developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to reduce its harmful effects.

The summit saw all countries present agree to cut emissions and approve a finance deal to provide an initial $30 billion for developing countries with up to $100 billion to follow. Further pledged was the greater transfer of low carbon technology and expertise to poor countries.

A key agreement to come out of Cancun is a scheme where developing countries are given financial support to cease logging. The deal, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation (REDD), does not make clear where the funds are to be sourced but countries like Norway and Australia have already given Indonesia money to cut back logging with Norway alone providing them with $1 billion.

This measure is a positive step in tackling global warming. Greenpeace spokesperson, Steve Campbell, claims that if deforestation ceased by 2020, around 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would not be released

into the atmosphere and thus help contain temperature rises.

Under REDD, Indigenous groups have been afforded some protections although it has been argued that the language securing their rights is weak. Ben Powless from the Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change has cited the real possibility that a significant proportion of natural resources and land may be privatised in which case “the ones who would really suffer ... would be Indigenous communities as well as biodiversity”. He calls for the strong protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights through a comprehensive monitoring and compliance system with added safeguards to preserve those rights.

The content of REDD is still somewhat ambiguous and there is a danger that while portions of forest may be protected, logging companies may be inclined to simply go elsewhere. Moreover, concerns raised by en-

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O-Week vironmental groups include the prospect that wealthy nations will capitalise on the deal to offset their own emissions.

Campbell asserts that Australia’s intentions are to offset its own industrial emissions to the utmost on forests in developing countries. He feels that Australia must limit the amount of offsets that it can make and is worried that the vague nature of the REDD means that other industrialised countries will seek to do the same as the amount of offsetting that any country can do has not yet been agreed.

The details of REDD will be developed over the course of 2011 in preparation for the next climate change conference where it is to be finalised.

The Cancun round of climate talks was significant in that it committed – for the first time – all major economies to reducing emissions. The European Union’s climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, put the

inspection regime.

While some progress was made at Cancun, difficult issues of substance have been left for the next conference scheduled for November in Durban. The pledges to grant money for adaption to warming, deforestation and the transfer of technology represent good intentions, but the difficult details are yet to be settled.

The deal reached is inadequate to effectively mitigate the effects of global warming, however, the negotiations were at least sufficient to save the UN process itself from collapsing. Cancun was expected to be a true test of multilaterism following the dissent that reigned in Copenhagen.The UN representatives were moderately satisfied with proceedings with Christina Figueres, head of the UN climate treaty under whose auspices the talks occur, expressing pleasure at the demonstration of cooperation between countries and their ability “to reach consensus on a common cause”.

achievement down to a motivation amongst participants to avoid a replay of the much-hyped conference at Copenhagen which failed to produce an agreement.

Pleasantly surprised by the summit’s outcome was Britain’s energy secretary, Chris Huhne, who commented that it was “way better” than expected and could eventually lead towards something that is actually legally binding. Huhne felt that the talks sent a clear message that there must be reductions across the board, including from developing countries. Furthermore, he saw the deal as giving industry confidence to invest in low-carbon economies which would encourage further emission cuts in Europe and the larger economies.

In entering the talks, America opted for a strong stance asserting that it would not support incomplete deals on deforestation or climate finance unless China and India agreed to subject their emission pledges to an

However, what was agreed to is not binding but merely hopes to limit global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. It also obliges developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while developing countries are to plan a reduction in their emissions.

The task ahead to avoid dangerous climatic change is enormous and the lack of agreement on key issues such as the extension of the Kyoto Protocol (the only existing legally binding treaty which is set to expire in 2012), the monitoring of the promised national emission cuts and where the finance for developing countries is to come from merely increases the burden.

The climate fund for developing countries presents no specific cash promise, only a political aspiration.

Moreover, as noted by The Guardian’s John Vidal, the fund is not included in the text of the final agreement

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O-Week and could yet be overridden. Vidal interpreted this as being a case of the wealthy countries still wanting to “decide how the poor spend their money”.

Furthermore, scientific evidence suggests that global temperature rises will exceed the two degrees target.

Researchers from Climate Action Tracker claim that existing pledges have the world set for a temperature rise of over three degrees celsius. Nnimmo Bassey, spokesperson for Friends of the Earth International, expressed outrage at the potential temperature rise allowed by the agreement and attributed responsibility to the “lack of ambition and political will” of a small group of countries, specifically the US, Russia and Japan.

The prediction is disastrous for many countries and this sentiment was encapsulated by Bolivia’s delegation leader, Pablo Solon, who critically evaluated the cost of the deal as being “measured in human lives”. Indeed, developing countries will be the hardest hit victims of climate change with possibly millions of lives lost every year due to food shortages, drought and floods.

The Cancun ‘compromise’ according to Vidal, saw

“loopholes left in and dates left out” - a grave oversight potentially disastrous for humanity. Moreover, both environmentalists and the US envoy, Todd Stern, agreed that the Cancun deal represented incremental progress at best. The broad disappointment with the outcome from Cancun is compounded by the vacillation of governments which ultimately has delayed substantive action until the outcome of the next round of talks.

Meanwhile, lives and livelihoods at risk in the absence of effective, binding measures to combat the detrimental effects of climate change. The Cancun settlement must immediately be built upon – both inside and outside the UN process with the countries honouring their pledges to aid developing countries and curb their own emissions. Putting flesh on the bare bones of agreement is needed before the agreement becomes more than mere words spoken on a fickle wind.

Kavitha Burge is a Peppercorn Editor and constant target for vitriol from burly foresters upset that she hasn’t taken their degree.

tara mulholland’s tips for clueless first years It’s very easy to feel out of your depth in first year law. At ANU, unlike other universities they expect you to complete two law courses in first semester. While going to your lectures and tutorials does help there are ten helpful tips that will help you keep your head above water.

1. The Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC) can be your saviour. Even if you get everything else wrong you can always get marks for this. Remember not to leave your footnotes right to the last minute…there are few things worse than having an assignment dragged a grade for ‘non satisfactory’ footnotes.

2. Get to know later year students as they are good at abating freak outs and outlining the bare minimum of what you need to know. They’ve been there. They get it.

3. If you don’t know any later year students you can always just read their assignments at the Academic Skills and Learning Centre. They can proof your papers, and generally assuage any concerns you have. The staff there are angels in twill and tweed disguise.

4. Hang on to your course outline and means of assessment, the cases in there are the only ones you’re expected to know. But they likely expect you to know most of them, in fairly thorough detail.

5. You’re not the big fish in the little pool anymore; you’ve moved from the kiddie pool to the ocean. ANU law largely

consists of the best and brightest from all across this wide brown country of ours. You’re not on top of the bell curve anymore. Read all of your cases, take lots of notes and do weekly summaries, and maybe you’ll return to your place of former glory.

6. Many a later year student has bemoaned that ‘Ben Wickham is the best you’ll ever have’. Make sure you go to his lectures and if you want to read testimonials just have a look at ‘Ben Wickham for CJ’ on facebook.

7. Be pithy, there are many words for it: succinct, concise etc. If you are being flamboyant with your language you’re probably missing issues.

8. Start as early as you can. That three week honeymoon period at the start of semester is just that- the fights start pretty soon after that, and, as they say, forewarned is forearmed. If you’ve done your reading, and looked at your assignment early, you’ll actually understand what’s relevant in cases and lectures.

9. If you’re hearing a case come up over and over again, read it! We’re talking Masters v Cameron in Contracts and Donoghue v Stevenson in Torts.

10. And last but not least, make sure that you honour the power of the stuvac. Clear your calendar and lock yourself in the library. It’s incredible just how much you can learn in a week, but also incredible how little you learn in one night.

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O-Week

A New Van Diemonian Steve Morris treks the southwest corner The beautiful thing about growing up Australian is that despite our ‘arse-end-of-the-world’ status in every field of endeavour except competitive sport, about 97% of us have lesser cousins on whom to lay the blame: Tasmanians. It is a fun and easy game to play, and I have been guilty more than once of making un-wisecracks about familial ties and convict buggery and all sorts of stains. There is at least one thing however which the Vandemonians can and should lord over any and everybody: Tasmania’s natural environment.

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O-Week region on the southwest edge of the island. The King I spent only eight days exploring the South Coast family continue to oversee a small tin mining operaTrack in January of this year. While it is 85 kilometres of some of the more rugged coastline in Australia, the tion in that region. It was Deny King who literally laid South Coast Track is by no means as remote as Tasthe foundations for modern day escapees by building, mania can get. The extraordinary thing about Tassie is from scratch, the 400m corrugated quartzite airstrip at that there is remarkably little of it fit for continuous huBathurst Harbour, serving as the entry or exit point for man habitation. More than one third of the small island walkers on the South Coast or Port Davey Tracks. He is is protected by National Park or World Heritage Area also famous for walking the 85 kilometre South Coast designation. It seems a good half of that needs no proTrack in just two days on short notice to rendezvous tection as nobody with their head screwed on the right with a woman of mysterious identity who later became way would be so masochistic as to attempt living on the his wife, Margaret. west coast or the western ranges.

Walking west to east, Deny must have appreciAs always, there are a remarkable few who have ated the stark difference between the two coasts. If eked out a living in Tasmania’s wild frontiers. Convict Tasmania is anything to go by, it is little wonder 95% stock-keepers regularly disappeared into the remote of Australians choose to live on the east coast of the interiors in the early-mid 1800s, finding their selfcontinent. Taking as the backbone of Tasmania the imposed exile more comforting than penal servitude.

Ironbound Ranges, which tower over the vista the enNo surprises there. It is surprising though that such a tire length of the track and lurch out of the sea to over life could be lived on the geo1100 metres, living on the graphical fringes without living “Surely we must really hate west coast means battling on the edge of existence itself. the roaring forties, which our fellow human beings thunder in without obThe Tasmanian wilderness struction from the southhas a long history of harbourto want to piss off to a ern tip of the Americas. ing escapees. The story does part of the world notable, The obscenely regular rain not begin with the wave of middle-class city kids (mythem isn’t amongst other things, for its accompanying self included) looking for adexactly heart warming, eimiserable climate.” venture on well-worn tracks ther. The barren and boggy featured in TasTourism ads. buttongrass plains, swarmAustralia’s earliest and, until the Kelly Gang, most ing with march flies and the cold, pebbly beaches can widely renowned bushrangers used the Central Tablehardly be endearing when coupled with the lack of any lands as hideaways, often, but not always, on amiable edible wildlife. Put it this way: not even snakes bothterms with the Aboriginal tribes from whose turf they er with Tasmania’s southwest coast. The east coast, by launched successful raiding parties against wealthy abcomparison, is abundant in stunning flora. Tempersentee landholders. The aborigines held out for three ate rainforest, dry eucalypt forest, expansive beaches decades of European settlement in central, western and framed by deadwood-littered hills reaching almost into northwestern Tasmania until the coming of the Black the Southern Ocean, rivulets, waterfalls, great birds of Wars in the 1830s and before being callously betrayed prey are all features of the eastern reaches of the south

by Protector of the Aborigines George Augustus Robcoast. inson.

