Issuu

Vol. 78

Issue 21

THE WILD

14 September

SNAPPER BUS PASSES If you have to travel between campuses to attend your classes, you may qualify for a free bus pass. Free bus passes are provided if you have class at more than one campus on the same day. Simply pop into the VUWSA Kelburn Office, show us your timetable on MyAllocator, and we’ll verify your eligibility.

Here at VUWSA, we can: > provide you with a snapper card > top up your balance > place monthly passes on your card > load free bus passes Plus, you can even use your free bus pass on the cable car!

YOUR STUDENTS ’

ASSOCIATION

salient

CONTENTS REGULAR CONTENT

6–17

NEWS AND COLUMNS

5 Editorials 9 Notices 10 Māori Matters 10 The Week In Feminism 12 The Moan Zone 12 We Drank This So You Wouldn’t Have To 14 Ask Agatha 14 Bridget Bones’ Diary 16 Letters 16 Yarn With Zwaan 36 Music 38 Games 39 Books 40 Film 42 Science 44 Visual Arts 45 Fashion 46 Comics 47 Puzzles

7 11

Key unlocks the door VUWSA to join #teamredpeak?

Editor Sam McChesney editor@salient.org.nz

Senior Feature Writer Philip McSweeney

Design and Illustration Ella Bates-Hermans Lily Paris West designer@salient.org.nz

Feature Writers Sharon Lam Gus Mitchell

News Editor Nicola Braid news@salient.org.nz Investigative News Editor Sophie Boot Chief Sub Editor Kimaya McIntosh Sub Editor Zoe Russell

Distributor Beckie Wilson News Reporters Tim Grgec Emma Hurley Charlie Prout Beckie Wilson Elea Yule News Interns Jordan Gabolinscy Alexa Zelensky News Photographer Jess Hill

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Section Editors Sharon Lam (Visual Arts) Jayne Mulligan (Books) Bridget Pyć (Science) Kate Robertson (Music) Fairooz Samy (Film) Jess Scott (Fashion) Cameron Gray (Games) Other Contributors Te Po Hawaikirangi, Brittany Mackie-Ellice, Tom and Luke, Lydia and Mitch, Auntie Agatha, Bridget Bones, Rick Zwaan, Harold Coutts, Melina Genu, Miro Bond, Puck.

14–31 FEATURES 18 The Good, the Bad, the Bad, the Ugly, the Ugly, the Ugly, and the Ugly 24 Ants and the Art of Land Rover Maintenance 28 When Plato Met Frank Herbert 32 A Beautiful Place (to Lose Your Faith in Humanity)

Read Salient online at salient.org.nz Contact Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University PO Box 600, Wellington 04 463 6766 Advertising Jason Sutton sales@vuwsa.org.nz 04 463 6982 Social Media Philip McSweeney philip@salient.org.nz fb.com/salientmagazine @salientmagazine Printed By Inkwise, Ashburton

About Us Salient is published by, but is editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Press Council. Salient is funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should first complain in writing to the Editor and then, if not satisfied with the response, complain to the Press Council. See presscouncil.org.nz/ complain.php for more information.

issue 21

Editorial

Sorry, newly-minted Vic Politics Society, but we all know that in the 21st century, all meaningful political debate now takes place on Facebook. Case in point—the other day someone on my news feed noted that, as much fun as this whole flag thing admittedly is, why has our national anthem been given a free pass? Our flag’s a bit dumb, sure, and obviously we would all much rather be represented by a kiwi firing laser beams from its eyes, but why has this been the starting point? Our national anthem is a funereal dirge in which we beg God to protect us, to “put our enemies to flight”, and to “guide us in the nation’s van” (whatever the hell that means). And if you didn’t recognise those particular lyrics, that’s because they’re from the four extra verses nobody even knows exists, because we didn’t have to mumble them every week at school assembly. Perhaps nobody wants to start that particular conversation because deep down, we all know we’d probably just end up with “Pokarekare Ana” instead, which would be super awkward for those of us who only know the lyrics as “pokarekare ana, I found a squashed banana, I threw it at the teacher, she said ‘come here’.” Anyway, one nation under hypnoflag, singing about squashed bananas—it doesn’t exactly scream “long live the Queen”. Talk of changing the flag or the anthem is of course part of a wider conversation that has, as its logical endpoint, New Zealand becoming a republic. Last week Elizabeth II became Britain’s longest-serving monarch. She’s truly an inspiration to anybody whose sole aim in life is to stay in the same job for a really long time without achieving anything (public servants, then. Zing!). Of course, the monarchy is symbolically fucked; the current royal family are little more than the less-thangenetically-diverse descendants of usurping Germans, they’re totally anachronistic, and obviously no civilised, rational nation would decide that hereditary monarchy is a good idea. Clearly we should get rid of the Queen as our head of state. And yet. And yet.

The monarchy is just so benign that even going to the effort of getting rid of them doesn’t seem worth the effort. After all (see above), they don’t actually do anything. At worst Lizzie is simply a blank slate, at best a kindly old biddy. Harry’s a bit dim, but who isn’t these days; that inbred one with the famous kids is okay I guess; and, well, then there’s Charles. The best that could be said for Charles, I think, is that there’s always the chance he could fall off his polo horse before Lizzie chokes on her Earl Grey. Hang in there, Liz. Do us a solid. It’s not just that the monarchy is harmless; it might actually—albeit unintentionally—be a good thing. I can’t help noticing, for instance, that most of the societies I admire the most—the most equitable and least corrupt—are, like New Zealand, constitutional monarchies. I’m not entirely sure why this is. It might just be a quirk of geography—most of these countries are from northern Europe or are former British colonies. But on some level, I also suspect it has something to do with republics coming to believe their own bullshit. Countries in which the people have reclaimed the symbolic power of the state away from an arbitrary monarchy seem, in many cases, to lose the ability to critically examine that symbolic power. Which is to say, we don’t want the rah-rah patriotism of the US or France. Having an absurd and arbitrary monarch as our head of state helps to remind us that, in fact, most entrenched political power is absurd and arbitrary. It keeps us humble and grounded. So however far we distance ourselves, culturally and politically, from Britain, I hope we at least keep the monarchy—if only for the lols. Maybe we’ll keep them even longer than Britain itself does. In which case we should invite them to move over here and teach us polo, and we’ll all chuck squashed bananas at each other and remind ourselves that we’re all just full of it.

editor@salient.org.nz

salient

Person of the week

BY THE NUMBERS

Wayne Rooney

16,000 The approximate number of words both men and women utter per day according to a Northeastern University study.

70 The anniversary celebrated by the United Nations this week.

US$3.99 What you can pay for the app “Facetune”, which allows you to photoshop your own face.

90 Although Salient’s editor is a self-professed Gooner and its news editor visited Liverpool’s Anfield stadium as part of her commitment to the Reds, we are willing to make our person of the week Man Utd’s Wayne Rooney (but only because he was playing for England). While we’re not usually ones to skite about sports people, the 29-year-old scored his fiftieth goal for England in the team’s match against Switzerland last week. Rooney, who made his debut at the age of 17, has now scored more international goals than any other England player.

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Standing stones discovered surrounding Stonehenge last week.

14 The average number of times New Zealanders check their Facebook per day.

issue 21

N EWS. K E E N E Y E F OR N E W S? S END A NY TIPS, LEA D S O R G OSSIP TO N E W S@SA LIENT.O RG .NZ

Key unlocks the door Charlie Prout Our reporter Charlie is currently on exchange in Canada, and offers a perspective on the refugee issue from a Canadian point of view, as well as New Zealand. The New Zealand Government has changed its tune on refugees in the wake of increased media attention and will allow 750 more Syrian refugees to be resettled in New Zealand over the next three years. This is on top of the 750 New Zealand annually accepts in our refugee quota. The decision was influenced by recent international outrage over deaths of the two Syrian boys and their mother off the coast Greece. Media coverage has led to conversations about the refugee quotas of Western countries, especially Canada and New Zealand. In New Zealand, leading academics and Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy have been pushing for an increase in the refugee quota. Devoy told TV3’s The Nation that New Zealand should double the refugee quota over the next five years. “For a country that’s renowned for punching above our weight on the world stage, when it comes to taking in refugees, we lag behind the rest of the world.”

quota should be doubled and is upset at the Government’s slow response. “The fact that John Key did not want to entertain the thought of supporting those refugees was heart breaking and sad,” she said. In Canada there has also been increasing public pressure to raise the country’s refugee quota. Recently a number of marches were held in support of increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in Canada. Public outcry in Canada comes after it was revealed that the aunt of the aforementioned Syrian boys lived in Vancouver and had been attempting to bring the family to Canada. However, Citizenship and Immigration Canada clarified on Thursday that no formal application for refugee status had been made on behalf of the family. There has been a mixed response from Canadian political parties. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is standing firm on not allowing any more refugees until after federal elections later this year, but agrees more needs to be done and that includes military intervention. “Refugee policy alone is not a solution to this process,” he said.

Dr Alan Gamlen, a senior lecturer in human geography at Victoria University, also supported the increased quota. In an article published in the New Zealand Herald on 3 September he stated, “New Zealand should set an example to Europe and the rest of the world by raising our refugee quota substantially and urging our Security Council partners and other countries around the world to do the same, as a matter of urgency. In service of our values and our interests, it is the right thing to do.”

The opposition parties rejected Harper’s statement, arguing that Canada can do more.

Victoria student Enatha Musabe told Salient about her experience as a refugee from Rwanda and her thoughts on the refugee quota. She claimed that the refugee

Refugees and Victoria

The National Democratic Party’s leader, Thomas Mulcair, argued that Canada had failed Syrian refugees, and that the country should pledge to accept a further 10,000. New Zealand currently takes 750 refugees per year. This number has not changed since 1987. By contrast, Canada takes between 10,000 and 14,000 refugees each year.

According to the University, 66 students who identified as coming from a refugee

background enrolled at the University this year, along with 173 enrollments in 2014. In 2006, Victoria established the Victoria University Network to Support Refugee Background Students, and was the first university in New Zealand to carry out research into the area. The Network involves academic, support staff and students from Victoria, as well as representatives from organisations like Changemakers Refugee Forum and Red Cross Refugee Services and aims to research and advocate with and for refugeebackground students at Victoria. Other initiatives from the University include: —Ongoing advocacy, research and action from staff and students. —Annual welcome event connecting new refugee-background students with current students and members of the Network. —Global Remix—a refugee-background student social club, which supported the development of the Drop-In Centre—hosted in Murphy Building, 4–6pm Mon–Fri. —Publication of a targeted resource for refugee-background students “Opening Doors”, which has been recognised as a model for other tertiary institutions to adopt by the Department of Immigration. —Up to three targeted “Equity Scholarships” for refugee-background students enrolled in a degree programme, worth up to $2000 each (from 2013). If you are a student with a refugee-background looking for help, please visit victoria.ac.nz/ students/get-involved/communities/refugeebackground-students.

editor@salient.org.nz

salient

News and Columns

Politics Society launches at Vic Peter Dunne’s holographic assistant buys students beer Emma Hurley Recently the Hunter Lounge hosted the launch of Victoria University’s newest club, Victoria University Politics Society. About 150 people attended the event, most of them students, as well as a decent number of MPs, councillors, diplomats, and other politically associated people. Despite being in the capital, ten minutes from the Beehive, and buzzing with young hacks, this is the University’s first politics society. A political debate questioning “How Do We Solve the Migration/ Refugee Crisis?” was the highlight of the night. The speakers included students George Dooley (an International Socialist Organisation activist) and Politics Society President Jack Gradwell; MPs David Seymour (ACT), Denise Roche (Green) and Peter Dunne (United Future); and activist and writer Marianne Elliot. Dooley’s speech was a little scattered and he spoke a bit fast. Some were taken aback by his suave suit and initially had marked him as

a Young Nat. Overall, he wanted immediate action to increase the refugee quota, though he did not provide any specific numbers. Gradwell had a bit of a muddled speech. He disputed the idea that “taking refugees is good or evil”, or even “that anything is good or evil”. Overall, “Nietzsche” Gradwell seemed to imply that building a big fence around New Zealand would make all problems pertaining to immigration disappear. Seymour revealed that an attendee mistook him to be Peter Dunne’s assistant. He called New Zealand “the most thoughtful, diverse and tolerant society that the world has ever seen”. He wanted the refugee quota to better reflect New Zealand’s GDP growth and population expansion since 1987, but he also didn’t commit to any numbers. Roche spoke of her disappointment that her bill to increase the quota to 1000, supported by all parties except National, was voted down. However, she gave a shout out to the Young Nats, for perhaps the first time ever, for standing up for a quota increase. Dunne, wearing his signature bow tie, said

New Zealand needed to increase the quota from 750 to at least 1000, to reflect the 44 per cent population increase since 1987. He expressed dismay at the racism and xenophobia levelled toward refugees in recent weeks. Grace Carroll, a spokesperson for the society, said “we were pleasantly surprised with how well the evening went. The turnout exceeded expectation and the atmosphere was lively and cheerful… It helped that David Seymour was a good bloke and bought beers for students.” Gradwell started the society this year with help from a group of Politics and International Relations students. Carroll said the society’s goal is “to build a student community, nonpartisan in nature, that acts as an open forum for a multiplicity of events and opportunities. In fostering robust, critical thought and engagement, PolSoc aims to cultivate civically informed and active students.” The Society is open to anyone with an interest in or passion for politics.

BYO bags

Campus Fruit & Vege Market Brought to you by VUWSA

Open to the public Wednesday afternoons 2pm-6pm Location: Tim Beaglehole Courtyard. Held during semester, exludes Holidays

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issue 21

News and Columns

University remains cool in the face of Global Warming Jordan Gabolinscy

NOTICES Careers and Employment 2015-16 Internships and 2016 Graduate Jobs See Recruitment Schedule for details: http://bit.ly/1zGNacY Currently recruiting: GCSB, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, EY, Westpac, NZX, Aviat Networks, OMD, Zomato, Communication Agencies Association NZ (CAANZ), Tasman District Council, Optiver Australia, AgResearch, Scion, Department of Conservation… and many more. Connect with employers via Recruitment events: http://bit. ly/1DOS0WK Careers in Focus (Employment options for Building Science students) – 17 Sept, Careers in Focus Seminar for Law students (Legal work in NFP/Charitable/ Community organisations) – 22 Sept, NZX Graduate Open Day – 1 Oct Check in with a Careers Consultant during our daily drop-in sessions! http://bit.ly/1A1ORgv Get help with your CV, Cover Letter, Interview skills etc For more info, login to www.victoria. ac.nz/careerhub with your Student Computing login!

Victoria Abroad Victoria Abroad– Exchange Information Sessions every Wednesday @12:50pm Why not study overseas as part of your degree?! Study in English, Earn Vic credit, Get Studylink & grants, explore the world! Deadline for Trimester 2, 2016 exchange is December 1st, 2015!

A Victoria-directed film has been nominated for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in 2015. The film Thin Ice: The Inside Story of Climate Science, co-directed by Victoria’s Associate Professor of Geophysics Simon Lamb and staff at Oxford University, is a rebuttal to growing, and disturbing, criticisms that not only is global warming a hoax, but that the very study of climate change science is a waste of time and money. David Sington, Lamb’s co-director and fellow environmentalist, was hesitant at first to work on a project of this size but with the now-finished product being screened around the world, he claims “the final result is probably the most scientifically informative documentary ever made about climate change”. The film was screened in New Zealand last Sunday in Auckland. This is just one example of the work Victoria University does to combat climate change. Victoria University can lay claim to very intelligent and engaged professors who work hard to preserve and better understand the environment. Vic is an official signatory to the Talloires Declaration, an official commitment made by university administrators in 1990 to environmental stability in higher education. Before the film, which was initially released at Earth Day 2012, Vic established the Climate Change Research Institute in 2008, who work with “world class researchers to better understand and inform the decision real people are facing regarding climate change”. They are also a founding member of the New Zealand Climate Change Centre. Only a few weeks ago, on 19 August, a free public lecture was held at Vic by Professor Tim Naish (who also worked on Thin Ice) and Dr Marc Wilson from the School of Psychology. During the lecture Dr Wilson discussed factors associated with climate change, also the biases that make up both sides of arguments on the subject.

This Tuesday (15 September) a climate change lecture will be held in the Hunter Council Chamber. Oceanographer and climate scientist Dr Stephen Rintoul will speak about changing ocean patterns, in regards to the East Antarctic ice sheets erosion. Dr Rintoul is a member of the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart. VUWSA has also embarked on a number of initiatives to reduce the University’s carbon footprint, with this year’s Wellbeing and Sustainability Officer Rory Lenihan-Ikin submitting on the region’s climate strategy and implementing programmes like the campus-based vegetable market which opens this week. In 2013 VUWSA passed motions at their IGM stating “THAT VUWSA acknowledges the current and future impacts of climate change on students and society and the need for an urgent and comprehensive response. And, THAT VUWSA takes appropriate action where possible to support the transition to a prosperous and equitable low-carbon economy.” When students were asked whether actions taken by Victoria are significant enough to tackle climate change, the response was very positive—“climate change will always be an issue if we don’t educate ourselves and understand how to make a positive change”. Some students had no idea that any action had been taken in the first place, but they put it down to their own ignorance—“if I had known it was happening [free public lectures/international study] then I would be right behind it”. For more information about the University’s Environmental Policy, see victoria.ac.nz/ documents/policy/facilities-management/ environmental-policy.pdf.

editor@salient.org.nz

TE HUIKA TAUIRA 2K15

salient

News and Columns

Wikitōria ki Te Huinga Tauira 2K15. Ko te rā tuatahi tēnei, ā, ko te Rāpare te 27 o Akuhata. Ka tae atu te 40 o ngā tauira, nā ko mātou tērā. Ko te koekoe o te Tūī te reo tuatahi i rangona e tātou i te tomokanga. I pōwhiritia e te hau kainga a te Akatoki rāua ko Te Awhioraki i a mātou ngā tauira. Koinei ngā roopū i whakarauika mai ki runga i te pai whenua o Ōtautahi: Ngā Tauira Māori (Auckland University), Titahi Ki Tua (AUT), Manawatahi (Massey—Palmerston North), Kōkiri Ngātahi (Massey—Wellington), Te Roopu Māori (Otago University). Huri te ao, huri te pō i timata ngā manu kōrero i te pāparakauta. Kino kē nei ngā manu tīoriori e whakamahana ana ngā korokoro, e whakapuakina i a rātou ake aronga e pā ana ki ngā kaupapa katoa o te Ao Māori.

