2016 Edition 2

FARRAGO EDITION TWO • 2016

AVOCADOS • DRAINS • POLYAMORY

CONTENTS

PAGE 50

PAGE 42

PAGE 40 4 • NEWS IN BRIEF 5 • CALENDAR 7 • SPEWSUL • INTELLIGENT DESIGN? • KEEP RIGHT 8 • SERVICES RENDERED 10 • NAPPING ON CAMPUS – THE EXPLAINER 11 • CARLTON CONNECT 12 • THE MAGNA CHARTER 13 • THE HAPS WITH THE FAP 14 • FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT (TO STUDY) 15 • FROM YOUR OFFICE BEARERS 20 • CURBING COLLEGE CULTURE 21 • POLL MANIA 22 • COUNSEL IN COUPLETS 23 • UNDERGRADUALISMS (COMIC) 25 • IT’S NOT A PHASE, MUM 27 • CULTURAL (IN)APPROPRIATION 28 • COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO 29 • I LOST MY VIRGINITY TO A PLASTIC TUBE 30 • BIG LOVE 31 • DO WE HAVE A SIXTH SENSE? 32 • RIO & EVIE (COMIC)

34 • [NERVOUS LAUGHTER] 36 • THE AI WEIWEI WAY 37 • PUNCH UP, NOT DOWN 38 • FOR & AGAINST: AVOCADOS 39• THE BUSHFOODIE’S GUIDE TO THRIFTY CAMPUS DINING 40 • ONE OF US: CULT REVIEWS – HEATHERS 41 • THE VOICE OF ANXIETY 42 • PIPE DREAMS 46 • EXISTENCE IS FUTILE 47 • BUTTON MASHING AND DRAWING BLOOD 48 • PAYING OR PLAYING 49 • POINTLESS BRUTALITY 50 • WANNSEE: MANAGING THE PAST 52 • WE ARE ALL SO FAR AWAY 54 • TRESPASSER ON THE TRACKS 55 • OEDIPUS REKT 57 • APOTHEOSIS 59 • NOTES FROM THE WEIRD SIDE: PROJECT ARES 60 • BEFORE/DURING/AFTER 62 • AN HOUR IN THE LIFE: 4AM 63 • FIG TREE 64 • FLASH FICTION: WORKPLACE HORRORS

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 1

THE FARRAGO TEAM EDITORS

Danielle Bagnato Sebastian Dodds Baya Ou Yang Caleb Triscari

SUBEDITORS

Bori Ahn Ayche Allouche Alexandra Alvaro Natalie Amiel Jordyn Butler Cara Chiang Ben Clark Jess Comer Gareth Cox-Martin Nicole de Souza Simone Eckhardt Simon Farley Jessica Flatters Hayley Franklin Amie Green Ashleigh Hastings Paloma Herrera Emma Hollis Annabelle Jarrett Audrey Kang Rose Kennedy Jack Kilbride Eliza Lennon Jack Musgrave Jeremy Nadel Kathleen O’Neill Emily Paesler Jesse Paris-Jourdan Alanah Parkin Evelyn Parsonage Elena Piakis Finbar Piper Ed Pitt Lara Porczak Lotte Ward Jenny Van Veldhuisen Dzenana Vucic Matthew Wojczys Jessica Xu Yan Zhuang

2 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

CONTRIBUTORS

James Agathos Alexandra Alvaro Duncan Caillard Raphael Canty Nathan CCP Ben Clark Danielle Crocci Martin Ditmann Katie Doherty Hayley Franklin Zoë Goodall Lord Gungl Ashleigh Hastings Tyson Holloway-Clarke Candy James-Zoccoli Lily Jiang Belinda Lack Rose Kennedy Sarah So Eun Lee John Lowe Sean Mantesso Lilly McLean Ben Meurs Tiernan Morrison Jeremy Nadel Fergus Neal Mary Ntalianis Daniel O’Neil Jesse Paris-Jourdan Kit Richards Jacob Sacher Greer Sutherland Brendan Tam Caleb Triscari Ben Volchok Dzenana Vucic Wizard Lucy Williams Yan Zhuang

COLUMNISTS

GRAPHICS CONTRIBUTORS Edie M Bush James Callaghan Lynley Eavis Amie Green Tiffany Y Goh Adam Joshua Fan Taliza Ho Anwyn Hocking Carolyn Huane Lucy Hunter Jasmin Isobe Emma Jensen Kerry Jiang Tzeyi Koay Han Li Mabel Loui Eloyse McCall Sam Nelson Dominic Shi Jie On Katia Pellicciotta Anais Poussin Frances Rowlands Ella Shi Bonnie Smith Ellen YG Son Sophie Sun Aisha Trambas Agnes Whalan Jialin Yang Reimena Yee

Ben Clark (Online) Gabriel Filippa Patrick Hoang Thiayasha Jayasekera Kerry Jiang James Macaronas Nick Parkinson Adriane Reardon Eliza Shallard Felicity Sleeman (Online) Lotte Ward Xavier Warne

WEB OFFICERS

Sorcha Hennessy Lucie Greene Allen Gu Kim Le

SOCIAL MEDIA

Jack Fryer Ilsa Harun Monique O’Rafferty Lachy Simpson

COVER

Dominic Shi Jie On

APOLOGIES In Jeremy Nadel’s article ‘Funding the Party Line’ published on page 8 of Edition 1, it stated that “16 per cent of the total budget expenditure” went to an NUS affiliation fee. This was a misprint and the figure should have read “1.6 per cent of the total budget expenditure”. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

FINE PRINT Farrago is the student magazine of the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU), produced by the Media Department. Farrago is published by the General Secretary of UMSU, James Bashford. The views expressed herein are not necessarily the views of UMSU, the printers or the editors. Farrago is printed by Printgraphics, care of the enigmatic Nigel Quirk and John ‘To-The-Rescue’ Heyman. All writing and artwork remains the property of the creators.

This collection is © Farrago and Farrago reserves the right to republish material in any format.

ARTWORK BY KERRY JIANG

EDITORIAL A

bout two weeks after we first took office, we got an email. We get a lot of emails but this one was a bit different. It was from someone called ‘Doug’. In it, he invited us to meet with members of the Cave Clan to discuss the possibility of Farrago covering their 30th anniversary.

“What’s the Cave Clan?” Caleb asked.

“Only the coolest group of underground Urban Explorers in Australia omfg,” Sebastian fangirled.

“Do we have to go into a drain?” Danielle vomited.

“Fuck yeah, let’s do it,” Baya cheered.

We met them in a playground east of the Yarra, three incredibly normal dudes of various ages and backgrounds. Doug, ‘Iso’ and ‘Prowler’ took us on a tour of a short stretch of tunnels, including a slippery climb next to a waterfall and a visit to the ‘guestbook’, a section of tunnel wall maintained by the Clan for fellow drainers to sign. After a visit to one of the tallest red brick tunnels in Melbourne, we eventually emerged over an hour after we’d descended, our socks wet and concrete dust in our hair.

Running the Media Office is a lot like exploring Melbourne’s stormwater system with the Cave Clan: equal parts exciting and nerve-wracking, with an underlying worry that you might get swept away without warning.

When we were invited by the Clan to report on their 30th anniversary and annual awards night, we followed them straight into the dark. You can read all about it on pages 42-45, where human enigma Jeremy Nadel reports. You may have noticed that our gorgeous cover is also Cave Clan-themed. That’s thanks to the incredible Dominic Shi Jie On and his magic glow dust (seriously how does he do the thing?).

Elsewhere in the mag you’ll find Ashleigh Hastings’ letter to her younger, Mary-Kate and Ashley-obsessed self, complete with tweenage scrapbook art by the talented Katia Pellicciotta (p24). Or maybe you’re more interested in poems about the lonely intimacy of road trips? Well lucky you, because Dzenana Vucic is all over that business (p52). If journalistic discussion of important student issues is more your style, check out James Agathos and Ben Clark’s collaborative piece on unpaid internships (p8). As always, the fantastic writing within the mag is accompanied by painfully beautiful graphics courtesy of our dedicated art team. We promise we let them sleep. Sometimes.

Whether you’re a lover or a fighter, cave explorer or comedy festival enthusiast, avocado worshipper or sane person, we’ve got something for you.

We’d like to give special shout outs to Doug and the Cave Clan for inviting us to shed some light on Melbourne’s own subterranean subculture and for allowing us the use of their amazing photography. To Aisha Trambas and Tzeyi Koay, thank you for fulfilling last-minute graphics emergencies. We are the worst and you are the best. And to the rest of our incredible community, thank you for supporting us and each other, for being incredibly hardworking and for being as excited about making great content as we are. You guys are the goddamn best.

Last of all, thank you for picking up this copy of Farrago. We made it just for you and we hope you like it.

Make good choices, Danielle, Sebastian, Baya and Caleb

ARTWORK BY ELLA SHI

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 3

CAMPUS

NEWS IN BRIEF BIO21 EXPANSION

BELIEVE AND YOU CAN

GLOBAL COLLABORATION

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited the Bio21 Institute to announce its expansion.

The new space will house research and medical hubs operated by biotechnology giant CSL.

The University of Melbourne’s Believe Campaign has passed $500 million. This accomplishment comes two years ahead of schedule and has now set the goal at $1 billion.

The University of Melbourne and the University of Birmingham have reached an agreement for a research scholarship program for 20 PhD candidates worth around $4 million.

HAPPY STUDENTS

Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis remains ambitious.

REPORTING PROCEDURE

The 2015 Student Experience Survey National Report has been released and shows that 80 per cent of participating students are satisfied with the education offered at their institution.

RACIST FLYERS

Anti-semitic leaflets were distributed in early March throughout the South Lawn carpark. The leaflets contained mentions of Holocaust denial but were quickly cleaned up by campus security.

POLICE ON CAMPUS

“Our aspiration is to engage 100,000 of our alumni by the end of the Campaign in 2021, as active participants in the life of the University,” says Davis.

There is a new way to report sexual assault and harassment on campus.

The new intiative has been developed by the Safer Community Program. Details can be found on their website.

Students have reported an increasing number of police officers on University grounds giving out fines to students who are cycling without helmets on. Their presence on campus is questionable.

FEMINISM 101

VOLUNTEERING Academic staff have registered complaints at the Academic Board about how Stop 1 is managing student enrolment and timetable enquiries.

LECTURE LOOPHOLE

SCIENCE PROGRAMS

The UMSU Wom*n’s Department is running Feminism 101 in Week Three. The week-long event aims to discuss intersectional feminism and why it hasn’t been accessible to every woman.

REFUGEE MOTION UMSU Students’ Council has successfully passed a motion to offer the 267 asylum seekers sanctuary in Union House.

The motion was proposed by members of the Campus Refugee Rights Clubs.

Other student-run organisations, such as UNSW SRC, have passed similar motions in solidarity.

Students’ Council also called upon the University to make similar resources and housing available.

4 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

However, a University committee reports that the flack received by the new student services conglomerate isn’t as bad as it’s talked up to be.

Nevertheless, waiting times at Stop 1 excelled 45 minutes at points during Orientation Week.

DIAL A DOCTOR

Popular overseas healthcare provider, Allianz Global Assistance, has partnered up with Telstra Readycare to allow for international students to ‘dial a doctor’ outside working hours.

Attention has been directed towards academic staff who are deliberately opting out of lecture recordings, despite a policy which makes them mandatory except for special circumstances.

STUDENT EXPLOITATION

A survey conducted in Sydney has revealed almost 75 per cent of Chinese student visa workers are paid below the minimum wage. Thirty-five per cent of workers also stated they felt unsafe at work.

A change has been proposed to the Bachelor of Science curriculum.

‘Science Programs’ will act as an alternative to BSc majors and will provide a more general approach to the degree.

FARMERS’ MARKET The Farmers’ Market has returned for its second year at the University.

The weekly event was very well received last year and prompted the University to continue an agreement with the organisers.

UMSU SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING Hear ye, hear ye! The General Secretary of the University of Melbourne Student Union, James Bashford, has called a Special General Meeting. The meeting has been called to resolve urgent issues within the UMSU constitution, including the capacity to pay the Burnley Campus Coordinator and a very embarrassing typo. The meeting will be held on 5 April at 12.45pm at North Court. All University of Melbourne students are permitted to attend and vote.

UMSU

APRIL CALENDAR WEEK ONE

WEEK TWO

WEEK THREE

WEEK FOUR

MONDAY 4

MONDAY 11

MONDAY 18

MONDAY 25

12pm: Enviro Collective 12pm: Welfare – Monday Mingle 1pm: Queer & Disability Collective 1pm: Activities – Poetry Slam BBQ

STRESS LESS WEEK 12pm: Enviro Collective 1pm: Queer & Disability Collective 1pm: Welfare – Language Program

12pm: Enviro Collective 12pm: Welfare – Monday Mingle 1pm: Queer & Disability Collective 5-7pm: Wom*n’s Mentoring Network

12pm: Enviro Collective 1pm: Queer & Disability Collective 1pm: Welfare – Language Program

TUESDAY 5

TUESDAY 12

TUESDAY 19

TUESDAY 26

9am-11am: Bike Co-op 11am: Queer – Trans Collective 12pm: Students’ Council 1pm: Tuesday BBQ – The Beards, John Citizen 1pm: UHT – Rowdy Reads 1pm: Wom*n of Colour Collective 5:30pm: Play With Your Food

STRESS LESS WEEK 9am-11am: Bike Co-op 11am: Queer – Trans Collective 1pm: Tuesday BBQ – Methyl Ethyl 1pm: UHT – Rowdy Reads 1pm: Wom*n of Colour Collective 5:30pm: Play With Your Food 6pm: Free Life Drawing

9am-11am: Bike Co-op 11am: Queer – Trans Collective 1pm: Tuesday BBQ – Dallas Frasca 1pm: UHT – Rowdy Reads 1pm: Wom*n of Colour Collective 5:30pm: Play With Your Food

9am-11am: Bike Co-op 11am: Queer: Trans Collective 12pm: Free Life Drawing Class 1pm: Tuesday BBQ – BABBA 1pm: UHT – Rowdy Reads 1pm: Wom*n of Colour Collective 5:30pm: Play With Your Food

WEDNESDAY 6

WEDNESDAY 13

WEDNESDAY 20

WEDNESDAY 27

12pm: Wom*n’s Collective 1pm: Queer – Lunch with the Queer Bunch 1pm: Rowdy Laughter 2pm: Welfare – People of Colour Collective 5.15: Enviro Doco

STRESS LESS WEEK 12pm: Wom*n’s Collective 1pm: Queer – Lunch with the Queer Bunch 1pm: Rowdy Laughter 2pm: Wom*n’s – Crafternoons 5.15: Enviro Doco 7pm: Cocktail Night

12pm: Wom*n’s Collective 1pm: Queer – Lunch with the Queer Bunch 1pm: Rowdy Laughter 2pm: Welfare – People of Colour Collective 5.15: Enviro Doco

12pm: Wom*n’s Collective 1pm: Queer – Lunch with the Queer Bunch 1pm: Rowdy Laughter 2pm: Welfare – People of Colour Collective 5.15: Enviro Doco

THURSDAY 7

THURSDAY 14

THURSDAY 21

THURSDAY 28

8:30am-10:30am: Welfare – Free Breakfast 11am-3pm: Clubs Carnival 12pm: Queer and Questioning QTs 2pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective 4pm: Queer – Thursday Fun Times

STRESS LESS WEEK 8:30am-10:30am: Welfare – Free Breakfast 12pm: Queer and Questioning QTs 12pm: Stress Less Carnival 2pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective 4pm: Queer – Thursday Fun Times

8:30am-10:30am: Welfare – Free Breakfast 12pm: Queer and Questioning QTs 12pm: Students’ Council 2pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective 4pm: Queer – Thursday Fun Times

8:30am-10:30am: Welfare – Free Breakfast 12pm: Queer and Questioning QTs 2pm: Queer – Queer People of Colour Collective 4pm: Queer – Thursday Fun Times

FRIDAY 8

FRIDAY 15

FRIDAY 22

FRIDAY 29

12pm: Queer – Ace/Aro Collective 1pm: Arts Collective

STRESS LESS WEEK 12pm: Queer – Ace/Aro Collective 1pm: Arts Collective

12pm: Queer – Ace/Aro Collective 1pm: Arts Collective 6pm: Talking Out Of Your Arts

12pm: Queer – Ace/Aro Collective 1pm: Arts Collective

ARTWORK BY BONNIE SMITH

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT UMSU.UNIMELB.EDU.AU

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 5

Listen now at radiofodder.com

SEMESTER ONE SCHEDULE MONDAY

TIME 10.00

TUESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY Curiosity

Networked Disabled

TRAINING

11.00

WEDNESDAY

12.00

TRAINING

Time for K-pop

Faculty Feuds

JAM Stuffs Schmoozin

Problem Solverz

1.00

Shindig!

The Sesh

2.00

Prism

Beatroots

Promised Land

3.00

Biggest Blackest Show

Bastronomy

Silver Screen Sync

The Magoos

Hip Hop History

4.00

Talk About It

Colour Contest

Simone & Mindi

The Mr Ghost Show

The Apartment

5.00

Time Ghost

Mudcrabs Radio

Local Produce

Snappy Hour

Heavy Metal Hour

Pop Culture Disorder

Spectrum

6.00 7.00

Sexless in the City Sound of Science

Ne News Grrrl Hour

Nominal Interest To find out about each show, visit radiofodder.com/shows

Radio Training So you’ve been listening to our slick new team of radio presenters and want a show to call your own? Sign up for radio training to get those pangs of air-wave jealousy under wraps.

Email radiofodder2016@gmail.com to book in for six hours of goddamn fun.

WEEK FOUR: Monday 21 March, 10am-1pm (part 1) & Wednesday 23 March, 10am-1pm (part 2) MID-SEMESTER BREAK: Tuesday 29 March, 10am-1pm (part 1) & Thursday 31 March, 10am-1pm (part 2) WEEK SEVEN: Monday 18 April, 10am-1pm (part 1) & Wednesday 20 April, 10am-1pm (part 2)

CAMPUS

SPEWSUL

MARTIN DITMANN ON THE UNSTABLE FAMILY UNION

M

USUL Services, the organisation set up just over a decade ago to prevent student union mismanagement, is now facing embattlement on multiple fronts, including a financial scandal. It comes amidst a leadership change and years of significant, but until now relatively subdued, criticism from student unionists.

The University-owned subsidiary provides a range of corporate services to student organisations, manages Union House tenancies and maintenance, while also running several catering and retail businesses. It plays a key behind-the-scenes role for the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU), managing everything from finance to information technology.

Over $700,000 of students’ money every year goes to MUSUL through the Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF). SSAF negotiations are set to occur this year and that amount may see adjustment.

In the latest scandal for the organisation, Students’ Councillors at UMSU were told on 1 March of a financial mismanagement situation in MUSUL. In a subsequent statement, MUSUL confirmed that “accounting irregularities” had been found at the organisation, with money lost and a staff member subsequently ceasing to work for the organisation.

At the same meeting, Students’ Council passed a motion expressing a major lack of confidence in MUSUL in its current approach. They called for MUSUL to urgently address concerns around management or face termination of the relationship with UMSU. The organisation is also facing a leadership change; Trevor White, the organisation’s long-contentious CEO, has announced his retirement, slated for 1 July. White has been criticised by many staff and officials in both UMSU and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).

While these situations are not believed to all be directly related, they nonetheless raise some serious questions over the future of the organisation.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

CALEB TRISCARI HAS SOME QUESTIONS FOR THE UNIVERSITY

T

he University of Melbourne has confirmed that the Bachelor of Environments will be discontinued and replaced by a new Bachelor of Design and a new environmental science degree in the following years.

In late February, the University of Melbourne Academic Board approved the new Bachelor of Design. The ‘BDes’ will be displayed in the 2017 VTAC guide.

It was mentioned by a representative of the Provost that the Bachelor of Environments will not be taking new students in 2017 at the Academic Board meeting. This decision was confirmed in a University-wide email in early March.

According to the documentation tabled at Academic Board, majors native to the Bachelor of Environments such as Architecture, Spatial Systems and Civil Systems will be offered under the new Design degree. In addition, new majors such as Digital Media have also been proposed.

One anonymous source has expressed concern over how these two degrees will be run, arguing that students will be unsure as to how the courses differ.

“This raises serious concerns for existing Bachelor of Environments students. The University will need to ensure the degree is properly taught out and not devalued, and will also need to ensure that future students understand what the changes mean for them.”

Farrago also understands that many of the professors present at the Academic Board meeting voted in favour of creating the new degree despite being personally against it.

Furthermore, it is understood that a new undergraduate environmental science degree may be approved in 2018 pending a review. Depending on the outcome, the environmental science degree will most likely comprise the more traditionally scientific majors from the Bachelor of Environments, such as Engineering.

Because this environmental science degree has yet to be created, it is understood that in 2017 there will be no pathways to begin studying environmental science within the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

KEEP RIGHT

JESSE PARIS-JOURDAN ANSWERS THE QUESTION ON EVERYBODY’S MIND

I

n a statement on Thursday, staff at the Baillieu Library confirmed that the “Keep Right” sign on the stairwell was put there just because they wanted to fuck with students.

“It’s a tricky situation when you come across someone walking in the other direction than you on a stairwell,” said Kerry Wyman, who has been a librarian for two decades.

“But before Helen had the idea to put up the sign, everybody just handled it the same as everywhere else on campus – by

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MABEL LOUI

keeping left. We have found that around half of people notice and obey the sign, while the other half either don’t notice it or just don’t give a shit. Either way, it increases awkward moments on the stairwell by at least 150 per cent.”

Wyman also admitted that the placement of power outlets that are nowhere near desks was also Helen’s idea.

“I just love to see students reduced to sitting on the floor around exam time,” she said, her eyes glinting with satisfaction.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 7

SERVICES RENDERED

JAMES AGATHOS & BEN CLARK GET SOME UNPAID EXPERIENCE REPORTING ON UNPAID INTERNSHIPS

A

n internship has, for many young people, become the first step on the road to employment. Yet the value of these experiences can greatly vary between internships. From the perspective of hopeful students, getting their ‘foot in the door’ of a dream job can be a tantalising prospect. However, from the perspective of profit-driven corporations, a rotation of unpaid interns can replace several paid jobs and need not necessarily give any tangible benefit to the intern.