I live a perfectly good and comfortable life here Beyond Tasmania’s early transportation period, the in Canberra. I spend more money on textbooks than wilderness was not, as often was the case on the mainI would like to, but surely that’s no reason piss off for land, a place to ‘get lost’ literally rather than figurativeeight days of sweat and bog, carrying nearly half my ly. Sealers and whalers, poaching the then-abundant body weight just to feed an expansive appetite. Why the stocks of the Southern Ocean under government lifascination with escaping to a place so remote that the cence used ancient Aboriginal pads to traverse the lessonly way in is by chartered flight? Surely we must really travelled sections of the island in order to reap healthy hate our fellow human beings to want to piss off to a profits in Bass Straight and the Bight. part of the world notable, amongst other things, for its The 1880s saw the King family settle the Melaleuca miserable climate.

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O-Week It needn’t be said (nonetheless, I will) that ‘the west’ has long held a place in European imagination as one of frontier, natives and, just occasionally, great riches. To ‘go west’ is to resile from human contact, to find solitude. Australia’s earliest settlers, when exploring Australia’s vast interior, occasionally found great riches.

Mostly they found hardship, bankruptcy or death. If they were particularly lucky, they found a heady cocktail of the three. Stirling, on Australia’s behalf, delivered Western Australia civilisation, sobriety and rule of law based on a federal constitution. Unfortunately, since then, they’ve given nothing in return. Three-fifths of bugger all, as my dad would say.

Isolation has a beautiful capacity to put things into perspective. It forces a hierarchical view of life. When the only food readily available to you is strapped to your back and the only means of transport are your own beanstalk legs, a certain prioritisation cannot help but occur. For those few days, credit bills cannot be as important remaining injury-free, which cannot be as essential as finding sources of potable water. A return to civilisation (loosely used here to refer to Cockle Creek – Australia’s trailer trash theme park) is welcome, no doubt, but not so the concurrent return of worries about income, balanced budgets and status updates.

After three years in an ANU Hall, living rather disgracefully and increasingly in other peoples’ pockets, my return to Canberra was marked not by mass facebook emails and endless photo uploads, but by a recognition of some of the downsides to endless technological development and media encroachment. I’m no advocate for the stone-age digital counterrevolution, but it is a nice feeling to know that not checking my emails daily won’t lead to privation. For that I may just win isolation from pyramid schemes and endless unread distribution lists.

Stephen Morris is Peppercorn’s Grand Cyclops and resident Australian history supremo.

Photos courtesy of the author and Joel Dawson.

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O-Week

Burmese Praise Caitlin Keogh The release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest on the 13th of November 2010 made many highlight lists for 2010, yet it does not mark the end of the battle for human rights in Burma. It is better seen as an encouraging achievement.

Suu Kyi has led Burma’s struggle for democracy and human rights for more than two decades against a military dictatorship. Having returned to Burma to care her ill mother, she became embroiled in Burmese politics and following an unsuccesful popular uprising aganst military rule, emerged as the Secretary General of the National League for Democracy (NLD).

In 1989, she began her long spell of intermittent house arrest and refused offers of freedom that required her to leave Burma. She was already under house arrest when in 1990, the NLD overwhelmingly won a general election only to have the results nullified by the military dictatorship.

Before returning to Burma in 1988, she had lived in London with husband Dr Michael Aris and their two children. In 1997 her husband was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and was no longer allowed entry to Burma. Despite not being under house arrest at the time, Suu Kyi did not believe that the military would allow her to reenter Burma, so when Aris died in 1999

they had not seen each other since Christmas 1995.

On 24th November last year, Suu Kyi responded to questions from youth activists from throughout the Asia Pacific region. The conversation was as notable for the gentleness and humility of Suu Kyi as it was for the substance of her responses.

Having spent 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest, Suu Kyi could be forgiven for recounting her personal experience yet she shows no interest in doing so, caring more about Burmese democracy than her own situation.

Her first answer moves quickly to draw attention to the 2,200 political prisoners who remain behind bars in Burma. She speaks particularly about those who are young people in their twenties and asks the audience of youth activists to raise awareness of the situation. It is here that the politeness of her manner becomes most striking as she asks the interviewer ‘Do you think that they would be happy to do that?’ It is this commitment to democracy that has made Suu Kyi a beacon of hope in South East Asia. Her belief in peaceful resolutions has won her many awards including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. She used the prize money to create a health and education trust for the Burmese people. However, in this conversation her

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O-Week focus is on the lack of freedom of communication in Burma.

After two conference calls into Burma had been unable to reach Suu Kyi, Amnesty International Malaysia made a direct call while the Asia Pacific youth listened via Skype. The phone lines are monitored and interfered with by the Burmese military. Suu Kyi considers this control of communication as a chief obstacle to human rights development in Burma.

Applications for internet access must be approved by the military and they are ‘not always granted’, with those associated periperally with the democracy movement being stonewalled by the regime. Given the lack of freedom of information and communication that this creates, Suu Kyi asks youth abroad to use their IT access to increase awareness about the situation in Burma. She describes this as doing, ‘the work that we are prevented from doing ourselves’.

There is no request for intervention or rescue, Suu Kyi firmly believes in the resilience of the Burmese people and puts faith in their capacity to improve their own situation. Her commitment to Burma cannot be questioned.

When asked where her inspiration to continue comes from, Suu Kyi does not reference the common Buddhist texts or Gandhi’s influential philosophy of non-violence. Instead she refers to the integrity of the people around her.

She sees it as a duty for all Burmese people to seek change. She acknowledges the resilience of her ‘very, very good colleagues’ and asks, ‘with colleagues like that how can I even think of stopping trying?’

The interviewer, understandably nervous as she converses with a modern luminary, held in similar high regard as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, queries whether she may ask another question. It is here that Suu Kyi gives perhaps her most heart-warming response when she gently replies, ‘Yes, dear’.

Suu Kyi describes the present situation in Burma with optimism. In the 10 days since her release, she says she has seen more young people getting enthusiastic and involved than she has in the past. She again notes the challenges in communication and expresses a wish that Burmese youth could connect with the rest of the world.

When asked which regional government is most

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important to assist the struggle of the Burmese people, Suu Kyi shows that she is no foreigner to diplomacy and pragmatism. She states that all the ASEAN countries need to coordinate their efforts along with China and India.

Not content with a mere reference to the ASEAN, Suu Kyi acknowledges the specific importance of a number of members including neighbouring Thailand, economically powerful Singapore, historically comparable Malaysia and the democratic Phillipines. Regarding Indonesia, she laughs as she notes its importance because it ‘used to be a military dictatorship’. Here she displays not only her willingness to receive support but her understanding of the region.

In her final words Suu Kyi extends an invitation to ASEAN youth to visit Burma. From her tone, she expects this invitation to be accepted. As one of the greatest political figures of our time it is refreshing to hear her honesty, optimism and concern for others.

The popular rise of Suu Kyi can not be seen as a surprise. Her father Aung San was instrumental in Burmese independence from the British Empire and founded the modern Burmese army. Her mother was an important Burmese political figure who was appointed as the Burmese ambassador to Nepal and India.

After a childhood in Burma, her later education occurred in India and the United Kingdom. She also worked for the United Nations in New York.

Some commentators have suggested that the junta orchestrated the release of Suu Kyi on the 13th of November 2010 to deflect attention from the general election held six days earlier, which pro junta candidates dominated..

The election has received widespread criticism given the restrictions on political communication, the number of political activists who remain imprisoned and the enforced absence of Suu Kyi from the ballot paper.

Regardless of the reasons for her release from house arrest, Suu Kyi remains steadfast in her calls for democracy and continues to inspire human rights activism.

Caitlin Keogh is a Peppercorn Editor and has a daily transfusion she’s that much of a bleeding heart.

Peppercorn, Issue One 2011

O-Week When Egyptian protesters took to the streets calling for the end of the current regime, parallels could be drawn between China’s own rebellion during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In both countries, demonstrations were against government corruption and favoured democratic and economic reform.

Visual similarities also emerged as a protester in Cairo stood in the way of a water cannon, recalling the famous ‘Tank Man’ of Tiananmen Square. While Egypt’s future is still uncertain, more than 21 years after the Tiananmen massacre, Chinese democracy looks unlikely to materialise particularly as the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner and political activist, Liu Xiaobo, remains imprisoned.

I r o n i c a l l y, on the eve of International Human Rights Day, Liu Xiaobo was charged with activities including: the ‘spreading of rumours and defaming of the government, aimed at subversion of the state and overthrowing the socialism system’. As part of Liu’s defence, he stated that his previous court appearances (in 1991 and 2009) were also for speech crimes. Liu told the court “merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly”.

On Christmas Day 2009, Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court, the city’s second-lowest people’s court. The trial lasted a suspiciously short time - only two hours - and foreign diplomats were forbidden from entering the courtroom. Unsurprisingly, the court also rejected an appeal against the sentence.

Christmas Day is a normal working day in China, but an important holiday for the embassies in Beijing following the case. China used this small window of opportunity to hand down one of its harshest sentences against a political activist in recent years, in an attempt to lessen its impact upon the international community. The sentence caused outraged nonetheless, with Human Rights Watch describing the trial as a “travesty of justice” and world leaders called for Liu’s release.

Furthermore, while in prison, Liu will be denied political rights for an additional two years, including writing or speaking on democratic reform. The harsh sentence is made more

unappealing by the notorious reputation of Chinese prisons due to their appalling treatment of political dissidents which can include regular beatings by guards. Moreover, a common cause of death in prison arises from the refusal of vital medical treatment. A recent instance of this occurred when the writer and dissident, Li Hong, was diagnosed with a serious neurological illness in prison. He was repeatedly refused medical parole until he was completely paralysed, and died six months later.

Liu’s sentence is also unconstitutional. Oddly enough, the Chinese constitution professes to enshrine freedom of speech and the press, but one does not need to look further than a blocked Facebook or Twitter page to see evidence of censorship in China. The Chinese government avoids mentioning the exercise of freedom of speech when it tries dissidents, and uses the term ‘inciting subversion of state power’ from the 1997 Criminal Code. Unfortunately the 2004 constitutional amendment that ‘the state respects and safeguards human rights’ is ineffectual, but often cited by China’s Xinhua news agency in propaganda.