I te aranga mai o te rā i te rā tuarua i puta ngā mata weriweri i runga i te atāmira, ki te mahi Ka tō te rā i runga i ngā puke, i ngā waipiataata, kapa haka. I tū rangatira, i tū pakari ngā roopū i te whenua o Tahupōtiki, i te rohe o Kai katoa i te atamira rā. Pāpā ana te whatitiri, Tahu. Ka eke pai tō mātou wakarererangi hikohiko te uira, rū ana te whenua, whatiwhati ki ngā one o Ōtautahi. Ko mātou a Ngāi te moana nā ngā mahi a Hinerēhua, a TāneTauira e haruru nei, e tae ā-tinana mai ki rore. I rongo mātou katoa i ngā waiata i ngā te tū hei māngai mō ngā tauira Māori o mōteatea, i ngā haka o tērā rohe, o tērā rohe Te Po Hawaikirangi

huri noa i te motu. I te hekenga mai o te pō i whakariterite mātou i a mātou anō, kātahi ka peka atu ki te pō whakangahau ki te mahi whakawhanaungatanga. Ka tahuri atu ki te rā tuatoru. I taua rā i puta ngā pūkenga katoa. I te tuatahi i purei ngā roopu i te pā whutupōro me te netipōro. Koinei te wa i hiki te ihi, te wehi me te wana. Kei runga noa atu a Ngāi Tauira. I te pō o te Rāhoroi i mau pūweru ngā wāhine, i mau hūtu ngā tāne, ā, ko tēnei te pō tohatoha i ngā taonga o Te Huinga Tauira. Kāore tētahi pō i tua atu i taua pō rā. Mai i te timatanga tae noa ki te whakamutunga. Me mihi ka tika ki ngā kaiwhakahaere, arā, ko Te Akatoki rāua ko Te Āwhioraki, mō tā rātou kaha manaaki, kaha poipoi i a mātou i tēnei haerenga. Kāore he kupu hei whakapuaki i ngā kare-ā-roto, i ngā tūmomo āhuatanga kua kite, kua rongo. Waihoki rā, he mihi matakuikui ki ngā kaitūruki, ki ngā kaiwhakahaere o Ngāi Tauira. Ko koutou ngā kaihoe e hoe ana te waka ki uta. #TūMāoriMai.

The Week in Feminism

Not that kind of girl: A spotlight on Lena Dunham Brittany Mackie-Ellice Creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls, Lena Dunham is a feminist worth knowing about. She wrote and directed films throughout her time at Oberlin College where she graduated with a degree in creative writing. During her time there she produced several independent short films that she posted to YouTube. Most of them deal with themes of sexual identity and enlightenment, including one where she and her friends talk about experiencing orgasms for the first time (awesome). Following her graduation she starred in a web series, wrote lots of stories www.salient.org.nz

and essays, and created her own web series titled The Delusional Downtown Divas. In 2010 she produced a semiautobiographical short film Tiny Furniture, which ended up serving as the gateway to the rest of her career. Her film earned her a *slightly* wellknown name at HBO where she did a blind script deal. This led to her meeting Judd Apatow who took the job producing Girls alongside her. Girls is an equal parts hilarious, melancholic and wholly unapologetic look at the lives of four girls struggling through their twenties in New York. It looks at relationships, friendships and sex (lotssss of sex) through a uniquely feminist-tinted lense. In September last year, Lena published a collection of autobiographical essays in a book titled Not That Kind of Girl. Well received by some and torn to pieces by others, no matter what your stance on the content is we all have to agree it stays true to the sassy and (sometimes painfully) selfaware persona that Lena lends to the public. One of her essays talks about her experience being sexually assaulted by a fellow Oberlin College classmate, which resulted in huge

controversy. There was an overwhelming cynical reaction to the accuracy of her account—an increasingly common reaction to women speaking out about their assault experiences. Despite the controversy her book reached number 2 on The New York Times’ Best Seller list and contains some awesome stuff about feminism, body image and sexual identity. Her most recent feminist project (aside from working on season five of Girls) is Lenny Letter, an email newsletter about all things feminism, health, politics and friendship. It is being launched this month and will be a beautiful hybrid of feminism news and projects. It is being created by Lena and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner who is another inspiring woman to have a look at. You can easily subscribe in advance by sending through your email address.

issue 21

News and Columns

VUWSA to join #teamredpeak? Sam McChesney VUWSA has an eleven-year-old policy on its books to “support the changing of the current New Zealand Flag”, it has recently emerged. It is unclear whether the policy—motion 21 of 2004—will require VUWSA to support whichever of the four godawful proposed flags goes up against Blue Ensign in March next year. VUWSA President Rick Zwaan, however, pointed out that VUWSA would still need to be satisfied with any proposed alternative. The motion is just one of the hundreds of external policies still on VUWSA’s books, many of which are eccentric or outdated. Many more are purely ideological statements with few or no practical implications. VUWSA external policy is voted on by the student body or by the now-defunct Student Representative Council (SRC). External policy is binding on the association until it is rescinded. The External Policy Book runs to 50 pages and covers everything from ham sandwiches with mustard to neo-colonialism in Latin America. Under motion 134 of 1974, VUWSA officially “urges support” for a mandatory gap year between high school and full-time tertiary study in order to “combat academic elitism and encourage awareness of economic oppression”. In 1985, VUWSA passed at least 56 separate motions pertaining specifically to sexism and women’s issues, including that the Government set up a women-only panel with the power to ban any video deemed pornographic or misogynist. In 1987, the SRC passed a 339-word motion condemning US political interference in Latin America, a move that was bound to have prompted some soul-searching on Capitol Hill. The prize for “most awkward policy” goes to motion 79 of 1975, which reads “That this Association congratulates the Khmer Rouge on the success of their fight to liberate Cambodia, and that it wishes them the best

of luck in their endeavours to reconstruct that country.” The policy was overturned in 1984, by which point the Khmer Rouge had massacred an estimated two million Cambodians. Readers will be relieved to learn, however, that under motion 16 of 1985 VUWSA is opposed to nuclear weapons being brought onto campus. Interestingly, it would appear that the Executive have been violating motion 192 of 1978, which states “That all Executive members be made to wear gold lamé suits and that they be required to walk on six-foot stilts as a mark of their dignified status.” Violation of VUWSA policy by the Executive is potential grounds for censure, or even dismissal. VUWSA’s external policies include: 190/70 “That the men’s toilets at the east ground floor be renamed the ‘Richard Wild Memorial Shit House’.” 191/70 “That Sir Richard Wild be invited to open the new room in the appropriate manner.” 30/73 “That fire drills be held on the hour, every hour in the morning, and ten minutes after the hour in the afternoon.” 83/73 “That the catering people put a sign in front of ham sandwiches when and if they contain mustard.” 100/74 “That this Association recognises that ecological problems cannot be solved under our present economic system and any attempts to solve them will in the long term be thwarted by the very nature of this system.” 92/77 “That instead of saying ‘Yes’ to the motion, people may be instructed to say ‘Pig’ and instead of saying ‘No’, that they may be instructed to say ‘Library Sixth Floor’.”

recognition of his services to the Association.” 167/78 “That this Association condemns the violation of human rights by the Soviet Union and United States, and deplores the way in which the issue of human rights is being used as a pawn in the rivalry between the two superpowers.” 202/78 “That Gaudeamus Igitur be sung before all SRCs and Executive meetings.” 112/81 “That VUWSA condemns the recent hiring of a stripper by members of the J7 rugby team to perform at a fund-raising function.” 126/81 “That Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is a she.” 109/82 “That VUWSA actively discourages Association members from using the word ‘Fuck’ during protest rallies, marches and pickets. That the word ‘Fuck’ is not to be used on official Association chant sheets, and that the word ‘Fuck’ not be broadcast over Association equipment during officially Association endorsed rallies, marches or pickets.” 16/88 “That this SRC acknowledges that the Palestinian civil and military authorities acted in the contravention of the moral and legal codes of the day in the events surrounding the arrest, conviction and execution of Jesus of Nazareth.” 5/03 “That capitalism is not only good but is necessary for graduates to pay off their student loans.” 27/03 “That VUWSA campaign for a GEfree campus.” 35/04 “That VUWSA congratulate Rodney Hide on his election to Parliament.” 2/05 “That VUWSA oppose extreme left wingers taking over the New Zealand Government.”

102/78 “That the Editor of Salient be given a cold shower at the end of the year in

editor@salient.org.nz

salient

News and Columns

It’s okay, we’re safe now Last week when half of New Zealand was whingeing about how we don’t need a new flag, and the other was touching themselves to a photo of the proposed-butnot-proposed Red Peak design, something tragic happened. A Salient issue washed up without a Moan Zone. The world stood still. Like many a Syrian refugee, we were far away from home, with little chance of ever returning. The location—Hanoi, Vietnam (for people in Vic House, that’s in Asia). The weather, moist. The ladies, masculine. After all the money VUWSA gives us for our weekly literary contribution, we simply had to spend some of it on a holiday. So while all of you first-years got to Instagram your home town and the friends that you never contact and think you are better than, we got lost in a country with 90 million people. If you’re a regular subscriber, you will know we are fairly arrogant but still better-looking and more intelligent than

most people. To our surprise, this attitude didn’t pay off. After three bottles of snake-infested rice wine, we went on an adventure which resulted in us waking up to what could have been The Hangover Part 4 (which still would have been a better film than parts 2 and 3 combined—even with a surprise appearance from Hillary Duff ). We woke up in what looked like a jungle. We had no idea that in the early hours of the morning we had boarded a boat and eventually swam to one of the 2000 floating islands which make up Ha Long Bay. Tom was naked from the waist down, apart from one shoe on his left foot. Luke, on the other hand, was wearing no shoes, but he did have on a Vietnamese dress. It was safe to say that we were in trouble. We had managed to get from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, without being able to recall anything

from the previous evening. A long story short—Vietnam looks a lot better when you can see straight. The rest of the week consisted of trying to attain new passports so we could fly home, which caused us to miss the deadline for Salient last week, resulting in the sadness of many of our beloved fans—but at least it gave us something to write about this week. Always use the tour guide provided, Luke and Tom P.S. A few disclosures: VUWSA only pays us in left-wing propaganda and invites to the Women in Philosophy meetings; Luke went to Vietnam with his Nana not Tom. As the brighter ones would have guessed this makes the above story complete bullshit, something that we’ve mastered over the past year and a half at uni.

We Drank This So You Wouldn’t Have To Lydia and Mitch

Mac’s Green Beret (IPA) Cost: $13/6 pack ($2.1 each!!!!!) Alcohol volume: 5.4% (1.4 standard drinks) Pairing: Pams Cheesy Aliens chips, discount sushi Verdict: www.salient.org.nz

This week we drank too many beers and carried out some pretty high-level Facebook stalking. We don’t care to examine whether there is a causative link there, suffice to say that extreme caution was exercised to avoid the dreaded accidental friend request. Our deepest sympathies go out to anyone who has ever had that moment of absolute panic, followed by a hurried Googling of “how to delete a friend request”, followed by deciding that you actually wanted to move city and change your name anyway. We don’t review beer often so this Tuesday evening was a special occasion. Of our 19 reviews this year, we’ve only reviewed one beer (Wild Buck, s/o $3 quarts from The Mill), and as it was Lydia’s favourite and a whopping 2.4 standard drinks for $3, we rated it highly. Mac’s foray into the craft(ish) beer(ish) market, the Green Beret IPA, tastes less like water than Wild Buck, but does have a more confusing name. Our best theory on the military theme of the

name is something something masculinity something something patriarchy something something women drink beer too, riiight? If we had to describe this beer in four words, it would be “fucking hoppy” and “it’s beer”. Having already been rejected for at least two jobs each this week, we decided that the best course of action was to get drunk in Mitch’s workplace and turn off the email notifications from job sites because it just hurts too much now. An unfortunate side effect of this decision was ending up on the Facebook pages of people who write columns like this shitty excuse for opinion in student magazines around the country. We are pretty that sure we looked cooler than them, but they did have less outwardly political content on their pages which probably counts in their favour to be honest. Basically, we spent most of our time look at the Instagram of that hot guy that writes for Craccum and less time focussing on the beer. You’re welcome.

issue 21

News and Columns

Reminder: Get Home Safe Beckie Wilson Students from the University of Michigan have launched a Companion App that allows users to walk home with the protection of their friends. The free app enables the user to connect with a friend or family member while walking home and allows that person to virtually track the friend walking home via GPS on their smartphone. The app registers when the user goes off track, falls, starts to run or is pushed. It then asks if the user is safe, and if there is no reply within 15 seconds, the app sends out an alert to the friend and, if selected, the police, and then activates a personal alarm. The app was originally designed for university students walking home and around campus. Women’s Group President Chrissy Brown endorsed the app claiming that “anything that makes women feel safer walking home is a great thing. If that’s talking on the phone to

a friend, using an app or walking a different route”. However, both Brown and fellow Women’s Group member Emlou Lattimore acknowledged that one app would not stamp out rape culture. Furthermore, the app is only accessible to those with a (sufficiently charged) smartphone. However, Brown concludes that “getting people involved in the app will change the way we think about how people get home safe and that ultimately is a good thing”. Last April, Salient reported on Victoria’s delayed implementation of safety precautions along the Boyd-Wilson path near Te Puni. VUWSA’s 2014 President Sonya Clark called for greater action in order to keep Victoria students safe on campus and around town. In early 2014 three attacks had been reported on the Boyd-Wilson pathway.

We fucking love science More money for science Emma Hurley The Government will spend $96.5 million across 48 science research programmes over the next four years, as part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) 2015 Science Investment Round. MBIE’s Science Board, with help from independent experts, selected 48 research programmes to fund from a total of 157 proposals. University-led projects were awarded $53.8 million, or 67 per cent, of the funding. Victoria University received $5 million in funding for research projects including treatment for multiple sclerosis and polyQ diseases, communications infrastructure, anti-foul marine paints, and medical implants. The figure is a reduction on last year, when the University received $7 million. Professor Kate McGrath, Vice-Provost (Research) at Victoria University, said the funding was “an outstanding result for Victoria and reflects our research capability

in areas that are important to the New Zealand economy”. The University of Auckland received the biggest share of funding at over $14 million. This will fund eight major research projects including electric car planning, a drone device to analyse farm pastures, and family violence prevention. The other New Zealand universities were also given funding for research projects including the resilience of New Zealand lakes, beefriendly pesticides, studies of surf breaks, and sensors to measure brain-oxygen levels. Thirty-three per cent of the funding round went to non-university enterprises to fund research in high value manufacturing and services, hazards and infrastructure, environmental research, energy and mineral, and biological industries. This includes GNS Science, who were awarded $9.6 million for research into oil and gas discoveries in New Zealand basins.

Over the years Victoria students have complained about their safety around the Boyd-Wilson path, where attacks have happened in recent years. VUWSA Welfare Vice President Madeleine Ashton-Martyn told Salient that the association has “been pushing the University to actively create a safer campus environment through trying to map the key areas that students are concerned about and identifying infrastructural improvements that might help. Usually that fear comes from badly lit pathways and lack of knowledge of campus safety reporting and response procedures.” The Greater Wellington Regional Council has recently updated its tips on walking home within Wellington, adding a journey planner to its website to help users map the most visible route home. Alternatively, the Wellington City Council advises that people stick with their friends on the walk home and avoid taking shortcuts down alleys or parks. Either that, or the Council suggests arranging for someone to pick you up or taxi home. You can download the app for free for both Apple and Android.

Last year 90 per cent of Victoria University’s external funding for research was from Government sources—mostly contestable funding from MBIE, the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Health Research Council. “Research funding is important to the University as it allows more of our staff to progress cutting edge projects and further develop their knowledge and expertise,” Prof McGrath said. Who got what? University of Auckland: $14 million University of Waikato: $10 million Lincoln University: $6.2 million University of Otago: $5.7 million Massey University: $5 million Victoria University: $5 million Auckland University of Technology: $2.4 million University of Canterbury: $1.8 million Source: http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-services/ science-innovation/investment-funding/currentfunding/science-investment-round-2015successful-proposals

editor@salient.org.nz

salient

News and Columns

Ask Agatha happened and live with the brief and intense awkwardness that comes from drunk dialling and texting. It’ll feel awful but as soon as it happened, it’ll be over.

Dear Agatha, On Saturday I was a sloppy mess and was being drunk and melodramatic. I woke up to see I tried to call my crush about eight times and texted her about eight times without a reply. I am so mortified, I feel like I’ve basically ruined any chances I have with her. What can I do Agatha? -Drunk and Disorderly.

Your last option is to fake your own death and leave town for good. If you do this, make sure you use a real body and remove the teeth so they can’t use dental records to show it isn’t you.

Hey GG. Sorry not sorry, but there is no such thing as a friend zone. Some people are going to be attracted to you, some people are not going to be attracted to you and that’s fine too. If you are hanging out with someone and they just think you’re hanging out as friends, it’s going to be super weird for them to realise how you were interpreting everything.

Good luck covering your tracks, Agatha.

Well, well, well, DD.

Hey Agatha,

We have ALL been here. There is a fine line between a sneaky cute message and a full on barrage of drunken clingy madness. You have a few options available to you though. You can apologise for being such a mess and call it what it is. If you’re straight up, it can sometimes feel liberating and you can regain some dignity from this situation. Your second option is to ignore everything that

I’ve been interested in this girl for ages and we hang out and have a great time, but when I asked her to date me she said that she didn’t want to jeopardise the friendship. I was totally friend-zoned. What can I do to get out of the friend zone?