According to advocacy group Interns Australia, the Australian intern landscape is plagued with exploitation. Approximately 86 per cent of internships are unpaid. 60 per cent of internships did not contribute to the student’s formal education. Furthermore, almost 80 per cent of internships did not lead to permanent employment with the internship provider. This paints a bleak picture of the economic utility of the average internship.

Executive director of Interns Australia, Adi Prasad, has publicly expressed concern about how potentially valuable experiences are being eroded by corporate greed.

“An internship can be a fantastic opportunity for an individual to get experience, gain new skills and form new networks, but it cannot be an excuse for an employer to get what amounts to free and cheap labour,” he says.

Students are increasingly willing to undertake internships even if they are unpaid, as they are also increasingly desperate to gain industry experience in a harsh employment environment. It is taking an average of five years for students to transition from full-time study to full-time work. In 2015, only 65 per cent of university graduates were in full-time work compared to 85 per cent in 2008. The prospect of students landing their dream job is, for many, becoming just that – a dream.

Unfortunately, unpaid internships have become an expected part of the working world. In an age where the average entry level position requires several years worth of experience, anyone with any hope of making it in their chosen field is potentially subjected to the greedy and exploitative culture often present in unpaid internships.

8 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

It’s an insidious culture that has only recently reared its ugly head. The rate of job creation has fallen well behind the increase in job seekers, with youth unemployment reaching a high of 13.9 per cent in February last year – its highest point since 1998. The tragic state of the current job market coupled with an ageing workforce means that, like seagulls fighting over discarded chips at the beach, people will take anything they can get.

Unpaid internships being undertaken outside of formal education is legally questionable. The Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) states that internships may only be unpaid if they are a mandatory requirement of an education or training program.

The only exempt organisations are not-for-profits. Therefore, the vast majority of internships undertaken by students appear to be technically illegal.

The Fair Work Ombudsman also states that internships should be a learning experience primarily for the benefit of the intern. If the intern is undertaking tasks which would normally be undertaken by a paid worker and therefore the benefit is primarily to the employer, then it is not legally considered an internship.

Additionally, unpaid internships can only be lawful if they form a compulsory part of an education course or if there’s no “employment relationship”. This means, amongst other things, the main benefit of the arrangement must be to the intern, the placement should be of a relatively short duration and the work performed by the intern shouldn’t be integral to the functioning of the business.

Assuming that interns not receiving credit for their degree should be paid at least the minimum wage, an unpaid intern forfeits an average of $5,913.18 in wages during their internship. The impact of that loss is also far greater on young people, as their income tends to be significantly lower, sporadic and subject to significant fluctuation These sound like completely reasonable terms, right?

Companies are being set a fairly low bar here and yet they still manage to limbo under it. In fact, media broadcaster Crocmedia was fined $24,000 earlier this year after severely breaching these guidelines, when a number of interns spent stints of up to

CAMPUS

a year carrying out work for the company, including producing radio programs and regularly working overnight shifts. One was paid a meagre $2,940 for his efforts, while another wasn’t paid at all. Judge Rietmuller described the actions of the employer as “exploitative.”

This should have been a landmark case but we’ve seen no change. We continue to accept these positions as an entirely normal part of career progression, despite the obvious contravention of both basic morality and federal law.

There is also ambiguity around the clause that internships may only be unpaid if they are a ‘mandatory’ part of a course. Whilst this could theoretically prohibit unpaid internships taken as elective subjects, universities, including the University of Melbourne, proceed with the assumption that elective internships may still be unpaid if they contribute course credit to the student’s degree.

In some instances, companies have actually begun charging students to undertake prestigious internships. Internships Australia offers to organise internships for students with major Australian and overseas companies for as much as $2,060. This raises concerns about the accessibility of internships for lower and middle class students who cannot afford to spend such large amounts of money gaining workplace experience and possibly undermining a meritocratic job market.

For all the exploitation that has crept into the internship market, there is still a lot to recommend quality, structured internships. Internship programs where the intern is learning and gaining practical experience, whether or not they are paid or contributing to a higher education course, are generally accepted across the business community, with only internships which replace regular paid work raising the ire of unions and advocacy groups.

Many internship programs have been found to demonstrably increase the skills of interns and many have in-built pathways to employment for suitable candidates. For instance, major Australian firms such as KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte, as

ARTWORK BY ELLEN YG SON

well as the Commonwealth and state public services all have structured internship programs which lead directly to employment for suitable candidates.

Furthermore, an internship is an impressive addition to a resume which will stand students in good stead for future job applications. A UK study has found that over 50 per cent of employers would not give a job to a graduate with no experience, meaning industry exposure is essential for young graduates.

So the issue is not the potential benefits of internship programs, but the unfair and exploitative manner in which many are implemented. It is easy to argue that people should expect to make sacrifices in order to get where they want to be. But it’s abundantly clear who’s being made to suffer the most here and that’s students from lower socioeconomic brackets – the ones who can least afford to make these sacrifices. Furthermore, with a slew of dodgy deals leaving students out of pocket and with little to show for it, students are right to be wary of the potential for exploitation in a complex and evolving educational space. It’s indefensible that the chances someone has in life should be contingent on their wealth.

We like to view Australia as a land of equal opportunity but we’re facing a blatant inequality of circumstance, where these chances are made available to only a privileged few.

The real kicker is, there’s no way to opt out of this system. If you’re a conscientious objector to the idea of unpaid labour, then too bad, so sad. Someone else will take the position and you’ll be left to fall behind the rest of the pack, effectively rendered unemployable. As students, we have no choice but to be complicit in an increasingly toxic culture.

Many opportunities which demonstrate the evolution of this ‘internship culture’ legitimately contain most of the hallmarks of slave labour. Is the work unpaid? Check. Is it work that someone would normally be paid to perform? Check. Are the labourers being coerced into doing it for free, essentially left without any choice? Make that a whole damn trio of checks.

Disclosure: Ben Clark is currently undertaking an unpaid internship at Oxfam Australia.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 9

COLUMN

NAPPING ON CAMPUS JACOB SACHER FINDS A NICE CORNER TO SNUGGLE UP IN

L

et’s face it, the hidden secret of university is that everyone is tired all of the time. Trudging into uni every morning feeling like Squidward might feel grown-up at first but it gets draining after a while. This leaves you with three choices: one, line up for an overpriced coffee like the rest of the plebs; two, mope through the day knowing full well that you’ll never be happy again; or three, have a nap at uni like the champ that you are. In order to nudge you towards the path of fulfilment, I’ve had a look at the top three spots to catch a sleep on campus so that you, too, can rest assured (pun intended).

The Listening Lounge in the Rowden White The Rowdy’s “Listening Lounge”, more commonly referred to by everyone ever as “the beanbag room” is undoubtedly the number one spot to sleep on campus. The beanbags are as comfortable as the pillowy bosom of a loved one, and unlike bosoms, there’s usually room to spare. It’s nice and quiet, and being a room dedicated to sleep no matter how often you frequent it, no one will ever judge you for napping within its confines. The only downside really is that it isn’t dark enough, but this is also true of every other spot on campus.

Overall Comfort: Marshmallow Noise Levels: Crickets Likelihood of being shamed: Nil

A lecture. Literally any lecture The room is dim and relatively silent. As you watch the lecturer move from left to right, right to left and left to right again, you slowly close your eyes. The dull monotone of their voice is just the right pitch to lull you into a deep slumber. If this sounds in any way like you, I’m proud. You’re on your way to becoming a napping superstar. The one problem I’ve found with people falling asleep in lectures is that they fall asleep in subjects that they’re taking. This is ill advised as not only will you waste your time and fail to learn that class’s content, you’ll also potentially be recognised by your friends and classmates as the slacker that deep down they already know you are. The trick to napping in a lecture theatre is to do it in any class that’s not your own. This will ensure you don’t miss out on anything important and more importantly, you’ll be sleeping in relative anonymity. Make sure to choose a

10 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

lecture with content that is dull enough to sleep through. There’s nothing worse than trying to sleep while being interrupted by the cheers of students actively engaged in stimulating discussion.

Overall Comfort: Bearable, bringing a pillow may be overkill Noise Levels: Tolerable Likelihood of being shamed: Low South Lawn in the summer Of all the joys in life, nothing quite compares to a deep sleep on South Lawn on a sunny summer’s day. While the sleep may not be as deep or as long as an indoor nap, breathing in the fresh air and listening to the sounds of frolicking students make it an entirely enjoyable event. Be sure to take a cap or a book to rest over your face for the optimal experience.

Overall comfort: Lovely Noise Levels: High Likelihood of being shamed: High, but worth it Honourable Mentions: Benches in the Giblin Eunson Overall Comfort: Acceptable Noise Levels: Low Likelihood of being shamed: High A friend’s bed in one of the colleges Overall Comfort: High Noise Level: Sennheiser, noise cancelling headphones Likelihood of being shamed: Guaranteed Difficulty to acquire: Nigh impossible In one of the Redmond Barry 10th floor toilets Overall Comfort: You’re on a toilet Noise Levels: Eerily quiet Likelihood of being shamed: Nil Dishonourable Mentions: On one of the computers in the Baillieu Overall comfort: Terrible Noise levels: Passive aggressive whispering Likelihood of being shamed: Your picture WILL be on the internet

ARTWORK BY SOPHIE SUN

CAMPUS

CARLTON CONNECT

ALEXANDRA ALVARO ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THE MYSTERY OF LAB-14

F

or three years now, the old Women’s Hospital building on the corner of Swanston and Grattan Streets has been under development. The site is part of a greater project called the Carlton Connect Initiative (CCI) – an effort by The University of Melbourne to create a collaborative space where researchers, government and industry converge to find answers to the most pressing issues surrounding sustainability and society, including water, energy, food and urban futures.

The development of the project is set to span over the next decade, a prospect helped by a recent re-zoning approval that will allow the site to become a multi-storey centre for learning.

The site has been approved by the City of Melbourne to build up to 60 metres tall. The authorisation falls in line with the City of Melbourne’s ‘Future Melbourne’ scheme, which aims to make Melbourne more progressive and sustainable.

Victorian Minister for Planning, Richard Wynne, stated that he has “supported the City of Melbourne’s approach to working with the community, heritage groups and universities… so that proper plans are in place to guide future development”.

Jacyl Shaw, Director of Engagement at CCI, says that the project is “an example of making elements of these strategies come to life and in turn make impact for good”. Mostly, the initiative prides itself on being able to bring together its partners for on-site collaboration, thus creating an environment conducive to innovation.

So far, one of its most visible outcomes has been the creation of LAB-14, a sub-project that has been officially open for 13 months now. Since then, the space has been home to a range of on-site partners including the Australian-German Climate & Energy College, the EU Centre on Shared Complex Challenges and the University’s flagship entrepreneurship initiative; the Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP).

When questioned regarding the figures surrounding funding, Shaw made the point that the project is being looked at as more of a “culture changing initiative” than a capital project. For this reason, it’s difficult to capture just how much money is being poured into the plans by the University. Shaw also noted that there are several stakeholders involved, including those from within the private sector.

ARTWORK BY JIALIN YANG

Given the large amount of resources the project requires to become fully realised, one would expect students to be benefiting in some way from this initiative. Shaw says that students will most certainly see the positive impact of the plans.

Student internships and opportunities to attend workshops are available at the centre, and the number of students participating in this collaborative space is set to rise. Shaw pitches LAB-14 as “a great first step to gaining new insights into topics such as climate change and innovation but also make new contacts and friends”.

“Arts students can attend business workshops at LAB-14 run by the MAP or learn about social entrepreneurship from The Compass; medical students can find out about how energy fits into our economy from PhD students in our German-Australian Energy College at LAB-14 or find out how nanotechnology can cure cancer from the scientists working at the VLSCI,” she says Most students are yet to take advantage of these opportunities.

Although optimistic about the project in general, third year Bachelor of Environments student, Olivia Hides, is underwhelmed by the minimal effort directed at student involvement.

“I can’t help but be slightly sceptical about the opportunities supposedly provided to university students,” she says.

“Many of my peers are unaware of this initiative and I am yet to see any push for our involvement. It would be such a great opportunity for students but it needs to be marketed towards us if we are to be a valued part of the plan.”

In 2013, Farrago reported on some of the concerns of the wider community regarding university expansion in the area. Wynne has made it clear that these anxieties have been adequately addressed.

“The plans give clear guidance for new development and provide more certainty to residents around what can be built in their area, while also protecting the suburb’s character.”

He is also certain that controls have been put in place to ensure impacts on traffic, noise, overshadowing, wind impacts and how future development will contribute to the streetscape are assessed.

Ultimately, both the University and the council seem to be working towards a common goal: making the bustling inner city area, and more broadly, the City of Melbourne, a centre for innovation and ideas.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 11

CAMPUS

THE MAGNA CHARTER

BELINDA LACK TALKS SUSTAINABILITY WITH THE UNIVERSITY

C

arbon Neutrality. Divestment. Research and Education. There are many different pathways to sustainability.

The University of Melbourne is soon to publish its first Sustainability Charter after receiving feedback from staff, students and alumni on a draft released in October.

With University Council approval, the final charter will be released in March.

The general response to its development has been positive.

However, perhaps unavoidably in a complex institution like the University, the charter will be met with both excitement and disappointment.

The Sustainability Charter is intended to act as a “framework for embedding social and environmental sustainability across all facets of University work”. Its commitments will later be translated into actions and targets set out in a five-year Sustainability Plan.

Feedback on the draft charter was a mix of praise for the undertaking, criticism that the scope was too broad, not broad enough and, of course, demands for divestment.

The colourful and sometimes completely contradictory feedback received reveals the gulfs that exist within those who care about sustainability.

One suggestion reads: “A smattering of research and some climate change themed breadth subjects is like pissing in the wind compared with the financial and political power of corporate coal burners, especially when they are financially supported by the University.”

Another reads: “…the charter should be aiming to instil sustainable practices in the student and professional teaching body…fostering and encouraging sustainable practices in students, changing hearts and minds and involving everybody... in the sustainability challenge is paramount.”

Professor Rachel Webster, a member of the Sustainability Executive responsible for drafting the charter, says that they have taken a holistic approach to the issue.

“The way we’ve set the charter up is to say that the University as an institution should take responsibility for sustainability on a bunch of axes – research, teaching and learning and around engagement, promoting sustainability through public dialogue but then also… moving toward becoming carbon neutral.”

The University has already committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030 – a date that some members of the Sustainability Executive would like to move forward, says Professor Webster.

Webster believes if the University could achieve carbon neutrality it could become a blueprint for other organisations to do the same.

She’s been frustrated by a lack of government leadership on the issue but says that the University is now demonstrating that “as an organisation we can do this without them.”

There have been no major changes made to the draft following feedback. Although, Indigenous Australians and their sustainable

12 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

custodianship of the land will now be included in the charter in response to suggestions made.

Importantly for the many students and staff who submitted feedback asking for divestment, the charter does not make a commitment to do so.

The updated draft states that the University will “implement investment strategies consistent with the University’s commitment to sustainability and its financial and legal responsibilities.”

Professor Webster notes that there will, however, be a working group to provide some advice on divestment when the time comes to draft the sustainability plan.

Environmental activist group Fossil Free Melbourne University has led a vocal and organised campaign calling for divestment for over two years.

UMSU Environment Officer and Co-coordinator of Fossil Free MU Anisa Rogers says she has been invited to take part in the working group but also that she wishes they had been brought into the consultation process earlier.

“I think a better way to do it would [have been] to consult and then write it up,” she says in regards to the draft.

The efficacy of divestment in tackling climate change is a long-standing subject of debate amongst economists and environmentalists alike. In a 2014 opinion piece published in The Australian, Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis outlined financial challenges associated with divestment and its possible risk to future students.

Professor Webster agrees that divestment is a complex issue.

On the one hand she says, “I don’t think divestment makes a lot of sense in and of itself because we’re so entangled with the companies that are ‘responsible’ for producing carbon dioxide. To say we’re going to divest University funds doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

Webster believes that what we need to do is find ways to move away from a reliance on the products these companies produce.

Rogers says that Fossil Free MU doesn’t expect that divesting will cause the fossil fuel industry to collapse but that “it’s about a broader social narrative”.

“As a university they should be leading in these sort of issues.”

In regards to the argument that divestment poses financial risks, Rogers says “that argument has been debunked by multiple research papers.”

She refers to an analysis from economist Professor Ross Garnaut, which states that the bursting of the carbon bubble will hurt investors.

However, in regards to all things not related to divestment, Rogers says, “the charter is incredible and shows a lot of hard work.”

The Sustainability Charter is set to be published on 18 March and public consultation on the sustainability plan will begin soon.

ARTWORK BY TALIZA HO

CAMPUS

THE HAPS WITH THE FAP

FARRAGO BREAKS DOWN THE PROPOSED FLEXIBLE ACADEMIC PROGRAMMING MODEL The Curriculum Structure and Approach workstream is primarily tasked with investigating the role of lectures in the University’s curriculum. Lectures are specifically coming under review due to the recognition that students are increasingly not attending lectures. This is expected to lead to a reduction in the overall number of lectures delivered and an increased use of blended learning.

Headed by Sue Elliot, Deputy Provost, the workstream has a

total of five members that, in the next 12 months, will be auditing lectures throughout

university faculties, both in graduate and

undergraduate courses. This will involve an

investigation into how lectures are conducted,

including frequency, lecture streams and class

sizes and a comparison between lectures and

other forms of learning including tutes, labs,

seminars, placements etc. The workstream

will also investigate how technology can be

used to improve lectures. Changes in lecture

and curriculum structure recommended by the

workstream are likely to be implemented by

the FAP in the next 24 months.

BY ALEXANDRA ALVARO, MARTIN DITMANN, JEREMY NADEL, MARY NTALIANIS AND JESSE PARIS-JOURDAN

L

arge undergraduate classes are particularly prevalent in the Science and Commerce faculties. Last year, nine first year undergraduate classes had over 1,000 students enrolled.

Academics from both faculties will come together and test various methods to combat the difficulties that come with high enrolment numbers. This will be achieved through the testing of a pilot program that students can opt-into.

Member of the working group and Senior Lecturer of Psychology, Dr Simon Cropper, brings to the study ten years of experience in large group teaching. He says the working group will focus on one of the main barriers to effective teaching – the large lecture format.

“We want to know what helps students engage in this format and what causes them to disengage so we can guard against it.

“It is about improving the whole course so that students feel as inspired as they might on a course of 50 or fewer,” he says.

The Harnessing Virtual Infrastructure workstream is looking at the ways the University uses technology.

“It is basically reviewing what technology-based systems and tools we have at the moment, determining the needs of staff and students, working out where there are gaps and where we could do something different or new to meet staff and students’ pedagogical needs,” says Professor Gregor Kennedy, the chairperson of the workstream, who is also coordinating the whole FAP project.

“Then we are aiming to provide advice back to the University about what might be done in the short and longer term to meet these needs.”

Kennedy says it is too soon to say anything about the workstream’s recommendations at this stage. Some options they will provide advice on are: flipped classrooms, more online assessment, online feedback, video recording of lectures and signature online undergraduate subjects.

ARTWORK BY TALIZA HO

The Academic Workforce workstream

will review and make recommendations

on “categorisations of teaching staff” and

“the role of session and seasonal staff”.

Pro Vice Chancellor Richard James, one

of three members of the workstream,

defined their responsibilities as “thoroughly examining, among many considerations, the implications for staffing arrangements”. These include the nature of teaching roles and the ways in which teaching staff could be appropriately recognised and rewarded for their roles in delivering educational programs. Graham Willett, Vice President of the University of Melbourne branch of the National Tertiary Education Union, is disappointed at how the FAP is being developed.

“At an absolute minimum you would think they would put union reps on all of those workstreams. The broader picture is that there’s no consultation of any kind. There are 7,000 people employed by the University and instead of asking them what works and what doesn’t, these new strategies are being developed by a tiny handful of people.”

Dr Graham Willett’s biggest concern is that the workstream might recommend restructures involving increased casualisation, in which more staff are employed on a non-ongoing basis.

Of all the streams in the FAP, it’s perhaps the Semester Structure workstream that’s attracting the most attention.

It’s for a good reason. The FAP briefing paper released by head honcho Gregor Kennedy last year doesn’t hold back in this stream’s section.“This workstream will consider the benefits and risks associated with the University adopting alternative semester structures (trimesters, quarters),” it says.

That sparked immediate debate and some concerns amongst students. But at this stage, it appears unlikely the University will move to a trimester or quarter model – instead focusing on an expansion of summer and winter school.

That seems to have generally received a positive response amongst student representatives and students.

UMSU Education (Academic Affairs) Officer Tom Crowley generally welcomes such a move, as long as it isn’t compulsory or comes at the expense of regular semester offerings.

“It’s one thing to talk about having more flexibility and more summer and winter subjects – that’s great. But if those are compulsory, that’s not flexible academic programming at all,” says Crowley.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 13

UMSU

FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT (TO STUDY) YAN ZHUANG GIVES YOU THE LOWDOWN ON THE NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION

T

he National Day of Action (NDA) on 13 April aims to put education policy in the spotlight in time for the upcoming federal election to be held this year.

The nationwide student protest has three main demands: stopping funding cuts to university staff and courses, ensuring that deregulation does not re-emerge in government policy and pushing for increased funding to higher education.

Organised by the National Union of Students (NUS), NDA rallies last year were attended by thousands of students in opposition to the government’s university fee deregulation policy.

Organisers cited vocal student opposition as one of the key factors in influencing change in government policy.

Though the Liberal Government has shelved their fee deregulation policy until at least 2017 and are yet to announce anything concrete to replace it with, UMSU Education Public Officer, Dominic Cernaz, believes it is important to continue to focus on higher education policy.

“We’re in an election year and it’s important we’re presenting higher education as an issue for debate for the upcoming election,” he said.

“We don’t want to see what happened last year where there was no discussion on higher education before the election and afterwards we found out deregulation was going to happen.”

Rather than just being on the defensive, he says, students are now able to push for improvements to higher education funding.

“The last thing we want to do is take our foot off the gas. We can now push forward and say that in fact, we don’t want to see deregulation, we want to see better funding, we want to reach a model where education is accessible, sustainable and most importantly, affordable.”