If Chinese tones are disregarded, the word ‘Xinhua’ in Chinese is a close homonym for George Orwell’s fictional language in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak. This is important because the state-owned propaganda agency exercises control by covering up and blocking reports of unwanted news, such as the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in favour of promoting an alternative view. An article by Xinhua said the Peace Prize decision was a gross interference of China’s judicial system because it was “enshrining a convict”.

In what was a poorly disguised trophy to rival the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Confucius Peace Prize ceremony awarded 100,000 RMB to the former Taiwanese vice-president. Embarrassingly, the prize’s recipient declined to attend, not previously aware of the Confucius prize’s existence. A confusedlooking young girl toted by organisers as an ‘angel of peace’ collected the prize instead. But there is a more serious side to this story, as what should have been a day of celebration for China has gone unnoticed or ignored by the majority of the Chinese population.

I was in Beijing during the Nobel peace prize ceremony, and as it would be useless to find any news from Chinese TV

Lessons from Liu Xiaobo Annabel Joske on Chinese human rights abuses

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O-Week stations, I checked the BBC and CNN to find that the channels were blocked. The Nobel Prize website was blocked and so was YouTube, so in the end I paid for a VPN (virtual private network) and used an American server to watch the ceremony online. Following Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, China is now the only country today with a Nobel laureate in prison. China has encouraged its people to believe that their first Chinese Nobel laureate, an accomplished poet, writer and human rights activist, is in fact a dangerous criminal.

Although China’s strong economic growth means seri-

Comrades, Welcome to Peppercorn for 2011. It is our pleasure at the LSS to introduce you to the work of our new editors, Adam Brereton, Lachlan Caunt, Kavitha Burge, Leif Eldridge-Smith and Caitlin Keogh. We think they bring the lolz and the srs business in equal measure and hope that you will enjoy the fruits of their substantial labour.

Given this edition’s spectacular cover, it is perhaps an opportune moment to reflect on student organisations. Though the LSS is variously imagined as a resume pit-stop for careerists, an event management consultancy or a drinking society for Burgmann residents—the society is and must be a vibrant and representative student organisation.

The LSS provides the pulse of law school. The LSS is the oldest student organisation on campus, and the multi-generational mess we've accumulated in our office is testimony to that. Over the years, the LSS has played a formative role in the establishment of a ANU 'law school culture'. Ever mindful of student poverty, we also lovingly feed you with our BBQs every month. We host social events like the famous Law Ball and infamous Pre-Toga, we bring in legal celebrities to provide members with 'thought provoking insights' and we believe in promoting an engaged (albeit hungover) law school community. We spread information about external events, provide you with lols and get you cheap coffee at Gods HB. Togas, bread and circuses - it's all very classical.

The LSS provides really important services for members.

We spend huge amounts of money on the highly successful pre-exam tutorials and past answer database to help you suppress those half-yearly existential crises. As fifth year approaches and the breadline looms, we help you get one of those frightfully inconvenient *job* things. Our links to sponsors, clerkships info night, government, non-corporate and International careers night and our many other careers services ensure you're able to find employment when you leave.

The LSS is always engaged in the crucial work of student

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ous political discontent is unlikely, the Chinese government is still concerned that Egyptian protests may stir up unrest at home. Strict control is maintained by blocking internet search terms of ‘Egypt’ and ‘Cairo’ on Twitter-like microblogging websites. However, today’s students in China are more preoccupied with their school exams and finding a good job than carrying out a mass protest like their brave Egyptian counterparts.

Annabel Joske is a contributor to Peppercorn.

Anecdotal evidence suggests she may be the tianamen square tank guy.

AN Edict from Madame President

advocacy. We are very serious about making your voices heard to the faculty, to the legal profession, and to government. Sure, we sometimes lack the theatrics of our livelier student representative friends in Union Court, but we make considered submissions in numerous fora on a range of issues that affect your life at law school. We are more pie chart than picket line—a vanguard of bureaucratic revolutionaries.

Above all else we are your student organisation. Come in and visit us, we bought a fish. He's called Murphy.

Yours in law, Alice Crawford

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Land of the Brave, Land of the Fee

Dave Rowe waxes lyrical about JD creep.

America is popularly imagined as a lawyer’s paradise. This is a nation where the constitution is not an obscurity but the object of constant public reverence; where Jay-Z raps about the Fourth Amendment; and where William Shatner endorses personal injury firms without the slightest hint of irony.1 If there’s one thing our great and powerful friends

like more than a lawsuit, it’s a market. In these United States, however, there is real concern that the market for legal education is screwing its consumers, and our comrades-in-arms, American law students. Australian students should be taking note.

American law schools have proliferated at great speed in recent years. At last count, just under two hundred law schools had been accredited by the American Bar Association, and dozens more linger in unaccredited purgatory. The annual US News and World Report grad school rankings divide American law schools into four tiers. The first hundred schools are individually ranked, while the lumpenmass of schools beyond the Top 100 are sorted only into the rough categories of Tier 3 and 4. Your JD will cost you a pretty penny wherever you go, however. The fourth tier Ave Maria School of Law established in 1999 in Florida, for ex-

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O-Week

ample, charges $35,380 USD a year for tuition alone.

Room and board runs to $13,131.

The New York Times recently explained the logic of this from the point of view of universities. American law schools, it said, are ‘cash cows’. Large lecture style teaching and relatively inexpensive infrastructure make law schools cheap to set up and run, and the money they pull in can be used to subsidise loss-making departments of universities.

Things aren’t so crash hot for our student compatriots, though. The American economy remains in the doldrums, and demand for law grads is weak. Even if the economy were booming, there is every indication of a structural glut of JDs entering the labour market. Law student rag The National Jurist reports on an epidemic of over-indebted, under-employed legal eagles.

Law schools allegedly use a variety of dodgy techniques to fudge the statistics, but it is clear that graduate employment rates are increasingly poor outside of the top institutions.

The fiery online tabloid Above The Law has covered the backlash: one Boston College Law School student wrote an open letter offering to return his JD for a refund, while an unimpressed graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School went on hunger strike in 2010 in protest. Scores of bloggers have emerged, demanding that something be done about American legal education and urging prospective students to reconsider. By all accounts, though, law schools are still capable of bringing new students in. The allure of a highly lucrative career, though perhaps a chimera for most, retains currency. Federally guaranteed loans assure universities of payment, but there is no escape for students— the loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Amidst all of this gloom, the state of legal education in our fine Commonwealth looks rather sunny: the halcyon days of Whitlamite free education may be long

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gone, but HECS takes the edge off, right? Though the GFC did see some blood-letting, Australian firms are hiring once again with aplomb, and many an ANU student breathed a sigh of relief when Mr Abbott’s public service hiring freeze was narrowly averted in last year’s political tumult.

Nevertheless, we should be on guard. ANU hometown-hero Margaret Thornton has written about the relentless creep of neoliberalism into the structures of Australian legal education, and certainly some hallmarks of the American experience are visible in the direction higher education has taken in this country. The ranks of law schools have swollen from 12 to 32 in the two short decades since the Dawkins reforms. HECS rates, though still incomparable with American tuition, have increased substantially.

Fee-paying places look set to become more common as law schools across the country adopt the JD model. More broadly, Thornton speaks of a shift in the conception of education towards a market orientation.

Cash-strapped universities gear their programs for mass-delivery, and debt-accruing students see themselves as consumers of a commodity and are increasingly keen simply to realise a monetary return on their investment in legal education.

Of course, we need not fall into the pitfalls of the American path. It is to be hoped that with prudent administration and sufficient government support, we might be able to replicate the (enormous) educational successes of our American friends, while at the same time learning from their mistakes. As law students, we should be making our voices heard at a time of significant change in our system. The price of freedom, as they say here, is eternal vigilance.

Dave Rowe is currently swanning around the USA with a stupid smirk on his face.

Peppercorn, Issue One 2011

O-Week

The ERUPTION OF MOUNT MERAPI

BY Hari Lodwick If you have never been there, to imagine what Indonesia is really like as an Australian is almost impossible.

Even living there for five years as a kid and studying the language and culture for the better part of my academic life didn't prevent me from being constantly surprised by the country and its people during my Year in Asia in 2010.

For an Asia-Pacific Studies student at the ANU, the Year in Asia is an optional extra for your otherwise standard bachelors degree. For a student majoring in Indonesian Studies, the Year in Asia involves a semester of classes at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Central Java, and a semester of field research in Malang, East Java - the Woop Woop of Java which, to an Australian, still looks like sprawling suburbia. For the academic masochist (like myself) you can tack a law degree onto this whole affair, do honours, and stay in university for seven years. But I digress - this article is supposed to be about some of my experiences in Indonesia, not a thinly veiled CV or a lament about how I'm wasting my youth on my own indecision.

As I was explaining before, Indonesia is different to Australia in almost every way imaginable. I won't put down all my observations on the cultural and environmental nuances of one of our closest neighbours here (save that for the anthology I'll be sending to Lonely Planet). I will however talk about something that no Australian alive today will ever experience on their home soil, but that many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in Indonesia consider a fact of life: volcanoes.

While Australia has had a plethora of natural disasters in the last couple of years (including droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires), the Indonesian archipelago is a place where tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, monsoons, and volcanic eruptions are so common that all of them occurred at some point while I was there this past year. In Australia, we may sometimes be faced with bushfires and uncharacteristically heavy rains, but at least we can be certain that the land beneath our feet isn't going to move in an unexpected way. Isn't going to move at all, in fact.

Indonesia has no such guarantee.

Gunung Merapi (Fiery Mountain) is historically a very active and regular volcano, with it's last devestating eruptions in 2006 destroying the mountainside town of Kalikuning. It is only about 25km from Yogyakarta, and on a clear day you can see it from the city centre. When Merapi began to sporadically cough noxious and extremely hot pyroclastic clouds into the air in late October, I was actually nowhere near the university city. I was several hundred kilometres away in Malang, East Java, busily not writing my field research paper on modern Javanese tattoo culture. Instead, I was planning my trip back to Yogyakarta to meet up with friends still living there from the previous semester. One particular friend of mine, Ilana, was actually making her way back to the Central Java city from Australia to celebrate submitting her honours thesis which she had been working on while we both did the ACICIS (Australian Consortium of In-Country Indonesian Studies) program together. We had been in close contact online for the week before our little reunion, making plans to go to the beach and drop in on our favourite restaurants and cafes. After the first big eruption on the 25th of October, the next time we were chatting and the eruption came up in conversation I told her - we're going to be there, we should do something.