It must be uncomfortable for you too, but I mean, you’ve got to respect people enough to realise they aren’t relegating you to some sort of forbidden forest, but communicating to you that they only see you as a friend. So be a good guy and enjoy the cool friendship that you still have together. #Killthefriendzone2K15 Agatha

-Good Guy

Bridget Bones Diary Pretty Kitty Committee Let’s take a minute to talk about the Brazilian wax. You know the one ladies. The half hour of total pain as some foreign woman rips hair off the most intimate part of your body with some hot wax and a cloth. Much glamorous. I’m not a huge fan of the Brazilian. Mostly because it hurts. But also, I really cannot think of much worse than lying on a table having someone wax my arsehole (yup, that happens too) and chat to me about their weekend. BUT, for some strange reason, once every six weeks I take myself down to the salon to endure the removal of hair. www.salient.org.nz

WHY? Who the fuck decided that the vagina of a woman entering her second decade needs to look exactly the same as it did when she was 11— completely hairless? Admittedly, I do it for my boyfriend. I would hate for him to have to try and deal with the forest that can ensue if I get too lazy to wax. But some weird, oversexualised part of me does it, well, for me. I want to have a perfect pussy. So I grit my teeth, spread my legs, and wait for the pain. Guys, you can get Brazilians too. Lord knows how it works, and I’m sure it’s pretty painful, but hey, if that’s what you’re into, you do. (I’m pretty sure Olympic swimmers get that shit waxed in order to streamline. Maybe

it makes sex better?) There’s nothing wrong with not waxing, some people just aren’t into that. But, if like me, you’d rather be bald as a badger on your nether regions, then welcome to what I am officially calling the Pretty Kitty Committee. xx

News and Columns

issue 21

Eye on Exec Nicola Braid Somewhat surprisingly, this reporter was amenable to the prospect of spending her Tuesday evening attending a VUWSA Exec meeting so that you, our trusty readers, could be kept fully abreast of your Executive’s actions, thoughts, feelings, money spending, etc., etc. However, after sitting through over an hour of chat “in committee” (which I am not allowed to report on), it reached 6.07 pm and this reporter had ALMOST LOST HER MIND. My staying power can only be chalked up to the company of AcademicVice President Jono and Campaigns Officer Nathaniel, who kindly appeased me with pizza. But enough about me, let me get on to our fearless leaders. Spirits seemed high among the Exec this week, perhaps due to the nearing end of the trimester (and thus the Executive’s terms), or the excitement of the upcoming VUWSA elections. Due to what President Rick cited as reasons of “commercial sensitivity” and “personal” something something, what I can actually write this week remains limited. So, I made a rap about what your execs are up to (when you read/sing this in your head, go with the tune to Drake’s “Furthest Thing”). Somewhere between NZUSA and new VUWSA Somewhere between our conference and their conference [I am] Somewhere between lethargic and amuse-d Somewhere between a Budget and referendums But Maddie’s been at Massey, for some hardship workshop and just workin’ student welfare While Ellen’s doin’ work groups and celebrating’ reps now Everyone is thrivin’, so much on their plate now. Chennoah’s doin’ equity and diversity back from Ireland, maybe got some space now What they got to say now? Jono will explain how 180 pt Master’s are weird but it’s cool cos

Rory L-I’s got a market, and that energy competition [He’s got energy, got a lot of energy] Jacinda’s got the Budget, Toby’s got those Fac’ Games and Rick is doing “admin” about stuff we cannot name now. [shout out to Nathaniel for his cred, but this writer’s inability to fit him in the verses] I been thinkin’ on the low, head bobbin’ on the low ‘Cos I’m tired and this chat is goin’ slow I’ve been plottin’ on it though, this week’s issue on the go Learning things from VUWSA like everyone I know. Some Issues tho NZUSA The Exec discussed whether to pay the remaining levy to NZUSA, and what the payment would mean for the upcoming national student conference. Most members agreed there was nothing to gain from “rehashing” the ongoing NZUSA/VUWSA beef. However, members expressed a preference to put the levy money toward conference costs rather than directly to NZUSA, on the basis that it might guarantee the conference was accessible with the money being used to help people get there. There was one suggestion to offer NZUSA President Rory McCourt some sort of “we’ll pay as long as there’s a conference” demand, presumably made out of cut-out newspaper letters. The Executive also discussed the upcoming referendum on VUWSA’s membership to NZUSA. It was agreed that the referendum would be tacked on to the end of the VUWSA elections, with a neutrally-worded question.

Fee Setting Prezzy Rick mentioned that the University Council will set the University’s domestic fees on 28 September at a University Council meeting and expressed his hopes that there would be a student “presence” on the day. Welfare VP Maddie was thanked for compiling the results of VUWSA’s fee survey, and Rick said he was currently collating a “paper” and doing “research” on the issue. [If you put it in inverted commas at least it sounds suspicious and exciting.] 180pt Master’s Programmes The Exec discussed the stance that VUWSA should take with regards to the University’s proposed 180-point Master’s programmes. VUWSA’s Academic Reps Jono and Ellen plan to develop a clear stance toward the contentious programmes, and proposed focus groups with both undergraduate and postgraduate students as a means of ascertaining the StUDeNt Per$peKtIvE. Other really important things that Salient was sure to report on: —Class reps will have certificates this year and not trophies. —The Exec is still up to a bunch of stuff. —The Faculty games are coming up. Perhaps the most entertaining segment of the meeting though was watching the Exec try to schedule an Exec-wide meeting. In a flurry of cross-referencing diaries with meetings, it took a good five minutes for the nine-strong executives to settle on a time and to peer-pressure a somewhat querulous President into getting out of bed early. That and Rick forgetting to formally close the meeting.

Members of the Exec also agreed that VUWSA, as an association, would take an “impartial stance” on the referendum, but individual Exec members were free to express their personal view on the NZUSA/ VUWSA affiliation. editor@salient.org.nz

VUWSA

Letters

salient

Yarn with Zwaan Rick Zwaan, VUWSA President

Letter of the Week:

This week campaigning gets into full swing for the 2016 Executive. Amid the posters, fliers, banners, catchy slogans and election watch Twitter accounts are the actual candidates who are vying to represent you and govern a 116-year-old multi-million dollar organisation.

Poe’s Law strikes again

For VUWSA to be great, it requires excellent Executive members. It needs intelligent people with integrity and a drive to get on and do things. It’s easy to make a poster with catchy slogans, hang a banner in the Hub and say you’ll do things. It’s a lot harder to actually show that you can. This requires voters to do our research. We need to ask the hard questions and critically analyse their experience and achievements to date. While it can be hard to get that info for some candidates, for those running who are currently on the Exec, I’d encourage you to read the “score cards” that Salient produced a few issues ago. Head along to the candidates forum this week and hear from them firsthand. Ask questions on their Facebook pages and talk to them if you see them around campus. After VUWSA’s revenue streams were cut a few years ago after Voluntary Student Membership (VSM), we’ve been steadily building our capacity and improving our operations and building relationships. This has a taken a lot of work from disciplined and dedicated Executives. VUWSA has a long and colourful history, and Executives can make or break not only the reputation of VUWSA, but of students generally. While we were pushing for student seats on Council this year, people would still raise concerns about incidents involving VUWSA Executive members that happened years or, in some cases, decades ago. Over the years, people have used their position of power to further their personal political agendas, be actively destructive, or sit there just to build their CVs. We’ve also had some incredibly humble and selfless people who get it and tirelessly work to serve all students. To ensure that VUWSA continues to head in the right direction, we must elect people who are not only nice and personable, but also have a vision and the skills and competencies to get on and make things happen. With the right people around the table, VUWSA can be very effective in making Victoria, Wellington and New Zealand a better place for students. The building blocks are there. The longevity and effectiveness of VUWSA relies on you to look beyond the election sweeteners to who the candidates are as people and whether or not they’ll serve you well on the Executive. www.salient.org.nz

Dear Salient Got to agree with your article ‘Naughty Te Puni’ Salient 7th September and I sympathise with the plight of the neighbours when these blockhead, drunk students get out of control and cause strife and noise! What a pain in the backside. Students - here’s a message to you about your boozing! It is not funny, you make yourselves look like complete idiots with your carry on, your behavour is dangerous at times and as for the money you are wasting - what are you using to pay for your booze addiction? Please grow up and become responsible, mature adults. You are not at school anymore - you are at university for a possible career if you actually graduate? Being drunk is not a joke and if you cannot control yourself, then maybe go back home and come back to university when you have grown up. Instead of boozing, do something constructive and for goodness sake, have consideration for your neighbours who have had enough of your antics and irresponsible carry on and behaviour! Signed ‘Been Around the Block’ Letter of the Week receives two coffee vouchers and a $10 book voucher from Vic books.

Flags n shit Dear Salient, Look at hypnoflag. Look deep into its soothing spirals. You are feeling sleepy. All your cares are drifting slowly away. Hypnoflag is the answer. Fuck Kyle Lockwood, and fuck that other flag that nobody ever mentions. When you wake up, you will realise that Red Peak is a bunch of overrated triangles. You will forget about all about it within a week. You’re slowly coming back, in five, four, three, two...

Salient letters policy

Salient welcomes, encourages, and thrives on public debate—be it serious or otherwise—through its letters page. Letters must be received before 4pm on Thursday for publication the following week. Letters must be no longer than 250 words. Pseudonyms are fine, but all letters must include your real name, address and telephone number—these will not be printed. Letters will not be corrected for spelling or grammar. The Editor reserves the right to edit, abridge, ordecline any letters without explanation. Email: editor@salient.org.nz Post: Salient, c/- Victoria University of Wellington Hand-delivered: Salient office, Level 3, Student Union Building (behind the Hunter Lounge)

News and Columns

THAT M A ES I R

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issue 21

Don’t hit pill-ow the belt Two dozen military cadets were injured this week, and not from the usual atrocities (read: Syria, the Gaza strip etc., etc.), but from a massive pillow fight. At the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, 24 students were injured in the annual bout aimed at “building camaraderie” with first-year students (NB: they also say that about the Toga Party). Luckily none of the injuries were fatal, and news just in: hazing is still alive and legit in American institutions, surprise surprise.

Are you fe-line this trip? A Japanese tourism organisation has developed a specific travel package for luring cat-loving travellers to Hiroshima. The company has invented an online map, giving punters a “cat’s view” of the city, a feline Google Maps if you will. Based on the travels of “Lala”, a so-called “street-wise” cat, the service comes in addition to Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture where a cat serves as a station master and of course, Aoshima or Japan’s “Cat Island”.

THIS IS OUR FOURTH STORY ABOUT MINIONS In what has now become a challenge, nay a fascination, for Salient, we have another story about the Minion characters from the film Despicable Me. In what can only be described as the most fitting prank to take place in a town called Peacehaven in East Sussex, ten of the town’s rubbish bins were painted as minions. While it is unclear who was behind the jovial prank, the town’s council has praised the “creativity” of the delinquent decorator, particularly for the attachment of googly eyes and arms.

The fruit of my affection Mandarin farmers in Japan are working on creating a heartshaped mandarin to woo customers into consuming their version of vitamin C. The shape is hardly a genetic feat—the farmers place a wooden and metal contraption around the fruit as it grows. Around 65 per cent of the crops turned out with the desired shape.

I see the papacy Pope Francis II recently popped into a Roman optician to get a new pair of glasses. While this would have been a real spectacle for Catholic onlookers, he apparently told the shop owner “he did not want to spend too much money” (the lack of indulgences, we guess). If papal were wondering about Franky’s choice, don’t fret—his holiness is a devout believer in bifocal lenses and holy supports the photochromic path.

editor@salient.org.nz

Features

The Good, the Bad, the Bad, the Ugly, the Ugly, the Ugly, and the Ugly

salient

Sam McChesney Next Tuesday, Victoria students will vote on whether to remain in basket-case national union NZUSA. From abusive texts, to festering realpolitik, to Don Brash, Salient editor Sam McChesney traces the story of NZUSA’s current predicament. It was 26 July, 2005. In what right-wing blogger David Farrar would slam as “the most expensive bribe since Muldoon”, Helen Clark and Trevor Mallard unveiled their flagship election promise: to remove interest from student loans for all graduates living in New Zealand. The move cost $100 million in its first year, rising to $300 million a year. From Labour’s perspective, it was worth it. The party, then in its second term in government, had unexpectedly wilted in the face of Don Brash and his Orewa Māori-bashing, and for months seemed doomed to death by racism. But to the fury of Farrar and National, Labour’s “bribe” won them the election; young people defied the demographic trend of the past two decades, voting in numbers not seen since the early eighties. The turnout for 18 to 24-year-olds that year was 76 per cent. Over the following three years, Brash would resign from Parliament over his links to the Exclusive Brethren, and National would sweep to power with the improbable support of the Māori Party. The media tactics of Brash’s successor, John Key, would themselves come under www.salient.org.nz

heavy scrutiny during the 2014 election, but National would continue to pummel a divided and ideologically rudderless Labour. To an ambitious Labour staffer named Grant Robertson, though, those events belonged to a troubling, post-Helen future. For now, Clark’s government had survived—just. Robertson was a former president of two students’ associations— the Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA) and the New Zealand University Students’ Association (NZUSA). A studentpolitics geek who wrote his 1994 Honours thesis on NZUSA (in which he criticised the reforms of his future boss, Andrew Little), Robertson had become a key member of the team assigned to developing the top-secret interest-free loans policy. Throughout this period he was in regular contact with Camilla Belich and Andrew Kirton, NZUSA’s 2005 co-Presidents, and once the policy was ready he broke the news to the pair—NZUSA’s decade of campaigning had finally paid off. After their terms ended, Belich and Kirton moved to the UK together. A few years later, they married.

“We’re not paying” Rory McCourt opened his phone to discover a stream of abuse. It was late on a Saturday night in February 2015, soon after McCourt’s election as NZUSA President, and the sweary text had been sent from Rick Zwaan’s phone. Zwaan, President of the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA)—the job McCourt held in 2013—would claim the next day that a friend had written and then accidentally sent the text, in a prank gone awry. His story looked suspiciously like a white lie designed to protect hurt feelings and a fragile working relationship; the two had previously served together on the VUWSA Executive, and they’d be seeing a lot more of each other that year. Either way, McCourt was taken aback.

Features

issue 21

“Not run by very bright people” Just a few days prior, the NZUSA conference at which McCourt was elected had been a fractious affair. McCourt needed a two-thirds majority to become President, but neither VUWSA nor its Otago counterpart, OUSA, was playing along. The two associations had recently announced their withdrawal from NZUSA—under the Constitution, they had to stay and pay fees for a further year—and neither particularly wanted to be there. OUSA wasn’t there at all— they’d dispatched a member of the VUWSA Executive, Madeleine Ashton-Martyn, in their place. In the first of OUSA’s many fuck-you gestures to NZUSA in 2015, Ashton-Martyn was under instructions to vote No Confidence no matter what. VUWSA, meanwhile, was abstaining, effectively blocking any candidate from reaching the twothirds threshold. Stung by VUWSA’s refusal to vote for him, McCourt and his supporters confronted the association’s delegates—telling them, in effect, that if they weren’t going to cast a vote they should just bugger off. They grudgingly did so, and McCourt was elected in the following round. But Zwaan soon got his own back. At VUWSA’s next Executive meeting, he told his underlings that VUWSA had been “ostracised” by other members of NZUSA, and that this could be grounds for withholding some or all of its $45,000 membership levy. By and large, the Executive jumped at the chance to save money on a service they no longer wanted. At the meeting, Zwaan also warned members of the Executive not to listen to the “manipulative” McCourt. That Saturday Zwaan got drunk, and a sweary text was sent off his work phone.

“Throwing tantrums” Over the following months, VUWSA and OUSA engaged in a drawn-out game of brinkmanship with NZUSA over their levies. Despite receiving legal advice that it was liable to keep paying until September, VUWSA only budgeted $11,250 for NZUSA levies in 2015—gambling (incorrectly, as it turned out) that McCourt would not be willing to sue over the remaining $20,000. VUWSA capitulated in late May after unrelenting pressure and legal threats from McCourt. Over the following two months, the association rewrote its budget from scratch to plug the resultant hole. OUSA, meanwhile, paid its levies for the first half of the year but refused to pay the remainder. The Executive told McCourt in July that the funds had been “reallocated”, and sent NZUSA a letter asking the association to wind up—a request McCourt described as “bizarre”. Eventually, OUSA also—sheepishly—backed down. McCourt is polished and even-tempered, an obvious politician in waiting. But when I spoke to him in July, he was downbeat and clearly furious. Accusing VUWSA and OUSA of “throwing tantrums” over their levies and describing the two associations as “completely childish”, he also expressed grave doubts over both NZUSA’s survival and the ability of students’ associations to work together. “Our student movement is dying,” he said.