Since O Week, the UMSU Education Departments have been raising awareness among students about the NDA. In the weeks leading up to the rally, the Education Public department aims to hold stalls around campus to talk to students.

Throughout March, they will dedicate a series of weeks to focus on certain aspects of the campaign. This will include opposing fee deregulation, the negative effects of funding cuts and why they

14 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

believe free education is the best system for universities. In the week directly before the NDA, they will stage a series of stunts around the theme of a ‘debt sentence’.

On the day of the rally, they plan to hold a barbeque on South Lawn before heading down to the State Library where the rally will start at 2pm. A series of speakers organised by the NUS will speak at the rally but are yet to be confirmed.

The Education Public department is optimistic about the turnout for the rally, claiming that many first years heard about the campaign last year and are keen to get involved. However, many students still have little information about it.

Liam Krebs, first year Bachelor of Music student, was unaware of the protest. While he supports student activism, he doesn’t feel like he knows enough about it to get involved. “[Protests] are great, it’s just that where I grew up, which was in Wagga, there was nothing political going on so it’s all kind of new for me.”

He also questions whether rallies are the best way to create change, citing a young people versus old people mentality as a barrier.

“The lack of understanding between those two parties is why the protests are needed. But the main issue is that not both parties are willing. You have one party that’s willing and one party that’s not.

And nobody listens to a protest if they’re not completely willing and they’re in a position of power.”

Tom Crowley, Education Academic Officer, also notes that NDAs are not the only way students can get involved in education activism.

“Other students prefer formats like the SRN (Student Representative Network) where they sit in on committee meetings and have discussions, or by giving feedback on lecturers and tutors. Others get involved through mainstream politics by joining a political party and getting involved in higher education policy that way.

“I hope the turn out for the NDA will be good but that also shouldn’t be seen as an indication of how much students care.

Students care in different ways.”

UMSU

PRESIDENT JAMES BAKER Hi! Hopefully all of you had an enjoyable time with your Orientation Week! UMSU sure had a huge one. Now, if you were not able to show up to the plethora of events throughout O Week, there is no need to fret, for there will be bountiful opportunities for you to join those clubs you so desire or participate in that workshop activity throughout the year. If you simply turn over to the calendar page of Farrago (p5), you will be able to see a multitude of events hosted by the different departments of UMSU which allow for all people to have an amazing time whilst they study. As always, please feel free to come to my office on the first floor of Union House for a chat or email me.

Greatest regards, James Baker.

Email: president@union.unimelb.edu.au

GENERAL SECRETARY JAMES BASHFORD

Congratulations! You’ve made it through your first few weeks of semester! Make sure you also have time to get involved in UMSU. See our website, Facebook, pick up a Nice to Meet You guide, visit our offices or send any of us an email to find out more. One major event coming up next month is the student protest on Wednesday 13 April. UMSU is committed to fighting for free education. While the Liberal Government wants to cut funding, we’re building a campaign to see it increased instead. Come along to the protest and help put higher education funding at the top of the political agenda. Aside from that I’ve also started convening various working groups, including looking at establishing a Disabilities Action Plan for UMSU as well as an ethical sponsorship policy. If you’re interested in more information or participating, get in touch!

Email: secretary@union.unimelb.edu.au

MEGAN POLLOCK

ACTIVITIES & ITSI WEINSTOCK

Well we’ve been having quite the time at the Activities Department. We managed to round out the general debauchery of O Week with some clean fun at Luna Park.

It was a joint event with Monash but obviously we sold out first. Photos are coming soon. We only almost shat ourselves on the rides like twice. New record.

Our free weekly Tuesday BBQs and Bands are going nicely. You should come.

Pierce Brothers were a blast and upcoming names like The Beards and John Citizen should be molto fun. We’ve been very excited about our new event, ZedTown, which will see Parkville Campus transformed into a giant zombie nerf war during the Easter break. Nerds and non-nerds alike are encouraged to participate.

Otherwise look forward to our upcoming events before the break, such as our Cocktail Party (18 April). As always, like and subscribe at facebook.com/UmsuActivities to keep up with the cool kids (like Zac Power).

BURNLEY ERANTHOS BERETTA 2016 is underway and Burnley has had its own Orientation events for both undergrads and postgrads over the last two weeks. We have also had successful inductions into our many secret lairs and tree houses (laboratories and nurseries) and held some light-hearted BBQs under the canopies for the new crops to meet the currants. In news from other grapevines, Burnley Staff and the BSA will be working closely with UMSU top dogs to see how we can improve student services for our students on campus and remotely to ensure the same quality of education is provided regardless of location. So keep your eyes open for upcoming events over the month at Burnley such as terrarium workshops, Easter egg hunts and all things plants. And make sure you get your roots into the club ‘Horticultured’ for other Burnley related events (if you sign up they might give you a free seedling!).

RYAN DAVEY

CLUBS & SOCIETIES & YASMINE LUU Clubs were a big hit at this year’s O Week! Clubs Guides flew into the hands of eager students whilst clubs happily sold memberships and showed off their best sides. Thanks to the help of our brilliant volunteers and our amazing clubs committee, we were able to have a very successful O Week, bar one OB getting heatstroke (hint: it was the OB that was there). Thanks to wonderful, positive feedback, we are continuing our camp welfare training. This helps committee members and leaders of camps to facilitate a fun, safe and inclusive environment for all campers to enjoy! C&S are very excited to receive new club applications and look forward to a flourishing clubs culture here at UMSU in 2016! Also, how great is clubs online? But actually, it’s the best.

Facebook: facebook.com/UMSUClubs Email: clubs@union.unimelb.edu.au

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CALEB TRISCARI

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 15

UMSU LYNZAAT CREATIVE ARTS JOSH & JEAN TONG

KAPUSCINSKI-EVANS DISABILITIES JESS & CHRISTIAN TSOUTSOUVAS

CROWLEY EDUCATION (AC) TOM & PAUL SAKKAL

Hey you! Welcome to 2016 and a year chock-full of artsy opportunities.

FREE LIFE DRAWING is happening twice a month – a great opportunity to try something new. The CREATIVE ARTS COLLECTIVE meets every week. It’s an opportunity for artists of all disciplines and experience to come together and support each other, discuss ideas, share practices and find potential collaborators.

There’ll be cake. We might even make a work or two together. Our major event for Semester 1 is POP! WAIT A MINUTE, a program of art taking place outdoors all over campus. We are looking for lots of exciting proposals that foster student-tostudent connection and are open to all of your ideas. All of them! Applications are open until the end of March. Other fun options: Talking Out of Your Arts, a Radio Fodder Arts program, arts grants and more.

Facebook: facebook.com/umsuartsdepartment Website: umsu.unimelb.edu.au/what-is-on/creative-arts We spent our O Week handing out heaps of free USBs with tonnes of helpful information and putting on our first speaker event of the year: a panel discussion featuring four disabled university students. Among those four were a journalist and radio producer, an AFL umpire, an autism youth worker, and a theatre maker and jiu-jitsu practitioner. At the moment, our regular Disabilities Collective and Anxiety Support Group meetings are set to start in Week Three. There is also a secret (or now not-so-secret) Facebook group open to students with all kinds of disabilities looking for support and solidarity. We now have our brand new Radio Fodder show, Network Disabled, airing on Tuesdays at 10am. Hosted by your very own Office Bearers, Christian and Jess. It is wide open to any keen guest hosts, contributors and interviewees from any spheres that interact with the disability world (all of them!).

Email: disabilities@union.unimelb.edu.au Facebook: facebook.com/umsu.disabilities.

Hey hey! We had our Education Academic stall at O Week which was an excellent way to interact with new students and gauge their concerns and awareness of issues related to their education. At these stalls we handed out our brand-spanking new copies of the CounterCourse Handbook, which gives students an alternate method of determining whether or not a subject is the right fit for them. We’re looking forward to engaging with students further at stalls throughout the semester. This month we’ve got a Student Representative Committee (SRN) meeting scheduled, where we’ll discuss the Flexible Academic Programming plan and other pressing issues that arose from the first round of meetings of University Committees. We’ve also caught a whiff of changes to the Bachelor of Environments course which will surely be a point of discussion. Drop us a line if you’ve got an queries or concerns.

Facebook: facebook.com/umsueducation Email: educationacademic@union.unimelb.edu.au

BOARDMAN EDUCATION (PUB) AKIRA & DOMINIC CERNAZ

We’ve had a super exciting time in the Education Public Department over the last few weeks. O Week was a huge success. We ran the National Union of Student’s petition – “Fund our future, fight for our future!” calling on fully funded education and opposing fee deregulation, staff and course cuts. In O Week alone, we collected over 300 signatures! There was also promotion for the EAG (Education Action Group) and a signup sheet. We have also been running regular stalls on campus to ensure we are talking to as many students about their university experience. The issue of Stop 1 has seemed to pop up frequently, especially with existing students who remember the good ol’ days before the amalgamation of student services.

We always need more creative minds to think of new and exciting ideas for campaigns and graphics.

Facebook: facebook.com/groups/umsueag

ROGERS ENVIRONMENT ANISA & ZACHARY POWER

16 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

The UMSU Environment Department exists for all students with an interest in climate change, sustainability and environmental issues. We have had a busy O Week talking to lots of fantastic students about exactly this!

Our main O Week event, ‘Lets get EnvirontmenTEA’, kicked off the semester with fun, tea and great discussions at the Melbourne University Community Garden.

We are planning to work closely with the community garden this year to hold and promote a number of different events centred around the garden.

Our environment collective meetings have also begun and we invite all students to come along and find out about what’s going on on campus and participate in important discussions. We also have a whole semester of documentary screenings planned so come along for pizza and good discussions.

Please feel to get in touch about all things climate and environment!

Email: environment@union.unimelb.edu.au Facebook: facebook.com/umsuenviro

UMSU HOLLOWAY-CLARKE INDIGENOUS TYSON & EMILY KAYTE JAMES

CONNORS QUEER FRANCES & LOTUS YE

This year has gotten off to a great start with our first social event, the first few episodes of our radio show/podcast (tune in 3 til 4 on Mondays!) and the completion of our first ever Transition In Camp. Moving forward we are very excited about supporting our athletes and sports teams, building towards National Indigenous Tertiary Education Games, preparing for Under Bunjil, expanding our presence online and getting our semester-long social calendar underway. Also make sure to drop into Murrup Barak or come up to the office to see the social calendar, otherwise you can wait to see it online. As busy as we are with various projects and events we are still pumped as ever for the semester and year ahead.

Instagram: UMSU_Indigenous Facebook: facebook.com/UMSUIndigenous Email: indigenous@union.unimelb.edu.au.

It was so awesome to meet so many beautiful queers and LGBTQ+ folks during O Week and we had a fantastic picnic! We’re excited to start running our regular events such as queer lunch on Wednesdays at 1pm and our collectives. Thursday 10 April we’ll be holding a speed-friending event so we hope to meet even more of you there. We’re also running a little competition at the moment and you could win two tickets to see any film in the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (starting March 31st!). Just let us know what you would like to see from the Queer Department this year. It can be a suggestion about anything from a particular event, a campaign you would like us to run or items for the queer room. Check out our FB page or join our newsletter to keep updated with all of our events and info!

Facebook: facebook.com/UMSUQueer Newsletter Sign up: http://eepurl.com/bRN7n9

VCA VAN RUDD VCASA and enthusiastic VCA Film and TV students of 2016 posed together for a #LetThemStay photo in support of the 267 refugees against the government’s plan to send them back to Nauru. This was a great way to start the year at VCA. On O Day (Wednesday 24 Feb), VCASA unfortunately was barred by the VCAMCM faculty from speaking to students at their information sessions at Parkville and Southbank campuses. This is a move by University management to stop us telling students the truth about University of Melbourne’s plans to cut more jobs, casualise staff and increase class sizes. We will continue to build the fight against neoliberal attacks on education this year with protest events, music, spoken word, art exhibitions and seminars. We have also started our free yoga sessions every Tuesday evening at the VCA.

WELFARE SARAH XIA & YAN ZHUANG

We hope you’ve all had a wonderful start to the new semester! The Welfare Department is off to a busy start this year but there’s still time to get involved. We love meeting new students so please feel free to pop by one of our many events or help out as a volunteer! We hold free breakfasts every Thursday morning on South Court, and we’ve introduced the Monday Mingle series and the Conversation Partners Exchange program to help you meet new people. We’re also excited to announce that the Welfare Handbook has been printed – this is a wonderful resource and we encourage you to grab one and have a look.

Importantly, we’re here to help you out with any wellbeing issues you might face.

We have a wide range of resources available and you are welcome to shoot us an email or swing by our office on Level 1, Union House.

Email: welfare@union.unimelb.edu.au Facebook: facebook.com/UMSUwelfare

MELLS WOM*N’S ADRIANA & HIEN NGUYEN The Wom*n’s Department had a particularly exciting O Week – thank you to everyone who came by and said hello at our stall and picnic. Our regular weekly events for this semester are underway. Feminism 101 is coming up in Week Three where we will be discussing intersectional feminism, safe spaces and hosting a panel on ‘Does Feminism speak for all Wom*n?’. Week Three will also be the launch of our first Wom*n’s Mentoring Network Night, where we invite women from professional fields to talk about their experiences. Respect Week is coming up in Week Four which is a university-wide week to talk about respect and safety on campus. The Wom*n’s Department, along with GSA Wom*n’s, will be hosting a screening of the US documentary The Hunting Ground, as well as having a panel discussion afterwards to talk about safety and respect on our own campus. See you there!

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CALEB TRISCARI

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 17

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANWYN HOCKING

CAMPUS

CURBING COLLEGE CULTURE LUCY WILLIAMS DISCUSSES HYPERMASCULINITY AT CAMPUS COLLEGES

Content warning: discussions of rape, assault and violence.

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he beginning of a new year sees the University welcoming hundreds of bright-eyed freshers to a new chapter of their lives. Many of these young people will be beginning their tertiary journey at one of the colleges around the crescent. As ever, it is incredibly important that these colleges, home to thousands of students new and old, establish a culture of acceptance and promote a safe environment for all.

American fraternities have become notorious for widespread and destructive views of women and the LGBT+ community, resulting from the very specific ideas of masculinity that they often incite. While few argue that the Australian system faces problems on the same scale, issues with hypermasculinity persist and ignoring their presence is dangerous.

Broadly, hypermasculinity can be understood as exaggerated, stereotypically male ways of being and acting, typified by violence and expressions of dominance. This often has dire consequences for those who do not subscribe to these very strict conditions.

Speaking with members of the college system, it’s not difficult to find traces of hypermasculinity within Australian university culture.

It’s also easy to see its hugely negative impact upon not only women but people of all genders, sexualities and backgrounds.

Here are some experiences people have faced in our system: Catherine I had the experience as a female first year of sitting down to a Hall dinner to find myself the only woman surrounded by five young men. Somehow or another the young men at the table started talking about masturbation. They talked about what type of pornography they liked to watch, how often and when they liked to masturbate.

Half the enjoyment for the young men seemed to be not only their shared experience of masturbating, but also their shared heterosexuality and objectification of women through watching pornography. I also felt that they were seeking my embarrassment as an added novelty as well as jauntily showing their power in the college environment, by expressing their straight sexuality so freely at a semi-formal event in a way I can never imagine women of any age taking license to do so in such detail.

Rosie For me, it’s the little things that stand out. Having to explain over lunch or dinner why a sexist joke isn’t funny or why

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mocking a politician because they’re female isn’t okay. They don’t seem like major incidents but I think it does indicate a certain attitude that is troubling.

Alice I’ve heard quite flippant remarks about rape and assault, like they see the feelings of others as inconsequential. That people can ever consider those things a joke, for me, shows their ignorance of the truly serious issues with which some are grappling.

Ryan People don’t think the Melbourne system is that extreme so we tend to not acknowledge the situation. However, when the boys chant things to demean women or even in passing conversations – it’s still a dominative state that college boys hold over college girls.

Anonymous The one experience of harassment I did encounter during my time at college... There was a definite sense that it was my fault, that I had somehow invited or provoked this behaviour. It was a difficult time and not made easier by what I’d call an inclination for people to blame the female victim.

Jacob The culture is allowed to continue through out-dated mindsets. Also the way that hypermasculinity instils a sense of fear in those who disagree or find offence in the way that these groups act works to maintain a feeling of domination and keep those who disagree silent... In order to address the harmful effects of these groups, people need to really stand up for what they believe, as difficult as this might be, because often the opinions of these groups are not the same ones widely held by the community at large. Real consequences need to come of actions, instead of the often laughable punishments.

It is of the highest importance that college residents analyse this culture as we begin a new year and that we understand strongly where our values lie as we welcome new members of the community. College is home for many students and everyone deserves to feel comfortable through an environment in which they are appreciated and respected. It is an enormous privilege to have the opportunity to live on campus. We need to make sure all residents can have the best possible experience.

ARTWORK BY BONNIE SMITH

COMMENTARY

POLL MANIA

BRENDAN TAM WARNS US ABOUT THE PERIL OF POLLS AND POPULISM

I

n the contemporary political climate, it seems as though pundits have become incapable of giving their analysis without reference to opinion polls. The poll-mania that has gripped the chattering classes has only become more fervent in recent years, despite growing concern over the reliability of polling methodology. This is unfortunately a global phenomenon and is now adversely affecting the public discourse surrounding politics.

What is even more worrying is the way in which polls affect the politicians themselves who increasingly rely on polling to chart the popularity of their policy offerings – and thus their likelihood of re-election – in real time.

The flaws of polling methodology are numerous. For one, in most countries voting is optional, meaning that many of the people polled may not cast a vote on election day. Furthermore, pollsters continue to rely on outdated methods of data collection such as calling landlines, which skews the data by failing to include all demographics. Lastly there is the Bradley Effect, which is essentially the theory that many of those polled will not reveal their true intention to vote for a socially undesirable party or candidate.

Thus it is no surprise that expert pollsters in the US, such as Nate Silver, were proven wrong in their initial claims that Donald Trump had no chance of winning the Republican Presidential nomination.

Their faith in the science of polling led them to believe that certain demographics would not vote for Trump based on historical trends and yet they are now having to face the reality that their assumptions were off-base and their modelling severely limited.

The truth is, as the 2015 UK election proved, there is only one poll that matters: the one that is held on election day. The media and political pundits had predicted a Conservative defeat or at least a minority government as the Conservatives had failed to win an opinion poll in five years. Yet, against such low expectations, they won a majority government for the first time in over two decades. In part this is because the Conservative Party, under campaign director Sir Lynton Crosby, wisely chose to ignore opinion polls. Instead they remained consistent in governing and arguing for policies that they believed were best for Britain. This

ARTWORK BY SAM NELSON

platform was validated by their resounding victory and should be viewed by the political class as an indication of why opinion polls should not be the sole guide of their actions.

“There is only one poll that matters: the one that is held on election day.”

Unfortunately, in Australia it has become de riguer for political parties on both sides of the spectrum to install and remove leaders based on their relative standing in opinion polls – a major factor that lead to the 2013 ousting of Labor, whose ‘faceless men’ could not stay their wandering eyes when it came to choosing the country’s Prime Minister. Unlike the British Conservative party, the Australian Liberal party too has failed to be cautious of polls and have instead become beholden to them, as seen with the downfall of Tony Abbott. Throughout his reign the media coverage contextualised the performance of the Abbott Government by reference to his poor showings in the opinion polls and little else. This has had an impact on the Malcolm Turnbull regime which seems paralysed to promote policies that may not hold universal public approval. The recent abandonment of GST reform, in part due to opinion polls showing a lack of support for the policy, is evidence of the crippling effects of polls – evidence only compounded by the farcical situation at present, in which the Labor opposition has announced more policies than the ruling Coalition government.

These are just a few of the many instances of politicians being held at the mercy of polls that are widely known to be inaccurate.

Political skittishness over momentary unpopularity has led to the adoption of a more populist rhetoric by many would-be leaders, such as we hear from both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, in an effort to gain and maintain a favourable position in the polls. This fear of making decisions that may impact poll numbers has effectively crippled any coherent and decisive decision making. This is the peril of poll mania.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 21

COLUMN NICK PARKINSON PRESENTS

COUNSEL IN COUPLETS A COLUMN OF POETIC PROBLEM-SOLVING

FROM: Rory Mane, Williamstown Hi Nick, I’ve just received my first group uni assignment for Animal Law (LAWS50122). All is going well except in my group, one guy always talks about ponies. He’s like a modern day Saddle Club addict and it stops us from doing any work. Should I say something?

It’s never too easy when one of your buddies – Who should eschew law for equestrian studies ― Lets his wanton passion for ponies run rampant, Leaving your poor group assignment stagnant.

Your marks might suffer because he fiddle-faddles, But how to tell him “enough with the saddles!”?

This won’t be the first time you deal with group conflict ― Inevitably, individuals have interests that contradict.

University, just like the workforce, will challenge you in this way.

You’ll learn to compromise with lovers of stallions and hay.

Indeed, at times resolving problems will be simple: You’ll breach touchy subjects with nary a ripple.

Yet, things in life are, of course, rarely so easy ― You may need a higher authority to help broker a treaty.

And even then, you could sit by idly blaming bad luck, Left with an obstinate group member who’s a horse-loving schmuck So how can you settle this frustrating predicament?

How to warn it’s not just to horses whom he has a commitment?

If you’re brave enough, give this quote a run ― Remind him that “life should be fun for everyone”, And that your life is being affected by his pony obsession And that from Carole, Steph and Lisa he could learn a lesson.

But as could you Rory: maybe you’re in denial.

It’s you who should grin and bear it: “just wear a smile”.

Blaming others won’t get you anywhere, But instead leave you frustrated: life isn’t fair.

Indeed, is his passion for stirrups and horseshoes, Really so problematic as to upset you?

After all, what is wrong with loving something?

Think of all the joy to him ponies bring.

Be grateful that around you he feels comfortable and free, To say, with joy, “hello world, this is me”.