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O-Week Ilana arrived by air, and I made my way there overland by travel (an overnight shared minibus that costs about $5) on the 2nd of November. It was a clear day, and I could see the volcano smoking quietly on the horizon as I drove up to the city. The city was still covered in ash from the eruptions the week before, but otherwise it seemed quite safe. Before Ilana and I had left, we had created a facebook event called "Help Donate Supplies to the Merapi Evacuees" and invited all our family and friends to try to help out however they can. We managed to raise about 10 Million Rupiah, which is over AU$1000, in less than a week. By this stage more than 50,000 people had been evacuated from their homes on the slopes of Merapi and were living in camps - most only a few kilometers further down the mountain from their homes. On the first day, with help from our friend Fajar, we managed to rent a car, buy supplies, and borrow the services of his friend Hary and his 4WD ute. Hary, the owner of an adventure business, was actually the first person up Merapi after the first eruption. The men guarding his property hadn't responded over radio, and police were too scared to go look for them, so he went up himself in his 4WD decked out with all his adventure equipment, including spotlights, to retrieve their bodies. He kindly took the time to drive us and all the supplies we had purchased from the giant supermarket and discount store Carrefour up to the villages about 8km away from the crater of Merapi.

We dropped off the facemasks, baby supplies, food, water, bedding, first aid and hygiene supplies to two separate places - the first a distribution point for supplies, and the second an evacuation camp. I had thought it might be a good idea to buy lot of little milk boxes to hand out to the children at the camp, many of whom don't even get fresh milk when the volcano is quiet. It was heartbreaking watching kids push towards us, hand outstretched, for a single milk box, drinking it down thirstily as soon as they received it. A lot of effort had clearly gone into this camp, with supplies painstakingly listed and checked off, teachers volunteering to entertain small children, and designated sleeping and toilet areas. However, the ground was slick with mud, the general countenance of the people was grim, and we were told lots of people were sneaking back up the mountain to check on their farms and livestock during the day. We had also seen on local news that a lot of the evacuees had been forcibly removed from their homes, and footage of police kicking down doors belonging to those who refused to leave was all over the TV. Exhausted but exhilarated, we gave them the last of our supplies and headed back down to the city.

The next day, Wednesday November 3rd, was much more stressful. None of the people who had helped us the

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day before were able to come again. Fajar and Hary were busy continuing to evacuate and organise people back up the volcano, so Hary's friend instead came to meet us. We had already spent the better part of the donations, so decided to just use the remainder on basic food, hygiene, and baby items. The weather had changed, and it had been raining very heavily all day. The news had been warning people all morning about "cold lava", ash mixed with rain which was flowing in several areas down the volcano. As we drove up the mountain for the second time, the traffic was terrible - slowed by flooding roads and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's decision to visit the camps on this particular day. The danger exclusion zone had been extended, so we weren't allowed back within the 10km distance we'd been at yesterday and had to make do with dropping off supplies at a ranger depot point. The rain was falling really heavily by this stage, and because we couldn't see the volcano for the cloud and fog, we didn't realise that what we thought was merely thunder was actually the volcano erupting again. While we were at the 12km mark, unloading supplies, the exclusion zone was extended to 15km - leaving us 3km away from safety.

The rangers insisted we try some local cuisine before we left (at which Ilana glared at me saying "if I have to eat it, you have to eat it") which we hurriedly ate while listening to all the emergency warnings on their radios, before excusing ourselves and joining the queue to get back down to the city. Stressed and not nearly as fufilled as we had been when we'd seen our efforts being given to actual people, we tried to focus on the beach trip we had planned for the Friday. That night I could feel my friend's house shaking and hear the windows rattling from the eruptions only 25 or so kilometres away. The city was covered in a thick layer of ash, many locals from Yogya had left to stay with relatives elsewhere, and the friend I was staying with suggested the next day that I stay somewhere a bit further south of the volcano.

On Friday night, after we had arrived at the beach, we got the news that the biggest eruptions so far had happened - destroying the very areas we'd visited on our first supply run up the mountain. Although most of the people were evacuated in time, about 50 did not make it. While we knew we'd done our best, we couldn't help feeling the futility of our efforts and the insufficiency of those of the Indonesian government. Merapi is a very active and regular volcano - and erupts approximately every five years.

The 150 lives lost while Merapi erupted in 2010 the difficulties in evacuating people in a safe and timely way, as well as the issues in distributing donations, demonstrate that the systems in place to mitigate this kind of disaster aren't quite enough. Firstly, there were alleged technical issues with the seismic equipment usually used to moni-

Peppercorn, Issue One 2011

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tor the volcanic activity which meant that impending eruptions weren't picked up on as quickly as they could have been. Next, was the issue of people refusing to leave their homes. Many people in the affected villages have never even been as far away as the city, only 20km from their homes, and were frightened to leave what they knew.

There were stories of police having to forcibly evacuate people, and of people running away from the evacuation camps back to their homes. Education seemed to be the big issue here, especially in regards to familiarising people with the necessity of evacuation. Also, the poor quality of infrastructure, in particular roads and stormwater drains,

made actual evacuation very difficult. While there were a lot of local donations, poor organisation meant that dividing them up fairly amongst evacuees was very difficult. International donations were low as well because publicity for the eruption was eclipsed by the Indonesian tsunami which happened around the same time. The Indonesian government needs to recognise that neither Merapi nor its inhabitants are going to leave, and that better procedures need to be in place to protect the latter from the former for when it next erupts.

Hari Lodwick studies Law/Asian studies and is somewhere around her fifth year. Photos Hari Lodwick

Peppercorn, Issue One 2011

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Searching for Alex Bruce A week before the restrictive trade practices essay falls due Leif Eldridge-Smith Heavy sleeplessness rests on the tiny patches of yellow and grey discomfort: Law school pebbles balance my rolling, marble mind. in the sickly air of uncarpeted winter. Nicotine. Abstracting. Diverging. From the lumping concrete. Conscious, a dangling participle. Between the shortness of breath. A quality of the weak air, exhaling me: rasping the dry copper-rust throat and climbing the air currents. My lungs gum the nothingness.

Beaky bird eyes cock at the grains in my fingers. I shift uneasily within my still frame: A fluster of memory, colour, feelings. in the numb, frost-bitten capital. In a silent vowel. A fantôme phoneme, smoking at the circumflex. I remember my frozen nose, protruding and flick, snub the stub with disdain. Cross-legged and carefully hidden from the magpie. A Patrick Whitemoment between human and beast, without the listening snap of twigs and eucalypt whistle of the dry bush.

My mind, the focal-point glass marble is grinding the sinking stone floor. Shifting weight.

Sadness. Sudden, sagging. I stop. The ants start to crawl. A black être with legs is annoyingly close to my brain. Twitching, spindling senses. A finger appears. From nowhere. Extended sinews stretched thin. Hollow marrow, bones tunnelling my sourcelessness. The ant is convulsing, trying to flick off the pain. Being. Ugh. The roaming unconscious eyes, with a mind of their own – threading the essay themes and REM subplots – alight, affix. Out of place. Slacks, hanging off the frame of Alex Bruce. The Venerable, Buddha-proportioned Alex Bruce. ACCC gun. Flushing back the words into himself with self-conscious humility. Those words, those morphemes; submissions – shrinking in wig-hair stiffness – that burn legal personhoods. Alex Bruce. Supplicant, in the folds of merry jelly. I searched.

Dust, exerting work: I flipped. I tore through the legal files. Names dimly glossed past and slid off my memory as I furiously delved. 220102, 220101, 220099 filing past. No 220100. In the sweating dust from the search, empty handed. No thesis. No thoughts. I searched again, in the library. I’d have to start typing a draft soon.

In the back of my wandering, wondering brain, the first years ogled at the monk; the merry

ghost of summer-past, palming the grass with your feet. When the sun still shone and your toga bulged with colour. Pacing the even conversation of confused parental smiles… Right through to the Narnia-cardboarded base: Ten year old me is stuck in perpetual winter. In grass stained school shorts. Winter tweed dried stiff and odourless. The shame-pickled goosebump thighs.

Bloodless, numb, gartered and nose-frozen wool-rash winter. When it’s too cold for Alex Bruce to wear his cotton colours. Or the approval of the Dalai Lama. Pure, white silky approval; the tingle beneath the frictionless scarf, slipping in the Australian summer.

Glances askance. Had hesitated. Through the rim of marble glasses. I had clung to Chomsky, hard-covered and safe in the pluperfect. ‘You’re the monk!’ Ice stabs. Me? My Rambo-monk law revue impersonations came back; inert confusion then clarity fly kicked. It hurt; eye jelly quaked, queased. The thought hurt, flinched. Cradling the air over grey-pink temples. Waiting for the tender memory to stab itself to death.

Still, the embryonic essay waits. Unborn non-sentences. like nihilating anti-matter. Maybe if I emailed. To set up a time. To talk to the Ven. Alex Bruce, in the course outline: Consultation hours: 2-5pm Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays. Fridays by appointment. What is Alex Bruce on Wednesdays?

Hi Alex, Could we meet to talk about my Restrictive Trade Practices Essay? The thing is I’ve got ‘flu.

Could we meet later, say Friday?

Yours truly, turning numbly, mumbling to no-one but my collar; in my head-cold conscience: the email grated against something ingrained, beneath the numb. Sinking in the pit, below the pain. Save as draft.

Law School pebbles again. I turn to the grains in my hand. Crumbling at the touch. Defining my fingerprints. Basking in the shadow of a sun. Sabahul-khayr. Arabic and law lessons dripping, bleeding into the yellow and grey fingertips nursing my temple. Al-qahirah. Cairo. Promising, shining through the pane-less windows. (Giving me a headache). Ideas. Living, chromatic ideas. Born in between the vapid airs. In the sheets of the tissue. wailing silence of unborn immense words. From the common law’s bleeding caesarean. My first breath suffocates and coughs and helplessly cries through. And tears words, torn from the swimming air. made fleshy.

Or like hard-boiled gallstone droppings. My blocked nose whistles. Aspiration exhales.

Better go home. Get sleep.

Consciousness dawns. The thought of Friday creeps the horizon. At least the morning light is Friday light… My headache sees it anyway. My bones shift within their haunches. Syntactic structures click and haemorrhage. Through the frozen hamstrings, the mind-body paradox puzzles. Through the dizziness, the automaton grips the gears as locomotion smokes and sparks

and steams. Ach wait. Aïe. Pain. Agony. Just pain again. I hit my head on the air as I got up. Life slowly picks me up and carries me, within the latex balloon of sticky bones. Reality hangs loose.

Caught. In the sticky net of Cartesian ontological planes. Form is empty. Emptiness is Form.