How did it come to this? Last month, McCourt travelled to Hamilton to speak to the Waikato Students’ Union (WSU). The meeting was to discuss the WSU’s large (and heavily disputed) debt to NZUSA. But to McCourt, the debt was more than just a red budget line—it was what dragged him into this mess in the first place. In 2013, WSU President Aaron Letcher announced the association’s immediate withdrawal from NZUSA, and the withholding of its levies. The move prompted a wave of renewed scrutiny of NZUSA. Simmering discontent with the national body suddenly belched forth. The previous year, NZUSA had accepted polytechnic associations into the fold for the first time, rebranded to the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations, and appointed a polytech graduate, Pete Hodkinson, as its president. University associations were unhappy with Hodkinson’s performance, and at the distraction that the polytech associations were causing. “Suddenly [NZUSA] was being dominated by the polytechnics,” Letcher told me this year. “You had polytechnic associations that were not very well funded, not very well resourced, not run by very bright people, with quite shocking histories in some cases, and they required quite a lot of support to keep them afloat.” Letcher felt that far too many of NZUSA’s limited resources were being devoted to individual polytechnic associations. “There were NZUSA staff focusing on helping them negotiate contracts with their institutions and that sort of thing. We would have liked more focus on support for students nationwide. “Pete Hodkinson’s a very bright guy, don’t get me wrong, but some elements of the job he wasn’t up to,” Letcher says. “He didn’t really understand the university sector. [NZUSA] were just out of touch with what university students’ associations and their members needed at that time.” But Letcher himself was a divisive figure, a Young Nat in a sector dominated by lefties. The presidents at the three largest students’ associations—Francisco Hernandez at OUSA, Dan Haines at Auckland’s AUSA, and McCourt at VUWSA—quickly put out a joint press release calling for reforms to NZUSA but criticising Letcher for his “rash and hasty decision”. Calling themselves “the troika”, the three presidents—all Young Labour members and close friends—aimed, in Hernandez’s words, to “seize control of the reform process” away from Letcher and the WSU. The troika commanded significant influence. The three associations, along with Canterbury’s UCSA, were NZUSA’s founding members; UCSA withdrew in 2008. OUSA is NZUSA’s wealthiest member association and its second-largest by membership; AUSA is the second-wealthiest and has the highest membership; and VUWSA is third on both counts. Between them, the three associations contribute $145,000 in NZUSA membership levies. NZUSA’s income from levies in 2013 was $201,000, and its total income was $381,191. Losing one, two, or—whisper it—all three members would have been—and still would be—a crippling blow to both its finances and mandate. editor@salient.org.nz

Features

At the centre of the troika’s concerns was NZUSA’s limp campaigning. Students—particularly postgrads—continued to suffer from deep funding cuts, and Hodkinson was criticised for weighing in on issues—such as asset sales and the retirement age—that had no relevance to students. Earlier that year, Hodkinson’s “Big Questions Tour” had largely involved the president lugging his guitar around the country and holding esoteric meditation-come-jam-sessions with other student politicians.

salient

Pressure from Hernandez’s Executive, and a petition organised by Victoria student (and Young Nat) Nick Cross, forced the pair to call unwanted referenda on OUSA and VUWSA’s membership.

“The irreplaceable thing about NZUSA is a national student voice,” Haines told me at the time. “If we’re not doing campaigns, then we’re just like a service provider or providing cheap deals, and that’s so far removed from why NZUSA exists that we should just let it fall over.”

In response, McCourt and Hernandez drafted referendum questions that were clearly leading, foregrounding the pair’s desire to stay and reform NZUSA. In VUWSA’s referendum (“That VUWSA stay in NZUSA”), the two options were “No” and “Yes, but only with reforms”. Meanwhile, OUSA’s referendum asked “Should OUSA continue its membership of NZUSA if it [NZUSA] implements reforms that enhance its campaigning capacity?” At the end of the year, both associations voted by comfortable margins to stay. But the fuse had been lit.

For all their tough talk, the troika were NZUSA supporters and wanted their associations to stay members. But by going public, Hernandez and McCourt inadvertently sparked calls to withdraw.

The following year brought new presidents. Sonya Clark was that rare thing—a VUWSA President who wasn’t a member of Young Labour. Nor did she feel any particular loyalty to NZUSA, which,

2013 NZUSA referenda

OU SA

Yes, but only with reforms

(20

13 )

UC SA

(20

)

14%

)

WS A(

25000 21,100 20000 14,800

14,000

10000 Yes

5000 0

www.salient.org.nz

27,000

15000

86%

(20

Membership

30000

Should OUSA continue its membership of NZUSA if it implements reforms that enhance its campaigning capacity?

$1,076,143

$1,616,233

63%

~ $4,500,000

37%

$4,350,795

$ / Million

That VUWSA stay in NZUSA

Income (excl. business interests) 5

OUSA

UCSA

AUSA

VUWSA

)

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in an election year, had once again failed to pull up any trees. In September 2014, Clark and her Executive abruptly decided to withdraw, exploiting the ambiguous wording of the previous year’s referendum. “Students gave us the mandate to stay if there were significant reforms,” Clark said. “There haven’t been.” Two months later, OUSA followed suit. And WSU? The association has continued to withhold most of its levies, its (alleged) debt hitting $60,000 at the end of last year. Meanwhile, NZUSA has refused to recognise WSU’s withdrawal and, despite all evidence to the contrary, still considers it a member. Hodkinson, for his part, now does stand-up comedy. He probably has a lot of material.

Mutinies and machinations When Hernandez and McCourt drafted their referenda in 2013, they had another motivation in mind. Both, as it turns out, wanted to be NZUSA President. Was this why the questions were so leading? Hernandez—always the more blithe and self-deprecating of the pair—now openly admits that he had a conflict of interest, while McCourt strenuously denies it. Whatever the reasons, the pair—having secured their associations’ membership—were both presidential candidates at the NZUSA Special General Meeting in November 2013, along with Haines. The troika were about to face off. The realpolitik and emotional manipulation that has come to mark the annual NZUSA SGM is often the most visible and least palatable aspect of the organisation. The SGM usually takes place during the summer holidays when students are disengaged. It’s also poorly advertised, attended only by insiders and wannabes. Stripped of any visible signs of accountability—student media, actual students, non-reptilian organisms—participants indulge their most childish and Machiavellian impulses; all of which, of course, is immediately leaked to the press anyway.

McCourt’s duplicity, and startled by Hernandez’s cartoonish persona and constant Game of Thrones references, the other associations fled to the safer, blander Haines. Hernandez was devastated at the betrayal—the delegates were his colleagues and friends—while the OUSA Executive was furious, fining two of the delegates (who had been under instruction to vote for Hernandez) after an hour-long dressing-down. The troika have remained good friends, but the affair earned McCourt a reputation in student politics circles for underhanded tactics.

“The solutions are a bit more difficult now” This isn’t the first time NZUSA has faced a mass revolt from its members. “When I was involved in NZUSA and OUSA in the late 80s, NZUSA had half its members threaten to withdraw,” David Farrar recalls. Farrar was co-President of the Otago Commerce Students’ Association, and served as an Otago delegate to NZUSA on a number of occasions. “NZUSA back then makes NZUSA today look incredibly competent, well-managed and efficient,” Farrar says. “They had I think seven vice-presidents and seven research officers, so there were fourteen, fifteen people on the full-time payroll. They had a vice-president for everything, like international affairs. I think there was one education vice-president, and that was it—there was one out of fifteen for education issues! And in ‘86, ‘87 there was a huge restructuring.”

In 2012, Hodkinson marked the end of an entirely unremarkable year as President by running for re-election. Though he was running unopposed, he failed to gain election after the first round of voting— meaning that more than a third of all delegates had voted No Confidence. Hodkinson cried at the result, and in the second round enough delegates switched their votes to push him over the threshold.

But this time, the situation is different. “This is the third time I’ve seen NZUSA have a significant number of associations say they’re leaving,” Farrar says. “But the solutions are a bit more difficult now.” Whereas in the past members would use the threat of withdrawal to force a bloated NZUSA to sharpen up, there are now associations that literally can’t afford to keep paying, and NZUSA’s revenue and overheads are lower than ever. On paper the association makes a surplus of around $50,000 a year, but this is swallowed up by members reneging on their levies. Now the existential threat is real, and the culprit is Voluntary Student Membership. Fuck; it’s time to go even deeper down the rabbit hole.

In 2014 only one person ran—a protest candidate—who lost to No Confidence. The failure to elect a president led to the re-run in early 2015, when McCourt was elected among the aforementioned scenes of bitchiness. But 2013 was even more farcical.

“A training ground for future Labour MPs”

After the first round of voting, Hernandez was leading but fell short of the two-thirds threshold. In the second round, after which the bottom-ranked candidate would be eliminated, McCourt engineered a mutiny by three of OUSA’s four delegates, convincing them— behind Hernandez’s back—to switch their votes. How he pulled this off is unclear—“I had the most compelling vision, and I had their confidence,” McCourt told me unctuously; whereas the three told Hernandez that it was a tactical move designed to eliminate Haines and force a runoff between Hernandez and McCourt. Others present believe McCourt had simply bad-mouthed Hernandez, casting aspersions on his friend’s ability to lead. Either way it backfired spectacularly. McCourt was eliminated in the second round despite the extra votes. In the third, confused by the vote-switching affair, suspicious of

Old timers can skip ahead

On 13 October 2008, I and hundreds of others poured into Union Hall at Otago University to hear Helen Clark speak. By then the Fifth Labour Government was rag-tag and spent. Clark was doing the university tour, a final attempt to drum up support in the face of John Key’s slick, resurgent National, and in Dunedin she delivered another timely bribe—a promise to restore universal student allowances. Though we cheered, deep down we all saw the desperate gambit for what it was. Universal allowances didn’t even make social-democratic sense—it was a policy that would only benefit the middle class— and besides, if the poll results were anything to go by, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Sure enough, within a month Labour was defeated, the National dog had a new ACT-shaped tail, and the 18–24 vote had plummeted to 60.1 per cent. editor@salient.org.nz

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David Farrar puts a slightly different spin on it. To him, it stood to reason that National wouldn’t help out a group that neither lobbied helpfully, nor was truly representative of its membership base. After all, why would they?

Voter turnout 18-24 years (as percentage of eligible voters)

Turnout

“As with almost any public sector lobby group, NZUSA always tends to lean left of centre, calling for higher taxes and more spending, and you expect that,” he says. “That’s not a particularly big issue. But the perception is that they are just anti the National Party, regardless of what the National Party does… and that they are just there to attack us and get headlines.

70 60 50 40

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199

200

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5 2008 2011 2014

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Unlike interest-free loans, NZUSA had little involvement with Labour’s universal allowances policy. Instead, they were busy attacking Labour from hard-left positions, calling ad nauseum for “free, publicly funded tertiary education”. So it was little surprise that the association quickly alienated itself from the new National government. National made one early overture to students, providing a 10 per cent subsidy on all voluntary loan repayments over $500. But NZUSA attacked the proposal on the grounds that it would benefit wealthy students more than poor students. According to Farrar, a National Party member and sometime employee, the reaction pissed National right off. “You expect lobby groups to have a great wallop at you when you don’t give them money, or when you do stuff that they think is hostile,” Farrar says. “But when the Government comes out and says, ‘hey, make a voluntary repayment and we’ll knock ten per cent off ’, and the national union of students comes out attacking it, that just signifies that you guys don’t want any relationship with us, you’re full of Labour and Green Party politicians who just want to change the government. I thought that was a huge error and something that quite badly tarnished the relationship.” Soon after, in late 2009, Heather Roy’s bill to make all students’ associations voluntary was drawn from the private members’ ballot. At that point, students’ associations earned most of their revenue through compulsory membership fees set by members. The bill, titled the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill but popularly known as Voluntary Student Membership (VSM), posed a direct threat to that funding by banning the ability to extract compulsory membership fees. It soon became clear that National supported the bill, and those on the left had no doubts why. “There’s certainly a perception among the National Party that NZUSA, along with the TEU and virtually every other union, is against them,” Grant Robertson says. By 2009 Robertson was an MP, and was one of VSM’s most vocal opponents in Parliament. “Don’t mistake, one of the big reasons for the National Party accepting the ACT VSM stuff was they wanted to undermine students’ associations. They didn’t like people who held them to account, who criticised them.” www.salient.org.nz

“When people see the Labour front bench dominated by people who were NZUSA alumni, including the leader, the finance person, the chief whip, education spokesman, it’s not surprising that people at National tend to think of it as a training ground for future Labour MPs.” VSM passed in September 2011. Most associations removed membership fees in an attempt to retain members, and signed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their universities. Under these SLAs, students’ associations were contracted to provide the same, or similar, services that they had provided pre-VSM. But in most cases, the funding was drastically diminished. VUWSA lost around threequarters of its revenue, and WSU about two-thirds. With many associations no longer able to afford their levies, the national body lost $160,000 in revenue.

“A discussion” Throughout 2015, VUWSA and OUSA both insisted they wanted “a discussion” about the future of the national student voice, but the organisations have been accused of failing to offer any serious alternatives. OUSA has been especially waffling. Having threatened withdrawal at various points since 2010, each new president has had a different approach and a different opinion on how best to fix the national union. In 2010, under Harriet Geoghegan, OUSA withdrew its full membership to become an “associate” member. In 2011, under Logan Edgar, OUSA cancelled its withdrawal after NZUSA increased its funding of Te Mana Ākonga, the national Māori students’ association. In 2013, under Hernandez, OUSA put the matter to a referendum; and in 2014, under Ruby Sycamore-Smith, OUSA decided to ignore the referendum result and withdraw anyway. When the 2015 President, Paul Hunt, complained this year that NZUSA doesn’t intuitively understand what OUSA wants and needs, it raised the question whether anyone does. For his part, Hunt wants NZUSA to adopt “a federal model” comprising the presidents from each member association—a change that already took place last year. But maybe we shouldn’t be looking for the logic in it. The reality is that for student politicians frustrated by the ever-increasing financial pressure that both students and students’ associations face, NZUSA has been a convenient whipping boy. After all, who doesn’t feel that students simply should have more political influence, that if NZUSA were doing its job properly we wouldn’t be so loaded with debt and relegated to the political margins? Our parents got their degrees pretty much for free. Now they’re about to start cashing their superannuation checks, and we’ll be the ones paying for it. Where are our handouts? Why is nobody winning our battles for us? Why is NZUSA so fucking useless?

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“Students should thank Don Brash” And what of that great victory, interest free loans? How does NZUSA recapture its 2005 mojo?

“Paul is living in fantasyland” NZUSA works out of a cluttered office on Lambton Quay, which it shares with media outlet Scoop. Hundreds of ring binders and file boxes line the shelves, and a hand-painted banner emblazoned “Stay in NZUSA”—destined for the Victoria Hub—is draped over a table. The office houses McCourt, NZUSA Executive Director Alistair Shaw, an NZUSA intern, and the heads of Tertiary Women New Zealand (TWNZ) and Te Mana Ākonga. TWNZ is fully funded by NZUSA, and Te Mana Ākonga by both NZUSA and its ten member roopu; with NZUSA teetering on the brink, both face uncertain futures. McCourt runs through his, and Haines’, list of achievements. They’re not insubstantial; across the political spectrum, most agree that McCourt has done a solid job. This year saw the culmination of a long-term project between NZUSA and the Government that massively reduced Studylink waiting times and reduced the number of dropped calls by over 99 per cent. After years of campaigning— albeit by associations around the country as well as NZUSA—the Government has indicated it will introduce minimum rental property standards. Last year, swathes of Labour and NZ First tertiary education policy were lifted from NZUSA, and NZUSA’s “First in Whānau” policy was adopted by the Māori Party. Next year, the Ministry of Social Development will partner with TWNZ to run consent education during Orientation. But to many associations, these small wins—especially after the prolonged fallow period and backward steps of the past few years— aren’t enough. When I asked Hunt what NZUSA would have to do to prove its value to OUSA, he demanded a reduction in tuition fees and an unfreezing of the allowances and living costs cap. McCourt does little to hide his contempt for such a position. “We’re not the Government,” he says. “I’m not responsible for Steven Joyce’s decisions. The Government has a policy to reduce the cost of the loans and allowances scheme. To reverse that we’re going to have to make a very strong case and campaign over a number of years.” On Hunt himself, McCourt is scathing. “I think Paul is living in fantasyland if he thinks we’re going to change the Government’s entire approach to tertiary education overnight without doing anything,” he says. “That’s the rub—that Paul wants to do nothing, sit around and criticise. It’s not good enough, he should get active and get off his arse.” Hunt’s demands, unrealistic as they are, do point to a wider problem— that NZUSA has no long-term plan, no measurable targets or key performance indicators. And nobody seems that interested in writing them. McCourt, for one, is an activist at heart, and allergic to any notion that NZUSA should be results-driven. Instead he’s focusing his efforts on the “one big campaign” he promised when he was elected, which, he’s now decided, will be for “a debt free future”. All of which sounds like the polarising, hopelessly idealistic NZUSA of the pre-VSM years—but McCourt, pointing to the explosion of support for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US, argues there is now a genuine appetite for radical, youth-oriented politics.

“Of course we like to mythologise interest free loans as a win by NZUSA,” McCourt says. “But we happened to have a former president in the Prime Minister’s office and a sympathetic government looking for a third term. It’s not a direct relationship with the success or not of NZUSA.” As David Farrar puts it, students “should thank Don Brash, for making it such a close election.” Where NZUSA deserves credit, McCourt believes, is in keeping interest free loans on the political agenda. Interest free loans happened because NZUSA had been campaigning on the issue for the past decade, putting the issue at the front of Labour’s mind when it came to tertiary education matters. “Helen Clark credited NZUSA with having been a consistent advocate of making tertiary education more affordable,” Grant Robertson says. “Their ongoing campaign was a factor in the fact the issue stayed in the minds of the public and the politicians. Bear in mind that’s 2005, and student loans with interest were [introduced in] 1992, so you’re talking about a 13-year period in which that was a significant campaign that NZUSA ran. So it’s not something that got delivered to students instantly.” Robertson, Labour’s education spokesperson David Cunliffe, and Cunliffe’s counterparts Tracey Martin (New Zealand First) and Gareth Hughes (Green), all agree on one thing: effective lobbying takes time. They argue that the demand by student presidents for quick fixes and immediate results is both shortsighted and naive. “We know that at some stage there’s going to be a change in government,” Martin told me. “John Key can’t last forever.” Like McCourt, Martin is scathing about what she sees as Zwaan and Hunt’s short-termism. “Rick and Paul don’t understand the long-term implications of what they’re doing,” she says. “If NZUSA falls over we’d have major concerns around the student voice with regard to its ability to speak to Parliament. It’s Parliament they need to speak to, not just government.” But Martin also delivered a thinly veiled threat. “Labour will notice and [New Zealand First] will notice if students’ associations decide not to speak to us when we’re in opposition. Do they think we won’t notice that? At some stage one of us will be a place of influence, do you think we won’t remember?” Um… fuck you? To all the Victoria students out there: next week’s referendum is about your movement, your money, your future. You’re not obliged to chuck away lucre to make some MP’s job marginally easier. Nor are you obliged to cast aside an 86-year-old institution purely because your local association can’t, or rather won’t, keep its books in order. Clearly, NZUSA is not in a good place. It arrived here by a mixture of poor luck, naiveté, arrogance, and ineptitude—sometimes its own, and other times visited upon it. Whether it can get out again—that’s for you to decide. editor@salient.org.nz

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ANTS AND THE ART OF LAND ROVER MAINTENANCE INTERVIEWS WITH ECOLOGISTS, BY GUS MITCHEL Back when I was a university fledgling and still living out of the family nest in Ngaio, my adaptation to student life was eased by one of the biology lecturers at Vic moving in next door. At their housewarming, I was introduced to a number of his co-workers and my potential future lecturers. At the time, they were only known to me by the animal they studied—“the deer guy”, “the rhino guy”, “the tropical fish guy” and so forth, like some zoological Justice League. Four years of biology study and a Salient gig later, I decided to ask “what are their stories?”, as well as learn their actual names.