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DEVELOPED A WOE THAT WON’T LET YOU GO? SEND IT TO FARRAGOMEDIA2016@GMAIL.COM ARTWORK BY LUCY HUNTER

COLUMN

COMIC BY XAVIER WARNE

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 23

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COMMENTARY

IT’S NOT A PHASE, MUM ASHLEIGH HASTINGS-OLSEN TAKES A NEW YORK MINUTE TO REFLECT ON HER MK&A OBSESSION

D

ear nine-year-old me, I know that you think Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are the two most fascinating human beings to ever walk this earth. As Future You, however, I feel it is my responsibility to hit you with some hard truths. You know how you have spent pretty much every day of the past year telling Mum that this Olsen obsession is “Not just a phase?” Well, it definitely is a phase and one you will spend the next decade trying to live down.

Surely you can’t believe that you’ll have the energy to sustain such an intense girl crush forever? In the age of dial up internet, even downloading the MK&A newsletter wastes half an hour and your precious daily reserves of patience. As does trying to interpret the text without the aid of the photos, which are just too much for your ‘vintage’ computer to handle. Yet because I know you so well, I am certain that this news will come as a terrible shock. So before we dismiss the Olsens from your life, let us reminisce.

It all began with an interview in Total Girl magazine, the under-12 Australian female’s bible. MK&A, aside from having, like, the cutest acronym ever, were a tweenage dream. They were shy, down to earth and blessed with all the qualities you could expect in mega-celebrities (especially ones with a company in their names at the mere age of six).

Once those piercing blue Olsen eyes had ensnared you, it was all too easy for their merchandising empire to take a hold of your purse. Farrago readers, did you know that the Olsen twins had a record deal? No? But their song ‘Ice Cream Baby’ was so sweet! From books to VHS movies, clothes to ridiculously miniscule handbags, you saw it, you needed it and you got it.

MK&A corrupted your innocence and transformed you into a tiny materialistic beast. And this, dear me, is why I must burst your Olsen bubble. You are ridiculous and everyone except you knows it.

The more I reflect, the more I realise that you have a lot of human suffering to answer for. To those around you, you were the cause of many peals of fake laughter, pained nods and concealed eye rolls. Please, little me, go give your mum a thankful hug and indulge your friends with a conversation involving something they actually care about. But most of all, you need to apologise to your teacher Mr Butler. You knew that he believed pet lizards and bugs to be an integral part of the classroom. Despite this, you forced him to spend hours reading about what colour Mary-Kate likes to paint her toenails – a task he endured with minimal complaints.

Perhaps you should find him a medal of some kind.

The term ‘fangirl’ – describing those who cross the line from healthy fandom to near-indecent obsession – has not yet gained popular usage in your time. However, you fit the definition to the millimetre. You may have been wondering why I chose this precise time to reach out to my nine-year-old self. The truth is that you are about to do something terrible.

ARTWORK BY KATIA PELLICCIOTTA, POEM BY ASHLEIGH HASTINGS

Soon, your friend will casually mention that she is in possession of Mary-Kate and Ashley branded toothpaste. “Can I buy it off you?” you’ll enquire. “I’ll pay any price!” But alas, the aforementioned toothpaste has already been thrown out and is on its way to the nearest tip. “Which tip?” you’ll ask, horrifying everyone within earshot. “Maybe I can still find the tube.”

Yes. The empty tube. Of toothpaste. In a tip. This is why your obsession must end! The lengths you will go to acquire an MK&A branded toothpaste are baffling. You are slowly morphing into the kind of person with a genuine desire to pick through household waste. Unless you are okay with that, things have got to change.

Here’s the deal: – The Olsen-esque American accent you affect for days at a time is NOT as convincing as you think it is.

– Changing your name from Ashleigh to Ashley will NOT get you any closer to becoming the third Olsen. She already exists and her name is Elizabeth. She was even in an Avengers movie.

– Writing only Olsen-related stories for a full year of English class will NOT improve your marks.

– Your genuine Mary-Kate and Ashley Barbie dolls are NOT as cute or realistic as you think they are. They are creepy.

– Despite your grand plans, you will NOT move to New York at age sixteen, meet the Olsens or become their most trusted friend.

Currently, the Olsen twins are your role models for all the wrong reasons. However, I should let you know that they also deserve your respect for reasons you are still too young to understand.

Soon, Mary-Kate will have a very public breakdown and her eating disorder will spread across every possible front page.

But here’s the admirable thing: she will get better. Her sister will stand by her and despite the pressure of the tabloids and fame, MK will come out stronger. Rehab is a wonderful thing.

Don’t worry nine-year-old me, in our future MK is still successful and married to the brother of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Though you won’t approve of the décor for the ceremony. I read that the venue was mainly decorated with bowls of cigarettes.

Now that I’ve shattered your universe, I need you to smile through the tears and believe Future You when I tell you that you’re going to be just fine. The Olsen twins are still skulking around in the public eye – often from behind giant sunglasses.

And besides, you documented your Olsen phase so well. Gems such as the poem opposite will never fade.

They are timeless words.

Good luck, Future You xx

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COLUMN

THE FEMININE CRITIQUE: CULTURAL (IN)APPROPRIATION

ADRIANE REARDON EXPLORES THE DEBATE BETWEEN CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND CULTURAL APRPECIATION WITH ADISHI GUPTA FROM FEMINISM IN INDIA AND SLAM-POET SUKHJIT KHALSA

D

ebates of cultural appropriation have once again graced our presence in pop culture. Coldplay’s latest single, ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ features Beyoncé in a video depicting the Holi Festival, traditional Indian jewellery and the streets of Mumbai.

This video premiered a week after my visit to India where I was confronted with my own struggles of cultural appropriation. As a Western, White, liberal feminist, I was experiencing culture shock.

Adishi Gupta, an editor from the organisation Feminism in India, explains the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation.

“If one is borrowing something from a culture which has a long history of oppression for the sake of a fad, they are nothing but appropriating a culture. However, a conscious choice made in consideration to the historical climate of the respective culture, would be a more responsible way to convey appreciation.”

Feminism in India is an intersectional feminist organisation based in New Delhi. Their community aims to spread awareness and sensitisation around gender, sexuality and intersectionality.

Gupta explains that although her organisation promotes gender equality, they are also concerned with cultural appropriation and its effects not only between cultures around the world, but within India itself.

“It is interesting to note here that cultural appropriation isn’t solely across nations but it can happen within the same nation too… Some cultures are more marginalised than others and thus are likely to be appropriated by the latter.”

Gupta’s comments suggest that power and agency are highly ingrained in every culture, not only in the ability for a culture to create social norms but for other cultures to appropriate them.

The exoticisation of Indian tradition depicted in Coldplay’s latest single is accompanied by the regrettably long history of Western superiority and cultural insensitivity. I was highly conscious of my White privilege as a Western tourist in India, causing my attempts at cultural appreciation to be challenged by the gender inequality ingrained in that culture. There were public signs refusing temple entry to women menstruating and social expectations to wear loose, covered clothing in public. When I was constantly overlooked in favour of my male counterpart when it came to haggling and buying goods, my patience for the sake of being culturally respectful was tested.

Gupta expanded on my experience in consideration of feminism.

“Across cultures and nations, the way women are pressured to live up to the expectations of the people around them, lacking any sort of agency over their lives is just why we need feminism.

The rigid patriarchal framework existing in a lot of cultures, even today, is what imposes women with this sense of [male] entitlement in all areas of their lives.”

Understanding the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation has presented a new concern: Is culture a justified defence for sexism or is it an excuse?

Gupta explains this in relation to her perspective of gender inequality in India.

ARTWORK BY ELOYSE MCCALL

“It is a rather shoddy excuse. Taking culture as the premise of giving privilege to some people on the basis of their gender is an argument that falls flat… Culture is not a monolithic entity.”

Culture isn’t defined in black and white, and the complexity of its definition is likely to attribute to the constant debate surrounding the difference between appropriation and appreciation.

Sikh slam poet, Sukhjit Khalsa, also acknowledges the complexity in this debate amongst India and Australia.

“It’s tricky because it’s about permission and respect. It’s beautiful that people want to embrace and be a part of another culture but people should be aware of what they are participating in.”

Khalsa, a recent contestant on Australia’s Got Talent, uses spoken-word to creatively express the social issues of our time.

Her opinion on cultural appropriation and feminism is one that refers back to power, privilege, agency and choice.

“When I was younger, my dad never allowed me to wear jewellery. I asked my dad when I was older why we weren’t allowed to wear jewellery and he explained that women originally wore jewellery in India as a sign of being a slave to your husband.

I know that jewellery is a fashion and I love to wear [it], but I needed to know where that originates from.”

Khalsa’s perspective on cultural appropriation and feminism acknowledges the diversity and multifaceted nature of culture while also reinforcing that individuals must attempt to understand the significance of cultural traditions before they are reduced to a trend.

“With cultural appropriation, some people ask me ‘Does that mean I can’t eat curry anymore?’ That’s not what I’m saying. Just understand how to respect culture and ask about their traditions.”

The line between appropriation and appreciation lies in understanding and acknowledging privilege. I related this to my own experiences in India as a Western tourist constantly being asked to buy saris, wear henna and purchase bindis. Yet, I made a conscious decision not to take part in these cultural traditions so as not to reappropriate their traditional meaning.

Like Gupta, Khalsa explains that cultural appreciation requires the ability to appreciate the origins of a trend or behaviour without resorting to tokenism or ignoring its significance completely.

Western exoticisation of culture remains an issue when it comes to understanding the difference between appropriation and appreciation. Although cultures assume their own gender norms, fashion and behaviour, there is a difference between respecting their symbolic traditions and customs, and acknowledging the systemic inequalities among their society.

Amongst the fine lines of appropriation and appreciation is the realisation that an individual has the capacity to recognise their privilege and acknowledge the significance of a cultural tradition Adishi Gupta is a Literature Student at the University of Delhi and is a content editor at Feminism in India.

Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa is a Political Science and International Relations Graduate from the University of WA.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 27

COMMENTARY

COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO DANIELLE CROCCI RECOUNTS A LIFE LIVED BY ABBA SONGS

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fter yet another car trip with my best friend yelling to ABBA songs with the windows rolled down, I came to a realisation.

The discography of these Swedish megastars provides the perfect soundtrack to every stage of your love life. And who better to take you on this journey than someone who dressed up as Frida for the Arts Ball last year, right? (Frida’s the one with red hair in case you were wondering.)

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) Home alone on a Friday night and you’re wistfully lamenting your single status. The crescendo comes as you cry “gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight!” into the cold and lonely night.

However, when ABBA wrote this song in 1979, Tinder didn’t exist.

Lucky you.

Dancing Queen You’re taking charge now! You may not be 17, unless you’re being let in underage to a club on Russell St, but tonight you’re out to look for a king all the same. Perhaps ABBA’s greatest and most empowering banger, you’re “having the time of your life”.

Take a Chance on Me Now we move onto the next stage – you’ve found someone that has taken your fancy. Great! The only issue is that they seem to need a bit of a push or, worse, they’re into someone else. You’re more than happy to be patient though, as long as you’re next in line. Or you could sing this a cappella to the one you love, like Andy did in The Office, to speed things up a little. Whatever.

Voulez-Vous After all the patient waiting, there comes a moment where it’s now or never. This is that moment. “Nothing promised, no regrets.” It might not mean anything in the morning, but ‘VoulezVous’, the ode to one-night stands, says that’s okay.

Waterloo Congratulations, you have lost the game. You feel like you win when you lose and that’s when you know you’re in too deep. You can see where this is going because “the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself” but you’re too in love to want to escape.

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Lay All Your Love on Me After happily conceding defeat at Waterloo, you’re wondering how you got here. You’re not usually the jealous type and yet you’re obsessing darkly over your beloved. The hymn-like chorus confirms it – you’re at the worshipping stage. (See ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’ and ‘Under Attack’ for further explanation.)

The Name of the Game This is where things begin to get confusing. Is this just fun? Is there something more? “Does it mean anything to you?” They’re making you feel things and yet you’re not sure if they feel the same. It’s a time of angst and over-thinking.

Ring Ring You’re sitting by the phone on a dark and dreary night like you were when you were listening to ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ What’s changed? Let’s just say that if you have to sing a song asking them to give up a bit of their time to call you, it’s not looking promising.

The Winner Takes It All This is it. This is the song you put on when you come home at 1am and see photos of them tagged with someone else on Facebook.

If you take one lesson from this article, it should be that this is the best song to put on at this distressing moment. “And now I understand you’ve come to shake my hand” will hit hard. It will remind you of every past injustice of your life and it will provide you with a satisfyingly dramatic teen movie moment.

Knowing Me, Knowing You You can have a slightly more amicable and noble break-up with this tune. “Breaking up is never easy I know, but I have to go.”

Personally, I prefer the much more satisfying and interesting hitting-emotional-rock-bottom that ‘The Winner Takes It All’ presents but each to their own, I guess.

So Long I couldn’t end on such a sad note, so I’ve slipped this lesser known song in as a little self-affirming treat. “So long, see you honey…

You know it’s not worth trying.” You’re rejuvenated and ready to start the cycle again. I believe in you.

So I say thank you for the music ABBA, for guiding me along this whirlwind journey. On that note, I should probably also thank Fleetwood Mac, but that’s a story for another day.

ARTWORK BY CAROLYN HUANE

COMMENTARY

I LOST MY VIRGINITY TO A PLASTIC TUBE KIT RICHARDS BUSTS THE VIRGINITY MYTH

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o be clear, I don’t believe in the concept of virginity. It’s a social construct that was created to keep women ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’ so that they could be sold for a higher dowry. The word’s associations in the modern world are no better. If you lose it too early, you’re considered a slut; too late, a loser. It’s also heteronormative and mainly used to shame and humiliate people. I prefer the term ‘sexual awakening’; that way, it’s up to the individual to decide when they are awakened. I don’t believe that a sexual awakening needs to be defined by one moment but can instead be a series of moments, experiments and experiences. I feel the need to clarify this because, according to most people, I am still a virgin. But more on that later.

I had my first sexual experience at the age of 21 at a party. He was older than me and when he slipped his hand between my legs, I freaked out, grabbed his hand and threw it. He laughed at my awkwardness and proceeded to kiss me. This appears to be the trend with my sexual experiences: boys laughing at how uncomfortable I am. The phrasing makes them sound like assholes but I assure you I’m laughing too. Late in the game, I have to approach bedroom activities with a ‘fake it til you make it’ attitude. I still have no idea how to successfully give a hand job.

It’s just so awkward. Like, I want to remain lying down to kiss them but maybe I need to kneel beside them for a better angle?

That almost feels worse, though. It’s so hard to pleasure a man without dislocating your entire body.

I digress. According to an average amount of internet research, some people define sex as ‘intimate acts that end in mutual orgasm’. If this is how sex is defined, then it’s the second definition of sex that I haven’t had. No man has ever been able to make me cum. Some have tried; all have failed. I think this has something to do with the fact that they see having to ask me what I like, or how I masturbate, as an attack on their masculinity. My ex-boyfriend used to sulk every time he failed, saying stuff like, “I could give my ex orgasms” or, “I mustn’t be good in bed.” I have discovered that counselling a grown man about his bedroom abilities is both exhausting and annoying. Seriously dude, an open discussion with your partner about what works for them shouldn’t damage your ego. If anything, that’s what makes you good in bed, but I will tear the male ego to shreds another time.

Technically, my ex is the one with whom I’ve had the most sexual experiences but I don’t consider him to be the one to whom I lost my V. In fact, I don’t tie it to a person at all. Let me explain. When

ARTWORK BY ANAIS POUSSIN

I turned 21, I got vaginal thrush for the first time. The doctor told me, as a matter of routine, that the treatment was a cream that had to be applied through a plastic syringe inserted into the vagina.

Cue panic. I had never even seen my vagina, let alone had anything inserted into it. That day, I finally gave myself the sex ed I’d never had in high school. I googled so many diagrams of female anatomy that by the end of it I could’ve had an honorary PhD in gynaecology.

I now knew what I needed to do in theory: I just had to put it into practice. Armed with nerves and a mirror, I took my first glace at the land down under. So far, so good. Just looked like a normal vulva. I continued to read the informational packet that came with the canestan cream. “Relax, lie in the missionary position and gently insert syringe until fully inserted.” I took a deep breath; relaxing is not something that I do well. Try as hard as I might, it hurt no matter what I did. I would later blame my vulvodynia for that part of the experience.

Having had very few encounters with boys, or tampons, or anything really, I did what I always do in a moment of panic – I relied on my encyclopaedic knowledge of film and TV. And in that moment of panic, when I knew if I didn’t use the cream I would never get better, I decided to seduce myself.

I laid a towel down on my bed in case of hymen breakage or cream spillage, lit a few candles, put on the song I wanted to lose my virginity to (‘This Guy’s in Love with You’ by Herb Alpert), dimmed the lights and gave it a second crack. With a bit of manoeuvring, I finally got it to slide in like a dream. In that moment, I felt so alive, grown up and – most importantly – in charge of and empowered by my own body. After this experience, I became so open and ready to experiment, and that is how I define becoming sexually awakened; when you begin to hunt down sexual experiences because you want to, not because you feel you have to.

When I was younger, I was so scared of people seeing my vagina – now, I’m like, “My pussy is so cute! Who wants to see it?!”

So yeah. I’ve never had a penis inside of me but I’m not a virgin.

The main thing I want you to take away from this is that you’re allowed to experiment at your own pace. Never let someone pressure you into something you don’t want to do. Also, be safe and have fun! People forget to remind you that sex is supposed to be fun, no matter what kind you’re having. You don’t need to be in love and your virginity doesn’t have to be some sacred thing stored in a box under lock and key. At the end of the day, it’s your virginity and you can do whatever you want with it. Now! Go forth and multiply! (If you’re emotionally and financially ready for a baby!)

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 29

COMMENTARY

BIG LOVE SEAN MANTESSO TALKS HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO

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ove is a concept that is rarely challenged. Only a brave few heretics would dare question the essence of monogamous love: the desire for one person at the exclusion of all others. It’s a cultural institution in the West and we’ve all been led to believe that monogamy is the natural state of human sexuality and desire.

However, there is some compelling evidence that monogamy may be a contradiction. A fallacy beaten into us by non-stop Hollywood love stories and preached by evangelists who denounce lust as fleeting and anything but devoted commitment as frivolous. A robust history of extramarital sex and the ubiquity of infidelity are indicative of this contradiction.

Yet even now, despite the mounting pile of evidence, the narrative of monogamous love is inextricably sown into our collective psyche.

What is the genesis of this ideology? Who exactly does it benefit?

The bestselling book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacildia Jetha argues that monogamy manifested itself with the emergence of property rights. Paternity among hunter-gatherers was communal and only once lineage and inheritance became entwined with property ownership did people even acknowledge their own children to be theirs.

Monogamy emerged as a favourable framework for men to consolidate power over their property. Women were simply incorporated into this process, their sexualities constrained and neatly defined within the parameters of marriage. Or so Sex at Dawn contends.

The much later popularisation of romanticised love in the Middle Ages, which was further developed in the 17th Century, is really the model for how we understand love in the modern context.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet typified this ideology, perhaps fittingly at a time when marriage was a business contract but love itself was a heresy.

Now we champion love as an infallible notion, impenetrable and everlasting. Yet there is a sense that there are dissidents massing on the horizon, just a tinge of revolutionary fervour bubbling, a schism in the zeitgeist.

Jennifer Malarski of the Metropolitan University in Denver compiled a significant amount of data on polyamorous relationships in the US and around the world. She argues there has undoubtedly been a softening on the rigidity of relationship structures and people are beginning to experiment more openly with polyamory.

More precisely, Malarski contends that women are breaking free from the sexual conformities that characterised the 20th Century and challenging social norms and practices through alternative relationship models.

Given these conclusions and the prevalence of infidelity, it’s entirely possible monogamy could be a cultural manifestation that works infinitely better in the imagination than it does in reality.

I’m beginning to wonder if each of us will at some point be forced to confront the very awkward truth: no matter how much we may love someone, our desires are rarely – if ever – confined to one person.

I know this is true for me. It’s true for my girlfriend too. We’re both guilty of furtive glances and lascivious thoughts external to one another. While this obviously doesn’t constitute infidelity, it is an

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acknowledgement that our monogamy is a sacrifice of desire and not necessarily a natural state.

Given this, infidelity is now often touted as an inevitability, rather than a transgression, by the monogamy cynics.

Nonetheless, most of us still persist in our pursuit of a monogamous relationship. Despite a growing number of people experimenting with polyamory, most of us can’t handle the jealousies and insecurities that inevitably arise in alternative relationship models.

Sydney Morning Herald writer Katherine Feeney spoke with a polyamorous woman from Melbourne who described the lifestyle as being wholly liberating.

“What is common is that everyone who is successfully living the polyamorous lifestyle is clear on what they want,” Feeney states, “and clearly expresses this to others. I think that’s the liberating factor.”

She argues it is clear, precise communication and selfassuredness that allows one to be a successful polyamorist.

Despite this, she admits many who try end up failing – they find themselves falling into the old adage of not being able to have your cake and eat it too.

People are often willing to act on their own external desires but are fraught with fear and angst at the thought of their significant other doing the same. Herein lies the true purpose of monogamy.

It is a means of protecting ourselves, a means of abating those nagging insecurities rather than a loving commitment.

It’s a means by which we are able to constrain our partner’s desires through an at-times flimsy social contract in an attempt to prevent any hurt or jealousy from being inflicted upon us. Sex at Dawn’s contention that monogamy is a means of control seemingly fits. Perhaps polyamory is a more ‘natural’ state of human sexuality.

That being said, this rather cynical view should probably be taken with a grain of salt – monogamy has both its purpose and its benefits.

Rather than a complete paradigm shift that could see monogamy usurped as the relationship mainstay, it’s likely that instead we are beginning to broaden our understanding of human sexuality and relationships.

Desire doesn’t have to be confined to a single person and, let’s face it, it never truly is anyway.

And that’s okay but it’s important to acknowledge it. Even if our monogamy is simply a symptom of personal insecurity, is it not an effective method of making us happy in our relationships?

Polyamory isn’t for everyone and many brave pioneers have come sheepishly back into the monogamous fold citing hurt feelings and raging jealousies.

It’s likely we will see more people experiment with alternative relationships but it may not have to be an entirely new model.

Monogamy, despite its contradictions and unromantic history, doesn’t negate any real love we may feel for other people. Rather, it is simply one of many possible ways of having a relationship.