What is it about the second level of the law building that sucks out the air? The old carpet unthreads beneath my weight and I must tread carefully, at the knee joint. If I keep it bent, it doesn’t hurt so much. How did the numbers start going up? I’ve already doubled back several times. It must be around here. I think. I presume. The memory of a reasoned thought, stored from childhood. Ascending order. It was 2.07, right? The law building will spit me out at random when I descend: A relation. A stochastic chain, Generating states of mind.

Where’s Alex Bruce? Room 2.07? Or in the exam paper? Behind my unseeing eyes, racing the yellow pages? Or the clammy sweat in the fresh air outside Melville Hall, after the exam? Or in the tape recordings? that remind me, that I’m not in class. That I’m not where I’m supposed to be. (Wherever that is). Alex is the silent breath, while I think for the words to write the essay; to sweat it out like a sickness for this breathing invisibility. The hairy absence of applause, creeping writing around the red pen.

An airless breath of second-story adrenalin, before I enter the merry jelly. I passed his door.

And kept moving. I never breathed a syllable of misting Canberra saliva. Silence-filled meaning palpable, magnifying, as through a lense, the enigma. The shifting blood in my mind fell back with every step away from the door. The roaming, spongy imbalance turned around. I met, just kissed the door handle. My ear tickled the varnished condom of sapping lacquer on the warm, bleeding wood.

The lecture recordings blip and meter passing time and later pace my media player. And repeat again. I whispered and blew back static phonemes in the foaming headphones. To the heavy breath in the taped crackle, the merry spirit of Summer-past: cellophane nitrate crinkling onto the guilty conscience of the present. I willed myself to speak. But breathed the words back.

Because I didn’t know what to say. The breath clung and glotted and found clarity in the pneumatic nodes, breaking in the reed pipe: Allemagne allgemeinen. The German germ dissolved the flour in my throat, and skirted the meaning – in broken English. Ich flüsterte auf deutsch züruck... and danced, and hovered and held my hand back into my mouth, in the shivering umlaut. And alienated the native speakers. And said nothing of any meaning. While the hem of your robes listened to a wind from Tibet, for news – neither of us could understand. Legalese Latin perhaps? Cold, hard, tangible in the numb. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

German comes. In complete sentences. French is fleeting words en vrac. Philosophers on cocaine. It’s buried in my subconscious. It runs with my blood. And lulls and lolls and lingers with desire. It skims my thoughts with a rush of colour. A gush from maman with fingers that rip through the emphatic tension; the bleeding fabric of picturesque Australian pixels (in HD) are always frayed around maman. Words torn from me. In the breathless pause. Of blinding Zorn. And made flesh. Scissoring womanhood tissue. Colère, choler. Running colour streams at the seams, from l’oeil d’Oedipe. I can never keep up to decipher them: Sartre’s abstracting yellows and reds. French.

But Tibetan. Sweet and sour wingdings to go. Light-headed in the Himalayas. Nostalgic butter-lamps and 1000 year old staleness: unwashed monk. Rusty prayer wheels without starting point. Headless, I think. No air, and no nose. No lightness or heaviness or meaning. Nothing. A blinking cursor in Microsoft Word. waiting.

Leif Eldridge-Smith is currently floating through space on a moonbeam and a prayer

Dear Leif: Thanks for the notice and for attaching your story. I confess to having had to read it a few times before getting some grip on it. Overall, I have no difficulties although when I read the title, I was a little concerned that it gave the impression I am not available to students who are in difficulties with their assessment and now can’t find me to get some help; especially before assessment is due. Can this be clarified?

The only text I would probably suggest be deleted is that part of the sentence that reads: “.....but stinking with the sweat of passing hands in the Australian summer.”

The only reason I suggest this be deleted or modified is out of respect of HH Dalai Lama (note the spelling: “Lama” and not “Llama”). The “pure white silky approval, flapping around (your neck) in the wind” is a reference to the ceremonial khatas that are a sign of greeting / respect. Especially the ones given by HH Dalai Lama are very pure, of very high quality and never handed around, nor stained in any way.

They are very special. The two khatas that HH Dalai Lama has personally given to me when I met him are very carefully stored, not out of pride, but out of respect for His Holiness.

There is a certain irony to the plight of the student who is searching for “Alex Bruce”, whose own Buddhist existentialism would deny the very existence of an intrinsically and substantially existent person called “Alex Bruce”. The last lines in your essay hint at this: “no air, no nose....” Whether intentional or not, this is very reminiscent of the very famous”Heart Sutra” (Sherab Nying Po - In Tibetan) where it says: “Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty.... in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no visual form, no sound, no odour, no taste, no object of touch, and no phenomenon. There is no eye element and so on up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element. There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so on up to and including no aging and death and no extinction of aging and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation, and path; there is no exalted wisdom, no attainment, and also no non-attainment” Sure, there is a “conventionally existent” Alex who teaches at the ANU, but “Alex” is merely a label that designated to a psycho-physical entity existent in dependence on name,

parts, causes and conditions and social attribution. Both the “Alex” the student is searching for, the “RTP essay” and the student him or herself do not exist apart from the bases of their designation.

The point is that while the student believes the essay exists as a solid and frightening “thing” out there, it does not.

Another student regards it as a trifle; something to do before watching the next episode of “Australia’s Got Talent”.

Likewise, the “Alex” that the student is searching for does not exist apart from the bases that the student in question designates to him. Therefore “Alex” is designated “teacher” in dependence on the students and faculty. He is another “Alex” to his brother and sister and parents, and yet another “Alex” again to his oldest, nearest and dearest friends. Even to himself, the “Alex” of 2010 is not the “Alex of “2000”. As a self-existent and intrinsically existent “Alex” that is sought out by the students, he does not exist.

The fear that the student feels toward both the RTP essay and the absence of “Alex” (or the fear that some students may feel at the presence of “Alex” !) is a fiction created by the mind of the student imputing certain existential qualities to both that just don’t exist. There is no “us and them”, “we and they”, “you and I”, “student against teacher”. The lack of substantial and intrinsic existence of these imputed designations means that there is only “us” relating flexibly on an ever-changing field of reality. Today “Alex” is the teacher.

In 20 years, the student may be the teacher. The difference between us is therefore one of degree and not substance.

I suspect Shakespeare was reflecting his “closet Buddhist” tendencies in his comedy “As You Like It” he wrote: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts” For myself, I really like Fr Thomas Merton’s last words to a conference after which he died prematurely through being electrocuted in his bath: “So I will disappear from view and maybe we can all have a Coke or something.”

With Peace & Best Wishes Alex

O-Week

Manifest destiny The colonial question Lachlan Caunt encounters all-pervasive post-colonial guilt Is colonialism truly to blame for all of the poverty, misery, depredation and starvation currently suffered by the third world? The recent article by famed American neoconservative Bret Stephens, provocatively entitled: “Haiti, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Who Cares?”, caused outrage, and more than a few sanctimonious monologues by those that read his deliberately inflammatory piece.

The article posited that countries like Haiti and Ivory Coast, since throwing off their shackles of colonialism, have notably decreased the quality of life for their increasingly impoverished citizens. At the heart of the indignant polemics written in response was the belief that colonialism, even a century after it countries ceased becoming outposts of the fine British Empire, is still to blame for the woes afflicting the third world.

The responses to Bret Stephens’ article, while diverse in the level of indignation, universally attributed the suffering of the third world to either repression by colonial masters, or poor transition from colonialism to independence. But so long after all traces of colonial-

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ism have disappeared, can the West still be to blame for poverty in the Third World?

When Baby Doc Duvalier, an autocratic darling of the West, was overthrown in Haiti in 1986 per capita GDP was $768US. In 2009, it was $519US. Can colonialism be blamed for negligent governance, widespread corruption and incompetent economic management?

On the Transparency International scale, the most reliable measure for internal corruption, Haiti ranked 177 out of 179 countries. Is this still to be considered the fault of nations that have consciously steered clear of an economy that, with ample guidance, could become a jewel of the pacific on the back of crop and tourism based economy?

How long does it take for a nation to control its own destiny? Some countries fought for independence, from a position directly comparable to those of the current third world, and went on to achieve glorious ends.

America, originally a disparate collection of settlers, staged a revolt based on an extortionate tea tax, and, with sage and measured governance, increased its

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O-Week wealth exponentially over decades and eventually centuries. While it took a century and a half for America to become the global superpower, it must be noted that their economy continually progressed, because of, and perhaps despite the absence of external help.

Does colonial guilt take years, decades or centuries to lessen? A point in time must eventually be reached when a country is impoverished not because of colonial rule at some distant point in the past, but because of local corruption, domestic criminality and endemic depravity.

To take a more geographically relevant example, India, perhaps the most notable and well remembered of countries to throw off colonial rule, made a transition from a British colonial outpost to a fully functioning, economically burgeoning democracy. This came not as a consequence of a unique bestowment of wealth or power from the departing British, but from a decision, made by Indians, to seek democracy and order. At the time the British left India, the literacy rate was a mere 18 percent. Nationalism, especially as a consequence of the acrimonious split with Pakistan, was rising. But, independent of any British coercion, persuasion or guidance, India took what, eventually, became the correct path, and became a democracy. Not because of British malfeasance, but because the populace made a choice, which was, in the end, the most socially and economically propitious choice.

Economic deprivation, starvation and autocratic rule are not unique to former colonies. Yemen, a country with a population of 23 million, has a per capita nominal GDP of $1,061. Suffering continued poverty, repression and a ubiquitous oligarchy that serves autocratic and economic functions equally, Yemen seems a perfect image of a former colony suffering from a poor transition to independence. Yet, Yemen never lived under the yoke of colonialism, and like much of the third world, Yemen’s suffering is its own.

This suffering was crafted by a greedy ruling elite and a dispassionate bureaucracy. Yemen represses the poor and enriches the wealthy not because of external meddling, but because of internal shortcomings. A pliable population and a canny ruling elite has served to keep Yemen in the economic doldrums, not an apa-

thetic colonial master neglecting a former favoured outpost.

Colonialism was not the original sin that created the impoverished third world. In 1881, King Bell and King Acqua, of the Cameroons River, West Africa, wrote a letter to the British Prime Minister, begging for the advent of British Colonial rule “ We want our country to be governed by the British Government. We are tired of governing this country ourselves, every dispute leads to war, and often to great loss of lives, so we thing it is best thing to give up the country to you British men… We are quite willing to abolish all our heathen customs…

No doubt god will bless you for putting a light in our country”. Colonialism was not necessarily a result of the powerful repressing the weak, the rich invading the poor. Colonialism, for all of its faults and foibles was not undertaken with malice aforethought. It was taken with an, admittedly misled, morality and sense of duty demanding civility where the colonists believed there was none.