Heiko Wittmer (Conservation and Restoration Ecology) “The Deer Guy” What’s your area of research, and where have you travelled to carry it out?

I’m interested in trying to understand population dynamics, so basically I’m trying to look at what determines population size of these species (deer and puma). Because of my research, I realised that predation can have a very big impact on these guys—I ended up www.salient.org.nz

studying both predators and prey populations. So I study deer, caribou, that sort of stuff, simultaneously with their most important predators. Because I focus on ungulates, I’ve worked mostly in North America and South America. The predator that I’m mostly interested in is pumas. They’re distributed all the way up from Alaska all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, the widest distribution of any terrestrial predator.

Where did you live while doing field work, and what was the day-to-day experience like?

I have another research program that is in Borneo. I work with a colleague of mine to look at understanding the distribution of a variety of species with respect to differences in habitat productivity. There’s a few ungulates in that system, like mouse

issue 21

deer, and there’s also predators in there like clouded leopard. In June, I went there for three weeks to do field work again. We fly to Jakarta, which is all good, but then you end up on much smaller planes to try and find your way to Borneo, and then we just stay in a very little town called Ketapung, and we end up in these areas to sort out all the things like permits. The study area is only about an hour’s drive away from Ketapung, but once we get dropped by taxi, we have to hike 20 kilometres with all our luggage for two or three weeks into our study site. My colleague, Andy Marshall from the University of Michigan, he’s built a field station there, but as it tends to get a bit crowded with all the research assistants, I end up mostly pitching a tent close by. [It’s a] very remote area—you have to hike in quite a bit, but because it’s a third world country, the costs for people working for you are very low and so we have maybe six or seven field assistants working for us, helping with data collection, and they’re all locals. We have a field manager there that we pay. We have a cook, who prepares food for everyone, and there’s a porter every second day who comes and bring fresh vegetables. And that for us is really neat because it takes away all the organisation of what we need on a dayto-day level to get organised. What we can then do is go into the field and completely focus on getting field work done. I really like that set-up. What was the most interesting thing you learned about life in Borneo?

Borneo is the best example, because what it made me realise was that everywhere you go, you will see the majority of people being kids and young adults. We end up having one or two kids most of the time, and then you go there and you see some really large families with lots and lots of kids, and so you start realising that it’s continuing to be an issue. Populations are just growing at very fast rates. And then of course from a conservation perspective, you start to realise that every single person there, they want the same standard of living that we already have. The kids, they run around in Chelsea shirts, the big soccer clubs, and the reality is they just want the exact same lifestyle that they do. And then, of course, with an increase in population, puts pressure on the natural resources, and that’s why they end up logging rainforests and developing palm oil plantations because you can make more money off them, and that makes a lot of sense, from that perspective. And yet, my own work there, it focuses on

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trying to maintain these pristine rainforests because that’s where we see these species that we’re interested in such as orangs or gibbons, and they can’t live in a palm oil plantation. And so for me, travelling there has given me a new perspective of conservation. A top down approach that is suggested by Westerners as a one-size-fits-all solution to loss of biodiversity doesn’t work in countries like that, simply because there’s such a bottomup demand for resources that they just can’t afford to set aside national parks. That has virtually no income for them, because it doesn’t help them to actually improve their standard of living. So that is one of the most interesting social experiences I’ve had there. And it enforces, to Andy Marshall and myself, how important it is to hire these locals into our field camps because that is the only source of revenue that we bring back, our research, into the community. We’re helping them have a way of making a living. What was the most interesting thing you learned in your field work?

I always viewed predator-prey interactions as simply having to understand the predator side of things and the prey side of things. And through the research in North America, for example, we learnt that we’d been missing one really important determinant of these interactions, and that is scavenging. So basically a lot of our research has shown that bears, black bears in our case, they find these kill sites of puma, so where a puma has killed a deer and eats from that deer once or twice, and then that is being found by a bear and completely eats the entire carcass over a short period of time. So all of a sudden, a puma needs to go hunting much more often because it cannot defend the deer it killed against such a big scavenger like a bear, so what I found really interesting about that was that it’s not enough to understand pumas killing deer, you actually need to understand how that kill rate also depends on other species that might come to those carcasses and steal energy from the puma, forcing him to kill more often. And actually that understanding, I think, has profound implications for both conservation and management, because I think most studies in the past may have underestimated the number of deer that puma might have to kill over an entire year. Is there anything that we as humans could learn from deer/puma/predatorprey relations?

Maybe just that the upper limit of populations are being set by the natural

resources available, as well as limiting factors like predation. There is going to be some form of an upper limit of a population size that can be supported, and we are currently still increasing exponentially, even though clearly resources are already an issue for half of the human population. What I sometimes take away from it is, when I study animal populations, that we have such a clear understanding of the upper limits of population sizes, and yet we refuse to accept the same is actually true for humans as well. We’re just completely ignorant. Have you committed any #fieldworkfails?

My students in California would regularly stumble onto marijuana plantations while monitoring our deer and pumas. It’s quite common to grow pot on federal lands (such as National Forests) and plantations range from very small with just a few plants, to some with as many as 100,000 plants that are even guarded to prevent theft. The plantations are often watered using sophisticated hydroponic systems. So the rule was that if students came across a hydroponic system, they would lift it and if it was full of water (in use), they had to turn around. The same rule applied to running into actual plantations. Just turn around and leave.

What is a #fieldworkfail? To scientists, Twitter is not just a sound heard in the forest. Over the last few months, field researchers, conservation workers and other biologists working out in the wilds have been sharing their mishaps and mistakes through the hashtag #fieldworkfail. Here are a few of my favourites: • •

• • •

“Accidentally glued myself to a crocodile while attaching a radio transmitter” “Butterflies that failed to show up for my elaborate experiment flew by my window while I was doing dishes at home” “Discovering secret granola stash in field station—realising later ‘flax seeds’ actually weevils” “Accidentally pee on a jaguar’s marked tree. Get chased by the jaguar for three weeks” “Set padded leghold trap near house for jackal. Caught lion”

editor@salient.org.nz

Features

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Wayne Linklater (Wildlife Biology & Human Dimensions Ecology) “THE RHINO GUY” What kind of research do you do and where have you travelled to do it?

I have a program working with large mammals in Asia and Africa, and most of that work is with rhinoceros and elephant. Most of that work is conducted with PhD candidates doing their degrees, or with natural resource agencies in those places who have datasets that they’d like interrogated. The other thing I do is pursue an interest in human dimensions ecology. That’s really the sort of ecology where we ask questions about ecosystems where people are regarded as central and part of those ecosystems and not separate. You talked about interviewing researchers working in “the wild”, but that theme very much sees ecologists and people as separate from “the wild”; there’s a dichotomy. Human dimension ecology tries to reverse that. It regards people as a part of the ecosystem and tries to understand the relationship between people and ecology. It asks questions about the degree to which people depend upon nature, and the degree to which people have to have a relationship with nature. Studies like trying to establish the role of urban greenery in people’s mental health, for example. Using one example of a place you travelled to do field work, where did you live while you were doing field work there, and what was the experience like living there day-to-day?

I can give you a couple of examples but the one that’s more interesting to you is field work in southern Africa with black rhinoceros translocation. So the objective was to make use of a current conservation translocation strategy, capturing animals from some reserves and putting them in new reserves. Reintroductions, we call them. So in that field work, my sights were distributed from northern Namibia down www.salient.org.nz

to the southeast of South Africa, so over a couple thousand miles, and I pretty much lived out of a Land Rover and a tent while we cruised around these 12 different sites, being present for capture and relocation and release and then post-release monitoring for a year afterwards. So an extraordinary amount of travelling over that continent and some very basic living out of a tent and a Land Rover. What was the most interesting thing you learned about life in southern Africa?

The most interesting thing? Life is pretty fragile. Coming from New Zealand, I’ve found southern Africa a very inhospitable place, for two reasons. First of all, New Zealand’s environment is actually pretty benign. We complain about our weather, and it’s true we have a very changeable oceanic climate and some foreign visitors who go into our outback find that dangerous and challenging, but compared to other places in the world, New Zealand is a very benign environment. We don’t have large predators, our forests are relatively easy to get around, they don’t have very many plants with thorns, we don’t have very many poisonous animals. Compared to southern Africa, this is a really easy place to work and environment to work in, bar a little horizontal rain sometimes. But the other thing is the social environment in New Zealand is very easy to work in, by comparison. Working in southern Africa, there’s an extraordinary crime rate. Either that or you’re incredibly isolated. It’s actually quite difficult in New Zealand to get well and truly isolated. And anywhere in New Zealand, you’re never really all that far from other people. But there are some places in southern Africa that are very remote. So both socially and environmentally I found it a much more difficult environment to work in. What was the most interesting thing you have had to learn during your field work?

Professionally, I learned that we could improve rhino survival after release very quickly by following some basic rules about the choices of rhino that government agencies make when capturing rhino for release. So we were able to make some quite major improvements in post-release success. Personally, I learned how difficult work can be in Africa, and I guess I met my tolerance for it there. Everyone has to discover their limits, and I definitely discovered my limits in southern Africa. I was doing long extended periods of fieldwork at the same time as maintaining professional and personal relationships in North America and New Zealand, and that was just incredibly demanding. What can we as humans learn from rhinos?

I guess I go back to where we started, life is pretty fragile. Rhino and many other species are very, very close to extinction, and there’s no certainty that my children or my grandchildren will see rhino, and I think we could learn a great deal from that. Have you committed any #fieldworkfails?

Choosing the wrong tyres for my Land Rover when I first bought it. It meant that, for example, in one trip across northwestern Namibia in one day, a trip that was just meant to take me the whole day, took me three days ‘cause I went through tyres on the really hard, sharp rocky ground. And that was a really debilitating day, so I learnt a lot about tyre suitability that day.

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Phil Lester (Insect Ecology) “THE ANT GUY” What does your research group do and where have you travelled?

What was the most interesting thing you learnt about life in Tokelau?

We work on social insects and primarily invasive social insects, like invasive ants and wasps. We’ve travelled a lot in the Pacific, like Tokelau, Samoa. I’ve got a PhD student in Northern Australia, we’ve got people going to Argentina and Chile, I’ve got another PhD student in Belgium, so we get to travel a chunk.

The travel between different islands of Tokelau is family-owned, you need permission to go places. It’s a very religious community—no work on Sundays, so you go to church. It’s an amazing experience to go to their church, lots of singing, but VERY hot. I’ve just about died of heatstroke a couple times just standing in church. You’re not used it, especially coming from Wellington.

Using one example of a place you travelled to do field work, where did you live while you were doing field work there, and what was the experience like living there day-to-day?

Probably the most interesting one would be Tokelau. You fly up to Samoa, then from Samoa you get on a boat and travel to Tokelau, a little atoll nation. There’s only about 1000–2000 people on the island itself, it’s very a small place, so going there by boat is interesting on its own. You all pile on a boat, and you take a mattress with you (hopefully). You get a mattress-sized piece of floor there and that’s where you are for the next two to three days. So you lie there, and then three times a day a bowl of food will be passed around. And personally, I get really get really seasick, so I don’t eat much anyway. It used to be my annual weight-loss plan to go to Tokelau and vomit for days on end! [laughs] When you get there, there’s one hotel you can stay at on one of the atolls, but in the other ones they have houses that they keep for visitors, so you go and stay there and you’ll share food with a family. Sometimes you’ll stay with a family or some separate level of their house.

What was the most interesting thing your team found in your field work?

We’ve done lots of genetics, we look at how these ant holes in these countries have a resident population of invasive species. But then there’ll be new invasions, new strains moving into these areas and that new strain can just explode, massive populations of these ants, so much that in Tokelau, when we were there, people couldn’t sleep because you’d go to bed at night and just have ants crawling over you. They keep people awake, babies crying, livestock getting acid sprayed in their eyes. We don’t know how lucky we are in New Zealand not to have large numbers of ants like they do, where it’s a massive problem. But over time those populations might die down too. Last time there was a big tidal wave and wiped out whole populations, or they may have died down themselves from pathogens or something. We’re trying to figure that out. What can we as humans learn from ants?

Well, we as humans think we’re pretty smart, but well before we started using antibiotics,

ants were using antibiotics. Leaf-cutting ants (a species found in the Amazon that are seen carrying bits of leaves) don’t eat those leaves directly, they take them underground and culture fungus on them. The fungus grows and then they harvest the fungus. What those ants do is produce an antibiotic to keep other species of fungus out, so they’re only culturing one specific strain of fungus in the chambers in their nests. So they’re farming it, and they’re applying pesticide and herbicides, essentially, to that “crop” to stop weeds growing in it. Somehow, those ants have managed to stop resistance development (in the fungus) to those chemicals. For us humans, we’ll go along and go “Hey, we’ve got a new pesticide to control this pest”, but after a few years there’s a resistance developed by the pest and it’s no longer effective. These ants have somehow managed to control that, they’ve managed to stop development of resistance to their defences. For millions of years, they’ve managed to do this. They’re just incredible little things. Have you committed any #fieldworkfails?

I don’t think we’ve done anything like that. One of my PhD students was in Argentina just a couple months ago when the volcano went off, so their whole research trip was obliterated by a volcano. But in terms of human error, I don’t think we’ve done anything that stupid that I’m willing to admit or that I can think of right now. We’re really competent, or at least that’s the image we’d like to present.

editor@salient.org.nz

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When Plato Met Frank Herbert

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issue 21

When Plato Met Frank Herbert Obadiah McDingleberry

In 2024, the private enterprise Mars One is scheduled to land on the red planet. In 2026, the Sagrada Família will be finished. By 2050, half of the Amazon rainforest will have been wiped out. In 2640, the Halberstadt performance of John Cage’s musical piece “Organ2/ ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)”, which began in 2001, will finish. On New Year’s Eve 2999, Futurama’s Philip Fry awakens from cryogenesis. By 3117, humanity could have made the six-light-year trip to Barnard’s Star, our closest neighbour. By 5200, we will become a Type II civilisation, capable of harnessing energy levels equivalent to the total output of the Sun. In 50,000 years’ time, the average global temperature on Earth will drop by around 6°C. In a million years, Betelgeuse will explode. In 50 million years, Africa will collide with Eurasia and turn the Mediterranean into a mountain range. In 800 million years, carbon dioxide levels on Earth will drop to a point where photosynthesis becomes impossible; oxygen and ozone will leave the atmosphere and multicellular life will die out. In 2.8 billion years, Earth will have lost its magnetic field and atmosphere, and the average surface temperature will reach 147°C. In 7.9 billion years, the Earth will fall into the Sun and be destroyed. In 450 billion years, the 50 or so galaxies in the Local Group will have coalesced into a single, giant galaxy. In 100 trillion years, the universe will run out of free hydrogen and no new stars will be formed. Around that time, give or take a few dozen trillion years, you may have finished exploring No Man’s Sky. No Man’s Sky, an upcoming video game from indie developer Hello Games, is vast. In fact, “vast” doesn’t do justice to it; any description invokes the kind of numbers that, when they don’t bring on a sense of crushing nihilistic ennui, are literally incomprehensible. Try this: the Milky Way contains an estimated ten trillion planets. No Man’s Sky— with eighteen quintillion, four hundred and forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred and forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred and nine million, five hundred and fifty-one thousand, six hundred and sixteen of them—is two million times the size. You can land on and traverse every planet—many are Earth-sized, or bigger—and interact with an infinite variety of flora and fauna. We will never see it all, ever.

The answer is procedural generation. Procedural generation rests on a logic of which Bishop Berkeley would be proud: the game’s universe is only called into being when there is someone around to observe it. The universe doesn’t exist as an immanent backdrop; rather, the game gives the player’s PC or console highly detailed instructions about how to construct any given corner of the universe on the fly. If a tree falls in No Man’s Sky and nobody is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound because, unless somebody is there, the tree doesn’t even exist. The game is able to be stored on such a small space because its content is produced almost entirely through code. For centuries, mathematicians have been discovering algorithms that closely model natural phenomena: terrain, musculature, bones. By drawing on these algorithms, and plugging them into the game’s code, developers can create rules that, in effect, act as laws of nature within a game’s virtual universe. For instance, Hello Games made extensive use of the “Superformula”, an algorithm discovered by plant geneticist Johan Gielis in 2003. The algorithm can describe a large range of natural forms including starfish, spiderwebs, diatoms, shells, snowflakes, and crystals. Where big-budget, or “triple-A” games would manually create each of these elements and store them in gigabytes’ worth of files, No Man’s Sky does it all through a few thousand lines of code. Hello Games made the rules that govern the universe, but that’s where it ends—many of the universe’s details remain, and will always remain, unknown to them. Who said God had to be omniscient? In a procedurally generated game, the content is created by the hardware running a series of calculations. What you see in the game is the “solution” to those calculations. To get these solutions, the hardware requires seed numbers—raw inputs that plug into the formula. For instance, for a basic equation x + y = z, the game can only determine the value of z if it is provided with values for x and y. Traditionally, this process is random; the game’s software includes a random number generator that creates the seed numbers that go into the equations. After all, the theory goes, if the developer has to manually generate every seed number, the game once again becomes finite.

We are very small. And No Man’s Sky is very, very big. Yet graphically, the game isn’t some poorly-rendered zeroes-andones cop out. From the trailers and gameplay demos, No Man’s Sky— featuring the bright, utopian palette of 1950s sci-fi book covers—is totally immersive and absolutely gorgeous. If you took just one twomegabyte high-res photo of the surface of each planet, and stored all the photos on DNA (the most efficient storage medium known to humanity), you would need some 77 million metric tonnes of the stuff—a small lake’s worth. Yet No Man’s Sky is set to be released on a single disc, and will be playable on a Playstation 4 or gaming PC. How the hell is this even possible?