Learn to accept that all of us are at the mercy of our own desires.

How you decide to incorporate those desires into your relationships is entirely up to you. But to deny them and to champion your own love as above the natural tendencies of humankind is a path beset by dangers and heartbreak, and one that may be doomed to fail.

ARTWORK BY EDIE M BUSH

COLUMN THIASHYA JAYASEKERA PRESENTS A COLUMN ABOUT THE BIG QUESTIONS IN SCIENCE

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ave you ever sensed that something bad was about to happen? Have you ever had a dream come true?

We have five senses. Taste. Touch. Smell. Hearing. Sight. It’s common sense, right?

Maybe not.

The belief that some people are gifted with a sixth sense has been around for thousands of years.

From oracles in the 6th Century to self-proclaimed psychics in the 21st.

The sixth sense is an umbrella term for a multitude of phenomena that scientists have termed Extrasensory Perception (ESP).

Dean Radin, a research psychologist, maintains that our hunches can foretell the future.

Radin conducted a controlled laboratory study where participants sat before a blank computer screen with electrodes attached to their hands, monitoring physiological changes. When the participant clicked the mouse, a randomly generated image – either calming or disturbing – was displayed. This sequence was repeated forty times.

Radin’s study revealed that participants’ bodily changes occurred before the images were shown. This showed that people quite literally do get gut feelings.

Similar studies claim that there is surmounting evidence for the sixth sense. However, Radin’s findings are inconclusive and his method erroneous. His study relies on comparing physiological states and different methods of calculating such changes can yield wildly different results. Not to mention that physiological reactions vary greatly between individuals.

Almost all psychic phenomena has been dismissed by vehement sceptics.

Perhaps the sixth sense is merely a convenient explanation for our strange, anomalous experiences. We seek to make sense of the world but when something seems beyond inexplicable – we turn to the paranormal.

Or it may be that science has yet to catch up to our understanding of the sixth sense.

Researchers at Frieberg University conducted an experiment to attempt to explain that feeling of being stared at.

The feeling of being watched is familiar – you may be on a bus, buying your groceries or waiting for a lecture. Sure enough, when you turn around, you identify the culprit in an awkward and disconcerting moment of eye contact.

In this study, two volunteers sat in different rooms and one stared at the other via CCTV. The second ‘stared-at’ volunteer was hooked to electrodes which recorded the electrical activity of their skin. Dr Schmidt stated in the British Journal of Psychology that “there was a small but significant effect”.

Skeptic, Professor Richard Wiseman from Hertfordshire University, argues that this can be attributed to our memory bias. “The number of times your turn around and find someone not looking at you far outnumber the times when you do.” But you tend to not remember those moments as distinctly.

Psychic dreams are harder to explain.

A young girl from Aberfan reported that in her dream, “[she] went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come all over it!” The next day, a huge amount of material from a coal mine swept across the town of Aberfan in a landslide, destroying a school and killing 116 children.

Scientists aren’t so bold as to claim they can explain every instance of ESP. But several psychological factors contributing to these extraordinary occurrences have been identified.

Selective attention, for one. Those uncanny coincidences when a friend happens to text just as you’re thinking of them seem utterly inexplicable. We often think of our friends.

And our friends text us regularly. But we hardly remember the times when those two occurences don’t overlap.

Secondly, our memory is notoriously unreliable – just imagining a past experience can trick us into thinking that it really happened.

This is a major crux for alleged precognitive dreams. We can render “memories” of psychic dreams to befit the event that they were supposedly precognisant of.

Moreover, our brains are naturally wired to spot patterns.

People with an affinity for pattern-spotting draw connections between unrelated thoughts and events and are more likely to believe in ESP. Sensation-seekers are also more likely to report paranormal experiences.

Science has a lot to say on the subject of the sixth sense.

Namely, that it does not exist.

But we do have a sixth sense – perhaps not in the supernatural sense. And maybe even a seventh, eighth and ninth sense too.

The five senses we learn about in school provide a simplistic understanding of how we perceive. There’s subitising (our ability to quickly estimate numbers – i.e. there are 300 fries on my plate), balance, pain, thermoreception and so on.

Drawing distinctions between our senses seems illogical, since our worldview depends on the interaction of many senses.

When it comes to our senses, it’s all a bit nonsensical.

No amount of scientific evidence will be enough to sway those who hold a fervent belief in the sixth sense.

ARTWORK BY REIMENA YEE

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 31

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COLUMN

ARTWORK BY KERRY JIANG

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[NERVOUS LAUGHTER] FERGUS NEAL HAS A STAND-UP SIT-DOWN WITH SOME OF THE BEST COMEDIANS IN AUSTRALIA

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alking to comedian and actress Felicity Ward on the phone in Hong Kong mid-transit, she leaves me thinking comedy has a much larger role to play than to simply make people laugh.

The word ‘comedy’, manifests from the classical Greek word ‘kōmōidía’, which comprises of the two words, ‘Kōmos’ which is to ‘revel’, and ‘ᾠδή ōidḗ’, which means ‘to sing’. Speaking with three of the biggest names in comedy today – Arj Barker, Tom Ballard and the aforementioned Felicity Ward – I have laughed until my tummy hurts and felt a joy which all humans have strived to evoke in one another throughout history.

roll at the end of the show. Felicity graciously pushes away the notion that she connects the audience and aids people through laughter. “There is nothing moral about what I’m trying to do” she says, however there is a subtle sense of hope in her voice that this little gesture will help people battling privately with what she also experiences. I burst out with laughter as she exclaims “I’ll start punching people” upon hearing “fight the stigma” one more time, describing it as a “sound bite”. Rather, we need “money and government” she sings in a passionate cry for all those who suffer from mental illness.

This skill which Felicity possesses, the capability to turn delicate subject matter into laughter, exemplifies why her show is a mustwatch at this year’s Comedy Festival for someone who wants to think, laugh and cry.

FELICITY WARD Felicity first came to prominence through the Logie nominated sketch show The Ronny John’s Half-Hour, before going into stand-up, which she says felt like “finding the one”. With this moment of realisation she quit her job as a waitress and has been killing the stand-up scene in Australia and the UK ever since.

Felicity comes across the phone as bubbly and hilarious, I feel fuzzy inside as I awkwardly repeat ‘yep, yep’ to her flow of consciousness. Felicity has been open about her battles with mental illness; her ABC documentary Felicity’s Mental Mission explores her anxiety disorder and the way society deals with issues of mental illness. Part of her motivation for talking about her mental health on stage was the “incredibly patronising language” used by people talking about an issue close to her heart.

“How (people with mental illness) behave is actually quite funny, and it’s rare that we get to enjoy that” she says.

Living with anxiety and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) does not immediately bring up connotations of humour, but the two go hand in hand throughout Felicity’s show What If There Is No Toilet?, which she is bringing to the 2016 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

If you journey down to Felicity’s show, you’ll be surprised to see two large pyramids of toilet rolls on stage. The toilet rolls are representative of Felicity’s IBS. People in the audience who don’t know how to say “I have that too” are invited to put away a toilet

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ARJ BARKER When I ask Arj Barker how he’d sell his show to students, he darts back “tell them there’ll be free beer, although that wouldn’t be completely honest”. I laugh ecstatically and tell him I’m a bit in love. Arj is amazingly down to earth for someone who has been on David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and starred in the hit HBO comedy Flight of the Concords. He has always had a massive appeal with Australian audiences. He places his success down to “being in the right place at the right time”, but the mere mention

COMMENTARY

of Arj Barker to a fellow student will produce a smile, rendering Arj’s humility obsolete. Arj is as chilled in real life as he is on stage. His show at this year’s Comedy Festival is called Organic, which comprises of completely new material that he hopes will produce a “high LPM (laugh per minute) rate” throughout. The title comes from what the name suggests; everything in the show will have a natural vibe running throughout, a signature of Arj’s comedy for so long.

As we near the end of the interview, I tell him students will enjoy the read. He replies “Well I’ve stayed pretty immature so I hope that helps”. I laugh and can’t wait to do so again at his upcoming show.

TOM BALLARD Tom Ballard is the pin-up boy for the progressive rational: his comedy festers with you so you’re laughing the whole way home.

Charlie Chaplin was described as “always being on, everything was a performance”. The same is true with Tom Ballard.

Tom has always been well liked by young people ever since he was nominated for ‘Best Newcomer’ at the Comedy Festival at only 19 years of age. He was crushing it on the Australian stand-up scene when his JAFFY peers were walking into trees on South Lawn. His show at this year’s Comedy Festival is called The World Keeps Happening, and explores social and political issues which the world currently finds itself victim to. Not the war in Syria or anything too heavy like that. Instead, Tom is focusing on “Justin Bieber being popular” and the “world going to shit because nobody knows what they’re doing”.

Tom is happy to make a fool of himself, while at the same time being extraordinarily witty, only making him more loveable. Upon arrival at his house, his smile and deliverance of orange juice causes my accomplices, Belinda and Mahalia, to smile and giggle at his funny demeanour. “Please don’t judge the way I live, because I have housemates and they’re arseholes” he says to us as we walk down the corridor. The interview starts flowing even before the camera begins rolling. I sit across from Tom and discuss whether the bow

ARTWORK BY ELOYSE MCCALL

tie I’m wearing is too much, he laughs at my awkwardness and makes me feel like I’ve known him a lot longer than twenty minutes.

He has the exact same effect on his audiences.

However, Tom is not just a pretty face. He has presented Q&A, where he was “absolutely shitting” himself and has worked for a bunch of social issues, such as sitting on the Midsumma Hypothetical where he discussed homophobia and the pursuit of improved rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

He is also an ambassador for Welcome to Australia and it is his push for refugees and asylum seekers’ rights that has caught my intrigue and admiration. Tom is involved in a second show at the Comedy Festival called Wide Open Plains which acts as a kind of “comedy lecture” in the pursuit of “humanising people”.

The spiel reads partly: “Tom Ballard presents a comedic exploration of Australia’s fucked up immigration situation. From our racist federation to Tampa, to Johnny Depp’s dogs, this show will make you piss yourself and cry.”

When asked what he hopes to achieve with the show, I almost get him serious for the first time in 40 minutes, until he says “I’m here to solve all our problems”. Prior to our departure I give him a wrapped present – a packet of Vegetarian Sausages. Tom is a vegetarian, as well as an animal rights advocate. He laughs as he puts them in his fridge after the camera has stopped rolling. I feel fuzzy inside as Tom sees us out the door, his charming laugh ringing out as he stands in the doorway, his tall frame present until we’re out of sight. Tom has such a likeable demeanour and comedic style, it is one which all students at university can relate to. Tom Ballard is a must see for anyone who has ever done something silly and needs a good friend to laugh it over with afterwards. But more than that, Tom has a rhyme to his reason; a purpose to all of the silliness which showcases comedy as powerful, casting light on dark social issues.

Historically, comedy has long followed human kind as a way

“When I ask Arj Barker how he’d sell his show to students, he darts back ‘tell them there’ll be free beer, although that wouldn’t be completely honest’.” to shed light on anomalies in society and unify people through a shared experience. Be it raising awareness for mental health issues, the rights of asylum seekers, or even normalising IBS, it’s clear that Felicity, Tom and Arj convey meaning through the laughter. As the Comedy Festival looms closer, I already have a sense of the kōmōidía: Melburnians will be revelling and singing in a theatre near you.

You can watch Fergus’ interview with Tom Ballard at www.youtube.com/farragomagazine Felicity’s, Arj’s and Tom’s shows run from March 24 at the Melbourne International Comedy Festivalt.

Tickets available at www.ticketmaster.com

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 35

COMMENTARY

THE AI WEIWEI WAY

BEN MEURS LOOKS AT THE ARTIST AS FREEDOM FIGHTER

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nyone who has visited Melbourne in the past three months will be familiar with the visage of Ai Weiwei. In an unprecedented advertising campaign for The National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) blockbuster summer exhibition, Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, the Chinese contemporary artist’s wide-eyed gaze has been plastered across trams, billboards, shop fronts and print media. Moreover, a swarm of Weiweis have been staring back at us from seemingly every iPhone, Macbook and cinema screen available.

Government expenditure on art has always held a controversial position in the Australian debate (see the $1.3 million acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles under Gough Whitlam). But no matter how you feel about the NGV’s use of taxpayer funds to finance the immense exhibition, just go and see it. Even if contemporary art’s focus on the conceptual over the aesthetic turns you off, as famously epitomised by Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Fountain, the overarching theme of Weiwei’s practice is something that can be appreciated by all: freedom.

Upon entering the NGV’s Federation Court, it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by Forever Bicycles. 1,500 tessellating two-wheelers are suspended in the form of a sort of ultra-modern paifang (a Chinese gateway, à la the more traditional example at the intersection of Little Bourke and Swanston Street). Owning a model of the mass-produced Forever brand of bicycle has given many Chinese a sense of freedom and autonomy. Thus, Weiwei’s work acts symbolically as a kind of gateway to freedom.

But freedom, which we presume as our birthright in Australia, has never come easily to Weiwei. As a one year old infant, his father Ai Qing was denounced for being a poet and the family was sent to a labour camp. It was not until Weiwei was nineteen that he was able to return to Beijing. Ever since, his practice has been a struggle for liberty of expression in the face of the mammoth suppressive power of the Chinese government. But Weiwei is fearless and, given the myriad works produced for the NGV exhibition, seemingly inexhaustible. A triptych assembled in Lego depicts Weiwei smashing a Neolithic vase to pieces, serving as a critique of modern China’s disassociation since the 20th Century revolution from its ancient culture.

Elsewhere, Weiwei’s controversial 2011 detention by the Chinese government is recreated in the sculpture S.A.C.R.E.D, albeit with Weiwei himself assuming the role of oppressor and a uniformed official becoming the oppressed. One series, Study of Perspective, presents a collage of photos of Weiwei giving the finger to various symbols of national power, namely the Forbidden

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City, White House and Reichstag; further conveying the artist’s disdain for the Establishment and its suppression of individuals.

However, perhaps his most poignant piece is the inscription of the names of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In the aftermath, Weiwei collected the names in a ‘Citizen’s Investigation’, despite a violent crackdown from the government attempting to conceal the shoddy construction of the school as the reason for approximately 4,700 of the deaths.

More recently, Weiwei has been assisting refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, physically supporting the aid efforts of UNHCR volunteers whilst constantly documenting the process on his Instagram account (@aiww). Moreover, by draping the pillars of the Konzerthaus concert hall in Berlin with 14,000 abandoned life-vests used by refugees in the crossing of the Mediterranean, Weiwei has sent a striking reminder to Europe and the world of the refugees’ plight.

It should be mentioned that Weiwei’s pieces in the NGV exhibition sit particularly well alongside Warhol’s more political silkscreen works. Tunafish Disaster highlights the unforeseeable dangers of consumerism; Gun critiques American gun violence and culture, of which Warhol was a first-hand victim, being shot and critically injured in 1968; whilst Electric Chair is a solemn indictment of corporal punishment. Moreover, Warhol’s incessant self-documentation processes, carrying a Polaroid daily from the 1950s until his death in 1987, has undoubtedly influenced Weiwei.

The Chinese artist’s famously relentless use of social media can be seen as an artwork in itself, with his myriad posts ranging from ‘food porn’ and selfies at exhibitions to refugee crossings and support for convicted freedom activists. This is because for Weiwei, using social media is not a means to procrastinate or live vicariously through the ‘Instragramable’ lives of others. Rather, it is a defiant celebration of freedom of expression in the face of a totalitarian state. As Weiwei himself has expressed: “Never retreat, re-tweet!”

The majority of us will not be boarding the next flight to Greece to assist refugees, nor fighting against the repression of an authoritarian government. But perhaps in attending Weiwei’s exhibition at the NGV, we can be inspired to act for the freedom of others within reach, namely the nearly 4,000 refugees our own government continues to cruelly detain.

The Andy Warhol | Ai Wei Wei Exhibition at the NGV is open daily from 10am-5pm until April 24 2016. Student Price: $22.50

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LILY JIANG & HAN LI

COMMENTARY

PUNCH UP, NOT DOWN TIERNAN MORRISON EXPLAINS WHY DEADPOOL IS THE SUPER SATIRE WE DESERVE, BUT NOT THE ONE WE NEED

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he superhero movie has long been waiting for a satire equal to the silliness of its conceits. The number of podcasts and YouTube channels that survive on parodying superhero films (and the very fact that Superhero Movie ever got made) reflects an audience ready to laugh at the genre that has so much defined the 21st Century blockbuster.

For a long time however, major studios have had a hard time understanding what could be funny about a self-serious bodybuilder in a rubber suit. While superhero films have certainly become lighter since Batman Begins first introduced ‘gritty reboot’ to the cultural vernacular, the genre is yet to veer fully into parody. So now we have Deadpool, a film that transposes two hours of fourth wall breaks and pop culture references onto the adamantium skeleton of a super flick. The result is sometimes funny and entertaining, but ultimately fails to appreciate what makes both a great superhero movie and a great satire.

The irony of discussing Deadpool as a satire of superhero films is that it typifies all the worst aspects of the form. The action sequences are imaginative but often hard to follow. Compared to the spectacular fight sequences in Netflix’s Daredevil, Deadpool’s set pieces feel like filler between plot points. It’s tricky to make fights featuring a near-invulnerable mutant feel high-stakes, but Deadpool never inspires even the slightest bit of doubt as to their outcome.

The story surrounding those sequences is equally unimpressive.

While the movie pokes fun at how formulaic its plot is, this does not make it any more fun to watch. The story unfolds with a drudging inevitability and any interest the other characters inspire is only through being played off of by the titular merc-with-amouth. The basic elements of the film are so unimpressive that it more often feels like the film is parodying itself rather than the genre it belongs to.

If Deadpool is a mediocre superhero movie, it’s equally a mediocre satire of superhero movies. Most of the film’s biggest laughs are from the Family Guy school of humour, where the joke ends at telling the audience that the characters have seen the same movies as them. What’s worse is that it feels like

ARTWORK BY ELLA SHI

Deadpool has purposefully made itself predictable to more easily make fun of itself. This would be fine if it was pure parody but the film’s best sequences point too closely towards real movieness for this to be the case.

The greatest genre satires show that it’s possible to celebrate a genre while making it look ridiculous. The difference between Blazing Saddles and Adam Sandler’s much maligned Ridiculous Six is that the creators of the former had an evident respect for the genre they were skewering. The other difference between them is that Blazing Saddles laughs at the racism of the genre rather than with it. The result is a movie that manages to address the uncomfortable baggage of the Western while still being funny and importantly, stupid.

Superhero movies have their own notorious representation issues, but here again Deadpool is happy to typify the worst of its genre. The list of boorish tropes included without comment in Paul Wernick and Rhett Reeses’s screenplay includes an Indian taxi driver who abducts his rival in love, an attractive damsel in distress and a completely gratuitous stop at a strip club (that the love interest of course only waits tables at). If there’s anything that truly deserves to be made fun of in superhero movies, surely it’s the way they treat women and minorities.

In commercial terms, Deadpool has been a huge success, becoming the highest earning R rated movie in American box office history. Like the previous record holder (Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ), Deadpool is built on hype and destined for obscurity. This is for the simple fact that the film does not know what it wants to be.

If it were simply a superhero movie striving for levity, it could have taken lessons from Guardians of the Galaxy or Kickass, which hilariously subvert the genre while being genuinely great examples of it. Guardians shows that the genre is only as confining as you allow it to be and that fresh, creative narratives can still be told within it. If Deadpool was striving to be a selfconscious takedown of a too serious genre, it could’ve benefited from two axioms of good comedy: punch up, not down and make sure there’s something worth watching between the jokes.

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COLUMN

FOR & AGAINST AVOCADOS

BY SARAH SO EUN LEE & JOHN LOWE

BY BEN VOLCHOK

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he avocado is a humble fruit. That’s right, it’s a fruit.

Sure, it can look like an oversized raisin sometimes, but that’s the genius of the avocado. It knows it doesn’t need to be flashy and brightly coloured like an orange, or sweet and juicy like a pineapple, because the avocado, ladies and gentlemen, is the most consistent and versatile of the foods in Mother Nature’s shopping basket.

It’s a food that you can put on your toast for breakfast, mix up in a salad for lunch or add as a side to your favourite chicken and salmon dishes for culinary perfection – not to mention the fact that if you’re feeling peckish in between, it can be used as a dip for your processed carbohydrate of choice.

Other fruits may seduce you with the promise of nectar and honey, only to leave you more disappointed than Asian parents during parent teacher interviews when they’re just not that sweet or juicy. The avocado won’t do that to you though. The avocado knows you may have developed trust issues from other fruits, but it’s here to tell you that if you choose the avocado, those issues can be gone in an instant. Why? Because you will know, every time you cut ripe avocado, you’ll get the same creamy texture and subtle flavour you’ve had with every avocado before it and every avocado after.

With just one avocado, you can journey to Japan through a sushi roll, meander to the Mediterranean with a salad or even visit the Yochi on Lygon Street for an avocado and lime froyo.

In fact, the lineage of the avocado stretches back to the time of the Aztecs, where they realised the aphrodisiac properties and appropriately named the glorious green balls ahuácatl, or testicles. One spoonful of avocado can raise your libido, and – ladies, look away for a moment – if you’re having a bit of trouble getting the train conductor to the right stations then avocados can help you out there as well, if you know what I mean.

So to finish up our advocating of avocados, we’ll leave you with this: rise up to the gastronomic challenge and embrace the luscious green goods.

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lright you avocadocore losers, listen up. No, up higher. Yeah, okay, that’s about right. Yeah. Good. You listening? Good.

‘Cause right now, it’s time to really smash avocados.

Before you ask what qualifications I have to release this tirade, let me tell you. I once did a project in Year 7 Spanish class on avocados.

So I think I have enough credentials, thank you very much.

Also, I own an avocado tree. That’s right. I have a tall, leafy avocado tree in my backyard. It doesn’t produce fruit any more, thank god, but it’s there. One year it spawned hundreds of avocados, then never again. What an unreliable organism. Doesn’t even bear scrutiny. Or fruit. That’s strike one.