The problem with the third world is not colonialism, nor apathy. The heart of the current suffering of the third world lies in the corruption, greed and depredation of the leaders of those countries that, through fate or choice, replaced the colonial yoke with the yoke of an autocratic government.

After colonial shackles are thrown off, the fate of a country is its own. The government it chooses, the human rights regimes it enforces and the economic programs it enacts are all in the hands of the populace.

If blood is spilt, it is not on the hands of the former colonists, but firmly on the hands of those who spill it.

Colonialism was not the worst thing to happen to the third world. The worst thing to happen was a combination a domestic fatalism, autocratic and often genocidal rulers and a population that refuses to take their own destiny into their hands.

Does colonial guilt take years, decades or centuries to lessen?

Lachy Caunt is a Peppercorn Editor and is currently in hiding from most of the IR faculty.

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O-Week

The Deregulator

Adam Brereton Professor Ian Young is skinnier than you. He has a bottlebrush moustache that looks like it was boosted from the local ANZ branch manager’s upper lip. He wears big square Gen X glasses that remind Gen Y that we missed the Cold War and are lazy failures. He’s also our new Vice Chancellor from March this year, landing the job after a long stint as Swinburne University VC. A committed deregulator, Professor Young has written on the merits of voucher systems and the Shanghai rankings, as well as maintaining his own academic career in Oceanography. Distinguished as he is, our new boss has a bleak record when it comes to undergraduates.

During his time as VC he oversaw the introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism, in the process all but dissolving the Swinburne Student Union.

This is a cautionary tale; sometimes the hand that feeds bites you instead.

Five years ago University campuses were a far cry from their current anemic state. Flush with other students’ money, clubs, societies and unions put their limitless imaginations to work organising piss-ups for

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themselves and, for some of the more left wing cliques, sending cheques off to Venezuela to help Chavez out.

Student levies also helped pay for a number of widely utilised services, like legal and welfare officers, and support for women's, queer and Indigenous groups. In July 2006 Voluntary Student Unionism was introduced and the good times dried up along with the subsidised brews.

The Swinburne Students’ Union (SSU) was at that time something like an amalgam of ANUSA and the ANU Union, what other universities sometimes call a guild, responsible for both advocacy and service provision. They charged each student $312 prior to VSU. Run by a cabal of socialists called “Student Voice”, the union attracted Professor Young’s ire when the paid staff of the union voted unanimously for a vote of no confidence in President Vicky Kasidis and her elected union officials.

The vote came about as a result of the SSU preempting the VSU legislation and shedding its staff. In February they jumped the gun and 19 employees were let go, five months before the changes were to take place. A

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reporter for The Age claimed a month later that only 5 remained. Ongoing industrial issues plagued the struggling socialists, who were taken to the Industrial Relations Commission by one sacked employee and called the cops on another to expel him from union premises. Professor Young was adamant that student service delivery was paramount and the union was impeding efficient provision of the essentials. Kasidis countered by blaming Young for the problems, accusing him of reducing the SSU’s funding for two years. VSU was to be the final stroke, she alleged.

At any rate, the University stripped $1.6 million from the Union and John Howard dissolved the other $3 million. A small cash reserve continued to fund activities but without any income the union lacked clout.

The simpering retrospective the SSU submitted to the Rudd Government’s 2008 VSU inquiry demonstrates the poor position the union enjoyed following its isolation by Young and its inability to manage its own affairs: “...student representatives have had to spend a large proportion of their time keeping the organization functioning and focusing on mundane day to day tasks such as ensuring compliance with financial reporting requirements and negotiating with the university over facilities, office space and the right to hold events on campus.”

“The SSU was also forced to re-locate equipment, files, furniture and student representatives from its office spaces on 3 separate occasions after Swinburne implemented VSU reforms in March 2006, with the most recent and largest move taking place over the Christmas break at the end of 2007.”

“SSU has survived the past two years because it held a large amount of funds in reserve, but these will not be sufficient to see the organization survive another two years.”

Reports written at the time don’t make the details of the struggle between Kasidis and the Vice Chancellor crystal clear but the nation-wide trend was that student unions failed in the absence of University bailouts. Professor Young declined to prop up the SSU and instead created a fully owned shell company, the Swinburne Students’ Amenities Association (SSAA), ostensibly to deliver more transparent and competitive student services.

His decision to form the SSAA demonstrates two things. First, this was Young’s own project: The board of directors consisted of himself, the Swinburne cen-

tral committee, and only four student reps: one each from the undergrad, postgrad, international and TAFE sectors of the uni. Secondly, finishing off the idiosyncratic socialist-run union was the raison d'être of the SSAA: Tighter university scrutiny over finances, an ex officio staff member or any number of compromise solutions with the SSU were ultimately discarded in favour of cauterising the stump. There’s also the matter of Young’s final comment in The Age’s report: “The university would help the union look at how it could rebuild.”

Cold as ice.

Student expectations of their relationship with university administration have changed dramatically since the advent of VSU, especially when advocacy and activism are concerned. New definitions of what is “allowed”, “appropriate” and “professional” dominate the student advocate’s lexicon, to the point where elected union representatives now often sympathise more with the University apparatus, or at least make apologies for its more egregious policies. This is the price demanded of our reps: no more mucking around and ballyhoo when there are committees to attend.

James Searle, the latest unfortunate to hold the SSU Presidency, confirmed as much in an interview late last year. “I don’t agree with the extent, but I can see where they’re coming from”, he said, qualifying the decision to dissolve the organisation he now leads. “[Professor Young] could have done a lot worse.” Searle also praised the VC’s willingness to meet with the union, especially after the previous ruling tribe constantly “[asked] for money with nothing in return.” Swinburne’s growth, debut in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings and courting of Indian international students also garnered a thumbs up from the new Prez.

Searle’s ticket, Shake Up, an unusual coalition of Green, Labor, Liberal and independent students, was formed in 2009 for the sole purpose of finally killing Student Voice off. He took two years to oust the socialists from power, owing to their “aggressive campaigns targeted mainly at international students”. Searle’s discussions with Professor Young have since centred around how the new union administration can start running services again; his tone of voice gives it away instantly as a reward. Nonetheless, the prospect excites the new President, who wants to “beat the SSAA at its own game”.

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O-Week It’s a shame both teams have the same manager.

The SSAA crew seem to have fewer hangups than their SSU counterparts. While waiting on hold to talk to a student rep I was told by a chirpy recorded voice that Swinburne has the highest national teaching quality and grade satisfaction. Fair enough, as least it wasn’t as vomitous as our own advertising. I was put through to Paul Kneebone, the coordinator of the SSAA’s student leadership and advocacy programme, and asked him how he liked his job. After a moment’s hesitation, Kneebone replied: “I’m an employee of the SSAA, so of course I’d give it a good review!” Unfortunately, I told him, the 2008 VSU report was unable to do the same: “...the SSAA board is dominated by the University administration with current and past student members making complaints to the SSU that they had no decision making power, inadequate training and support, were not provided with information in a timely manner, and had concerns that the level of services being provided by SSAA was not meeting student needs.”

When asked whether he agreed or disagreed with that assessment, Kneebone replied that the authors of the report were “probably right if that’s their assessment.” I asked again whether this meant he agreed.

“They must have felt strongly about it. [...] We’re trying to improve. It’s just difficult to assess what exactly.”

One specific event that demonstrated Professor Young’s commitment to undergraduate leadership was his presentation of “leadership certificates” to the SSAA and SSU representatives. Kneebone recounted how the Vice Chancellor undertook the Herculean labour of signing each certificate, remaining patient and good spirited even when new certificates had to be printed owing to typos or other errors.

“He had to sign all the certificates - there were quite a few.”

ed from the student body, their independence guaranteed by an “Advocacy Charter”. Amongst other things, this commits the student activist to being “completely independent and impartial” while still meeting a “duty to act in the overall best interests of the Student based on the facts and having regard to the University’s statutes, regulations, policies and procedures.”

Congratulations to the clever punters who guessed that the University’s “Academic Advice and Advocacy Audit Panel” is in charge of weeding out heterodox advocates. Moreover, students are encouraged in the ‘Advocacy Charter’ to make submissions to the panel if they don’t feel their advice was independent enough.

Understandable, when the university conceives of student advocacy and representation as being another check and balance on its academic apparatus: “Our experience indicates that when it comes to student representation, students are much more likely to take an active interest if the focus is on academic, campus and university issues pertaining to their studies. It is for these reasons that we have embarked on a journey to seek to enhance student representation with a focus on the student academic experience.”

Professor Young’s penchant for normative policymaking reached its zenith in the ‘Swinburne Behaviours’, a part of the ‘Performance, Development and Rewards’ (PDR) combined values and performance test for Swinburne academic staff. Josh Cullinan, an industrial organiser for the Victorian branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), describes the Behaviours as a system of bonuses where employees were ‘incremented’ up or down depending on both performance and personal conduct. Reach the correct score and... bingo: “If you turned up to an education or training seminar you got incremented up... the sort of real low end stuff we should be discouraging.”

“How about turning up to NTEU seminars?” I asked.

“Incremented down, if anything! The Swinburne Behaviours were the closest thing to Ian Young’s heart, we could have achieved a lot in enterprise bargaining had we given in on the Behaviours.”

Swinburne’s PDR guidelines state that the “Behaviours are an essential foundation and framework for

“He had to sign all the certificates - There were quite a few.”

Although Professor Young’s field of expertise is Oceanography, the organisation he leads bears the hallmarks of a man with a lawyer’s unblinking cyclopean eye for policy. The “Student Consultative Network”, the SSAA’s leadership and advocacy programme described

by President James Searle as a “tick and flick exercise”, is one example. Functioning much like ANUSA faculty representatives, prospective students are directly elect-

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Peppercorn, Issue One 2011

O-Week guiding individual and organisational behaviour.” The criteria are couched in general managinglish. For example, employees should “support, empower and encourage others to achieve excellence”. No worries, boss!

The rest of the “Behaviours” follow a similar style. Such general aims would be sure to attract universal support and compliance, right? Which would lead to a fairly even rate of bonuses distributed across all levels of management, yeah? Not according to Cullinan, who claims that while 21 from 26 senior managers met the Swinburne challenge, only 100 out of 600 junior and middle managers made the grade. Could this be because the code demands employees “generate enthusiasm and commitment for the Swinburne vision.” Since when was a middle manager enthusiastic enough for their own job, let alone sprightly enough to inspire others?