Random terrain generated through the “diamond-square” algorithm. editor@salient.org.nz

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For Sean Murray, co-founder of Hello Games, this posed a problem. His vision for No Man’s Sky—which he had held since he was a child playing Elite on his father’s Commodore 64—was of a gigantic, shared universe. Although encounters between players are extremely rare, an essential part of the game experience is that life is out there somewhere—players can come across already-discovered planets, find information left behind by other players, and, every now and then, they may just come across another human. For this to happen, every player needs to inhabit the same, identical universe. But if the seed numbers are random, this vision would be impossible—no one player’s universe would be the same. Instead, every seed number in No Man’s Sky is itself procedurally generated. For one thing, many of the seed numbers are created through algorithms based on real-world physics. “We create algorithms that decide if, for instance, a planet is the right distance from its sun,” Murray told GameSpot. “If it is then, it would have water, and so we generate water on the planet, and that creates rivers, and lakes, and oceans. But then it also creates moisture in the atmosphere, and that will affect the colour of the sky, because the wavelength of light is being diffracted in different ways to create different colours, just like in our world.” Indeed, the skylines are beautifully diverse: bright reds, pale yellows, deep, inky purples. The detailed physics also lead to the creation of complex ecosystems. For instance, many modern open-world games feature “day-night cycles”—the sun rises and sets in a realistic fashion, creating striking variations in lighting and mood. In No Man’s Sky, day-night cycles are controlled not by an in-game timer, but by a planet’s literal rotation in space relative to its sun. At night, nocturnal species of animal emerge, and these animals look and behave differently to their diurnal counterparts. Planetary rotation has other effects: a player might leave a space station, say, descend to a planet’s surface, and then ascend some time later to find that the space station is no longer www.salient.org.nz

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where it was—the planet’s rotation has changed the station’s position relative to the planet’s surface. For any factors not governed by these rules, No Man’s Sky uses arbitrary (as opposed to random) seed numbers derived from the planet’s coordinates within the universe. Meanwhile, the planet’s coordinates are themselves created by one super-seed number—the phone number of a Hello Games employee. The upshot is that the procedural generation is completely deterministic—not random. Every player’s universe is generated in the exact same way—meaning that every player’s universe is identical, and therefore able to be shared and inhabited simultaneously. Large open-world games usually require huge teams—Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, was created by over a thousand people, and cost a quarter of a billion dollars. But Hello Games is a small team of about a dozen, best known for mobile games like Joe Danger. Murray wrote the basic engine for No Man’s Sky himself in secret, part-time, over the course of a year. When the engine was complete, he brought three more colleagues on board; the four worked in a separate room, hidden from the other programmers behind a two-way mirror. The secrecy was motivated by a fear of failure, and the four kept their colleagues as out of the loop as possible. “When people from the rest of the team asked, ‘Really Sean, you really need to give us something on what this game’s about,’ I’d say, ‘I was really into sci-fi, and you never feel like you’ve ever been an astronaut in a game before, so that’s one idea I’m thinking about’,” Murray told Game Informer. “I think probably what people—if they had to guess—would picture is some kind of cute little astronaut dude running around. That probably made things even worse.” The rest of Hello Games only saw the game a few days before its unveiling at the 2013 VGX Awards.

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By that point, a small number of gaming journalists had been invited to view previews and demos of the game. They did so in silence. Later, when Murray pressed them for a reaction, they expressed skepticism—they doubted the game was, or could be, all the developers claimed. Those doubts were buried after the game’s debut at VGX—No Man’s Sky quickly became one of the most anticipated games of the past decade. But in many quarters, the doubts persist. From the little we’ve been able to glean about the gameplay, No Man’s Sky seems to involve flying around space, robbing intergalactic convoys, and landing on planets to check out Dune worms and day-glo alien dinosaurs. But therein lies a worry for many fans—there doesn’t really seem to be a story, or even much to do. As pretty and varied as the universe might be, simply flying around admiring it is bound to get tedious pretty quickly. In the industry’s lexicon, the gameplay looks shallow. Murray admits that Hello want the game to be as non-prescriptive as possible. “There’s a big part of us that doesn’t want to say ‘this is what you must do’,” he told GameSpot. He’s confirmed that No Man’s Sky contains some type of antagonist, but has refused to reveal more, and is cryptic about the overarching aim of the game. “You start at the edge of a galaxy, and you try and get to the centre of that galaxy, and when you do, something happens that is worthwhile seeking out, but it doesn’t end there,” he said. Coming up with scripted missions would be a double-edged sword. While it would assuage many fans’ concerns about a lack of things to do in the game, it would also represent a concession to mainstream video-game sensibilities and would run counter to the whole ethos of the project. Filling a virtually infinite universe with a relatively miniscule amount of narrative content would feel jarring and undercooked. On the other hand, Hello could stumble upon an endlessly profitable sideline in downloadable content (DLC) for the

game. Put that way, it’s perhaps predictable where this will end up. A deeper fear, though, is that No Man’s Sky will simply be the next Spore or Destiny: a game that promises the kind of sprawling scifi epic of fans’ wildest imaginations, then crushingly disappoints by being, merely, quite good. Destiny, released last year, was billed as the most epic space opera in history. It ended up being a lazy and repetitive knock-off of Halo and Borderlands, described by one critic as “the video game equivalent of a beautiful mansion filled with cheap Ikea furniture”. Spore, meanwhile, closely mirrored No Man’s Sky in its ostentatious claims—the game purported to involve guiding a species from a single-cell organism, through to multicellular life, civilisation, and eventually colonisation of space, all in an infinite procedurally generated universe. In reality, Spore was four or five unremarkable mini-games jammed end-to-end. So in what ways could No Man’s Sky fail to deliver? The muchtouted alien biodiversity could be more or less limited to what we’ve already seen in the trailers—and most of this has, to be blunt, been fairly derivative of Avatar, Dune, and, well, just dinosaurs. Similarly, most planets could end up falling into one of just five or six generic archetypes—a “sandy” planet, a “jungle-y” planet, and so forth. The promised “reward” for reaching the centre of the universe could be a massive letdown. And the processing power required to procedurally generate the content could simply be too much for many consoles to handle, resulting in visual glitches and poor levels of detail. When I was a child, I wanted to be a train driver in the mornings, and an astronaut in the afternoon. For the sake of my inner afternoonfive-year-old, I’m going to keep hoping.

editor@salient.org.nz

Features

issue 21

Features

A Beautiful Place (to Lose Your Faith in Humanity) PHILIP MCSWEENEY Last week, the Huffington Post revealed to its readers that New Zealand’s jurisdiction over her territories extended beyond just the North Island. The cat was let out of the bag; the South Island, previously thought to be an apocryphal rumour as to where New Zealand’s really gorgeous scenery is, or an old wives tales (“eat yer veges or I’m sending you to Ashburton”), is a legitimate and extant island that is part of New Zealand’s sovereign domain. This is, in the words of a laconic salt-of-the-earth but no-nonsense Cantabrian farmer stereotype I just made up to prove a point, “something the North Island could remember once in a while as well”. The Cantabrian then expectorated onto his arid ground and complained about lack of water and having too much rainfall in one breath. Our archetype has a point though. When it comes to New Zealand we’re pretty myopic, often relegating any islands that aren’t “North” or “South” to a kind of quaint cousin status. This is especially true when it comes to the more obscure or remote islands over which we claim domain. Even the whole “New Zealand has three islands” claim is errant, as this relegates the Chathams, the Aucklands, the Kermadecs et al. to oblivion. Yet their distance from New Zealand, and the New Zealand psyche, is more than geographical.

2001: A SPEIGHTS ODYSSEY Fittingly enough, I am currently typing this article from the final frontier of the South Island: Dunedin. I find the locals unusual; their mannerisms and tolerance to the cold perplexing. Their definition of “snow” is very liberal and assuredly not based on meteorology; once, upon witnessing a tiny sprinkle of precipitation out of a window, the people in the same room as I clamoured around and yelled “snow!!!” before going outside, faces awed to “play in it”. It was

only drizzle, but I hadn’t the heart to go into definitions. Other than showing myself to be a foreigner during these rituals I think I am infiltrating the scene rather nicely, talking about the frigidity of the weather, the quality of SoGos and how great Dunedin music was in the 1980s. But there is something about all cities and towns this far south that makes them seem like a final frontier of some kind. “Taiwanese Centre: Last Taiwanese community until South Pole” read one sign, next to a church called “MakersPlace”, replete with the same design and font of the allusion. This sort of idea is pretty common in the deep south; a construction of themselves as members of some kind of last bastion of civilization. It all feels as though, should the world compress itself into two dimensions in lieu of three, then this would be the edge of not just civilisation but the entire world. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been enchanted by the idea of Stewart Island; literally the last inhabited outpost before the Pole. Go south from there and you’ll find nothing but ‘tarctica. While it might be a stretch to call the place civilised—there are yearly gun deaths, a simulacra of a library and, according to someone I spoke to in the Department of Scottish and Irish Studies (name and address withheld), “there are no civilised people south of this. This is as far as it goes”. The island’s main community, Oban, has about 400 permanent residents, with a couple more scattered around the place and a couple of malingerers in Halfmoon Bay. I’m fascinated by the place more than I can say, because they’re New Zealanders—our kin, our countrymen etc—about whom we know nothing, and they us. They’re a different, unexplored kind of New Zealander in a different, unexplored, often-ignored area of New Zealand, and they are just like us, bound to the same systems, living similar lives. Isn’t that cool! Forget the uproar over The HuffPo mistaking us for only having

one island; if anyone deserves to feel piqued it’s Stewart Island, whose own compatriots forget about the place’s existence. Stand up and be counted, Obanites! The thing about New Zealand, and its colonial and maritime pasts, means that going through all the settled and habituated islands is not unlike opening an endless Russian—or, in testament to the isolation— Siberian dolls. Each doll removed reveals another differently formed, long-buried secret. Remove Stewart Island and you’ll see etchings of the Chathams; eliminate the Chathams and there are the Kermadecs, open the Kermadecs and suddenly the Auckland Islands have revealed themselves to you. Trawling over all of New Zealand’s territories is not unlike tumbling down a rabbit hole of obscure lore, esoteric locations and a pretty staggering amount of land at our disposal. The reason no-one talks about the Chathams, and especially the Morioris, is because it portrays Pākehā and Māori alike in a dreadful light. The evens run counter to the idea of a peacefully occupied Aotearoa; what’s even more unpalatable is that the Māori (a group with expansionist designs) were responsible for perpetrating the massacre, which would have happened in Fiji had the Pākehā not re-routed them to the Chathams instead. Anyway, suffice to say just one per cent of the Moriori population was left two days after the invasion and now there are no “fullblooded” Moriori left. So it’s probably good that we don’t talk about the Chathams. We don’t talk about the Kermadecs because the stories are so tedious, so soporific, it’s hard to take anything in mid-yawn. Even thinking about it makes me drift off mid-. The Kermadecs are boring. Trust me. But The Auckland Islands! A collection of editor@salient.org.nz

previously inhabited islands, south of Stewart, belonging to New Zealand, and which are essentially gathering dust and silt and sand in the midst of disrepair. While the climate on these isles isn’t exactly tropical or balmy, and the yearly amount of rain might be off-putting to those who prefer a daily dose of Vitamin A, on the whole these aren’t treacherous or dangerous places. There’s nothing a bit of insulation and weatherappropriate clothing couldn’t fix; they’re within close enough proximity to maintain ties with the “mainland” while carving out their own niche of New Zealand-dom. I suspect that within our lifetimes we’ll see these collections of atolls being somewhat settled and inhabited, for a variety of reason— part of it will be the allure of remote, isolated desolation to schmucks like me, part of it will be because, as the New Scientist keeps insisting on telling us, we don’t have that much space left and why not expand onto land that’s already ours? It could also provide an alternative approach to the Refugee Quota issue, which is currently raging on Twitter—with lack of space commonly cited as a reason our miserly quota is so scant, why not use some unused space that we have at our disposal? It’s time to acknowledge that the islands’ time being unencumbered by humanity might be coming to an end. There are still new frontiers to explore and populate. Or there would be if it wasn’t for the fucking Pitcairn Islands.

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only one of these countries has ties to the motherland New Zealand has assumed a kind of surrogate-father position. The British Consulate responsible for the islands is based out of Auckland; they use the New Zealand +64 International Calling code; when Pitcairn Islanders face the wrath of the law (more on that later), they are tried in New Zealand. They’re like our guilty little secret, the child with attention deficit disorder than no-one quite knows what to do with. The island itself is a pretty typical Polynesian atoll, about four kilometres by three, with fertile soil, gentle slopes, a couple of hills that the tourism board embellishes to “mountains” because their serried ranges do, it must be said, crowd the skyline. It boasts several unique indigenous species. The climate is mild, and I’m assured the panoramic views are things of awe-inspiring beauty. So it’s not exactly paradisiacal, but happily habitable? You betcha. In terms of Western settlement, there have been people on the island since 1790, when a group of mutineers aboard the Bounty and their Tahitian “wives” (read: slaves) settled on the island. Though the island was completely uninhabited, traces remained of a previous Polynesian settlement. Priceless relics, gloriously-wrought stoneworks and even lodgings were dotted around the island. Lacking any other form of leisure activity, the mutineers deemed it prudent and fun to throw these inestimably worthy artefacts in the sea during hard nights on the rum.

PITFALL

Things only deteriorated from there.

The Pitcairn Islands are technically the last British Overseas Territory, although most British consuls prefer either pretend they don’t exist or privately consider themselves emancipated from the isles. There are four islands, only one of which—Pitcairn—is peopled, if that’s not too strong a word to use for a place with only 56 inhabitants.

Perhaps we should have known, after such inauspicious beginnings, that no good could have come from this cursed isle. After the mutineers’ heated attempts at destruction and erasure of an entire culture, only one hallowed sculpture remains. You can see it at the Otago Museum because it STILL can’t be entrusted to anyone on the Pitcairn Islands themselves.

The islands are situated in equidistance between New Zealand and Peru, but because www.salient.org.nz

This is because the Pitcairns’ infrastructure

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and politics are a surreal, almost Kafkaesque mess. The closest analogies I can find to the way the place operates come from the village in Hot Fuzz and the town in A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, although to damage the Hot Fuzz metaphor these leaders would have no problem with rambunctious children. The Pitcairns is run—and I say this without risking any possibility of libel or calumny— by paedophiles. Seriously. In 2004, charges were laid against thirteen Pitcairn Island residents—at the time, a third of the total male population—for sexual offences against children, ranging from possession of child pornography to multiple counts of sexual encounters with children. Amongst this depraved cohort was the Pitcairns’ mayor of the time, Steve Christian. He was found guilty. Six years later the new mayor, Mike Warren, was charged with possession of images and videos of child pornography on his computer. Because of the island’s remoteness and the tenuousness of the law, the case still hasn’t been brought to trial, largely because no-one could decide where to have it. In the end New Zealand won out again. Warren, far from being ousted, let alone voluntarily stepping down, continued to serve as mayor of the island for four more years until 2014 when he was replaced by— wait for it—Shawn Christian, son of Steve, convicted during the 2004 trials, fresh out of penitentiary and eager to regain his family’s mantle and make his papa and “the boys” (what the cohort of rapists called themselves) proud. Christian is, as of time of writing, still the mayor, and it looks like it is a position he will be able to enjoy for some time to come. Be assured that the grotesquery doesn’t end there. One of the more severe problems facing the Pitcairns—other than culturally normalised child abuse, of course—is the threat of extinction. The population is currently at 56, all of whom have spent the majority of their lives on the island. Without implementing a sound and appealing

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immigration policy, the island would be reduced to three people of working age by 2045. The British Consulate, terrified that they might have to take direct action unless something was to be done, told its subsidiary that they needed to come up with a scheme to get people there and there to stay. Since the lunacy was writ in 2013, the Islands receive an average of 700 inquiries about immigration a year; so far, not a single formal application of residency has made, because this is what the denizens of the isle came up with: —New migrants would be prohibited from taking jobs or claiming benefits of citizenship for an “undisclosed, case-bycase” time. —New migrants are expected to have at least US$30,000W in savings (by way of comparison, the U.S. requires $10,000). —new migrants would have to build their own house, at a minimum estimated cost of US$140,000. —New migrants would have to spend the first two years doing community services— cleaning public toilets, keeping bushland kempt—for free or at their own expense. —New migrants would be prohibited from bringing children under 16 with them in accordance with international law. Assuming some masochistic soul did go through the rigmarole of this? After two years their “performance” would be “reviewed” by the island’s council—composed entirely, just FYI, of paedophiles, so at least you’d know how to answer the “are you planning on starting a family” question to their satisfaction—and so settlement is by no means guaranteed. A prospective immigrant might be reviewed for an indefinite amount of time; or they might be forced off the island after committing two years of free labour to it. In return, you’d get to live in a settlement without access to a non-manual telephone system, radio or television. You would, however, have access to the internet—at 512kbps. for $100 a month, with a 2GB cap.