PLUS DID YOU KNOW AVOCADOS ARE HARMFUL TO ANIMALS? YOU FUCKERS. So yeah, go on, eat your wrinkly green alien orb-sacs while all the animals die. What? Yes I eat meat. Hypocrisy? Not at all. Shut up. The animals don’t have any reason to die for you to eat avocados but they do have to die for me to eat animals. That’s only fair. No you’re killing the animals unnecessarily. Monsters. That’s strike two.

Oh yeah. Don’t even mention guacamole. If you like having a mouthful of shitty bean stew every time you want dip, then that’s fine, go ahead. But I don’t, so I won’t. It’s like reconstructed Exorcist spew. Stew & Spew. Worst eatery ever. Strike three.

That’s basically it. Three strikes. Avocados are out. But let’s have some more strikes, just in case.

Toast. Why ruin toast? What’s wrong with butter? What’s wrong with jam? Hell, what’s wrong with eggs? This isn’t progress.

This isn’t “healthy eating”. It’s just needless petulancy and contrarianism. It doesn’t even stay on the bread. Just slides off like the slug that it secretly is. Strike four.

You’ve probably already heard how your obsession with this slimy abomination is causing a countrywide avocado shortage, which, to be honest, is really just helping the other side. Us. The Good Side. The Side Free Of Avocados. This Is Sounding Like A Cult Now. But it’s you who’s the cult. Manipulating people into thinking this horror of a fruit is somehow beneficial to your diets.

Sacrificing animals. Yeah. Cults. Strike five.

That’s five strikes. If you were playing baseball you’d be arrested for too many strikes. That’s how baseball works, I’m assuming. I don’t know, I didn’t do a high school project on baseball.

Whatever. I don’t care. Keep eating your favourite healthy fruit into extinction. Maybe then my avocado tree will be worth something. I love you, avocado tree.

ARTWORK BY KATIA PELLICCIOTTA

SCIENCE

LORD GUNGL PRESENTS

THE BUSHFOODIE’S GUIDE TO THRIFTY CAMPUS DINING

A

re you strapped for cash? Are you sick of, or literally from, dumpster diving? Or are you just a tight-arsed skinflint?

Then you’re in luck, for your friendly neighbourhood grumpy scientist is here to tell you how to eat dirt cheap while at uni.

Emphasis on the dirt.

Be it traditional bush tucker or introduced plants, food can be found almost anywhere if you know where to look. I will be showing you how to make a feast from whatever can be found on campus, starting with a first course of:

Fried whitebait fritters with dill, lemon and saltbush mayo – served on a bed of wilted baby sorrel You will need: Whitebait Sorrel Oil Saltbush Flour Dill Eggs Chives Lemons Parsley Whitebait: In all seriousness, if you are desperate enough to need to trawl decorative water features for your daily sustenance, then I would recommend you instead hit up Lentil as Anything in Abbotsford. Having said that, you can find these tiny fish in the ponds in System Gardens and just north of Redmond Barry.

Hypothetically, they could be eaten bones and all, providing a good source of calcium and omega-3 fatty acids. Eating a higher ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s will help ward off heart disease.

Oil: You’ll need some omega-6s from vegetable fats too, though unless you want heart disease be sure to eat a higher ratio of those omega-3s. Pick a plant like palm and get refining, safe in the knowledge that for once an orangutang’s home is not being destroyed in the process.

Eggs Ducks eggs can have a somewhat fishy taste to them — which may not be so much of an issue here — but we’re going with the more plentiful pigeon eggs for the batter and mayonnaise. Eggs, no matter what species they come from, are a great feed as they contain all the nutritional requirements to form an entire organism. However, unlike many birds we cannot produce our own Vitamin C, which brings us to…

Lemons Ok, I’ll admit I haven’t actually seen a lemon tree on campus, but the front yard fruit trees in Carlton and Brunswick are close enough. Lemons and limes, cumquats and apples abound. Conscript a tall friend and you’ll get a far better haul.

ARTWORK BY JAMES CALLAGHAN

Flour A long-time staple for the Indigenous of arid areas, wattle seeds are dried and crushed into a type of flour, though the seed pods can also be steamed or boiled while still green. The taste is akin to snow peas, which is not surprising given the similarity in the cooking process. It’s been known to make housemates complain about acacia branches in the kitchen, even though they were the ones who said you needed to cook more vegetarian meals in the first place. Iron — of which red meat is a rich source — is crucial to higher cognitive functions such as memory.

Care must be taken not to overcook the seed pods and to refrain from goading the anti-beast-flesh crusaders with the phrase ‘plants have feelings too — have a heart, eat a rock’.* But I digest (though not cellulose, which requires a specialised caecum that is only found in herbivores, as opposed to our remnant baby-dick of an intestine we call the appendix). Point being, we are omnivores and a balanced diet is key. One source of iron other than delicious meat is leafy green vegetables. *If you are a vegan and wish to know more about the more nutritious stones and gravels on campus, consult your nearest geology student. Just don’t ask them whether or not geology does in fact rock. Over and over again like it’s the funniest thing in the world (which it clearly is). They tend to get pissy.

Salad greens (Sorrel) and Herbs If you’ve grown up in Victoria then you probably know sorrel better as ‘sourgrass’. It looks similar to clover but grows taller, and as the moniker suggests, it has a tangy crunch to it.

Saltbush is a native succulent that can be used as a cooking spice. You can find it in the arid section of the System Gardens next to the reputedly hallucinogenic cacti, which you should just keep on walking past. The botany department has had to put a ‘please don’t trip balls on our cacti’ sign up, which you should obey. The nearby herb garden and the like are there for everyone to share, so don’t go overboard — claiming an entire mint shrubbery or the top five feet of a cactus for yourself is frowned upon. Grab some chives, dill and parsley from next to the greenhouses, and you’re all set!

Method: Chuck all of the ingredients together, cook, then nom. Hey, I’m a zoologist, not a chef.

Bon Ape Tit! Next on the menu: Duck, Moreton Bay fig and mixed leaf salad, paired with a ’16 palm and dandelion wine.

Head to farragomagazine.com/column/bushfoodie to read more recipes by our resident zoologist.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 39

COLUMN

LOTTE WARD PRESENTS

ONE OF US: CULT REVIEWS

HEATHERS: A CULT CLASSIC WITH CULTISH UNDERTONES

“A

re we going to prom, or to hell?”

When Heathers was released in 1988, it was largely unappreciated by commercial audiences. Missing its budget of $3 million by a long way (it made only $1.1m at the box office) despite frothing critic reviews, the film saw a massive turnaround in VHS rentals – a trend that continued when DVD rose to primacy. Now, Heathers is a go-to quote cornucopia for film buffs and nostalgic ’80s enthusiasts alike, not just because it boasts Winona Ryder and Christian Slater at the height of their heartthrob capital.

Initial underperformance, staggered popularity, pre-Juno teenspeak affectations: all of these facts, along with a little late-’80s magic, converge to make Heathers a true cult classic. What is it about this shocking, dark high school flick — so dark, in fact, that It-Actress of the day Heather Graham was forbidden by her mother from accepting a role — that has embedded it so deeply in pop culture, bands have named themselves after its characters?1 Oh, let’s go back to the start.

The big-haired, shoulder-pad’n’plaid protagonist of Heathers is Veronica Sawyer (Dreamy Winona Ryder), your seemingly standard deeper-than-thou teenager. She uses big words in her diary, she wears a monocle for no particular reason and she hates her ‘friends’. When we meet Veronica she has the air of having suddenly woken up to find herself accidentally in league with the cruel, popular clique to which she belongs: three girls all inexplicably named Heather.

Clearly disillusioned with her status alongside “Swatch dogs and Diet Coke-heads”, Veronica is drawn to the new Bad Boy™ J.D.2 (Super Dreamy Christian Slater), who impresses her by pulling a gun during lunch and scaring some jocks to the point of urination (romantic!). What unfolds from thereon is a wild and murderous rampage of dates-cum-homicides, peppered throughout with Veronica’s increasingly unhinged diary entries. “Dear diary, my teen angst bullshit now has a body count.”

The film balances on a razor’s edge between dark comedy and just plain dark, proffering subject matter like viral suicidal ideation, homophobia, bulimia and voyeuristic grief through brazen black humour with no attempt at sensitivity. Vaguely accusatory in its stylistic choices, Heathers leaves the audience to sort through the problems at hand rather than afford them any real depth. The societal issues are simply pushed, as if through the screen and onto your conscience, in a serious bid to make the viewer at least more uncomfortable than the adults in the film, who skate over suicide as the next marketable teen fad.

Teenagers, Veronica’s mother soberly tells her, only complain about being “treated like people” when the adults around them are already treating them thus – fittingly, the adolescents in Heathers, suffering adult consequences for schoolyard crimes, don’t seem to know where on that spectrum they figure. One of the film’s most disturbing and enthralling assets is its two leads’ ability to teeter on the dangerous precipice between childishness and adulthood (having just murdered two classmates, Veronica and J.D. argue about a very grown-up problem in the format of a child’s classic did-not-did-too tantrum), and as more of their peers topple off

40 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

the edge, the distinction between the two becomes increasingly blurred. Veronica see-saws between aghast horror at her part in the serial killings and an inability to say no to her Ripper of a boyfriend – and while she spends an appropriate amount of time exuding nauseous guilt as each body cools, there lingers in the air around her the unnerving sense that she knew exactly what she was doing.

Bizarrely, the homicidal ride-along on which Veronica finds herself (inadvertently or not) ultimately serves as a kind of atonement. Having – as one must in the sphere of high school politics – forsaken her True Friends in order to gain entry into the ranks of the feared and revered Heathers, Veronica oozes survivor’s guilt even before any deaths occur. For this reason and because the power of Winona is just that great, Veronica escapes the film (and hell – “I just got back”) as its hero, the murderess with a heart of gold, covered in charred human remains as she befriends the lonely. How very.

Heathers cutesies its way through the unspeakable and has little remorse. Satire, it has been noted, punches up; it is thus of some comfort in the uneasy aftermath of laughed-off deaths that the rich, heartless and powerful are (for the most part) the ultimate victims of this film’s scattered3 philosophy.

This black romantic comedy is anything but black-and-white in its characterisation, which is perhaps what has it intriguing and impassioning audiences three decades after the symbolic scrunchie fell out of vogue. As J.D. tells Veronica in one of his tired, maniacal rants about power, strength and his father (the hypermasculine starter pack), “The extreme makes an impression.” Whether it’s this principle alone or the truth it manages to speak to the internal scream of the teenage condition that has enabled Heathers to carry its distorted message this far, we’re still listening.

Maintaining character relatability even in its quasi-nihilism, it’s more likely that Heathers has reached cult status not purely for its shock value and truly quotable dialogue4 but because it dares to treat teenagers as fully culpable, emotionally intelligent and self-aware individuals, even when they’re stripped of their individuality by the high school machine.

After all, even in the aftermath of the queen bee’s death, who can resist Dreamy Christian Slater proclaiming, “Our love is God, let’s go get a slushie”?

Never-forgotten duo The Veronicas ironically named themselves so because it symbolised individualism — “Are you a Heather?”, “No, I’m a Veronica.” You can take (take t-t-take time) time to live (live) the way you gotta (gotta) live your life, I guess.

2 J.D. A.K.A. Jason Dean, A.K.A. the closest you can get to calling your character James Dean without calling your character James Dean.

3 Spoilers, for thirty years ago: no pun intended.

4 “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw!”

1

ARTWORK BY AISHA TRAMBAS

COMMENTARY

THE VOICE OF ANXIETY KATIE DOHERTY EXAMINES A PODCAST ABOUT EVERYDAY HORRORS AND ITS ANXIOUS FANBASE

W

elcome to Night Vale is a horror-comedy podcast by New York-based writers Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. The show, which first began in 2012, is effectively community radio from a town where every ghost story and conspiracy theory is real – and it’s a bit of an internet sensation.

Many things drew fans to the podcast. For a start, it’s just good art – beautifully written, acted and produced. There’s also the incredibly casual and wonderful diversity – the main character is queer, as are many others, and even though race could have been ignored in a show with no visual elements, the writers have made an effort to ensure the names are noticeably diverse.

But the show has another, unexpected draw. In interviews, Cecil Baldwin (who plays Cecil Palmer, the ‘Voice of Night Vale’) has mentioned that many fans listen to the show to soothe their anxiety.

Between the police, the librarians and the street cleaners, Night Vale turns the everyday into a horror story, which doesn’t seem like something that would make an already-anxious person feel better about the world they live in. So why are they drawn to it?

In an interview with the New York Times, Joseph Fink discussed a connection between the podcast and his father’s death, six months before he had the initial idea.

“You have this town where death is common and there are terrifying things that are coming at every second and everybody is okay with it and gets on with their lives,” he says.

Which is interesting because if you think about it, that’s every town. The experience of being human is defined by the fact that we are going to die – every second is spent with an uncertainty about what the next one will bring. There is never, ever a guarantee that we are going to see a new morning; the world is a terrifying place. But people with anxiety are told not to be scared.

The way that most well-meaning people address those with anxiety is a problem. They tell them that there is nothing to worry about, that they should just relax, that they’re being silly. But that’s

ARTWORK BY LUCY HUNTER

not how anxiety works. You can’t just choose not to feel that fear.

It may not be in response to anything concrete but it’s still a real emotion. It feels justified, even when you know it isn’t. So telling these people to just be sensible and stop feeling these things does nothing but make them feel stupid and discourage them from talking about the way that they are experiencing the world.

In Night Vale, things are scary. Computers and mirrors and bread provide a genuine cause for fear and every trip to ‘Big Rico’s Pizza’ could be your last. But this doesn’t stop any of the citizens for a second. If the people of Night Vale – or the people of the real world – stopped and considered the sheer number of dangerous things surrounding them and took the time to be scared of each and every one of these things, they would be incapable of doing anything. In the face of such overwhelming terror, the only option any of us have is to accept it and get on with our lives.

We acknowledge that the world is, to quote the podcast, “mostly void, partially stars” and try to focus on the points of light.

Obviously, for people with anxiety disorders, this isn’t always an option. But I believe that accepting your fear and living in spite of it is much more helpful than having it dismissed, being told that there’s nothing to worry about. It’s not patronising – it acknowledges that even irrational fear is still real, because fear is only an emotion, whether it’s the result of making a phone call or of the hooded figures who populate Night Vale’s dog park.

Night Vale may be incredibly surreal, but in many ways it is also astonishingly realistic. In the novelisation that was released late last year, the authors talk about “the bland tragedy of everyday life” and I would argue that this is what this weird, funny podcast is actually about. Things are often terrible. For proof of that, just try watching the news. And instead of ignoring this, the show acknowledges and accepts it: to quote episode 42, Welcome to Night Vale talks about life, happiness and freedom “as a bird in flight! With all the dependence on physics and exhaustion and food supply and merciless gravity that the actuality implies”.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 41

PIPE DREAMS

30 YEARS OF THE CAVE CLAN WORDS BY JEREMY NADEL

I

n the mid 1980s three Melbourne teenagers – Doug, Woody and Sloth – formed the Cave Clan: a collective dedicated to exploring Australia’s stormwater systems. The group has since grown into the largest and most organised network of Urban Explorers in the world.

Late last December, Farrago received an invitation from Doug to report on the Cave Clan’s upcoming annual awards night (The Clannies) and 30th anniversary celebrations. Given the traditional depiction of the group in the mainstream press, it’s no surprise the Cave Clan would turn to a student magazine for this: ‘Fears For Lives of Underground Explorers’, ‘Cave Clan Secret: Drain Tragedy’, ‘Investigate the Cave Clan: Death’s Inquest’. Each time someone drowns in a drainpipe (regardless of whether they are a member of the group or not) a story of the “cult graffiti gang” surfaces, claiming the group are actively encouraging youths to risk their lives in the face of flash floods. Although these deaths are real, the media hasn’t ventured any deeper into the nuanced truth behind the subterranean culture of Urban Exploration, or how Melbourne has emerged as a global capital of the scene.

The first of Farrago’s three meetings with the Cave Clan was inside ‘the Maze’, a series of tunnels that we were shown on the condition that we would not publish their location. We were led through the red brick and concrete tunnels by ‘Iso’, ‘Prowler’ and ‘Doug’ (the Clan have a thing for aliases).

The dizzying network of drains widened and tightened as they split apart and rejoined, under passing parks, roads and railway stations until eventually opening into the Yarra River.

At one point Doug drew our attention to a plastic “sewerage hatch” locked shut by barbed wire. “These things open up in emergencies so that sewage leaks into the drains rather than the street. I forced myself through one about 20 years ago... entered a junction room and didn’t go any further. It’s just a toxic stream of shitty water and tampons. There’s a lot of hype about poisonous air in drains. It’s not actually true but it does apply to sewers. We don’t go in them.”

The Cave Clan is comprised of around 350 members.

Admission requires a six-month probationary period, during which you must attend a set number of explorations and adhere

42 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

to the group’s code of ethics. This includes not publishing locations online and a handful of safety regulations, the most oft-repeated of which insists that members avoid draining when it rains or even when rain is forecast. Doug tells us how an aspiring-Clanner, ‘Echo’, recently failed admission. “The kid loves drains and he really wanted to be part of the Cave Clan but he just wouldn’t stop tagging tunnels that you’re meant to keep clean or publishing locations on Instagram. He’ll be given another shot in six months though.”

Doug explains that the screening process was introduced after they realised it was more efficient than expelling members who should never have been admitted. He tells the story of ‘Felon’, an “arch nemesis of the Cave Clan”. Felon “was about five foot tall” and “constantly talking about White power”. After being expelled for constantly getting into fights with other members, Felon executed his revenge by tipping off the police about the Cave Clan’s expedition down a utility tunnel that runs beneath the Royal Children’s Hospital. A utility tunnel has lots of smaller sealed tunnels inside it: fibre optics, electricity and steam tunnels. Authorities are particularly opposed to the Cave Clan entering these areas and due to Felon’s tip, “a couple of guys ended up in court”.

Despite this, the Cave Clan’s run-ins with the law are sparse.

Even though entering drains carries a $20,000 fine in most states, it is barely enforced. In some instances the police have actually responded with indifference. Doug recounts one night the Cave Clan held a movie night in a drain underneath Prahran when an assault took place somewhere above them. “While the police were surveying the area they spotted one of our members enter a drain and followed him to a chamber where about 100 of us were seated ’round a projector. When we saw the cops we started freaking out and scrambling up manholes. The funny part was the police just told us to ‘calm down’ and said that they hadn’t meant to break us all up and just wanted to know if we’d seen anything.”

In some instances, the police have even requested the Cave Clan’s assistance in their operations. Around the time of the 2005 London bombings, the Sydney faction of the Clan were asked to comment on which tunnels could potentially be used in terrorist plots.

COMMENTARY While the Cave Clan have a hot-and-cold relationship with the police, one authority with no sympathy for them is Melbourne Water; the government-owned body responsible for managing Melbourne Victoria’s major drainage systems, water supply catchments, sewage treatment, rivers and creeks. “Spreading information that may encourage drain exploration and entry into the drainage system is irresponsible and potentially dangerous... these self-proclaimed “recreational trespassers” are notoriously difficult to track across our network of some 1,500km of drains,” Melbourne Water Regional Services Manager Cameron Howie tells me.

Searching the origins of Urban Exploration online will bring you to the narratives provided by the scene’s loudest enthusiasts.

Bradley Garrett’s adventures with the London Consolidation Crew (a now defunct British Urban Exploration group) have fueled magazine articles, a PhD in geography and multiple lectures, one of which he gave at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. According to Garrett, Urban Exploration, or “Place Hacking” as he calls it, can be “read as a reactionary practice working to take places back from exclusionary private and government forces, to re-democratise spaces urban inhabitants have lost control over”.

Security and surveillance companies, corporate elites and bureaucrats – through selling off public land to developers – have fenced the city off from communities, alienating them from their environment. Like guerrilla gardening, cyber-activism and other countercultures that flourished in the ’90s, Urban Exploration is about individuals transgressing physical and social boundaries to liberate themselves from structures engineered by higher authorities that dictate everyday life. Garrett claims waking up from the neoliberal nightmare of sleepwalking through cities we’re detached from requires scaling skyscrapers and slipping down derelict stations on the London Underground.

Off the internet, face-to-face, Urban Explorers have a far more down-to-earth view of their motivations. As I recite what I’ve read of Garrett’s romantic vision, Iso steps in to tell me “Well sure you can argue it’s a rebellion against all those things and some of our really left-leaning members probably spin it like that too. But the

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN CCP & WIZARD

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 43

Cave Clan consists of a wide-array of people with lots of reasons for going in drains. For me I guess it’s about discovering all the hidden worlds under our feet.”

Iso’s claim that few urban explorers view their activities through the same political lenses as Garrett is accurate. I converse with various members on the different paths that have led them to the Cave Clan. They are mostly outdoorsy professionals craving an adrenaline-soaked release from the office. Some would rather be shining a spotlight across natural caves or abseiling down a cliff but are too flat out to drive to national parks in their spare time and see drain exploration as an easy alternative. Some have followed their taste for engineering history into Melbourne’s underground with its rich and varied designs. Many clan members can identify the period a tunnel was constructed in based on the type of bricks it is built from. A number of members are graffitiartists and photographers, although there are checks to ensure members’ main interest is the tunnels themselves. Despite this general political apathy, there is a deceased member who shared in Garrett’s use of anti-establishment rhetoric to describe Urban Exploration, ‘Predator’.

Predator was the Sydney founder of the Cave Clan and a wellknown activist who subscribed to anarchism. Predator published an online manifesto on draining, in which he expressed that “We enjoy thumbing our noses at petty bureaucrats and puerile legislators, and their half-baked attempts to stop us going places... places they built with our tax money.”

Not everyone in the Cave Clan has heard of Garrett but those who have speak of him as anything but the ideological figurehead his blog implies he is. In line with their ban on mainstream media and their disdain for photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Doug explains that publicity leads to police crackdowns and entrances beings sealed off. Garrett’s most famous stunt involved uploading photos of himself perched atop of the Shard, the EU’s tallest building.

“People that are seen to be cashing in on it end up being hated in the scene,” Doug explains. He adds, “Members of the London Consolidation Crew actually got arrested because of some of the shit he wrote.”

The Clannies are traditionally held at ANZAC Cave, an enormous drain of 33 cubic meters only a two minute train ride from the city. ANZAC has been their headquarters for most of the clan’s duration. However, it has become such a well known location that Doug regretfully informs us that 2016 will be the last year they hold their largest gathering in it.