Also, feel free to write Peppercorn an email if you think the “Behaviours” sound a little bit too “Strength Through Joy” for your liking.

The SSAA, like its predecessor, was also the subject of industrial action after some employees, mainly women, got fed up with being underpaid compared to other Swinburne workers performing similar jobs.

SSAA workers employed under AWAs were “systemically under-classified” according to the NTEU, oftentimes being paid a salary up to $10,000 less than similar jobs at competing universities and less than the Swinburne award. Staff allegedly bled from the organisation.

Josh Cullinan organised a pay equity rally on the matter in September last year, timed to coincide with with VC’s own ‘Equal Pay Day’, which he described as a “big pat on the back for putting some women in senior management positions.” Although the demo seems to have been of the fart-in-the-bath variety, with 2500 postcards being delivered by the gatecrashing NTEU vandals, it was enough to provoke the Vice Chancellor into a direct confrontation, where he encouraged Cullinan to “have a hard think... Maybe you’re not doing the union any favours here.” Perhaps not; the new SSAA collective agreement is still weak when compared to the uni award.

That being said, it’s not like the NTEU got any bad publicity from the event (or even any discernible publicity at all). Young is a stealth bomber, pinging on the media radar only at times of his own choosing via his own press releases and columns in the Australian and Fin Review about the benefits of voucher systems.

Once Chancellor Gareth Evans had finished quipping his way through the ANU’s press conference you’d have been forgiven for assuming those columns didn’t exist either; one softball question after another pitched to the once-vocal Group of Eight critic who became king. Our newly independent Woroni also dismissed Professor Young’s history as a “skeleton in the closet” in a short news piece by Editor Scott Bolton, who concluded by defiantly answering his own rhetorical question on future student political developments with a triumphant “all clear.”

Professor Ian Young, brought in to trim Chubb’s fat, will almost definitely do a repeat of his Swinburne Ataturk routine, and probably should for the ANU’s overall interest. A hard manager, motivated to succeed in international rankings with a little tolerance for malarky will find plenty of fez hats to ban at the ANU as he drags us further into modernity. But for the undergrad drinking her way through six years of a law degree, hoping for some good times along the way and maybe even a job at the end, the University’s Byzantine research arm is of little interest. These might not be the students the ANU puts on glossies but we do exist and ostensibly our student representatives are the buffer between us and them.

This is why it’s so disconcerting that not one student officer has done their research on our new VC Overlord. Regardless of the eventual opinion of Professor Young that crystallises in student pollie HQ, whatever it may be, there is a real risk here because ANUSA survives only as long as they’re in receipt of the VC’s largesse; given some of the financial issues last year (Bush Week?) the association is by no means sitting pretty.

Even if you have a low opinion of student unions and would be happy to see ANUSA go up in flames, Swinburne is hardly operating under a better state of affairs.

Despite the advent of the Deregulator one beacon of hope shines brightly in our future: At least some of our student pollies are going to get some heaps good certificates, and who knows, the VC might even sign them himself.

Adam Brereton is a Peppercorn Editor and occasional /b/tard. He was denied an interview with Professor Young on the grounds that he wanted to do a sit down, which had to wait until march.

Peppercorn looks forward to meeting with the VC when he arrives.

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reviews Reviews Editor: Bojana Kos

DISC Blakroc The Black Keys Reviewer: Joe Frawley White skin and rap music has never been the easiest union to accept. Eminem ruins rap one song at a time, but the Beastie Boys show that it can be done. And let’s not forget Beck, who can rap along with the best of them.

So when two white musicians team up with a bunch of 90’s rappers and try to make an album, they’re going to have to work hard to impress. Blakroc is not the newest Black Keys record (see Brothers), but it has achieved so many interesting sounds that it really should be written about.

Drummer Patrick Carney and Guitarist Dan Auerbach are The Black Keys, a two-man wall of sound from Ohio. Together, they have created some of the best lo-fi rhythm and blues albums around. If you need help, think ‘The White Stripes’, add a boost of volume and depth and a beard that would make Jesus whimper.

Blakroc is an album that stands apart from what the Black Keys are known for. Over just 11 days in a studio in Brooklyn, The Black Keys laid down a sparse blues record which artists like Mos Def, Ludacris, and RZA wrote and rhymed to. The production of each track was left to the hip-hop and rap artists in the collaboration.

The result is a rock-meets-rap album, and it is hands down – amazing. As it was so spontaneous the whole album feels very natural, with nothing being forced or overdone. The beauty of this record lies in its seemingly effortless success. It just works.

After the initial culture shock of blues and rappers on the same studio take, you realise how much this al-

bum shines. Blakroc starts with lowhumming bass that only rap knows how to deliver, and the listener is soon punched straight in the ears with guitar, drums and rhymes; you can tell this combination has resulted in really unique music. It is obvious that The Black Keys wanted to continue their lo-fi style; Blakroc still sounds like a raw, garage record, whilst featuring some of the biggest MCs. Although Auerbach is given time to show off his unique psychedelicblues guitar style, his rhythms never dominate any given track. Instead the drums, bass and lyrics are the front of Blakroc. Both the drumming and the rapping are minimal (as neither ever lets loose), but this means both maintain cohesion - Carney’s drumming works so well on this record because he never tries to outshine the rhythm within the rap. The lyrics that were written by the rap artists cover the same themes: women, cars, and other rappers. It is also important to realise that the MCs involved were thrown in the deep end, as they couldn’t listen to a beat for a month and slowly pen their rhymes. They had to come in and deliver. This limitation ensured that everyone was pushing for creativity, not just The Black Keys pushing their own sound boundaries.

The blues sound the Black Keys spit out is a solid foundation for rappers to show off their talent. In some ways it would seem like an unlikely combination, but it’s a collaboration that works. Hell, it’s even a start to the argument that white boys can play rap music. Although each song contains a rap artist who helped shape their own track on the album, Blakroc flows in and out of songs seamlessly – the result being an album that is incredibly easy to listen to.

Book Truth Peter Temple Reviewer: Bojana Kos Australian fiction is no love of mine.

I’m not proud of it, but I struggle to get through anything by Peter Carey, Miles Franklin or Patrick White. So, it came as a huge surprise when I opened Truth

by Peter Temple and found myself unable to put it down.

Taking place in Victoria during the Black Saturday bushfires, Truth follows the actions of Inspector Stephen Villani as he investigates a series of suspicious deaths, uncovers secrets about his own home life and navigates the politics of being Melbourne’s top cop.

Temple’s style is sharp, unapologetic and breathtakingly real. From the first page, the dialogue rings in your ears, the setting takes shape instantly and protagonist Villani wins your affection and support without your even noticing. This character is so incredibly well formed and written that his bad decisions and oversights only add to his depth. Temple’s Villani is a flawed and brilliant re-creation of the good cop.

If Villani is the star of this story – the city of Melbourne is his enthralling leading lady. Temple is masterful at his portrayal of the culture, tensions and allure of Victoria’s capital, lending the storyline suspense and sex appeal. The language of Temple places the reader right into the fray, sipping cocktails with State Ministers, dodging allegations of corruption and poring over gruesome crime scenes. Everything about this book draws the reader into the closed and dangerous goings-on of the police force.

Keeping with the conventions of Australian fiction, Truth is littered with

reviews jargon, colloquialisms and expletives.

In this instance however, the result does not shock the reader, but immerses them in the complex world of Australian crime.

The winner of the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Truth is a tantalising and seductive read, where the pages seem to turn themselves. This book achieves that double-edged satisfaction upon completion that only the greats manage – the whole way through you’ll be dying to reach the end and when you do, you’ll be sorry that it’s over.

Film Another Year Mike Leigh Reviewers: Bojana Kos and Danjel Miladinovic Another year, another international film, another exceptional perspective on life.

The latest film from director Mike Leigh, Another Year made its debut on the international stage, doing the rounds at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festival, garnering widespread critical acclaim.

Set in London, Another Year is a harrowing and unapologetic glance at the ordinary and pleasant lives of married couple Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri Hepple (Ruth Sheen), as those around them experience a miserable year. The result is a dreary, unrelenting and honest story the likes of which Hollywood is pathologically incapable of producing. This film is certainly not for the faint-hearted, or easily distracted. If you do laugh, it’ll only be because that’s what you do when someone says something awkward or embarrassing.

Another Year is irrefutably British.

The panning of bleak landscapes, the brilliantly acted awkwardness and the

use of tea as an icebreaker only add to the overwhelming portrayal of English sensibility. Brilliant though this film may be, there is no escaping the fact that most of the 129 minutes of screen time is taken up with small talk.

Sounds dull, right?

Remarkably, the brilliance of this film comes from its ability to jump right out of the screen, filling the audience with dread, uneasiness and a suspenseful fear of what comes next. I found myself cringing and covering my face out of embarrassment when characters would cast surreptitious glances at one another. This drama demands the kind of response you’d expect at an action or horror film.

The cast is undeniably incredible.

Theatre veteran Lesley Manville shines as the emotionally unstable and delusional Mary, whose ups and downs drive the drama in Tom and Gerri’s otherwise ordinary life. The most striking aspect of this character is how applicable she is. She’s that spinster Aunt that we all have. And yet, Manville plays her so subtly, with innocence and blind, misplaced hope, that you can’t help but root for her the whole way through. Jim Broadbent also delights in his own way, bounding around with booming voice and startling expressions. I only thought ‘Horace Slughorn!’ once whilst watching him – which is quite an achievement.

True to form, Mike Leigh has tackled some heavy truths about society in this project. The plot includes a number of characters who turn to alcohol in difficult times and many who are eerily adept at self-deception. Another Year is rife with symbolism and deals with the gritty reality behind finding long-lasting happiness. It is this choice of subject matter that makes the film so relevant and worthwhile, and also the reason it won’t appeal to large audiences.

Ultimately, Another Year is an un-

conventional film, but a remarkable piece of art. It doesn’t have the latest album from Daft Punk featured in it, and it doesn’t come in 3D. You won’t even get that feeling of displacement as you walk out of the cinema, struggling to snap back into reality. This film is the closest thing to reality that you could get on the big screen. It’s a haunting look at what happens when life doesn’t end happily ever after and as such, won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re looking for an interesting spin on cinema, or even something to kick a little pro-activity into your life, I challenge you to sit through it. It’s a surprising beauty.

Theatre Uncle Vanya STC Reviewer: Brody Warren I’m not going to lie – I was not raised in a family of thespians. Sport and business take the forefront in the Warren household, and somehow I ended up loving the arts and studying law here in the bush capital. Point is, deprived of theatre as a child; you can imagine my excitement when the opportunity arose to check out Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya. With Hungarian director Tamás Ascher at the helm and the cream of the crop in Australian theatre filling the cast, the quality of Andrew Upton’s adaption was never really in doubt.