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Oh, and you’d spend your stay beholden to the whims of power-hungry and hopeless pederasts. Oh and one last thing, just a trifle really, but the only qualified high-voltage electricity technician, who manages all things electrical on the island, has reached retirement age and plans to retire within the year. He doesn’t have an heir. Good luck. It’s no wonder that the Pitcairns aren’t drawing in the crowds, something that doesn’t seem to perturb the council unduly. “In reality, no-one will migrate to Pitcairn Islands for economic reasons as there are limited government jobs, a lack of private sector employment, as well as considerable competition for the tourism dollar,” the council cheerily reported in its 2014 Economic Report to the Crown. The sonicboom-like sound that could be heard across the hemisphere once the report was delivered was generated from thousands of civil servants banging their heads against their desks simultaneously. But what of that tourism dollar? The Pitcairns does boast tranquility, I suppose, and one of the only cafes in the world that uses coffee beans that have been literally digested and then expelled from a rare elephant. And just look at the reviews! “The coffee was disgusting, tasted like elephant poop? My friend left there with a black eye because an angry lemur wanted his crusty baguette. Hard to find, watch out for the cliff. All in all great experience! Will be back.” In a less (elephant) shit-posting comment: “My friend fell off of cliff. He broke a leg and the nearest hospital was 700 miles away. No airlift either. Nice elephant poop coffee, but hire a personal doctor.” Even if they did have attractions worth the “36-hour detour”, it’s questionable as to how many tourists would show up. The island’s reputation precedes it, for one thing. Children under the age of 16 require a completed entry clearance application to enter the island, and must be supervised at all times even if this application passes. Grim. The Pitcairns also refuse to make passage to

their island affordable, charging NZ$5,000 to tourists wishing to arrive via boat. For Pitcairn Islanders, the price is halved. The Pitcairns represent the worst in insular boundary islands, the most hopeless and hapless and blissfully oblivious of their own hopeless haplessness. Soon, I suspect, the British Government will have to intervene and somehow clean up the residue of a failed experiment, and the place will lie empty and abandoned once again. Next time, at least, we have a better idea of what not to do when setting up a new island-state. As the adage goes, if you can’t be a good example you’ll have to be a horrible warning; in personifying the latter, the Pitcairns have succeeded admirably. As I stated earlier, it’s time to acknowledge that, in order to avoid over-population and keep our infrastructure running, New Zealand might have to think not, as was the argument in Auckland recently, horizontally or vertically but instead laterally. We have voluminous expanses of space at our disposal, especially in the South Island (Fiordland, anyone?), Stewart Islands and the Auckland Islands, and they can be habitated without making these places ecologically unviable or ruinous. If we implement ecologically sound strategies in concurrence with expansion, we can have our cake and eat it too. Maybe the answer should not be whether to build up or along in Auckland, but to stop building in Auckland altogether. However taking new land, conquering new frontiers, has pitfalls aplenty—cabin fever, insularity, remoteness and misplaced colonial pride. To that end the Pitcairns offer salient lessons. Let’s see if we can’t heed them.

editor@salient.org.nz

Music

Eat your greens and buy your music Kate Robertson

I love music. I appreciate the labour that goes into it, the immense talent it demands, and the grind that goes into maybe one day being heard by an audience larger than your immediate family. So with this being said, it’s impossible to ignore the effects that the ever-changing industry are having on the pockets of our creatives who are already struggling. New Zealand musicians have never had an easy run of it, but these days it’s not even an economically viable full-time gig for most, with coffee jobs paying for studio time and tours barely garnering a return. When did we decide that music should come for free? That someone’s passion isn’t even worth $16.99 at The Warehouse? Well buckle up kids, because I am about the guilt the fuck out of you and hopefully convince you to throw a couple dollars at the your humble musician. There can be no denying that we’re blessed to have so many music streaming services at our fingertips, most of which can be accessed for free. There’s Spotify free if you can tolerate the ads, 8Tracks if you enjoy having other people creating millennial-friendly playlists, Pandora if you like to live dangerously, Apple Music if you’re a fan of the highprofile curators, YouTube if data usage isn’t a problem, and SoundCloud for all the budding DJs. As a result, CD sales have only continued to plummet and even the resurgence of vinyl hasn’t been enough to bring things back to where they once were (oh, and P.S., digital downloads are also dying a slow, painful death). “But I thought those companies paid the artists?” I hear you hootin’ and hollerin’… well, it’s not quite so simple. What artists get out of each service varies. Apple Music have promised royalties, but thus far only followed through with about 60 per cent of them (hands up who else agrees that Tay-tay’s are the first to go out each month!), Spotify have an equation more complex than a Level 3 calculus exam, and SoundCloud have recently found themselves embroiled in a number of lawsuits for not paying anyone ever (dicks). Yes, one could argue that this kind of thievery is nothing new, that we’ve been doing it for years, but did

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anyone really own enough blank cassettes to do any real damage? I for one existed for three happy years on one side of a cassette containing a mashup of the Spice Girls, Boyzone, Green Day and commercial breaks (never was very quick on the old “stop” button). The struggle is real, and not even in some ironic first world problem way—it’s a real life shit storm. So in light of the aforementioned corner we’ve backed our most talented into, how do we go about changing it? God knows we students won’t be sacrificing our hard earned government dollars on a weekly trip down to Slow Boat Records or JB Hi-Fi anytime soon, so what options are we left with? Well, I offer two proposals. The first operates in a similar way to an ideal welfare state wherein we support our most vulnerable first. Before you go searching for that new Kiwi artist’s album online, sacrifice a couple bottles of Fat Bird and hit up the Flying Out online store instead. Tossing up between a new Kanye album and some nobody’s EP? Pick the nobody first, and continue to do so every damn time. My second highly researched one-man-select-committee option suggests taking a more experiential approach by making an effort to get along to more live shows. If you can afford to spend $500 on three days sinking piss and doing lines at R&V, then you can afford $20 to scoot on down to Meow on a Thursday night and catch some sweet tunes. Sure, these solutions aren’t perfect, but until you can show me a better alternative I think we should agree the give them a crack. On a happier note, it seems we’ve reached a bit of a crossroads regarding music ownership, and I have a totally psychic feeling that the tides are about to turn. The rate of change is slowing and the people with real influence are finally starting to put the pressure on. But until then, let your fellow student and music lover leave you with this— stop being such a tight arse and go buy your mum a CD to put aside for Christmas (I hear Sol3 Mio have a fresh one in the pipeline).

salient

issue 21

Music

E•MO•TION Carly Rae Jepsen

Harold Coutts After years of radio silence Carly Rae Jepsen is back. She slipped into success with what could have been a one-hitwonder, before disappearing as quickly as she appeared. An apparent 200 songs were written in preparation for her third album, and now three years after Kiss, it’s here. E•MO•TION is an aptly named pop album, begging to be felt rather than just listened to. Each song is either a declaration of affection or the crooning of a relationship ending, holding similar lyrical content to her previous album. All share an obvious ‘80s inspiration and a production that adds a welcome consistency. Each track has a unique factor, which stops them from all sounding too similar without the need for several contrasting genres racing through the album. Despite being an obviously emotionally charged album, it’s ironically lacking a full range of emotions—with danceable production being prioritised over Carly getting aggressive with some synthesisers. The album opens with the powerful “Run Away With Me”, a song that demands to be sung full force in the shower. It starts with a gasp of saxophone, and then through the first verse builds into a chorus that explodes with intense emotion, making it the most memorable track. The sax is infectious and a head-bop at minimum is recommended with every listen.

Lead single “I Really Like You” comes across as a modern version of her smash hit “Call Me Maybe” from 2012, which most recognise by name alone. There is a little disappointment that she hasn’t branched far from her successful roots, but it remains a catchy and enjoyable tune. Jepsen also demonstrates the ability to release less intense, more intimate songs with “All That”. The slow-tempo ballad has an emotional intensity, best danced to at 3am with a glass of wine in hand. Closing track “When I Needed You” discusses the mixed thought process of Me-versus-You in the needs of a relationship that has ended. It is perhaps one of the weaker songs on the album, with forgettable verses and a lack of any final crescendo that can often bring an album together. There is however enough strength throughout the start and middle of the album to contrast this. E•MO•TION is dipped in heartbreak, but sprinkled with a sense of fun. It brings emotional polar opposites together to form a sensational pop album that could be the soundtrack to either a just-got-dumped dance party, or the first night in with a lover.

editor@salient.org.nz

Games

UNTIL DAWN Developer: Supermassive Games Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Platform: PS4

½ Cameron Gray

I may have mentioned it once before, but it bears repeating—horror and mental illness is a dangerous mix. Then again, it’s difficult to dislike something if you’ve haven’t experienced it before. Until Dawn is the first horror game I have actively chosen to purchase and play. I could easily have said “nope, I don’t like horror games, I could have a heart attack or a shit-ton of nightmares, playing this is a bad idea.” I could have spent the $95 this game cost on Mighty Ape on a load of fun, but relatively less scary, indie games on Steam. Hell, if I’d never acquired a PS4, I would barely be thinking about the game at all. But I did, didn’t I? I bought the game, and played it to completion. The fact that this review even exists at all is testament to that. I say this because Until Dawn is a game all about choice. The core mechanic of the game is the “butterfly effect”—the idea that every choice you make has a consequence in terms of the story. It takes inspiration from the so-called “interactive drama” games that David Cage is known for, complete with quick time events, but by all accounts Until Dawn does this far better and can actually back up its promises. Every time I made a decision, I was wondering if I’d made the right choice, or if other choices I’d made had significantly affected my play-through to that point. It’s clearly a game designed to be played multiple times, because a single run will haunt you and make you wonder what you could have done differently. The horror genre is a perfect fit for this kind of gameplay, and Until Dawn unashamedly revels in every horror movie trope you can www.salient.org.nz

salient

think of. The story is a rather typical setup from the early 2000s: an octet of horny teenager stereotypes gather at a ski lodge in the Canadian wilderness a year after a horrific tragedy to drink, fuck and hopefully not get horribly murdered. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t say too much else, but there’s Ouija boards, Native American spiritual mumbo-jumbo, masked psychopaths (or so we think), an abandoned mental institution, mythical beasts and (oh yeah) lots of blood and guts. The writers clearly had their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks, and watching all the clichés unfold gives the game an element of cheesey fun that just wouldn’t be there if they took it too seriously. It helps that the actors delivered great performances, especially towards the latter half when the shit goes down. This is not to say that it isn’t scary just because we’ve seen all before. There are a few cheap jump scares, as to be expected, but there are genuinely scary moments throughout the game, and the atmosphere is one that is perfectly uneasy. The core mechanic throws both red herrings and genuinely dangerous situations at the characters, all of whom can die at any moment because of your decisions. There are many moments where you can, in fact, choose to do nothing and it will end up being the best thing you can do. You have to be careful not to call the bluff every time, because you might just end up seeing Hayden Panettiere’s head bouncing across the screen as a result. Some decisions can be made easier if you know your horror really well, so you can maybe not investigate that weird noise this time. There have been some complaints by other critics about the compulsory moments of motion control where you have to keep your controller perfectly still in order to progress—some say it’s almost impossible. For the most part I had no trouble with it as I have fairly steady hands, but there was one moment right at the end of the game when I missed the prompt, moved the controller slightly and ended up with a dead character. It was frustrating, but it was almost entirely my fault. Your mileage may vary, however. In addition, the game looks amazing for a PS4 exclusive. The lighting effects are top-notch, as they need to be when you’re exploring the dark hallways for clues, and the environments and character models are well-rendered. Some of the walking and facial animations unfortunately dip into the uncanny valley, with the walking controls sometimes feeling stiff and awkward as a result. You aren’t playing this for the controls, however, and these may just be minor distractions. Now that you know what I think, it’s time to decide. Should you make an effort and buy Until Dawn, or should you save the money for food next week? Make your choice, but be quick—there’s something behind you…

issue 21

Books

Thanks to Vic Books for providing a copy to review

Wind/Pinball Haruki Murakami Translated by Ted Goossen Random House Jayne Mulligan Murakami is both media-shy and simultaneously verging on overexposed. His fiction is variously described as surrealist, mystical, fatalistic, and melancholic. These are adjectives that I agree with using, but find that by distilling his work into four words, it smoothes out the complex minutiae that recur throughout his oeuvre. I haven’t read all of his work, as I wasn’t introduced to him until late in my university career. I couldn’t indulge in the binge-reading escapades I might have entertained had I been a high schooler when I first read him. The kind of addictive tingles that flooded over me as I read Norwegian Wood have not been replicated since. It was a type of first time, and those are eternally unable to be re-created. Murakami’s stories are full of unexplained malaise, unexplained mystical or supernatural occurrences; there are often cats, and sometimes they talk; there is often jazz, beer, cigarettes, and food—as both fuel and ritual. The characters within his worlds often exist in somewhat disconnected worlds; worlds that are both very corporeal, with plenty of sex and bodily functions, but perhaps most distinct about these characters is their emotional and social isolation. There is forever a longing that flows out of his characters. Last month, Murakami’s earliest works were translated into English for, largely, the first time. Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are the first two books of what is referred to as “The Rat Trilogy”. With A Wild Sheep Chase concluding the series, each story follows the fortunes and misadventure of the same nameless narrator, and his friend “the Rat”. They were first published in 1979, 1980, and 1982 respectively, and while A Wild Sheep Chase has been published in English since 1989, the first two stories’ translations were not widely available until now, at Murakami’s insistence. Wind/Pinball: Two Novels combines the two stories, and in a somewhat appropriate twist, are printed in different orientations—a surreal book experience. These are Murakami’s first stories; they were the product of an epiphany that, myth has it, occurred during

a baseball match. It was 1978 at Jingu Stadium, and Murakami was watching the game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp, when an American, Dave Hilton stepped up to bat. The moment he hit a double, the story goes, Murakami realised he could write a novel, and began doing so that very night. This epiphany is the basis for the introduction to the two novels, as he contextualises this period in his late twenties. The stories of the unnamed narrator, and his friend the Rat, find them drinking at J’s bar, frequently; beers and cigarettes fill the cracks of the stories. There are beautiful musings that occur in the same beat as a distinctly real image of drinking beer or playing pinball. The anonymity of the narrator seems like an explorative venture in ascertaining who is telling the story; Murakami seems to be enacting a question around the act of narratives. In the first book, the unnamed narrator is 21 and returning from college for summer, he listens to the radio, drinks, thinks about the girls he has slept with, and pursues a relationship with a girl who doesn’t remember meeting him. By the next book, the same character has moved to Tokyo to start a translating company, where he finds himself living with twins while the Rat didn’t make the move—we still hear his stories, and the unnamed narrator begins to become obsessed with the days he spent with the Rat playing pinball at J’s bar. In all honesty, the story didn’t seem to stick—as I read through the brief chapters and then the following novel, I felt like I slipped through it, never finding a footing or something to grab hold of. You can see the beginning of so much in this book. It seems perhaps Murakami is opening up—the beginning of the year saw his website engage with fans through the Agony Uncle persona, which allowed fans to ask of Murakami their biggest and smallest fascinations about him and his work, or simply seek his advice. He recently created a virtual tour of his desk, where you can see the many hundreds of records that don his wall, the very particular pencils he uses, and the baseball bobble head he prides—it’s a guide to Murakami organised really neatly. The introduction to Wind/Pinball meditates on his reluctance to translate these into English—he explains his feelings of discomfort that they aren’t as sophisticated as his later work, he is embarrassed by them; they’re his first. In this way, both the introduction, and the stories themselves, reveal a glimpse behind the curtain of someone who has so avoided the media. Definitely worth a read for all those Murakami fans out there: it’s not his best, nor does it need to be. editor@salient.org.nz

Film

salient

The Story Behind: Dreadlocks Story Fairooz Samy

Linda Ainouche is a researcher, anthropologist, writer, and director/ producer. Her recently-released documentary Dreadlocks Story reveals the hidden spiritual links between Jamaican Rastas and Indian Sadhus. Salient caught up with Ainouche to talk about her film and the processes behind making a transcontinental documentary.

an ability to “adapt to what I find, who I meet, where I go.” “It isn’t so much about being easy going,” she clarifies, “but being willing to adjust to different realities on the ground.”

When on the ground, Ainouche wanted to keep the aesthetic as natural as possible. Part of this was to honour the documentary’s topic—“part Ainouche is a woman of many talents. She teaches, she writes, she of the Sadhu and Rasta life is ‘living with nature’, without judgement, travels, and she makes films. What was the origin story behind such letting things ‘go with the flow’, not consuming or creating anything an adventurous spirit? “My parents are both from different cultures,” fake and not interfering with the way nature goes”—but Ainouche she explains. “I was exposed to cross-cultural connections from was also mindful of letting her subjects be themselves. “My goal was the way we lived and the way we travelled the world.” Ainouche is always to let people talk about themselves and what they wanted in adamant that that becoming an anthropologist (her first love) was front of the camera, in a very natural way,” she explains. “There are no inevitable. “I was born into this field... it was almost like second good or wrong answers, it was more important to capture how people nature, being surrounded by a mosaic of cultures all the time.” expressed themselves—some were singing, some laughed, some didn’t even answer the question asked but started telling a story!” For I ask how she made the transition from writer to documentarian. Ainouche, these natural touches only add to the authenticity of the Ainouche began in academia, and she says that communicating film. “That’s what combines improvisation with the use of the camera at a university level was “easy” but a little limiting. “Writing was to unveil truth, or highlight subjects hidden behind crude reality. It’s approachable and accessible (you just need a computer and some ‘direct’ cinema, without a narrator’s voice over.” To ensure that they brilliant ideas!)”, but the calling of film-making proved too strong to felt autonomous, she also let them choose where they wanted to be resist. “I found that the documentary genre allows me to ‘shoot’ the filmed. “I figured out how I could make people comfortable… it’s not reality as it is,” she explains, before crediting the medium with giving by forcing them answer exactly, like on a test or exam. It takes skill to her the “unique opportunity to break down barriers, which allows for tell a story from a variety of unexpected answers.” Aside from small a direct connection with people in their environment.” challenges—like suffering a mosquito attack in the Jamaican Blue Mountains—the filmmaking process has been extremely rewarding. When brainstorming topics for the project that would eventually The highlights have been meeting a range of incredible people and become Dreadlocks Story, Ainouche found herself drawn back to presenting a finished piece of work. “The most rewarding thing Hindu and Rasta cultures. Ainouche spent several years in India, was to go from having an idea, to making it, to getting support and completing a PhD on Jainism—“one of the oldest and least-known getting great feedback.” religions in the world”—and travelling the country extensively. While on a trip to Jamaica, she was struck by the Indian influences I ask about the title of the film—Dreadlocks—and bring up its in Rastafari culture, and even more struck that so few people had trending status in popular culture. also made the link. That was her lightbulb moment. “Putting it all together, it became clear to me that I had to do a documentary on From Vogue’s “Black hair” controversy to the Kylie Jenner/Amandla the links between Rastafari and Hinduism.” As an expert on both Stenberg exchange, to the Rachel Dolezal situation, to Giuliana subjects, she felt a responsibility to use her know-how to expose the Rancic’s shade on Zendaya (and her thoughtful response) and finally, “ignorance on Indian enslavement to the Caribbean Basin,” and to Miley Cyrus’ VMA blonde locs, dreadlocks have been a driving shed light on the “misconceptions, injustices, and judgements” that force behind discussions of cultural appropriation in the 2015 media continue to follow both Hindu and Rasta cultures. landscape. Afrocentric hairstyles have a rich history, but their antiracist origin are still relevant today in terms of discrimination against Dreadlocks Story took a year to complete. It was shot in France, India, Afro hair and other types of hair that are deemed “ethnic”. I asked Jamaica and the US, and Ainouche used local crews in each location. Ainouche what role “hair” played in the film. “Dreadlocks are often Assembling the pieces sounds like a Herculean task, but Ainouche’s misunderstood,” she begins. “The ‘main character’ is ‘dreadlocks’, and response was surprisingly relaxed. “I’m used to improvising and being over the course of the film we do learn something about its history in spontaneous,” she said, explaining that her years of field work fostered Jamaica.” She points out their multi-faceted history—“they represent www.salient.org.nz

issue 21

2 for 1 Margherita

the tenacity against the worst atrocious systems (slavery and colonialism) that human beings had to face. If it was not for British Colonial rule, Hindu culture, and a myriad of other global factors, dreadlocks might have never existed and been worn by Rastas”— but articulates their uplifting quality. “From the unique, and often terrible, circumstances in Rastafari culture, a beautiful form of selfexpression evolved.” Ainouche also emphasises that Dreadlocks Story covers a lot of different ground. “The film is really about the history of Indian culture in Jamaican society, and the influence of the different practical aspects of Hinduism on the emerging Rastafari movement.” I wanted to know if Ainouche had a particular goal in mind for the project. “My hope is that it’ll be seen by as many people as possible, so there can be a better global understanding of this history.” Although filmmaking and academia are different beasts, they have one thing in common—entrenched sexism. Things are improving, and Ainouche is making an impact on the forefront of both fields. “The world is sexist!” she exclaims. “That’s a naturally depressing fact.” Yet she’s optimistic about the future, arguing that “women have and always will be hard workers, no matter how sidelined we are by these various industries. We will continue to be great contributors to culture wherever we are in the world.” I ask what’s next on her radar and she assures me that she’s never idle. “I’m always thinking of new and exciting projects to work on, but I’m a ‘live in the moment person’ so I am currently focused on getting Dreadlocks Story out in the world and making sure people have the chance to see it!”

pizzas every friday from 3pm

The Hunter Lounge

Dreadlocks Story is screening at various international festivals and its schedule can be accessed at dreadlockstory.com/screenings. Find it on Twitter at @DreadlockStory or Facebook at fb.com/dreadlockstory.