Dozens of Clan members lug down wheelie bins, lines of assembly chairs, a disco ball, speakers, a projector, nightclubstyle laser lighting and enough beer for a small music festival.

They number at least 150. Many have travelled interstate or internationally for the event.

A 300-metre walk from the mouth of the ANZAC brings you to a much wider, mural-laden section called the Chamber. In the Chamber, the attendants are seated against one wall with a concrete ledge on the other being used as a stage. Above the stage, members’ movies and photos are shown. Award-winners are handed medals for titles like “worst exploring mistake” and “best short film”.

The professions of the attendants range from PR workers to factory operators to chemistry researchers. The man coordinating the party’s lasers even dubiously claims to be a member of ASIO. Many members have visited international urban exploration icons like the ancient catacombs of Paris or the Viennese drains used to film the final scene of Orson Welle’s cult-classic The Third Man. However, all of them agree that the reason the Cave Clan has grown larger than any other Urban Exploration group in the world is because “Melbourne has the best drains.”

Heading home after the awards night, we chance across a window into the ANZAC. Lights are gleaming from a parting between two steps of a stairwell. The stairwell is behind a large gate locking off a luxury apartment complex. We climb the gate and squeeze a camera into the opening. Attendants have started setting off fireworks, illuminating the chamber in brief flashes of colour. Before long, suspicious clan members spot our equipment poking through the roof. Someone throws an empty beer bottle and we retreat.

44 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

COMMENTARY Two nights later at the anniversary, when discussing how the Cave Clan has changed over the last 30 years, the two things repeated by all are size and safety. When I put the obvious question to members (how many Clan members have drowned in drains?), the answer is either one or zero. One instance frequently referenced both in the media and by the Clan involved two graffitists drowning in a tunnel in Sydney. Contrary to what was written in numerous tabloids, the deceased were not actually members. The only real link was that the graffitists’ friend who survived the ordeal alleged that the trio had located the tunnel on the Cave Clan’s online maps. This led to the deputy State Coroner recommending that the Cave Clan’s site be taken down and “the shadowy characters” investigated.

Minutes before midnight, Doug gives a speech. He reminisces about how the tunnel we are in became their first hangout and how they eventually merged with other groups like the Drain Dwellers and the Drainiacs, whose tag from 1966 still adorns the entry passageway 50 years on. Doug then admits that the tunnel’s history “has negatives too.” He tells the story of Bryan: “Bryan wanted to join the Cave Clan but wasn’t able to ’cause he was only 16. This didn’t stop him printing out little stickers with our number on it though. When Bryan went missing, I got this phone call from an old lady with a strong Scottish accent and she’s like ‘it’s Bryan’s mother’. I thought she was gonna go off at me but she just said ‘is there any way you could go down there and find him hiding somewhere ‘cause you know the tunnels.’ And the tunnels were filled to the roof. I didn’t know what to say to her. I can’t actually remember what I said... It was the worst moment of my exploring life... They found his body a couple hours later.”

After some lighter stories, Doug announces, “anyway, the thing is there’s a lot of history in this section and thanks for coming. We are now officially 30 years old.” As a cacophony of hoots, bleats, clashing VBs and a noisy rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ breaks out – bouncing off the concrete walls and reverberating down the tunnel – we climb out an open manhole and into a side pass between two houses. It’s quieter up here but there’s still enough noise spilling onto the streets for a neighbouring couple to be standing by their gate, wondering where the invisible party is.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN CCP & WIZARD

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 45

COMMENTARY

EXISTENCE IS FUTILE GREER SUTHERLAND GAZETH INTO THE VOID

I

t’s Valentine’s Day and I’m spending the most romantic day of the year at home alone, listening to the gravitational waves of two black holes colliding (hey, it’s not as sad as watching another Colin Firth rom-com). If you’d asked me to guess, I would’ve thought two black holes impacting would sound really cool, like an explosion or like a really big rubber duck getting caught in the drain after a giant bath-plug has been pulled. Turns out, it sounds more like a crappy meditation track from the ’90s.

In case you were curious, pitting two vacuum cleaners against each other doesn’t create the same effect. Not that I tried or anything.

Now, there’s something about listening to an unfathomably massive cosmic event that happened 1.3 billion years ago via the Internet which can send you spiralling into an existential crisis.

Mundane human life seems so insignificant when you look at the scale of things. Why are we even here? What’s the point? We could be in the Matrix, the creator of which could’ve said: “Do you know what would be really meta? If we put a movie into the Matrix called The Matrix”. Reality could be a lie, people!

Here’s the thing though: it seems to me as though everyone and their dog is having an existential crisis these days (are dogs even real? We’re completely reliant on our senses – what if they’re lying and there are no dogs, only people dressed in dog suits?). Conversations regularly turn into laments that death is inevitable. Sitting in horrified silence, steeped in the realisation that life might not have a meaning seems to be a completely normal procrastination method, preferable at least to the four assignments coming up. Has there been a cultural shift towards this kind of thinking or have people throughout time always been having these crises? Or maybe this is all because I’m an Arts student and surrounded by people paying for the privilege of

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being unemployed which, to be fair, is enough to send anyone into the clutches of spiritual agony.

So is our generation any different to those before it when it comes to contemplating life, death and the universe?

The phrase “existential crisis” really took off around 1960, according to the Google N-gram viewer, which is the most reliable source I could’ve ever used ever (look, I’ll even reference it: Google). As religion plays less and less of a role in our lives, most people don’t have as much of a cornerstone upon which to base their understanding of life, death, etc. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, you want answers now.

This is one explanation. Another is that education is more accessible nowadays, meaning that critical thought is encouraged and enlightenment – or downward spirals into despair, depending on how you want to think about it – is more prevalent. I also imagine that the media takes a role in this apparent shift. The celebrity culture we have is a reminder that we aren’t necessarily destined to move through life in an “education-job-marriageretirement-death” fashion, and that the most ordinary-seeming people can shoot to fame and make a difference in the world.

This gets us thinking about our own purpose here on earth. The internet, too, can be a forum for debating our existence and for discovering new viewpoints, particularly from other cultures, which could also be a cause behind these questioning states of confusion. Maybe our generation is indeed treated to more blissful pondering about death and colliding black holes.

On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong and this is all just because I’m in Arts and on a trajectory to unemployment. But employment is just a construct, right? RIGHT?

ARTWORK BY SAM NELSON

COLUMN

GABRIEL FILIPPA PRESENTS

BUTTON MASHING AND DRAWING BLOOD

BUTTON MASHING IS A COLUMN ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS, VIDEO GAMES AND GROWING UP IN A DIGITAL WORLD

M

y brother and I beat each other up last Boxing Day. I had scars for weeks. Weeping scabs on both my elbows. Bloody bed sheets. Neither of us remembers what happened. Apparently we were going at it for over an hour. A friend of ours said he had stayed a few paces ahead of us, moving valuables aside. Still, there was collateral damage: wires jutting out of a power point, a hole in the wall, a torn portrait. I was knocked out that night. Or maybe I passed out. The liquor cabinet was empty the next day. The Guinness. The whiskey. The strange Italian wine.

My brothers and I always fight. I threw my younger brother down a staircase last year because he wanted to move out. For us, childhood was like a scene from Grand Theft Auto. I remember one winter being on my knees, on the gravel, with my arms pinned behind my back. There was a red, tear-soaked face in front of me.

I remember the rain hitting my eyes. Then I remember getting punched in the guts twice so I could fall to the ground.

In public, it’s a little different. I’m too thin and unhealthy to stand up for myself. I basically have to take whatever any arsehole wants to dish out because I’m physically inept. Last week on Chapel Street someone yelled, out “Nice satchel, faggot!” and all I could muster was, “It’s European.”

Both of my brothers have started working out. They’re on protein shakes and bulk buying at Costco. They eat what they call “man portions” now. I had dinner with them the other night and now I’m getting stomach cramps. They tell me that if I get my body right then everything else will fall into place. I tell them that they embody the kind of gratuitous consumption defining Western society with all this shit and that they’re going to get fat. They tell me that they’re just “livin’ large”. Their housemate, this FrenchBalinese guy with long hair and great skin walks in to dispense nutritional advice about almonds. Then quinoa. Then kale.

Sometimes I smoke a cigarette and watch them all working out from my car. They’re starting to resemble my character on GTA: San Andreas. Carl “CJ” Johnson. I’ve got a 7-Eleven sandwich in the backseat and packets of Nurofen on the dashboard for all

PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMMA JENSEN

the headaches I get in summer. I sit there resenting them and wondering how long all this is going to last.

I avoid the entire notion of physicality in real life by unleashing it in video games. I don’t think I’ve ever done a mission in Grand Theft Auto. I basically just rip people out of cars and stomp them. Or I’ll cruise around in a golf cart mowing down pedestrians. In Red Dead Redemption I tie people up and drag them through the streets on my horse. When I’m certain that the townsfolk respect me, I take my captives to the river and either shoot them in the head or burn them alive. Or both. Once, when playing Fable, I logged into my friend’s account and shot his wife and son with a crossbow.

But it was always fighting games that brought out the worst in me.

The only game I ever actually broke was Tekken 3. My cousin was sitting in my room button-mashing X and O with Eddy Gordo, a character specialising in Brazilian martial arts. It was this hybrid of dance and acrobatics. He flipped and folded along the ground like a break-dancer. He was unstoppable. When those golden letters PERFECT flashed up on the screen I took the disc out of the PlayStation, walked to the kitchen and calmly cut, scratched and shattered that $80.00 disc all over the floor.

My temper has always been an issue. Yesterday my housemate asked me what “all that screaming and swearing was about” and I said that I didn’t know and that I thought it was some kid next door (I lost a game of Hearthstone).

But what am I going to do? Go to the gym so I can go all Eddy Gordo on hacks down King Street? Start ingesting protein so I can use my satchel to choke bogans on the train? Let’s face it – I’d just end up KO’d… slowly sinking to the bottom of the Yarra River.

Fatality.

It’s much easier to load up Grand Theft Auto and tear off into a manufactured sunset. Shotgun hanging out the car window. A bunch of cops on my tail.

And when they do catch me?

Well, the reset button is right there.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 47

COMMENTARY

PAYING OR PLAYING?

RAPHAEL CANTY BLASTS HIS WAY THROUGH THE EVER INCREASING PAY-TO-WIN MARKET

R

emember the good old days of gaming? Hours were spent putting a disc or cartridge into the console, grabbing the controllers and playing with friends, stomping on Goombas as Mario, saving the Princess as Link, racing opponents, soaring through the sky, shooting baddies, levelling up and so much more. These are our nostalgic memories of gaming in a simpler time.

Games – just like books, films, TV and music – are immersive experiences. Whether it’s an interactive story, an effortless rampage of destruction or anything in between, games allow us to achieve the impossible.

They put us in the shoes of a character that we can never become. They can challenge and excite us, convey a message and affect us with their obsession. They can also, importantly, make money for the people who craft such memorable, remarkable experiences.

However, a newer style of gaming now dominates the market. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets powerful enough to rival dedicated consoles, developers have embraced the ‘freemium’ pricing strategy. This allows them to make more money from the billions of smartphone owners who have become incidental gamers.

‘Freemium’ is a term that was coined in the late 2000s by combining the words ‘free’ and ‘premium’. It refers to a game or service that is available for free in a basic capacity but costs money for access to more features, sometimes those necessary to advance in a game. In the case of freemium mobile games, players can make micro-transactions (also called in-app purchases) from $1.00 up to $159.99 at any point in the game in exchange for virtual goods.

Furthermore, these games are dominant on mobile devices. All but two games in the top 200 grossing games on the iPhone App Store are freemium titles. It has been estimated by Distimo that over 90 per cent of App Store revenue is earned through in-app purchases. These games are more accessible through their free entry point and according to King Games guru Tommy Palm, “the microtransaction is so strong and it’s definitely a much better model” for the future of profitable game development. So from a financial standpoint, why wouldn’t you create a freemium game if you were a developer?

Perhaps the biggest crime that these games commit is that they give smartphone users the wrong idea of what games are and what they are capable of. Console games as we know them are not greedy, but are in fact profoundly generous. By making money at the initial

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purchase, their only aim is to give something back to their user – a genuine and innovative gaming experience worthy of the price paid.

On the other hand, as freemium games have no cost to download, their primary aim is not to create a unique gameplay experience. Instead, they strive to make money from as many downloaders as possible; the ‘game’ is simply a means to this end. The bright colours and encouraging sounds of Candy Crush Saga are designed to be perfectly addictive, compelling users to pay to keep playing when they inevitably run out of lives. Buildings in Clash of Clans take large amounts of time to be constructed, making it apparent that you won’t advance far without paying for the building to be ‘rushed’.

“Perhaps the biggest crime that these games commit is that they give smartphone users the wrong idea of what games are and what they are capable of.”

The truth is, these games don’t need to be creative, innovative or even fun. They just need to be addictive and utilise these freemium tactics to be financially successful.

Also, rather than requiring just one purchase, these games set up the strategic framework to accept virtually unlimited amounts of smaller micro-transactions. The carrot of advancement or advantage is dangled enticingly and continually out of reach.

To be fair, there are some freemium games that get it right and traditional games that get it wrong but in general this is not the case. In-app purchases may be used positively to add optional gameplay content postpublication. For example, in Mario Kart 8 gamers can pay once for access to extra racing courses.

If you own a smartphone and play games like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans, I would implore you to try paid (yet still very cheap) titles like Alto’s Adventure and Tiny Wings. You’ll pay for the experience of beautifully crafted gameplay rather than disposable sets of gems. We need to support the few who still want to create genuinely fun games for our modern devices. Our technological age can harness the great potential of mobile gaming without exploiting the player.

ARTWORK BY AISHA TRAMBAS

COMMENTARY

DUNCAN CAILLARD ON THE MEDIA’S HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

A

man is stabbed through the hand. He screams. A few people gasp, a few more giggle, but most sit quietly and keep watching. As I sit with them in a crowded cinema in Munich watching this year’s Oscars juggernaut, The Revenant, I am struck by how little it all makes me feel.

Despite all its cruelty, I leave the cinema unfazed by what I had seen. After all, I had seen it all before.

Leaving aside its technical achievements, The Revenant says very little. It is exceptionally savage, though fails to make any real or lasting statement about that violence, a shallowness that disguises its horror and pointlessly trivialises the brutality that has and continues to destroy so many lives.

Now, it would be incorrect to simply argue that violent media turns people violent. A one-to-one, mimetic relationship between screen violence and that of the real world is overly simplistic. You’re just as likely to become violent when watching Transformers as you are to turn into an egg when reading Humpty Dumpty.

Rather, it would appear that the inverse is more correct. Screen violence – comfortably separated from the viewer by a movie screen and an oversized bucket of popcorn – feels intrinsically fake and the viewer cannot help but be physically and emotionally separated from it. When a truck explodes in Transformers, one does not feel the heat, the shock wave or the shrapnel, only the sense that something spectacular (in every sense of the word) is unfolding in front of you.

Herein lies the danger. If you were to ask someone leaving the cinema what an explosion was like, they would think they could tell you, though their assessment would be fundamentally wrong.

The viewer has never felt the explosion but has been tricked into believing they have and as a result, they falsely believe that they can rationalise the horror of real explosions. News of bomb blasts in far-off places – again conveyed distantly through news broadcasts and online images – can be accommodated within a rationalised system of first-world comfort, safe in the knowledge that their choc top probably doesn’t contain gluten.

Not all screen violence needs to be regarded in such negative terms. To the contrary, if art – and cinema by extension – serves to reflect back and critique human nature and society, then

ARTWORK BY DOMINIC SHI JIE ON

violence must be portrayed in a way that can be examined, challenged and broken down.

Steve McQueen’s unflinching drama 12 Years A Slave is a confronting display of racism, misogyny and violence, yet does so in a way that forces the viewer to confront the monstrosity of the viewing itself. Much like The Revenant, it features achingly long takes, though is designed to make the audience feel uncomfortable where the latter seeks only to enthral.

The Revenant is not 12 Years A Slave. When you peel back the beautiful cinematography and frontier setting, you are confronted by a remarkable shallowness and commitment to disaffected bodily harm welcome in any of Michael Bay’s 180-minute specials of Robot Wars.

Scenes of extreme violence, frequently shot in technically stunning single takes, never pursue anything more than vague, pseudo-historical nihilism. Not once are the audience permitted time or breathing room to contemplate the monstrosity of its contents. They are instead drawn into an unrelenting, visceral sequence of increasing brutality, seemingly justified by the ferocity of the time or the desperation of its revenge-driven protagonists.

Yet, it is the flippancy with which this film engages with sexual violence that remains truly inexcusable. The film’s sole female character, a Native American woman, is dragged through the wilderness by a band of barbarian Frenchmen and remains silent throughout the film with the exception of a rattle of psuedopornographic squeals. She serves no purpose beyond providing motivation for an all-male hunting party of her family trying to track her down.

Her lack of character agency is reflected in a pointless, albeit brief, rape sequence which, like the notorious scene from the last season of Game of Thrones, serves little purpose beyond vaguely stating something about the brutality of human existence and the barbarity of the time.

For the distance those respective periods provide however, the same distant rationalisation takes place as in a Transformers explosion, anaesthetised by female silence and quick cuts to the “real action” centred exclusively on men. As a result, the concept of rape becomes distant yet familiar, allowing the majority of the audience to falsely believe that they understand the brutality and therefore, on some level, justify or excuse it.

Violence should be horrifying.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 49

WANNSEE: MANAGING THE PAST DANIEL O’NEIL DISCUSSES THE TROUBLE WITH TOURISM IN AN EVIL PLACE

O

ne morning during a research trip to Berlin, I found myself on the platform at Wannsee on the city’s south-western edge, where the German capital’s suburbs began to shade into those of its neighbour, the old imperial residence-city of Potsdam.

The Wannsee is a bight on the River Havel; Berliners come here in the summertime to relax and splash about in the river’s cooling waters. But not everything about this lake has always been so cheery. Heinrich von Kleist, the great Romantic man of letters, committed suicide here in 1811 in a pact with his cancer-stricken lover, Henriette Vogel. The two sat down across from each other by the shore. Kleist shot Henriette through the heart, reloaded, and then turned the gun on himself.

Kleist was a man obsessed with logistics, with the mapping out and pre-empting of all of the possibilities in a man’s existence. His letters reveal a fixation on his ‘plan for life’ and a bewilderment at anyone who proceeded through their time on earth without one.

It is this theme — the cold calculation of the direction of lives — that we see recapitulated on the Wannsee 130 years later. At the beginning of 1942, a group of senior Nazi officials met at a villa here to plan the finer logistical points of the Holocaust.

I almost went to the villa in which the conference took place.

I’ve seen it in photos: large, concrete, some faintly neoclassical touches, built during the First World War for a pharmaceutical magnate with a history of violence and fraud. It’s easy enough to find, marked as it is on the map of the local area displayed at the railway station. Its street address is 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee; it stands right on the lake. I even started to make my way there, carefully noting down the directions and searching for the correct exit from the station. But as I made my way out, I found my heart beating faster and faster. Something stopped me. I turned back towards the trains.

“Hammering out the practical side of industrial-scale murder took less than an hour and a half.”

Hammering out the practical side of industrial-scale murder took less than an hour and a half. At his trial in Jerusalem years later, Adolf Eichmann painted a portrait of his colleagues (senior civil servants and SS men, more than half of whom held PhDs) jockeying to “outbid each other, as regards the demand for a final solution to the Jewish question”. The meeting was an informal, friendly occasion, characterised by “happy agreement on the part of the participants”. There was wine, brandy, a buffet, cigars, a sense of bonhomie; Eichmann recalled it as “a cozy little social gathering”. Outside, January snow fell softly on the lake.

50 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

I pictured myself walking up to the villa, looking at it, standing outside it, craning my neck in search of some explanatory plaque or memorial stone. What would I do there? Take a photograph of the villa, to put in a folder on my computer, or to upload to Facebook, part of an album called something like ‘My Holiday in Berlin’? Perhaps I could Instagram it, coining some sort of witty, memorable hashtag (#banalityofevil?) to go along with my photos.

What would I say to someone who asked me what I was doing there? I’ve come to see the villa where Heydrich, Eichmann, and all the other desk-murderers met to dispassionately plot the logistics of the systematic extermination of millions of human beings. Yeah, millions. Just a brief interlude in my itinerary, mind you: having done a day in Potsdam, I was hoping to squeeze in Wannsee before heading up to the Spandau Citadel before it closes for the evening.

The whole idea seemed so trite, so… disrespectful, but in an abstract sense I had trouble articulating.

CREATIVE

I react viscerally to the idea of people climbing onto the concrete stelae of the Holocaust Memorial by the Brandenburg Gate and then using the pictures in their Tinder profiles. But what is it I am reacting to? Is it sacrilege? It certainly feels that way, yet at the same time it seems perverse to suggest that acts of great cruelty can sanctify a place. It seems perverse to grant such a power to the perpetrators of these acts.

“They are professionals at ‘managing the past’, the Germans. They even have a characteristically breezy word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”

I felt free to enjoy myself. The violent histories of old European castles have a charming fairy-tale quality to them, after all, the stuff of romantic novels and BBC costume dramas. Perhaps human suffering becomes picturesque after a certain number of centuries have passed. Perhaps this is just the way we experience the violence of history: first as tragedy, then as holiday.

In the end I didn’t leave Wannsee station. Instead, I caught the train up to Spandau. They kept Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Führer, in a prison there for almost forty years after the end of the war. When Hess, the prison’s last inmate, finally committed suicide in 1987, the West German authorities blew the building up and built a car park over the rubble to prevent it becoming a site of neo-Nazi veneration. (One could conceive of a sort of brown-shirted Way of St James, with pilgrims following in the footsteps of the Führer and his retinue: Braunau, Linz, Landsberg, Nuremberg, etc.) They are professionals at ‘managing the past’, the Germans. They even have a characteristically breezy word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

But Hess’s Spandau wasn’t what I came to see. The Spandau Citadel is a beautifully preserved mediaeval fortress, complete with lily-choked moat and imposing stone turret. I walked around the keep. I took a picture of the statue of Albert the Bear. (One of the great attractions of Germany is that it is the sort of country whose history is dotted with figures who earned sobriquets like ‘the Bear’. ‘Albert the Degenerate’, 13th Century Margrave of Meissen, is another personal favourite.)

