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IN MEMORIUM: 80 YEARS OF MASSEY STUDENT MAGAZINES As MASSIVE magazine ceases print production, we look back on 80 years of Massey student magazines and reflect on their time and what they were about. Josh Berry, Rachel Purdie, Brigitte Masters, and Morgan Browne report on the history of the university’s student owned and operated magazines: Satellite, Chaff, Magneto, and Off Campus.
CHAFF: 77 YEARS OF LAUGHS
Palmerston North campus student newspaper Chaff began life with the slogan “printed every now and then, God only knows why”. Published by the Massey Agricultural College Students’ Association, the paper began its longreign in March 16 1934, with an issue that could be purchased for a mere three pence. Early issues were typewritten pages with drawn illustrations, which can now be relived, with Chaff now ensnared forever in digital archives – the new bringing to us the days of the old. On the computer screen, under the Massey University slogan, the 70-plus year-old publication has been reproduced digitally, the aged paper brought to life, bringing the words of writers who would now be in their ninth decades. The newspaper persisted even in times of war, with intermittent publication following the outbreak of the World War II in 1939 until 1946. This period brought about a change to the production of the newspaper with the students’ Cultural Club producing it as a “war edition” from 1943 to 1944, with the title of The Horse’s Neck. Chaff ’s final editor William Muirhead had a longstanding association with Chaff in several different capacities. “I was a student volunteer for six or so years before taking over as editor in 2007, which I did for five years, and then last year I produced a full book of reprints and interviews covering the whole run of the paper from 1934-2011,” he says. “I even remember reading Chaff in the common room in seventh form, as we called Year 13 then, and being super-impressed by all the bad language and occasional blurry black-and-white nudity. “Up till then the only ‘student-y’ magazines I had
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seen were things like Tearaway and Rip it Up, teen magazines obviously written by adult writers trying to sound like young people. “ Chaff was actually written by young people, Muirhead says. “This is what I think was most important about Chaff, and about MASSIVE - it offered a student voice actually provided by students. Mainly this meant a very poor grasp of the possessive apostrophe, but it also made for a lot of stuff that was very funny, honest and occasionally profound. “Having just worked through over 1200 issues for “The Wheat from the CHAFF”, I can say that those qualities ran through the whole 78-year life of the paper.” Chaff ’s 1934 beginnings were under the auspices of “Turitea Newspapers Inc” as an A4 news sheet reproduced by typewriting through carbon paper. Back then, it was already full of jokes about drinking, sports club bulletins and complaints about food in the dining hall. From the fifties onward, when the printing timetable and format expanded, Chaff also began to offer a great deal of insightful journalism and feature writing too admittedly often hidden beneath a jokey headline. “Hard-hitting journalism and dick jokes became our slightly ironic mantra in the late 2000’s,” Muirhead says. “There was also, of course, a lot of filler and randomness. In many ways, it must be remembered, right to the end, we were still producing a weekly 64page magazine from an agricultural college. “It was partly because of those limitations, I’m sure, that Chaff developed an attitude and a tone quite unlike those of the other student newspapers. It was scrappy and with little to prove was free to push any boundaries it wanted to, often in deeply odd ways.”