The Hunter Lounge Thanks to Reading Cinemas Courtnay for providing double tickets this week editor@salient.org.nz

salient

A Snake with Four Legs? A controversial four-legged snake fossil sheds light on snake evolution and shakes science grounds. MELINA GENU

“fingers” and well-developed phalanges resemble birds’ claws—yet the size makes it unlikely that these four tiny legs were used for locomotion. The resemblance to bird feet suggests they were used for holding prey while the “snakey” body wrapped around an unfortunate small vertebrate—the animal equivalent of Judas’ kiss. Another option was they could be used to hold a partner while mating. T. amplectus had around 160 vertebrae before its tail and still retains its hand and feet, while, on average, once achieving a length of 70 vertebrae, snakes and lizards start to lose limbs. The fossil had preserved snakelike scales, skull and body shape compatible with serpentine locomotion and adaptations for burrowing (again, tiny legs are a great example of those). This would indicate that the early snakes did the same. The gut content was preserved so the researchers were able to identify bones from the hugging snake’s last meal.

To be or not to be [a snake]? A paper published last month set fire to the debate: a four-legged snake fossil was described by a group of scientists from the UK, led by Dr David Martill, a professor from the University of Portsmouth. That’s right, a snake with four tiny legs. And you thought that snakes would only have legs when pigs fly! The newly discovered creature was given the name of Tetrapodophis amplectus. Tetrapodophis, Greek for “four-footed serpent”, and amplectus, Latin for “embracing”. No one had described a 4-legged snake before. Tetrapodophis amplectus was found by Dr Martill during a field trip with students in the museum Solnhofen in Germany, when he noticed this small piece labelled “unknown fossil”. “All of a sudden my jaw absolutely dropped.” He then realised, that small little “snakey” creature had tiny little legs! Martill and his colleagues analysed the fossil and deduced it came from northwww.salient.org.nz

eastern Brazil. Before it was displayed at the museum and accidentally found by Martill, the fossil was housed in a private collection for decades.

A tight hug of life or death Tetrapodophis amplectus lived approximately 130 million years ago, when Africa and America were still together in one huge supercontinent called Gondwana. It was a great great great great relative to modern snakes. This ancient snake-like animal is 20cm long, had hooked sharp teeth, joints in its jaws (characteristics that allow snakes to expand their jaws for swallowing its meal whole) and a flexible spine, which Martill and colleagues estimate could be used to constrict prey. The limbs are greatly reduced yet highly specialised, suggesting that they were functional. The arms are 4mm long, while the legs are 7mm. The presence of slender

Tetrapodophis amplectus might not be a snake. Wait, what? It really looks like one to most of us, right? At this point you might have been convinced that Martill did find the missing link between lizards and snakes, and that it would soon be in really cool documentaries and movies, right? Well, according to Susan Evans, a paleobiologist of the University College of London, snake-like bodies appeared many times in history in different species of snakes and lizards—at least 26 times. “I’m trying to carefully sit on the fence as to whether this is actually a snake,” said Susan to Science magazine. Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist is also unsure. “I think the specimen is important, but I do not know what it is,” he stated in an interview for National Geographic. He claims that the vertebrae and the lack of association with another bone that occurs in every living and extinct reptile is enough to doubt that the four-legged snake is even a reptile, let alone a snake. He believes it could be an ancient amphibian instead.

issue 21

Science

Keep Calm and Eat Your Mi Goreng BRIDGET PYĆ

Everyone should calm down about MSG, says science. MSG stands for monosodium glutamate. So let’s break that down. We have sodium, i.e., salt—cool, I’m okay with that—and glutamate. Glutamate is a naturally occurring amino acid found in most common foods including meat, dairy and vegetables (think tomatoes, walnuts, and parmesan cheese). Our bodies also produce our own glutamate as we prepare to metabolise food. The much loved property of glutamate is that it enhances our tongue’s receptiveness to “umami”, one of the five basic tastes (alongside bitterness, sweetness, saltiness and sourness). Umami is a loanword from

the Japanese language meaning “pleasant savoury taste”. So putting this all together, MSG is simply the naturally occurring amino acid glutamate in its sodium salt form (meaning, like salt, it is easier to sprinkle on food). People who discredit it cite the study whereby mice suffered ill effects after having MSG injected into their brains. But duh. Almost anything can have a negative effect if consumed in too high a quantity, especially in this particular case, whereby a dose fit for a horse was injected directly into a small animal’s brain.

to analyse the effects of MSG. Double blind placebo studies on a large number of people, including 130 who identified as sensitive to MSG, have not been able to consistently trigger any reactions. Feeling sick after being starving and then stuffing your face with Chinese food does not necessarily demonstrate cause and effect. As such, your author would like to add MSG to the list of things that some members of society believe they are better informed on than scientists. Note that this list also includes vaccinations and climate change. Cummon guys!

More humane, and more scientifically accurate studies, have since been conducted

The Power of the Placebo Effect MIRO BOND We all know that when someone mentions pizza you suddenly feel hungry, even though you just ate an hour ago. This is one example of the power of mind over body, and has similarities with the placebo effect. Now, researchers have discovered that even when you know a drug you are taking doesn’t work, you will still feel relief. This has taken the placebo effect to a whole new level. Graduate Scott Schafer has conducted studies in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience to further

prove the placebo effect. Subjects were given a placebo treatment and conditioned to believe that it works. After four sessions, subjects were told that the treatment was false, but still reported that they were getting pain relief. Subjects who only had one session didn’t report continued pain relief. He discovered that the placebo effect still works even if research participants know the treatment they are receiving to ease pain has no medical value whatsoever. These new findings could open doors to treating drug addiction and drug management when it

comes to people who have undergone serious surgeries and are taking potentially addictive drugs. “If a child has experience with a drug working, you could wean them off the drug, or switch that drug to a placebo, and have them continue taking it,” Schafer said. All people need is ample time to believe a treatment works, then the placebo effect kicks in, and this study reveals that even when patients are told that the treatment is actually false, they still report pain relief. editor@salient.org.nz

Visual Arts

salient

THE NZ FLAG REFERENDUM AS ART SHARON LAM

The NZ Flag Referendum is the latest work of art produced by the country of New Zealand. While advertised as a collaborative piece inclusive to members of the public, the piece has been heavily edited behind closed doors by a panel headed by Auckland-based artist John Key. Key, who largely works in performance pieces, rose to prominence for his piece Haha I’m Prime Minister Now, noted for its overly long running time (2008–present). Since then he has raised controversy in the art world—an earlier audiovisual piece resulted in him being sued by Eminem, and his latest performance art piece I Looove Ponytails received strongly negative reviews and accusations of him being a “creep”. Even before its completion, Key has received public backlash for his current project. As part of Haha I’m Prime Minister Now, Key was able to gain access to taxpayer funds (a surprising achievement for an artist of questionable talent), of which an approximate $25 million is being set aside for the NZ Flag piece. Audiences have reacted to this with both anger and confusion, though he assures us that NZ Flag will be “worth billions”, garnering further confusion. Further critiques include the edited choices lacking artistic merit, and the project’s questionable necessity and role as a distraction mechanism from Key’s other failed pieces like No You Kids Can’t Have Lunch and its sequel No More Refugees Either. Undeterred, Key has continued to go headstrong with The NZ Flag Referendum. The piece is constantly evolving, though the final piece aims to be a rectangular image that will be printed onto various bits of cloth, tourist souvenirs and iron-on patches plastered to the backpacks of white adolescent males on gap years. The piece is now at the stage of four final options.

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NZ Flag Referendum, John Key, 2015

The visual result of Key’s piece makes it clear why it has been heavily critiqued for its lack of artistic substance. The piece shows a lazy response to cultural identity, have a dull colour palette and are generally boring, raising questions about the artist’s sense of taste. While Key aims to once again bring the piece to public collaboration (a vote will be held for one of the four designs), his position as head artist has let his fern fetish take over. Three of the four flags feature ferns, and the second and fourth are just indecisive re-colourings of one another. This was likely to have been done as the colour scheme of flag 2 is clearly uglier than flag 4, enabling flag 4 to appear more attractive in comparison. Key has publicly stated that flag 4, the tackiest of the four, is his favourite. A response to Key’s piece, which has proven to be more popular with audiences, is Red Peak by Wellington-based Aaron Dustin.

Although he had a very easy act to follow, Red Peak has definite merits. In a simple geometric gesture, Dustin subtly references Māori mythology and the special “first to the light” geography of New Zealand. Although the title of Dustin’s piece may bring up thoughts of one’s menstrual cycle, the minimalist, well-composed flag simply looks cooler than any of Key’s preferred pieces. However, so does pretty much anything else. Although there is a strong public call for Key to collaborate with Dustin, it is unlikely that this will happen, because “paperwork”. Key’s four fave flags are set to be voted on in November this year. While a Dustin-Key collaboration may not be seen, it is believed that Key was “very impressed” by Australian artist Tony Abbott’s recent piece I Looove Onions, and has not said no to a potential collaboration with the neighbouring lizard creature.

Fashion

issue 21

How to dress like a grown-up Jess Scott

3. Avoid wearing a longline bra instead of a shirt with five-

inch platform sneakers and violet lipstick to meet your landlady, boy-thing’s parents or potential employer. Also maybe do not stick rhinestones to your face, be seen in wedge-heeled glitter jelly shoes, a tiara, pink faux fur, or carry a Hello Kitty backpack in any context whatsoever.

Soon we will be fully-fledged Adults, released into the Real World, where drinking $9 wine at 10am, relying on cereal as a staple dietary component, and chatting up first-years in Estab will all become rampantly socially unacceptable. We will be forced to accept our fates as Functioning Members of Society, stop expecting our parents to pay our phone bills, cease participation in Mojito Mondays and get Proper Jobs, using the extortionately-priced pieces of paper we struggled through three-plus years of all-nighters and excessive quantities of coffee to obtain. Tips for camouflaging as a Grown-Up:

1. Knit the hair of your 87 cats into a matching sweater, scarf

and mittens combo, spray yourself with the scent of mothballs and carry a packet of Werther’s Originals at all times. Ensure that you keep photographs of aforementioned cats on hand to impress the girls at the bridge club with.

Pair your Nike Roshes with a Country Road mum top and puffer vest, exclusively wear tasteful shades of beige and off-white, loudly brag about your quinoa Bircher muesli recipe, and the energy efficiency of your solar-powered blender. Never be seen without a soy matcha latte and yoga mat in hand.

If you are at the supermarket and realise you’re wearing a near-identical outfit to that of a tutu-clad toddler, with the addition of platforms instead of fairy wings, you’re probably not doing great. 5. Dress only in lingerie, fur coats and stiletto heels, tottering about with a martini in hand and Lana Del Rey playing softly in the background, whilst toting one of your dozen Prada handbags and pushing your elderly husband’s wheelchair.

6. Pair your Ralph Lauren polo with a Ralph Lauren cap and

boat shoes, incessantly talk about golf, your tennis scores and the economy. Occasionally pop into the office to alternate between playing computer solitaire and staring at a wall all day (looking at you Commerce students).

Dress for the job you aspire to, wear Victoria’s Secret Angel wings and a Swarovski crystal-encrusted bustier to the law firm.

Never, ever change out of your graduation robes or cap, perpetually flaunt your academic prowess for the remainder of your fragile human existence. Your flesh prison becomes your CV, you are a walking advertisement for yourself. (You may, however, begin to smell.)

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Comics

salient

issue 21

Issue 20 Solutions:

Puzzles

Hard

“Escape Artist” A little bit sneaky this time. Six answers in the ‘quick clues’ extend outside the grid, and reading these letters will tell you the name of the escape artist. Cryptic clues don’t give you these extra letters, so if you’re solving this with the cryptic clues, look at the quick clues afterwards to get the hidden message. Quick clues Across 1. Plant’s ‘feeler’ (7) 5. Selections (7) 9. Distillation (7) 10. ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ artist (3,4) 11. Finance (3) 13. Sneeze amount (7) 15. Collapse in (3) 17. He played Red in this puzzle’s film (6,7) 23. Actress Kendrick (4) 24. Desire enviously (5) 25. Dark stone (4) 26. Broad-bladed weapon (7) 30. Copes with (5,2) 34. Location of the escape in this puzzle’s film (9,6) 35. Trippy (7) 36. Draw a conclusion (7) Down 1. Belgian city (7) 2. Ruling lineage (7) 3. When doubled, ‘Hungry Like the Wolf ’ band (5) 4. Prepare for a cliched psychiatry session (3,4) 5. One who repairs shoes (7) 6. Look grim at (5) 7. Third-party holdings (7)

8. Fitting inside (7) 12. Cleaning chemical (7) 13. Lady or the Tramp (3) 14. Golf prop (3) 16. Irritated (7) 18. Arrive (5) 19. Fancy tie, or fancy racecourse (5) 20. A quarter of this clue number (4) 21. On top of that (5) 22. Animal that sounds like a dessert (5) 26. Nonet of Greek figures (5) 27. Lead a meeting (5) 28. Come after (5) 29. Thing ending in .vuw.ac.nz that nobody checks (5) 30. Culture associated with hackerspaces and fablabs (5) 31. It’s what Hindus have coming (5) 32. Rolled snack (5) 33. Imperial weight (5) Cryptic clues Across 1. Start to logon after breakdown of Tinder, Vine (7) 5. Selections from the edges of chocolate slices (7) 9. After energetic start, scenes are crazy - that’s the idea! (7) 10. Rock band is good in France and mostly jovial (3,4) 11. Fork out for bark coming back (3) 13. Decline allowed for bit of liquid (7) 15. Epic tale is abridged for fade-out (3) 17. Actor (male) with important part as a guy who gets out of prison! (6,7) 23. She went backwards and forwards in ‘The King and I’ (4) 24. Contents of alcove - treasures to desire (5) 25. Jewelry stone is on graph axes (4)

26. Teach ‘em new Robert Rodriguez film (7) 30. Works with what’s available and creates haircut (5,2) 34. Warship Khan’s son made into a movie jail (9,6) 35. Weird Al follows, sure to be holding right (7) 36. Figure out the sound of genuine lookers (7) Down 1. Idiot twerking replaces ruler with pawn (5) 2. Partly in a style that’s horrible (5) 3. Operated centre of crank (3) 4. Bullshitted on the answer to 6-Down - take a break (3,4) 5. Shoemaker’s fruit dessert (7) 6. Possess a topless dress (3) 7. Five hundred leaving hordes of black birds (5) 8. Mostly wasting police operation (5) 12. On Monday morning, I acquire beginning of oven cleaner (7) 13. Deity ascends, becoming shiba inu (3) 14. Do it yourself leaving tie-dye shirt (3) 16. Ann, yo, come back! Edward is pissed off ! (7) 18. Get to stretch (5) 19. Coat’s re-envisioned with tie (5) 20. Number thrown back in Trevi fountain (4) 21. More caught in sex trafficking (5) 22. Big Elk talking about hair product in concert (5) 26. Ponders Greek figures of inspiration (5) 27. Sear around... I mean ‘seat’ (5) 28. To follow, it leaves en suite (5) 29. One in shade of green, coming back to inbox (5) 30. Constructor, one that doomed people often meet (5) 31. What goes around comes around: get a weapon in, AK comes back (5) 32. Shiatsu shift includes Japanese meal (5) 33. Jump excitedly after decapitation, just a little weight (5

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YOUR STUDENTS’

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ELECTIONS 2015

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THU 17 SEP - 1PM - THE HUB Election voting will take place from 22-24 September with campus booths and online voting available. www.vuwsa.org.nz