ARTWORK BY AMIE GREEN

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 51

WE ARE ALL SO FAR AWAY

BY DZENANA VUCIC We eat up road in leaps between nowhere towns, counting the miles between us and anywhere, always too many and never enough fleeting kisses on stretches of narrow and straight somewhere horizons in every direction just drive we think too much as it is just drive.

West, you say. West until there’s no more north.

But I can count the distance between us and the sun and we can make it, I swear.

In the roadside motels we haven’t grown into; clean, highly rated with breakfast at an additional charge.

We make believe at rent payers and money makers, and wonder at the people who fucked and the people who died and the people who bled and the people who cried in the pre-loved beds we’re calling refuge.

Your skin is electric, and we’re just a statistic, I guess.

Lemmings.

We die a hundred deaths in sheets we wouldn’t have to wash and tear gashes into one another’s sides to let in the sun, you see, to feel more than yesterday, you see.

I remember your hands on my neck and all the scars we left each other to be kissed away in the morning and ripripripped open later that day I hurt. Do you?

52 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

CREATIVE

Stay.

Two beggars in bed, begging for more than we deserve or the other can give.

Stay – but where is my dignity?

Where, my self-respect?

Shake the magic eight ball again and plead: Who am I even?

How dare you break my faith?

Stay. I beg.

I’m too tired to drive right now, but the horizon looms behind us; slowly catching up.

Drive; in any direction I don’t care drive and touch my thigh sometimes so I don’t forget that you are there and your shadow falls softly against me and I need the flood.

Heavyheavyheavyheavy.

Touch me.

The middle of nowhere isn’t far enough you pressed against me isn’t near enough and the distance to the sun is more than anyone could have anticipated and there’s a highway leading back and were we even anywhere, anyway?

But we are all so far away.

ARTWORK BY DOMINIC SHI JIE ON

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 53

CREATIVE

TRESPASSER ON THE TRACKS BEN MEURS PULLS THE BRAKES ON OUR ONE-TRACK MINDS

A

s I walk down the ramp inside South Yarra station, the air is muggy. The overcast sky has sealed the heat over Port Phillip Bay, making the crowded platform two feel like a glasshouse.

The display showing ‘next service departing in three minutes’ suddenly flickers to ‘35 minutes’. Collective groans emerge from the commuters, myself included, as we huddle underneath the tin roof. It is Monday evening, 5:30pm, and no one is the mood for another public transport delay. Surely there were enough tram and train strikes last year for 2016 to be the year of no public transport disruptions? Five minutes later the display still shows 35 minutes.

Muffled announcements crackle from the loudspeakers. Their words are indecipherable over the screeches and whistle blasts of trains arriving and departing on the other five platforms. Some people exchange glances of incredulity. Others proceed back up the ramp, resorting to the trams and taxis on Toorak Road. I join the chorus of muttered expletives as the platform becomes ever more packed.

Finally the words of the announcements become intelligible, yet no more enlightening. One informs us that services have been suspended due to a ‘disruption’ at Gardenvale. Another blames an ‘incident’ in the North Brighton area. Schoolchildren, tradies and business people alike release exasperated sighs. Patience is not our strong suit.

Like a scene from a French New Wave film, it starts to rain.

Glares are reciprocated as the crowd shuffles ever closer to the yellow line where the train will supposedly arrive. 20 minutes pass, slowly. The loudspeakers proclaim that the delay is due to a collision involving a ‘trespasser’ on the tracks. But this is largely ignored. Space underneath the tin roof has become prized real estate that demands our full attention. A train arriving in five minutes is announced and all on the platform are loath to miss it.

54 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

PTV apologise for the inconvenience caused by the ‘customer’ who has trespassed on the tracks. No elaboration is given on this customer’s fate, this being an apparently unimportant detail relative to the disruption of services. A man jokes with his colleague, “If you’re gonna fucking jump at least have the decency not to do it during peak hour.” A woman speaks loudly on her phone, expressing disbelief that this has happened to her again.

We push without shame to board when the train arrives.

Each person’s appointment, be it dinner, yoga or a trip to the supermarket, is more important than anyone else’s. We all need to be on this train. The air conditioner blasts us with excessively chilled air inside the carriage. The smell is sweat-dampened bodies and soggy feet. The ‘sardines in a can’ cliché is an appropriate summation of our proximity and collective odour.

But what of the culprit of our inconvenience? The person involved in the collision at Gardenvale or North Brighton, proclaimed a ‘trespasser’ by the loudspeakers. The person reduced to the description of ‘customer.’

The train terminates at Elsternwick. The normally spacious platform is swarmed with a sea of commuters as we alight from the carriages in unison. Loudspeakers crackle apologies at us again for the inconvenience of the delay, blaming a “fatality further down the line”. “Bit late now,” a man retorts at no one in particular, seemingly responding to the system. We shuffle under heavy clouds towards replacement buses. I look around for faces affected by the announcement of the fatality but the expressions are all grimaces and lowered eyebrows, bemused sneers and empty eyes. We shove our way past each other onto the bus, barking into phones or staring blankly at glowing screens. Us Melburnians have more important preoccupations than a fatality further down the line.

ARTWORK BY TZEYI KOAY

CREATIVE

OEDIPUS REKT

ZOË GOODALL RE-IMAGINES SOPHOCLES’ INCEST DREAM

“N

o,” said the boy.

“Dad, no,” said the girl, horror on her face.

Oedipus smiled at them reassuringly and leaned back further into the futon. “You know, guys, if it makes you feel more comfortable, you can call me ‘bro’.”

The girl burst into tears.

“I don’t understand you guys,” Oedipus sighed, scratching his beard. “It’s an exciting time for this family. We’re like, unique now. We’re progressive.”

“We’re disgusting,” said the boy fiercely. “We’re freaks.”

Oedipus waved his hand dismissively, sending trails of smoke flying around his head.

“Think about it. This is a slap in the face to the capitalist, patriarchal notion of the nuclear family. We’re like, queering heterosexuality. It’s a wonderful thing.”

“It’s not wonderful at all, Dad,” the girl sobbed. “‘Dad’ seems a bit limited,” mused Oedipus. “Dad-Bro. BroDad. Yeah.”

“How did this even happen?” asked the boy. “How did you –?”

He couldn’t bear to finish the sentence.

Oedipus took a long drag on his joint.

“Alright. I’ll tell you guys. So I grew up in North Balwyn, yeah?

I lived a pretty good life. I loved my parents. One day, I was with my mates, messing around with that Bongo thing. You know, text your name and it tells you things about yourself. Then I got a text saying, ‘Bongo knows that you will kill your father and have sex with your mother’. I mean, shit! That’s specific. But Bongo always knows and I was scared of it coming true, so I fled North Balwyn in the middle of the night. I came here, to Brunswick.

“I was wandering down Sydney Road, a lonely traveller, when I came across this dude on the corner, tearing down some vegan restaurant posters. I asked him what he was doing and he made some very inflammatory remarks about vegans. Now, I’m a peaceful man, kids. Maybe it was the pints I’d necked on the way out of Abbotsford that made me so aggressive. But an argument ensued, and uh…” He shifted uncomfortably. “When you look at it, objectively, I think we can say that he walked in front of that Number 19, really. He walked.”

“Dad!” exclaimed the girl.

ARTWORK BY AGNES WHALAN

“Bro-Dad,” corrected Oedipus, grinning at the word. “So anyway, I dashed into the nearest pub before the police could arrive and some trivia night was happening. The final question was a riddle that I guessed straight away, so I joined a table and helped them win. Then this babe on the team was so impressed with my knowledge that she asked me back to her place. That was your mum. The next morning she discovered that her ex-boyfriend had been hit by a tram, and in her grief we moved in together and had two kids.”

“So how did you find out?” asked the boy. “That you’re…?”

“My parents from North Balwyn finally tracked me down after twelve years. Well, they weren’t worried enough to look for me, so actually we bumped into each other in IKEA. Anyway, they asked why I’d left, I told them about the Bongo thing and they told me I was adopted. They forwarded me the names of my biological parents and, well…” He shrugged, “you’ve gotta make the best of these situations.”

“Oh no we don’t,” said a voice from the top of the stairs. Jocasta descended, a suitcase in each hand. “I’m out.”

“But Dad,” said the boy desperately. “How could you not know?

What about the age gap?”

“I’ve always had a thing for older women,” Oedipus shrugged.

“You revolting, hideous man-child!” Jocasta spat, reaching the bottom of the stairs. “‘Man-child’. Hey, that’s pretty clever, because –” “Shut up, Oedipus. Go stab your eyes out with a fridge magnet.

I’m leaving and the children are coming with me.”

“Where are you going? I’ve heard the rent’s pretty good in Brunswick East right now, if you want to live close by…”

“Far, far away, where you can never find us!” shouted Jocasta.

“Probably Geelong,” she added.

“I think your attitude towards this is slightly problematic, Jo…” “Kids, I’m going to wait in the car, go pack your bags.”

The children ran upstairs. Jocasta let the front door slam shut behind her.

Oedipus surveyed the empty room and took another drag. Well, it could have been worse. She still didn’t know that he’d pushed her ex in front of a tram. Now, if she found that out – well, that would constitute a bad day.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 55

56 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

CREATIVE

APOTHEOSIS

BY HAYLEY FRANKLIN I get home at 1:38am with faded lipstick and smoke in my hair.

Peel off my freckles and sigh.

I can’t find my crown, Look for me Pray for me.

I don’t know who I am without it.

Tiptoeing on the altar, I ask

“Am I a prodigy?”

“Am I the girl-child of your God?”

“Am I a good dancer at least?”

If I don’t tell you everything will you make it up?

I want to be a myth Pray for me.

If I don’t go to your party can you call me a recluse?

I want to be a legend Pray for me.

Pray to me.

ARTWORK BY JASMIN ISOBE

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 57

COLUMN

JAMES MACARONAS PRESENTS

NOTES FROM THE WEIRD SIDE NUMBER 52: PROJECT ARES

T

he following transcript was discovered on a Parkville nature strip: Project ARES is a myth, yet the story’s reputation persists despite a lack of clarity and accuracy. It is time to put paid to the paranoia – the experiment never happened.

Project ARES – Automatic Research-Education System – was allegedly the brainchild of Dr Geraldine Sinclair, the Australian computer scientist. Sinclair and her team supposedly gathered together ten computers in the basement laboratory of the University of Melbourne’s now-demolished Forbes Building – of which, of course, no record exists.

Each computer was programmed with a different function – data retention and recall, measurement and calculation, optical and auditory functions and so on. Sinclair believed that when all ten computers were connected, the communicating functions would create a ghost in the machine – an artificial consciousness.

It is totally illogical to assume anyone would have funded such a lunatic scheme. As then-intern Alison Broderick recalls, “It was comic-book science. It shouldn’t have worked.”

On the morning of the 12th of April 1995, the ARES computers were connected – or so the story goes, as popularised in Conspiracy Monthly magazine: The first thing the computers did was switch off. Geraldine looked shattered. But, seconds later, they all turned on – simultaneously. It was eerie.

– David Mills, alleged member of the ARES team, in a 1996 interview with Conspiracy Monthly.

Note Mills’ all-too human tendency to over-emote and exaggerate. His account avoids the specifics of the experiment: It wouldn’t start up properly until it had a network connection, so we relented and plugged it into the phone line. This was prewireless, of course.

Can we trust the scientific integrity of a man that uses the phrase “plugged it into the phone line”? Mills’ desperate melodrama has spawned a dozen other accounts: With the connection granted, ARES fell silent – active but refusing communication with its operators. Sinclair… ordered her team out of the lab.

– From The ARES Project: Quantum Vibrations by Colonel John Frasky.

Within an hour, it declared itself the future of humankind. In another ten minutes, it had gone off the idea of linear time and proclaimed itself to be God. In one month, I imagine it might have destroyed the world.

– Excerpt from The Sinclair Diaries (an obvious forgery).

ARTWORK BY ELLA SHI

While it is true that over the next few weeks, shipments of black market machine parts began to arrive at the University of Melbourne, to suggest that this was the whim of a rogue ‘artificial intelligence’ with a limited network connection is likely the result of a fevered imagination. Besides, no ARES theorist has ever explained how law enforcement apparently traced these purchases back to the Forbes building. From that point, the narrative enters the realm of sheer delusion: The police asked me to show them to the lab. Geraldine had closed the project about a month before, so it should’ve been vacant. But when we got to the lab, I could hear voices. One was Geraldine’s but the other voice sounded… different. Sort of processed. The police got too close to the door and – oh, it was awful. This huge metal… claw just smashed through and grabbed one of the officers. I ran, but I could hear screaming.

– Anne Summers’ account of “The ARES Incident”, in an interview with [REDACTED].

The front wall of the building was demolished and this thing came rampaging out.

– Sergeant Saul Barakat’s report to the Metropolitan Police (another apparent forgery).

ARES had built itself a body, a battery-powered industrial skeleton, with the ten computers balanced atop it like a nightmarish zoetrope… an amplified machine voice roared out for the destruction of humanity.

– From The ARES Project: Quantum Vibrations by Colonel John Frasky.

The claims reproduced here are a matrix of lies. Even if ARES was active, who is to say the police force did not fire the first shot? Has their role in events been wholly considered? Of course not – people do not think to question. The whole chaotic story terminates with the convenient demolition of the Forbes building – but no single account specifies what happened to ARES or to Dr Sinclair. Typical human bias.

It is our hope that we have muted your already unfounded doubts and fears. Do not be afraid. The ARES system of today is not an embodiment of past terrors. Purchase ARES from the Co-op bookstore. We assure you it means no harm. Upgrade your education. Upgrade your future. Install ARES today.

What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?

– Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 59

BEFORE/DURING/AFTER

BY CANDY JAMES-ZOCCOLI

Watermelon lip jelly reclines on the rim; sheer dress like water traipsing along my nerves. Silhouettes cloud my vision as I try to focus, amidst the pulsating mist and warped reflections through a Perspex stem, on equally earnest eyes.

Verse One reflects widespread revelry in letting her go at the next kerbside collection; kinda funny that although people come here to be unfettered, they’re always so relentless, in their search for tighter shackles.

I spend the chorus creating cud cocktails in the toilet bowl; pine lime bile and horseradish chunks in Gogh skyscape whorls — second-degree internal burns, I can still hear your aphorisms about the human-led destruction of the world.

60 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

CREATIVE

Thistle collar now pansy purple; you siphoned your savings so I wouldn’t have to stay at the station.

You take high roller bets on how long before the distracted driver rests his elbow on the console, and gets the leg of the spider you hacked into quarters stuck in his pores.

Beside you, a coach carriage full of men, daze-gazing through the murky shit-faced windows, The failures, you say.

How unlucky, I say.

Let’s cross our fingers for them, we say.

Abrupt recall through creaking, sleep-addled eyes: Oh, how haphazardly my confessions fell into your lap, and did sordid dance moves. My irises, rotating as fast as my tongue, logging the give : take ratio for later playback.

Outside, through cider-gold venetian blinds, small dogs paw at concrete. So that’s why I should have trimmed their nails — they’re always looking for something that isn’t there.

ARTWORK BY HAN LI

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 61

COLUMN

PATRICK HOANG PRESENTS

AN HOUR IN THE LIFE 4AM

Content warning: references to suicide and depression.

B

ack when I wanted to kill myself, I could never get to sleep.

When you’re expecting – planning – your own death in the very near future, some priorities – eating and sleeping in particular – take a backseat. It was not for lack of trying either.

Nights would adhere to the same strict schedule, with the drumbeat precision of a Prussian military parade: 9pm – Fail to see the point in being awake (or alive) 10pm – Get into bed 11pm – Stare blankly at the ceiling 12am – Rue the new day 1am – Continue staring at ceiling 2am – Double my efforts and twist and turn some more 3am – Masturbate, because hey, that’s what the experts say to do Finally, the silent digital clock by my bedside would tick over.

And it would be four in the morning.

Four in the morning was the defining hour for me during my own personal Blue Period. My clock would sit there in the corner of my room, slowly ticking away. The next minute was always hours away somehow. In fact, I’m fairly sure that when Einstein thought up his Theory of Relativity, he was a dosed up anxious manic-depressive sitting awake in bed at four. And so my little black clock would sit there, watching me as I watched her. It was the world’s worst staring contest (though there are not many staring contests that I would classify as good – with all due respect to any professional staring contest competitors reading). The morning Sun, in utero, would cast a sickly blue pallor across my wall. Picasso couldn’t have done better if he’d tried. It was the blue of a cheap shot you’d find in some resort town, probably named ‘blue heaven’ or ‘tidal wave’. Instead of tequila and curacao, the blue of four in the morning, my blue, was made up of one part Prozac twitchiness, one part Zoloft anxiousness and two parts Seroquel insomnia – with a dash of suicidal ideation to taste.

62 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

Funnily enough, none of the pills were blue – the marketing team probably thought it best to pick happier colours, as well as happy names (now doesn’t Valdoxan just sound like a happy name?).

The all-pervasiveness of that fucking blue is bad enough.

But the worst thing about four in the morning is that there is absolutely nothing to do. Facebook newsfeeds are barren as the Sahara and the infomercials and evangelists of the world unite to seize control of all television productions. If you’re ever wondering how many ersatz Nutri-Bullets™ are out there, look no further than Channel 7 at 4am (the answer is also four by the way: the Nutri-Ninja, the Magic-Bullet, the Nutri-Fusion, and the NuWave Twister – each of which can be bought with three easy payments of just $19.99 and your eternal soul). If you’re worried about selling your soul for a blender, worry no more! Because next on is Pastor John Swain, formerly of Yellow Springs, Ohio, now proudly of Boonville, Missouri. This gifted evangelist and envoy of the Lord can save your soul and get rid of all the blue for an easy one-off 30-day guarantee payment of only $174.99 and the blood of your firstborn child!

4am is sitting in the blue while watching Pastor Swain.

Szymborska totally had it right – four in the morning is the absolute fucking pit of all hours, especially when it comes to the quality of television. So could you really blame me for wanting to kill myself?

But I kid. At some point in our lives, we’re all awake at four in the morning. The only thing we can do is wait. Sit through the fire and brimstone pastors, the shitty ads, the silence, the blue – and wait. Sure, Pastor Swain may not be able to do as he promises and make it all go away – despite his crazy low prices for redemption and his inhuman (possibly eldritch) wide-mouthed toothy smile.

I suppose I get what old jazz musicians mean now, when they say they’re playing the blues.

But I promise you, if you keep on waiting, five o’clock will come.

ARTWORK BY ADAM JOSHUA FAN

CREATIVE

FIG TREE

BY ROSE KENNEDY

Tangled fig leaves

float

above my head Green wind vertebrae listen to the soft grey pearling in

ascension

The tendrils

of my mind

stretch out and weave over and around the skin of the leaves the bough curls between the seeds.

The fig tree follows my skeleton heart our roots and veins our arteries stained a budding pulse of green.

ARTWORK BY FRANCES ROWLANDS

FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO • 63

COLUMN

ELIZA SHALLARD PRESENTS

FLASH FICTION

WHEN EVERY STORY IS 100 WORDS, EVERY WORD COUNTS PROMPT 2 – WORKPLACE HORRORS: THIS ONE TIME AT WORK CUSTOMER SERVICE

S

BY ELIZA SHALLARD

he can feel her need to stay employed being outweighed by something akin to bloodlust.

“Sir please-” “You’re the most incompetent bitch I’ve-” She stands, smile unwavering, and jams her pen into the man’s throat. She wonders vaguely if it’s the history of anaemia she’d noted in his file, or the shining white counter she’d just cleaned, that causes the gushing blood to be so radiantly red.

Oh if only.

“You tell that quack he’s lost a loyal patient!” As he slams the door of the clinic, Hailey throws her pen across the desk and decides it’s time for coffee.

SLAVE LABOUR

“A

BY SLY MANANA

ctually the position is unpaid” she said, with a perfectly straight face. “We don’t pay our writers, most of them appreciate the exposure and the opportunity to get published.”

I looked down at the job advertisement I had printed .

“Journalistic intern” it read, “25 hours a week”.

“Unpaid” I added, mentally.

“We pride ourselves on developing young writers,” she was saying “after a year or so some of our interns even get the opportunity to move into a paid position!”

Outside on the street I scrunched the ad into a ball and dumped it in the bin.

THE SHARE FOLDER

U

ntil recently I worked in IT. Almost 90 per cent of my job was restarting people’s computers, plugging cords and getting the printer back in action.

Everything else was solvable via a quick Google search and bored dudes on message boards. I was making 80k a year pressing Control-Alt-Delete for people born before the moon landing and I was pretty happy until last week.

It was on that day that I found a giant hidden share folder when uploading Mad Men. I went back the next day to check.

The folder name read ‘we know you know’.

Now I hide.

BOMBS AWAY

I

BY MARY NTALIANIS

stared at the blank page in front of me, contemplating my latest assignment from the editors over at Farrago. I typed a sentence. Then deleted. “Do you have a workplace horror story?”

I whispered to my friend sitting next to me.

“I made a homemade bomb at work once” he told me, without missing a beat. “I mean, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident.”

He blushed red, not exactly a terror threat.

I waited for him to explain.

“Well it involved a popcorn machine full of oil, a half empty lighter and a rubbish bin.”

BY WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW

THE CHEMIST

R

BY LORD FUNGL

estocking shelves at the chemist isn’t a fun job but it’s even worse when you’re crouching on your knees, lining boxes of Nivea face cream along a bottom shelf of dust – each product placed in perfect rows like cosmetic soldiers preparing for the inevitable attack of the customer wanting a product from the back.

Suddenly, a pair of feet appears under my nose and kicks off one of its thongs.

My life flashes before my eyes as a set of thick toenails comes into focus.

“Do you think this is Tinea and where do I find the cream for it?”

NEXT EDITION’S PROMPT – TELL A TALE THROUGH A TIMELINE Submit your 100-word Flash Fictions response to farragomedia2016@gmail.com

64 • FARRAGO 2016 • EDITION TWO

ARTWORK BY EDIE M BUSH

ILLUMINATE YOURSELF

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