Even before the play had begun we were blown away by the set. Zsolt Khell had transformed every detail of Anton Chekov’s vision into an elaborate masterpiece, complete with rustic wood-chopping at the rear and exceptional attention to detail in interior furnishings. Not to mention the rain later on, pelting down from above, bringing an intense addition to the set, and an ironic reminder of the stifling Decem-

ber evening outside.

As for the production itself, Upton’s adaption was almost faultless. Every drop of sweat, every tear of frustration perfectly portrayed, and the stagnant, psycho-analytical storyline that seems typical of Chekov was brought to life in 1960s Australia with a majestic brilliance, largely due to the acting prowess.

The story follows the hopeless endeavours of Uncle Vanya (Richard Roxburgh) and his niece Sonya (Hayley McElhinney) as they slave to maintain the estate. The arrival of Professor Serebryakov (John Bell) and his young wife Yelena (Cate Blanchett) seems to force a lag in routine, simultaneously providing the impetus for a renewed sense of energy on the estate.

The regular visits from Dr Astrov (Hugo Weaving), brings news from the great outdoors and are a welcome contrast to the unbearable monotony of life within the house’s walls. With Jackie Weaver, Sandy Gore, Anthony Phelan and Andrew Tighe in minor roles, it is little wonder the dramatic

talent on show breathes fresh life and a renewed accessibility to a piece more often entirely misunderstood.

Roxburgh’s Vanya is truly explosive, the ANU Graduate presenting a remarkably delicate temperament of a man coarse, dishevelled and worn by an eternity of hopelessness and frustration. Weaving too commands attention as charismatic Astrov, moving with an urgency unparalleled in the lassitude of his surrounds. The intensity of the Doctor’s longing for Yelena was made plain in every aspect of Weaving’s performance, giving the audience a mature and irresistible gentleman, who, like those closest to him, is feeling the true strain of life’s responsibilities.

McElhinney also gave a strong performance as troubled Sonya, yet her Australian drawl was perhaps a little too exaggerated amid the neutrality of the other voices on stage, which became somewhat distracting. Meanwhile, the King of Australian Shakespeare brought us a Serebryakov like no other, Bell easily setting the tone for those around him, as we watched the

needy Professor visibly crumbling under the combined strains of academia and old age.

Katie Starlight begins her first ANU semester by defiantly rejecting her Pube parents’ values, career and life choices, proclaiming to her anomic Girls’ Grammar ‘friends’ that she will instead use her Law/ Asian studies degree to pursue a career with Ausaid, because she wants to devote her life to helping South East Asia’s less fortunate. The next night Katie has dinner at Ginseng in Manuka and orders in a loud clear voice, unaware that the waitress was in her grade, and insists, po-faced, that the bill be rounded up $1.32 ‘to show her gratitude’. At any rate, she enjoys her sweet and sour chicken as only a crusading young Protestant can.

On Market Day, Ms Starlight’s heartfelt political beliefs induce her to sign up to every political club in order that she might ‘stay across the issues’. She gives sincere assurances that she will attend the O-Week events of no fewer than six beaming caucasian clubs but commits a tragic faux pas by mistaking AFEC for the Chinese Students’ Society; her simpering apology that “all those clubs look the same” does nothing to help the situation. Nonetheless, she discards her new commitments in favour of her regularly scheduled basketball, volleyball, hockey and bridesmaid appointments; Girlfriends come first!

OBITER DICTHEADS

Upon returning to John XXIII from a summer as an unpaid gaffer for the Labor Party, financed at his Bowral parents’ expense and with their overweening praise, Biff Dudemichaels spends most of his O-Week inventing a series of putrid, obvious lies about his encounters with government luminaries that hint sinisterly at both his crippling social autism and unreserved willingness to debase himself to get access to the ‘corridors of power’. His boosterish, envious friends gullibly gobble up every spurt.

Mr Dudemichaels then spends the essential O-Week Toga cluster-fuck alternating between blasting pushups for onlookers and whining that BRA’s new ticket policy has ruined the event. Later he is heckled while trying to corner some vapid Johns “bishkit” by poking his filthy tube out of two folds in the sheet and acting like it’s the Platonic member. Unsuccessful in realising what the sixth year Economics/Law student considers to be his divine right, Biff convinces his longsuffering ex-girlfriend to give him a handjob and passes out in a puddle of his own taint with a victorious grin on his face.

Is it possible to describe the typical law student? Is it true that we’re all baptised in martyrs’ tears and sleep every night on a bed of rusty nails? To answer these questions and countless more you don’t care about, this year Peppercorn will document the year of two students for your amusement. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional and exists purely in the neurotic mind of the reader.

The true star of the night, however, was irrefutably Blanchett. As she glides effortlessly across the stage, you get the feeling that it really is her turf, staying attuned to each of her fellow actors’ every move. Blanchett has an incredible stage presence without being overbearing, and her Yelena was a tantalising mélange of poise, elegance, purity and desirability. I think I may actually be in love.

The dichotomy which lies at the heart of Chekov’s character construction was so impeccably preserved that the action flowed seamlessly from tragedy to comedy and back again.

Uncle Vanya was a fantastic conclusion to the 2010 season, and the Sydney Theatre Company can only hope to emulate this quality in their upcoming shows for 2011. Long live Queen Cate.

ANU EATS ITS OWN Dan Rose ANU Facilities delivered a flying head-kick to the ANUSA club Humans vs Zombies just seven days before O-Week, by prohibiting the only drawcard for the event – Nerf guns. According to ANU HvZ club President, Chris Carter, ANU has banned Nerf guns on campus, citing sensitivity, safety and prestige reasons. After speaking with several stakeholders in the HvZ campus, the reaction is extremely polarised.

The problem lies here though. Nerf guns are coloured brightly so that hired Force does not mistake it for the Real Thing. You can buy 8kg belt-fed machine guns, and Uzi-style automatic pistols – but they all look like childrens toys, and up until the HvZ craze swept America, they were in fact made for children. I don’t think anyone actually doubts that a bunch of adults at the southern hemisphere’s most prestigious University are running around shooting each other with toys and throwing socks around, though it seems some sectors of the campus would rather it was not this way.

But why have Nerf guns been banned? I think I may just have answered my own question here. “The university doesn’t feel that it’s reflective of our world class institution,” says Chris Carter, HvZ President. It’s also apparently “disrespectful” to victims of school shootings and war veterans.

Let me frame the situation for those who want to ignore the HvZ problem. ANU is allowing the HvZ club to use the ANUSRA Hall for battles, or whatever occurs in these games. Chris Carter also mentioned that they were in negotiation with ANU to be allowed to conduct missions in some secluded areas around campus at night, so long as ANU Security is notified. Furthermore, my long time friend and fellow traveller, ANUSA President Leah Ginnivan, told me that the Association was willing to extend insurance coverage to HvZ if they need to play their game.

I tried to contact the ANU Media Relations office so they could explain themselves to Peppercorn, but they claimed to have no knowledge of the HvZ issue. Despite the HvZ President explaining to me that Media Relations was involved, they shunted me off to Facilities.

In my attempts to contact Security, a subsidiary department of Facilities, I was told that only Brett Byron was available for comment, however he was not available at that time, and so I’ll have to omit this awful episode of hide-and-seek via telephone from the record.

Both Chris Carter and Leah Ginnivan could not recall any specific complaints made to them regarding HvZ. In conversations with students however, I was able to find that at least half of those I buttonholed were actively hostile towards the group. Initially I put this down to some kind of in-group social snobbery. Though upon further inquiry, they mainly cited the fact that in many cases, their lives were disrupted, or they were shot at, or they were tackled down by a large

zombie. Helen Phelps, one of the Witch-Queens of the ANU Liberal Club, said that Humans Versus Zombies was a bastardisation of the Queen’s English (“It should be Humans and Zombies”), and that it was a waste of taxpayer’s money (“Any of them who are on Centrelink should be in their rooms studying”). Something about this seemed fishy, but I put it down to the fact I was born a Red, a Pinko, a card carrying Socialist, and therefore will never integrate into this Great Land’s ideology.

Leah Ginnivan mentioned the positives of the game, specifically that, “It encourages people to get involved.” The “townie” demographic, the “nerd” demographic – these are all people that clubs and societies, as well as desperate student polls, have been desperately trying to tap for as long as I’ve been within the University system. And this sentiment is widely echoed amongst supporters of HvZ. Georgia, a Law student, said, “I’ve always enjoyed it… [although] it’s fun to judge the HvZ kids.” Joe, a Geology student, said, “It adds a bit of colour to campus life.” And there are always the jokes about the HvZ players getting their “annual Vitamin D”. Hohoho, I turd my pants laughing at that one every time.

ANU’s argument that the game detracts from the University’s world-class reputation is utter horseshit, and whoever formulated that pearl of wisdom should be tied to blocks of concrete and thrown off the Commonwealth Bridge. Admittedly, ANU produces world-class research, but it also exploits International students to a degrading extent. “Come in friends, spend your money here, and get a degree that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”. Furthermore, many of the students who play HvZ, I suspect, will go on to be one of those academics that pumps out peer-reviewed articles – the kind of academic ANU so highly values.

To address the argument that HvZ is insensitive to students who have been in war, or who have experienced school-shootings, this seems to be a classic case of Liberalism conflicting with itself. Students should, by all means, be allowed to run around like infants and play Cowboys and Indians, however now we are seeing the dirty footprint of paranoid liberals getting stomped into anything that may offend what is surely a tiny minority.

Dear HvZ: In principle, I agree with a game that prepares our future leaders for some kind of zombie apocalypse. In fact, if I had timeoff from working feverishly to support myself, I would probably play too. What I don’t like is the fact you people had a club with over 600 members, but lay down to the University. You had the guns, and you had the numbers, but you fucked it. Appropriate action would have been to charge down to the Chancelery in a flying-wedge formation, and use your arsenal to occupy it until they ceded to your demands of the free use of Nerf guns. Instead, you’ve taken the respectable route.

The University has the momentum now, and now they’ve succeeded in blindsiding you a fortnight before the Big Game, they won’t stop until they’ve stomped holes in you and left you a babbling mess.

This leaves us back at square one now. Zero-sum. The club that appealed to a wide demographic, one which tapped the untappable group of students, and did not rely on the drawcard of alcohol, drugs or free love, is going to lie down and take one for the Queen. Lock those bastards back in their rooms; this University belongs to the Good Ole Boys again. I for one have just broken out a bottle of tequila, because believe me, the good days are back, so pour a shot on the ground for our soon-to-be minced comrades.